Remembering that flight, she thinks of Jack, who passed eight years ago, he’d directed her into a landing at Montego Bay International Airport and told he’d loved her. And for two years they had shone so brightly together.
She can hear the blockhouse and the control centre speaking to each other in her helmet headset, but she tunes it out. The gantry has been rolled back and she can see blue sky through the capsule’s window. She recalls the excitement she felt when she watched Cagle’s Mercury-Redstone 3, America, lift from the launch-pad, rising up through a pale and hazeless Florida sky on a column of fire and thunder, such a pure and wonderful sight. Cobb doesn’t feel that thrill now, she is focused on her upcoming mission; she feels only a need to get everything right, to show Cochran and the others that she deserves to be right here right now.
The delay drags on. Through the periscope she can watch grey waves scudding across the Atlantic; in a mirror by the window, she sees the grey blockhouse. Below her, she hears pipes whine and creak, and then everything shakes and bangs as the ground crew check the engines’ gimbal mechanism. She thinks about the new president’s speech back in June—after Cagle’s flight President Kennedy was talking to Congress and he said they should set as a national goal “landing an American on the Moon and returning them safely to the Earth before ten years are up”, and she’s already thinking past this flight. She hasn’t even been into space yet but that’s what she wants: to be the first American to walk on the Moon’s surface.
The order comes through to top off the lox tanks. This is it. The countdown is finally going ahead. Minutes later, Cobb hears an infernal thunder as the main engines light and the hold-down clamps release with a decisive thud. The rocket begins to rise, slowly, ponderously, balanced atop its roaring pillar of flame. The top of the gantry slides past the window. Cobb offers up another silent prayer, this time one of thanks. She has much to be grateful for and she knows it—she was not first, but the Russians beat America to that, anyway. But she will beat the Russian record for number of orbits about the Earth.
The Mercury-Atlas rolls and shudders a little. Forty-eight seconds have passed, the rocket hits max-Q and the capsule vibrates, the dials and gauges before her blur. She wills herself to remain calm, none of this is unexpected, Cagle remarked on it happening during her flight. But that noise, that hellish roar, and the G-forces pressing her down into her seat, it makes it all real, this is no simulation. Oh this is what she wanted, this is what she prayed for—she feels such a sense of peace, despite the shaking and the demonic clamour and the weight upon her.
Twenty-four seconds later, the vibrations abruptly cease, the ride is smooth and clear and Cobb knows she is at last reaching for the heavens. After a minute, the booster engines cut off and the G-forces drop back to one as the boosters fall away. The sustainer engine continues to fire and the Gs build up once again, pushing Cobb back into her seat. The sky outside the window is black, and she says as much to Hart, the flight’s capsule communicator.
Cabin pressure holding at 6.1, she adds. Coming up on two minutes, fuel is 101-102, oxygen is 78-102, Gs are about six now.
Reading you loud and clear, replies Hart. Flight path looked good.
The jettison rockets on the escape tower fire, she sees it tumble away, and relays the fact to mission control. Capsule is in good shape, she reports.
Roger, you’re going for it, Jerrie, says Hart. Twenty seconds to SECO.
The sustainer engine cuts off as programmed, and Cobb is no longer pressed hard into her seat, it’s almost as if she’s falling forward. She relaxes her arms and her hands float up to hang before her. She starts to smile: zero-G. She made it, she’s in orbit, she’s above the sky. The capsule turns around and she sees the curve of the Earth below her, it’s so very blue and it glows and it’s streaked with clouds; and she can’t help saying, Oh the view is tremendous.
And there’s the booster, she can see it tumbling away, glinting as sunlight flashes from its white sides, a pencil of brightness against the blue, falling back to Earth, unable to escape as she has done.
You have a go, Hart tells her, for at least seven orbits.
Cobb closes her eyes, clasps her hands before her and bows her head as much as she is able in the helmet. She reflects on the glory of God’s creation and her current heavenly perspective upon it, she thinks of the part He has played in her life, she thinks of everything she went through, everything she did, to be here in orbit, the second American, the second woman, in space, and the first American to travel about the Earth 160 miles above its surface.
I’m coming back, she tells God silently. This is my first visit but it will not be my last.
She may have to fight Cochran for a second or third flight, or even more, but she will prevail. He will make sure of that.
DOWN
The trail ball, hanging thirty-five feet beneath the Trieste II’s keel, tells them they’ve reached bottom, so McIntyre orders some ballast dropped to give them neutral buoyancy. Taylor is busy trying to get a signal on the Straza Industries Model 7060 deep ocean transponder interrogator from any of the dots, but he’s having no luck. McIntyre kneels and peers out through the window—there’s not much to see, only the expected blurred and powdery sand of the bottom, tan shading to grey and then black thirty feet away at the limits of the search lights’ radiance. If there’s life down here, he can’t see it—and he tries to imagine what could survive with a pressure of four tons per square inch pressing on skin and eyeballs, compressing internal organs and cells…
Hey, wait a minute, he says.
He’s just seen something, a dark shape looming in the blackness on the edge of the light from the search lights. He can’t tell what it is—it’s not the wall of the trench, they’re more than half a mile from that; and another three hundred yards from the drop-off to the Puerto Rico Trench’s true floor.
You got anything on the sonar? he asks Taylor.
It’s unlikely: the minimum range on the sonar is thirty yards, so anything close enough for him to see is not going to be on its screen.
Got what? says Taylor. Hey, that’s strange. Multiple contacts. They just kind of appeared.
But McIntyre is still trying to figure out what it is he’s looking at. He lifts a hand and signals for Stryker to use the bow thruster to swing the bathyscaphe to port, and the sea bottom beneath the pressure-sphere rolls smoothly away to one side, the undulations seeming to propagate like waves across stationary sand.
Give her one third ahead on the centreline motor, he says.
The bottom current is about a quarter knot, but it’s pulling the bathyscaphe to starboard, so Stryker compensates.