Harold Calin

“ He had started with a premise of testing man's reactions to space probes under actual conditions, but what he was actually doing was testing space probes alone, with man as a necessary evil to contend with to give the project a reason.
It was all like putting a man in a racing car traveling flat out on the Salts in Bonneville, Utah. He'll survive, of course. But put the man in the car with no controls for him to operate and then run the thing completely through remote transmission, and you've eliminated the purpose for the man. ”

“ I'm afraid, Harry. The ailerons, Harry, they're gone. Very tenuous. They're gone. I can't see anything. The screens are black. No more shaking. No more noise. It's quiet and I hear myself breathing, Harry. Harry, the wrist straps on the suits are too tight. And the helmet, when you want to scratch your face, you can go mad. And Harry—"
That was the end of the communications. Something in the transmitter must have gone. They never found out. He didn't hit until almost a minute later, and nobody ever saw it. The tracking screen followed him down very precisely and very silently. ”

“ That's because the sky never looks warm. In winter, if you are in a cold climate, the sky doesn't appear at all friendly. It's beautiful, mind you, but never friendly. That is when you see it as it really is. Summer has a way of making it look friendly. The way you see it on a winter night is only the merest idea of what it is really like. That's why I can't feel too bad about the monkey. ”

“ Lynds was about seventy miles up, his velocity down to a point or two over Mach 2, in level flight heading east over the south Atlantic. From about that altitude, manual controls are essential, not just to make one feel better, but because you really need them. The automated controls did not have any tolerance. You don't understand, do you? Look, when one flies and wants to alter direction, one applies pressure to the control surfaces, altering their positions, redirecting the flow of air over the wings, the rudder and so forth. ”

“ When you reel in, the line can't become too tight or it will snap, so you have the drag. It's really quite ingenious. It lets the fish pull out line as you reel in. It's the degree of tolerance that makes it work well as an instrument. In flying, the degree of tolerance, the compensating factor is in man's hands. In the atmosphere, it's too unpredictable for any other way.
Well, they calculated to set the dive brakes at twelve degrees at the point where Lynds was. Lynds saw it all. ”

“ It's no more than a man in a barrel deserves. It's black out here, black and there's nothing to stand on. The earth looks like a flat circle of light and very big, but it doesn't make me feel any better. These buggies of yours won't be any use to anybody until you let the pilot do his own work. I crashed once, in a Gypsy Moth, with my controls all shot away by an overenthusiastic Russian fighter pilot near the Turkish border. Coming down, I felt the way I do now. ”

“ That's one of the nice parts about truly classified work. They can't make you out an idiot in public. Living on a boat in the Mediterranean is far nicer than looking up at the earth through a porthole in a smashed up ship on the moon, you must admit.
Well, Bannister could have well counted chickens on that launching. The first, second and third stages fired off perfectly, and within fourteen minutes the capsule detached into orbit just under escape velocity. The orbit was enormously far out. They let Lynds complete a single orbit, then fired the capsule's rockets. ”

“ They proved Lynds nuts, and got rid of me, but nobody would try it, even with manual controls, where there is no atmosphere.
When you're putting down after a maximum velocity flight, you feed a set of landing coordinates into the computer, and you wait for the computer to punch out a landing configuration and the controls set themselves and lock into pattern. Then you just sit there. I haven't yet met a pilot who didn't begin to sweat at that moment, and sweat all the way down. ”

“ After four minutes, the return vehicle was activated and as it broke away from the capsule, Lynds blacked out for twenty seconds. That was the only time I was out of direct contact with him after he went into orbit.
"Now do you understand about the manual controls?" Bannister said.
"He'll come out of it in less than a minute."
"One can never be sure."
"There's still no reason why you can't use duplicate control systems."
"With a switch-off on the automatic, if they fail?"
"Yes. If for nothing more than to give a man a chance to save his own neck."
"They won't fail." ”

“ Now, in applying pressure, you occasionally have to ease up or perhaps press a bit more, as the case may be, to counteract turbulence, shift in air current, or any of a million other circumstances that can occur. That all depends on touch. It's what makes some flyers live longer than others. ”

“ Any manual controls would be inoperative by the pilot in any case. No more questions."
I feel the way I do about the monkey, Argus, because, in a way, we all quit about that time. You don't like having spent your life in a rather devoted way with purposes and all that, and then being placed in the hands of a collection of technologists like just so many white mice ... or monkeys, if you will. Lynds, of course, had little choice. ”

“ There are two types of classified government information. One is the type that is really classified because it is concerned with efforts and events that are of true importance and go beyond public evaluation. ”