"You don't think the world will be different once Enloe lands?"
He had a distant look in his eye. "I suppose." He stepped back from the fence. "Maybe I'm just looking at the end of an era and not liking it much. Because it's my era. When rockets were toys for bright children and crazy adults."
"It has to grow up sometime. If we're ever going to get to the Moon. Have cities on Mars."
"I know." He smiled sadly. "I just wish it didn't have to hurt so much." He clapped me on the shoulder and nodded at the package in my hand. "Don't forget."
I had a few moments before the seven-thirty briefing, so I decided to drop by the suiting room. I found Major Meadows there giving a tour to some ten-year-old boy. "I told you not to touch the helmet!"
The kid just rolled his eyes. "This looks like airplane stuff. Where's the spaceman things?"
"These are the spaceman things," Meadows explained patiently. "My son, Mark," he said, by way of introduction and apology.
"Pleased to meet you, Mark."
He ignored me. "Come on, Mark. I'll drop you at school."
I held the door for the two of them.
It's funny, when I think back. If I hadn't held the door, I wouldn't have seen Margaret come into the building with Enloe.
They were laughing. I knew that laugh.
Margaret leaned close and said something to Enloe. Her secret voice.
They were holding hands. My hands.
I ducked back into the suiting room. I was too stunned to do anything but find Enloe's personal pack, open it, and gently place Rowe's gift inside it.
Then I stood there for what seemed like a long time.
Eventually I heard voices. Enloe and Guinan on their way to the briefing. My briefing. I knew I should leave. Right now. Any moment. Finally I forced myself out the door.
The next morning, Wednesday, May 5th, 1958, dawned beautifully bright in the high desert. I was up at four, unable to sleep later, and at the control center by five-thirty. As was everyone else. It was like Christmas morning: something grand was going to happen.
I stopped by Hangar Three, where Sampson, in white overalls, was setting up the cockpit.
Guinan's tank had already rolled out to the flight line. He was in the cockpit. Ridley and Sergeant Vidrine waved as they walked toward the tank.
I spotted Enloe on his way to breakfast with Grissom, Dearborn and Meadows. He gave me a double thumbs up. All I wanted to do was make the final suit check, and get to my console.
Going into the suiting room, I ran right into Margaret.
She seemed startled, almost pale. "Ed!"
"Sleep well?" I said. I couldn't hide my emotions any better than she could.
She sighed as her color returned. "You knew it was going to happen eventually — "
"Eventually. Not this fast."
"It pretty much had to be this fast, Ed." She looked at me with defiance. I never wanted her more than at that moment.
"Well," I said. "I suppose I should take one last look — "
I tried to brush past her, but she blocked me. I put my arms around her and pressed her against the wall. She wiggled away, smoothing her hair back. "Not out here."
We literally fell into an equipment closet. It was dark, crowded, with barely enough room for one person. Which is what we were, briefly. It was a fast, almost brutal collision of raised skirt, cold belt buckle, and torn panties.
For a moment we held each other, panting. "What about your rules against overlapping?"
"I changed them."
Once back in the light we both realized we were late. Maybe that was the reason we ran from each other.
As I plugged into the console next to Dearborn, I nodded to Rowe at his station in the back. Lost in thought, he didn't see me. Which didn't bother me in the least.
"Glad you could make room for us in your busy schedule," Dearborn said.
"Had to answer a call of nature." If he only knew.
"Curtain's going up," Dearborn said. He keyed the intercom. "Tank, this is flight. Comm check."
Moments later, Guinan's tank was airborne.
We had film cameras mounted in the KC-135 and at two places in the 11A cockpit. I mention this because we weren't able to see anything … we had to rely on the audio comm lines and telemetry. As did the rest of the world: NBC had managed to convince NACA and the Defense Department to allow it to broadcast the attempt live. (The Soviet failure made our image-conscious policy makers eager to show them up publicly.)
As the 11A approached the tank from behind and below, we heard Enloe, Guinan and the boom operator speaking from the script, which had by then been through a dozen in-flight rehearsals.
Suddenly we heard Grissom, in the lead chase plane, holler, "Watch it!"
At the same time Meadows, the other chase pilot, called, "Mid-air!"
"Abort." (According to the tapes, that was me, though I don't remember saying it.)
The next thirty seconds were confused. Guinan said he was rolling left. Grissom told him he had lost part of his tail and right wing. Guinan's broken reply: Can't hold."
I literally punched Dearborn on the shoulder. "Where's Enloe!" Forgetting that all along Dearborn had been calling, "11A, this is flight. 11A, this is flight."
At the same time I was hearing from every console at once. The one that registered was propulsion — the engineer monitoring the X-11A's rocket. "We're at redline."
"Woody, shut it down!" I didn't wait for Dearborn to make the call.
No response. No response. Finally, Meadows' voice. "Dust on the lake. Ten miles north of Boron."
Dust on the lake? That's when I realized that it was all over. One of the aircraft had crashed. But which one?
Then I heard Grissom's voice. "Tank's down, too. Five miles from Boron."
Rescue crews were already on their way, but it was too late. The X-11A had suddenly pitched up as the boom was being inserted. This would have been incovenient, but not disastrous, except that the two craft were physically connected. The 11A actually pivoted around the boom, slamming into the tail of Guinan's tank, rolling across the bigger plane and shearing off the right wingtip.
Guinan might have been able to save the tanker with damage to the tail or the missing wingtip, but not both. He was helpless to stop the beast — laden with fuel — from rolling over and plunging to earth.
Even so, he managed to retain some kind of controclass="underline" the KC-135 was almost level when it hit … in the proper attitude for landing. But it broke apart and exploded, leaving a blackened smear four hundred feet long across the desert. The only recognizable structure was the crew cabin with the bodies of Guinan and Ridley. (It was later determined that Vidrine, the boom operator, had been decapitated in the initial collision.)
Both of the men in the cockpit had suffered "severe thoracic trauma," in the bland words of the investigating board. There was one curious bit of damage to Guinan which could not be explained by the impact:
He had lost his right hand.
Enloe's death was more chilling. The cabin films, one frame a second, show him in control and in position up through the beginning of fuelling. Suddenly — in the space of one frame — his hands fly off the controls, as if he is reacting to an explosion of sorts in his lap. (The board later concluded it was due to a failure in the oxygen hose attached to the belly of his suit. It literally blew apart.)
At that delicate moment, the lack of a steady hand — and the sudden, reflexive push on the pedals — is enough to throw the 11A into its fatal pivot.
Even though he is in his flight harness, Enloe is flung toward the camera by the collision with the tail of the tank. The cabin remains intact. The light changes, shifting from sun to shadow to sun, as the 11A rolls across the tank, clipping the wing.