But to what end? For what purpose?
DOWN
Though he never said anything, McIntyre was surprised when the kludge worked as intended and scooped up the bucket from the ocean bed. The bucket is not exactly intact—it hit the sea surface pretty goddamned hard, has split down one side, and long snakes of film have escaped from the stacks and now hang down through the bars of the kludge. McIntyre tells Stryker to drop the shot ballast—not all at once, because they don’t want to strain the damaged bucket too much or give the kludge an excuse to drop what it carries. And as the Trieste II begins its effortless rise from the ocean bottom, so McIntyre feels his spirits begin to lift, and his mind flies across the miles to the Washington Navy Yard and he knows more than ever he made the right move when he transferred to the Navy Experimental Diving Unit. He’s not enjoyed this dive and he feels no real sense of accomplishment at having retrieved the bucket. The Trieste II is too fragile a mistress, and though this descent has gone relatively smoothly—nothing broke!—he remembers all too well others where one damn thing after another went on the fritz. Which is not to say saturation dives are always snafu-free, or that mistakes and malfunctions cannot also prove fatal.
But, he has to admit, spending hours inside a steel ball seven feet in diameter cannot compare with the freedoms of saturation diving, the ability to move about underwater unrestricted, chained only by an umbilical—because at those pressures air in bottles would last mere minutes—limited only by his own physical endurance. True, the Trieste II can take him so much deeper—he’s here now on his way back up from 19,500 feet beneath the surface!—while the deepest he’s dived on helium-oxygen is 600 feet, and he had to spend six days in a steel can decompressing afterwards.
He looks across the pressure-sphere at the tiny window which gives the only direct view the three men have on the world outside. It’s a circle of inky blackness in the curved steel, and his eyes play tricks and he sees it as a pool of infinite depth, an opening without end in the steel, a shaft through the abyss and the hadal zone into who-knows-where and who-knows-what…
Then, nine hours later, as they near the surface and reach the depth at which sunlight can penetrate the water, the black window begins to pale and fade to blue, day dawning on their submarine world, and it glows ethereally like a beacon signalling sanctuary. So McIntyre gets down on his knees and peers through the window, and there’s the kludge and trapped in its tines the bucket, and strips of films are hanging out of it like those fronds of rusty growth on the wrecks deep below, but they’re fluttering like kelp in the vortices generated by the bathyscaphe’s ascent.
At thirty feet, Taylor pays out the cable on the kludge, so when the Trieste II breaches the surface, the bucket will stay thirty-five feet below, where perhaps it will remain intact and not suffer the battering it would receive at the surface. McIntyre, still looking out through the window, sees a column of boiling white turbulence arrow down past the pressure-sphere. The bubbles evaporate to reveal a diver, who gives McIntyre a thumbs-up and then turns to the bucket in the kludge. And as they both watch, a strip of film separates from a film stack and snakes its way downwards, returning to the depths.
Taylor pumps the access tube free of water, and he and McIntyre open the hatch, while Stryker sets about turning off the onboard systems they won’t need now they’re on the surface. The tube is cold and smells of brine and something infernal, and then the stink generated by three men in a sealed steel sphere overwhelms it. He hears a clanging from above and worms his way into the tube and cranes his neck to look up just as someone opens the hatch and a shaft of clear blue morning sky spears down, causing him to blink and put a hand to his brow. He scrambles upright and clambers up the ladder, and moments later he steps out of the sail onto the bathyscaphe’s fairwater decking. He can’t help pulling in a deep breath of sea air, and he grins at the USS White Sands rocking on the swell a hundred feet away, and the USS Apache on station beside the auxiliary repair dock, and the boat butting up against the Trieste II’s float with a pair of divers hanging from its gunwales.
He wants to say, By God, it’s good to be back; but he guesses his face says it for him anyway.
He hears the slap of waves against the bathyscaphe, the bump and scrape of the boat’s prow against the fairwater decking, the guttural burble of its idling outboard; and the sunlight bounces from the restless sea surface in fractured sheets of brightness, and there’s a depth—it’s not the right word but nothing else springs to mind—a depth to the colours, to the aquamarine of the water, the scuffed whiteness of the fifteen-foot boat, the implacable grey of the USS White Sands and USS Apache, the ineffable blueness of the sky…
McIntyre stands on the Trieste II, his hand to his brow, he wants a cigarette but that’s going to have wait until he’s back aboard the USS White Sands, and he feels a bit like one of those Ancient Greeks or Romans who journeyed into the Underworld but escaped back to the surface, only he can’t remember the guy’s name and he can’t remember where he came across the story and he can’t really recall the details of it, just something about the woman he went to fetch deciding to stay with her husband…
But he sort of feels like him, anyhow.
UP
Cobb has missed out on the firsts so far, for all that she felt she deserved them. The Mercury 13—though there are only a dozen left in the programme, since Hart retired after her one flight to work directly for the women’s movement—was her doing, after all. She was the first American to orbit the Earth, but the Russians did that first; she was the first American to spacewalk, but again after a Russian had done it before her. The only first left, the one not even the Russians can beat, is the first human being to walk on the Moon. That’s what the Gemini and Apollo programmes are for, and Cobb is the most senior astronaut in the corps. That is her dream.
Only now they’re taking it away from her.
The Korean War is finally over, MacArthur chased the Chinese over the border sixteen years ago, and the war dragged on and on, lasting four times longer than the Second World War, eating up men and materiel, and through it all the USA put thirteen women into space on a regular basis. But now the soldiers are returning home, and Cobb has heard that NASA intends to train men as astronauts and rumour has it some of those will go to the Moon. She’s been doing this for seven years, this is her fourth flight into space, and they expect her to step down from the programme and let the men take the lead. She saw this happening more than twenty years ago, after the Second World War, when Rosie the Riveter had to hang up her rivet gun and put her apron back on. Cobb was too young to fly in Cochran’s WASP, but when the men came home and women went back into the kitchen, she knew it wasn’t for her and became a pilot instead—even though it was hard, really hard, for her to find jobs. Now… Now, she has flown three types of spacecraft, she has even flown supersonic jets, she’s not giving this up. God put her here on this Earth for a reason and it is not to “pick up the slack” after the men have had their go.
NASA have already pulled back on their plans. Though they have four years to go, it’s clear they’re not going to make the president’s aim of putting an American on the Moon in time. So Apollo II has been tasked with an orbital rendezvous with a spy satellite in order to perform in situ repairs. That Gemini 10 rendezvous, that was just proof of concept, Irene Leverton and Jan Dietrich did the same in Gemini 11. Cobb had hoped to be given command of Apollo I, but that went to Cagle, Cochran’s favourite, it was just a short flight to prove the hardware. Once again Cobb is second, as she has been in everything, and she’s commander of Apollo II, with B Steadman as pilot and new recruit Betty Miller as flight engineer. Miller was one of the eighteen who took the Lovelace Clinic tests back in 1961, she failed then but the selection requirements were relaxed given the experiences of the Mercury 13. It’s not like Miller is unqualified—she was the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific, from California to Australia, six years ago, she even received the FAA Gold Medal from the president for it. Her lucky troll, Dammit, sat in the simulator during the training for this mission, but it’s not up here in orbit in the real spacecraft.