Card Sharks

  Dearborn pulled the box open. A yellowed newspaper clipping wafted out. Dearborn plucked it from the air and gave it to Hannah....

  A Method Of Reaching Extreme Altitudes

  by Michael Cassutt

  (From The Los Angeles Herald, Monday, April 12, 1958:)

  U.S. TO TRY ROCKET FLIGHT

  BEFORE RUSSIANS?

  ROSAMOND, CALIFORNIA. (Herald exclusive) The United States may attempt a manned rocket flight in the next few weeks in an attempt to beat the Russians into space, it was learned here today.

  Officials at the Muroc Lake Test Site of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics referred this reporter to the USAF office here, which declined comment. NACA's Muroc Site is part of the larger, restricted access Tomlin Air Force Base.

  Nevertheless, it is known that six Air Force and NACA test pilots are training for flights in a winged rocketplane known as the X-11A. Several of these pilots are reported to have taken part in as many as five unpowered free flights of the X-11A, in which the Northrop-built vehicle glided to a landing on the dry lakebed at Tomlin.

  The planned orbital flight would reportedly see the X-11A take off from Tomlin to rendezvous with a specially-modified Boeing tanker at 30,000 feet. Following re-fueling, the X-11A would rocket into orbit on its own power, returning to Tomlin after making a single orbit of the earth.

  The existence of the American orbital program, long rumored, comes three weeks after the announcement by the Soviet Union that it hopes to launch a manned spacecraft known as North on its own orbital mission sometime later this year ...

  (From the notebooks of Edgar Thayer:)

  In those days - which seem quite long ago, as I write, but were actually less than five years in the past - the Muroc Lake facility of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics wasn't on any maps. This had less to do with security concerns (NACA was a civilian agency, anyway) than with the general lack of formality, or even public interest. Nevertheless, as I waited for the phone call in the ratty motel in Rosamond on the morning of April 12, I didn't need directions: I already knew where to find it.

  I was fourteen years old and living in a small town in southern Minnesota when the wild card struck. Although we were not isolated - we had CBS radio coming through loud and clear on WCCO - we were not directly affected. For years I thought of the plague as less important than polio, which had crippled one of my classmates.

  What fascinated me was the proof that there was life on other planets. I was already a sporadic reader of comic books - sporadic only because the vagaries of distribution didn't often bring them to St. Peter - and became a devotee of Heinlein's Tak World books. I discovered the first one, Eclipse, in the St. Peter High School library my junior year, and made such a fuss over it that my parents bought the next one, Fire Down Below, $2.45, for me the following Christmas.

  They faithfully sent me each new one, all through my time at the University of Minnesota, and even during my first two years in the Air Force. I can remember eagerly unwrapping The Sound of His Wings, the 1955 volume - the last in the series, alas - while sitting in an office at Kirtland Air Force Base looking out on the very hangar where the Takisian ship Baby had been based before being moved to California.

  So I was one of the few - very few - who still believed that humans might have a destiny in space. Who weren't ready to give up the dream just because someone had found us first.

  My work in the Air Force was as an analyst with the foreign technology division. It consisted of taking captured German and stolen Soviet weapons - in my case, missiles - out to New Mexico and firing them off to learn how they worked. It was fascinating, and my experience in the infant field of launch operations got me assigned later to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, where I worked on Pied Piper, our first satellite program.

  That April morning in Rosamond I was twenty-eight years old, having left the service after completing my ROTC committment. I had spent the intervening year at Aerojet in Pasadena, working on the rocket engine that would later be used in the X-11A. My background as a launch controller had come to NACA's attention, however, and I had been summoned to the high desert in great secrecy for an assignment of unlimited duration.

  It was greatly upsetting to my wife, Deborah, who was left in the apartment in Pasadena, pregnant and caring for our five-year-old daughter.

  For me, however, it was a dream come true.

  ***

  They started early at Muroc in those days. The phone call from Dr. Rowe's office came before six ... by seven I was at the administration building (shack would be a better word) thirty-two miles away, having passed through three successively picky Air Force checkpoints, while driving through the flat, trackless waste that was Tomlin.

  (There had been a late spring rain that year, and the usually dry lakebeds were covered with an inch-deep sheen. Rising over the Tehachapis, the sun and its reflection effectively blinded me: never the best of drivers, I could just as easily have driven off the road, rolled the car, and drowned in an inch of water.)

  By nine I had been badged and cross-examined by a security officer named Battle, who had the air of a parochial school nun. Then I was taken into my first briefing.

  It wasn't particularly dark in the conference room; the blinds had been drawn so that viewgraphs could be seen. But it took a moment for my eyes to adjust from the blinding brilliance of a desert morning.

  Rowe was just discussing how some unexpected funding cuts were going to force stretchouts in the final testing phase ... possibly delaying the first all-up launch of the X-11A by several weeks or more.

  "Ah, shit, Doc," said a voice from the back. "Who needs the tests? We know it'll fly ... let us fly it."

  "That's easy for you to say, hotshot," a second guy said. "You won't be flying the first one." There was some general laughter.

  Then Rowe noticed me.

  "Here's the new arrival now," he said. "The most vital element in any program team ... the last one to join. Ed Thayer." I shook some hands that belonged to vaguely familiar faces, then took an open chair between the two men who had been kidding each other.

  To my right was the youngest pilot in the group, Mike Sampson, an Air Force captain. The file on him had been brief ... first in his class at West Point, service as a fighter pilot in Germany, an engineering degree from Michigan. What was unusual is that he had also done graduate work in astronomy. Clearly he had his sights on a career in space, not just aviation.

  The loudmouth who didn't care for the pace of the testing program was Al Dearborn, a naval aviator. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and pants the color of a diseased liver, he looked more like the number two mechanic at a small town filling station than someone who held the Distinguished Flying Cross. (He had shot down two MiGs in Korea.) One of my briefers had expressed amazement that Dearborn had gotten into the program at all, assuming his selection was a bone thrown to the Navy in exchange for minuscule financial support. In fact, Dearborn hadn't even finished in the top three when the Navy selection board made its choices, but two of the other finalists chose to stay in flight test at Patuxent River while the third had managed to break his arm in a softball game.

  Sitting across from me was Major Woody Enloe, USAF, blond and handsome in the manner of a teen movie star. Even sitting down he seemed taller than the others. He was known as a pilot's pilot, the only one ever to have waxed Yeager in a dogfight.

  Next to him was his reverse image, the dark, homely, clumsy Casey Guinan, a civilian pilot who had worked with Rowe since World War II. His file showed him to be a multi-engine pilot and though the decision about who would fly the X-11A on its maiden voyage was still to be made, Guinan was sure to pilot the tanker instead.

  I don't remember many details from the briefing. The first all-up attempt to get the X-11A into orbit was then still three weeks off. As Dr. Rowe pointed out, it had been three weeks off for six months now. There were on-going concerns about the fuel lines - the X-11A had two engines, a jet and
a rocket motor, which shared common tanks. So there was the obvious problem of pumping liquid oxygen from one aircraft to another at 30,000 feet. Which in turn made the X-11A itself a potential flying bomb.

  Everyone knew the refueling concept was tricky ... but the only other way to get a workable manned spacecraft - not just a tin can - into orbit was a multistage launch vehicle. The U.S. had the Convair Atlas ICBM, which had put Pied Piper into orbit. A multi-stage version of Atlas was years and millions of dollars away.

  I did learn that my job would involve monitoring the two propellant systems. Fortunately I had helped design one of them - the rocket. So all I had to do in the next three weeks was become an expert on jet engines.

  It never occurred to me that this was unreasonable, or impossible. There I was, sitting in a room with Wilson Rowe, who had been one of my idols, and the pilots who would be the first space travelers. I was home.

  ***

  When the meeting broke up, Dr. Rowe called me over. He was then about fifty, slim, bald, with merry eyes hidden behind the engineer's thick eyeglasses. He had grown up with aviation ... watching some of the first Army tests at Camp McCook in Dayton, Ohio, where he lived. (The story was that a Packard-Le Pere LUSAC 11, the earliest American fighter plane, had crash-landed in his family's backyard, thus ensuring that young Wilson would do nothing else in his life.) Getting into M.I.T., earning one of the first degrees offered in aeronautical engineering ... working on America's first jets and rockets during World War II.

  Those were the broad outlines of Rowe's career, but they said nothing about his ability to lead or inspire. During my brief career at Aerojet I had run into no less than four of his former associates ... all of them spoke of him in awe as the man with the vision. The man who believed. The man who would cajole or seduce or threaten or bully to reach his goal.

  The single biggest disappointment in his life was obvious to everyone ... that he, himself, would never see the Earth as a sphere ... never kick the dust of the surface of the moon. You see, Rowe had paid his way through college as a barnstormer, flying his own specially-modified Stearman in county fairs and settings even less formal all across America. It was his eyesight that forever kept him from becoming a professional pilot, a verdict he accepted gracefully, without complaint.

  But even now, it was said, when the pressure got to be too much, he would sneak off to nearby El Mirage to go sailplaning.

  "Mr. Thayer. I've been waiting for you."

  At first I thought I had already done something wrong. "I came straight here from Security," I said.

  He smiled, his eyes twinkling behind the thick lenses. "Not this morning. For weeks. Months."

  Fumbling for my sunglasses, I followed him out of the briefing shack into the noonday sun. He never even blinked. I had a quick, nod-of-the-head tour. "Control center's over there ... Aerojet office ... Pratt & Whitney. Hangar Two." That hangar was practically a shrine to someone like me. The JB-1, the first American jet, had been towed here, complete with a dummy propeller on its nose to confuse Axis spies. (I had seen a replica of JB-1 at Jetboy's Tomb in New York, of course, during a Boy Scout trip there when I was thirteen.) This was also where Kelly Johnson's lovely XP-80 had flown, with the ill-fated Halford engine. "Oh, yes .." he said finally, as we approached another massive, never painted structure. "Hangar Three." We went inside.

  It took me several seconds to realize that I was looking at the X-11A, vehicle number one. (Northrup, the prime contractor, was assembling birds two and three out in some town with the unlikely name of Pico Rivera.)

  I had only seen a couple of rough sketches in Aviation Week ... and they hadn't done it justice. They made the X-11A look like a slightly larger Bell X-1 - a bullet with wings.

  This was a winged beast more like an eagle. Or, to shift from the aero to the nautical, a manta ray. For one thing, it was twice the size of the X-1, 55 feet long, with a delta wing forty feet across at its widest. The tail, rising above the fraternal twin engines, reached eighteen feet.

  It was the cockpit that reminded everyone of the X-1. It was so cramped that Enloe - never a noted humorist - was widely quoted as saying, "You don't climb in ... you put it on." Because most of the X-11A's volume was taken up by engines and fuel tanks, there wasn't even room enough for the pilot to float around once reaching zero-G. Later models would be bigger, with better engines. There would have to be more room ... if we were going to land X-11A or its children on the Moon.

  "The world's first spaceship," I said, walking underneath it with its father.

  "Is it? What's going on with the Russians?"

  "My information is over a year old."

  A tight smile. "That's not what I hear."

  My background as an analyst was no secret to Rowe - to anyone. But who knew that I'd kept in touch with the FTD, more as a hobby than anything else? My wife, maybe. "All I have is raw data."

  "That's okay. This isn't a quiz. I just want to know if von Braun and Korolev are going to beat me."

  The fact that he knew those names told me he had access to whatever information there was. Von Braun had headed the Nazi V-2 rocket program and had been brought to the U.S. briefly after the war to build rockets for the U.S. Army. After the wild card struck, the program was scrapped. Leaving his brain - or whatever was valuable in it - behind, von Braun returned to Germany, where he was scooped up by the Russians.

  According to the stories - and they may have been just that: stories - he found a soul brother in a Russian engineer named Sergei Korolev.

  Korolev was a lot like Rowe ... a child of aviation who burned to go beyond it. He was flying gliders in his twenties and building rocket motors in his thirties. He had come close to being shot during the purges that destroyed the Soviet air force in 1938, wound up in a gold mine in the Arctic under a de facto sentence of death ... only to be reprieved. He'd built katusha rockets for Stalin during the war, and then was put in charge of finding a use for all the captured German V-2s.

  I would have given anything to be present when Korolev first met von Braun.

  "They've adapted one of the German designs for a multi-stage booster -"

  "The A-10?"

  "More or less. They call it the R-11."

  "Interesting coincidence."

  "It's a big brute -"

  "You've seen it?"

  Should I answer? I had seen Pied Piper photos, which were highly classified. But Rowe knew about Korolev and von Braun; surely he knew about our spy satellites. "Yes. It's twenty stories tall, maybe thirty feet across at the base, tapering like an artillery shell. I guess it puts out over a million pounds of thrust -"

  He was shaking his head, out of pleasure or annoyance, I couldn't say. "And we have a tenth of that."

  "And they will throw away nine-tenths of that rocket."

  "The spacecraft itself ... ?"

  "A modified missile nosecone with a blunt bottom. One pilot."

  He was thinking, almost certainly replaying endless debates over the very same issues, reaching the same conclusion. "We couldn't have done it. We built bombers, not intercontinental missiles." He smiled again. "But their way is faster."

  "They haven't had a manned launch yet."

  We were interrupted by a female voice. "Dr. Rowe?"

  I turned. A woman in her early thirties wearing a white blouse and a beige skirt was walking toward us. She had copper-colored hair that was pulled back by a hairband and was wearing her sunglasses inside the darkened hangar. "They were looking for you over in administration," she said.

  "Thanks, Peggy." He clapped me on the shoulder. "We'll have plenty of time to talk later." As he went out: "By the way, Edgar Thayer, Margaret Durand. The rest is up to you."

  Only when Rowe had walked off did she take off her glasses. I saw that her eyes were a blue so pale they looked transparent. Maybe it was the drab surroundings, maybe it was my personal situation. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

  ***

  I had married a ho
metown girl for reasons that couldn't possibly have been any good. We both thought we were in love. We both wanted to get out of St. Peter.

  Oddly enough, we hadn't been high school sweethearts: I had gone on three forced dates (to this day I can remember each excrutiating moment) ... two homecomings and one senior prom, each with a different partner. I knew Deborah, of course - I knew everyone in St. Peter High - and thought her quite pretty and nice. She even had a good sense of humor. But she had a steady boyfriend, one of the Borchert boys, from a farm family east of town, with whom she was constantly breaking up. Nevertheless, most high school couples in St. Peter had, like it or not, mated for life. It never occurred to me to ask Deborah out.

  Not until I came home on my second summer vacation from St. Paul. I had left St. Peter a virgin; I had returned a veteran of half a dozen sexual encounters, some of which I hadn't had to buy. Romance was in the air. And Deb was in the middle of a surprisingly long breakup with Billy Borchert.

  One thing led to another, as they say. When I went back to the University of Minnesota at the end of the summer we were sort of engaged. When Deborah called three months later to tell me she was pregnant, we got married. And I, the panicked new father, worried about supporting a wife and child, joined ROTC, committing myself to five years of service in the Air Force. (The way I looked at it, I was committing the Air Force to support me for five years.)

  Deb joined me in St. Paul, where Caroline was born.

  We had one good year, I think, that year when Caroline was in her crib. Living in married student housing only slightly better than a Selby and Dale tenement, we had no money for baby sitters - when we did go out, even to see a movie like She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, it was a special occasion - but we were entertained by Caroline's antics. Deb made a stab at being the wife of an engineering student, helping me with my course work, reading some of the texts - I think she even thought about going to the U of M herself. But all she had really wanted was to save herself from becoming a farm wife. It was enough for her to have a child and be in the big city.