John Berryman

“ There were so many forms of circuit-breakers and self-protectors in the machine that the whole gate had been switched off as long as the short was in existence. No wonder telemetry hadn't told us anything.
As I prepared to fix the trouble, I switched on my radio and had Sid connect me with the ground. "Canaveral Control," one of those emotionless voices said. He could afford to be. He was on the ground.
"Get me Cleary," I ordered.
"Cleary here, Mike. What have you found, boy?" He sure was anxious about that solenoid.
"Not much, Paul. Just that Fred Stone is a fathead, too. ”

“ While the crash trucks were still kicking up a dust trail tearing out to get us, there were guys on the radio with those cool voices, and Sid was tiredly saying "Roger," to all their questions. And we didn't do any moving about. You'd be surprised how weighing four hundred pounds makes you willing to wait for the crane to lift you from your seat. All at once I almost wanted to be back in space again, where I didn't weigh anything at all. Almost.
They flew us back to Canaveral for the de-briefing, both asleep. The whole mob was there to greet us, Paul Cleary, Fred Stone, and even Sylvia. ”

“ He leaned back against his desk and started talking to me, like they say, straight from the shoulder:
"I'll give it to you straight, Mike. We've tried every legal way to wash you out of this mission. There isn't a one of us here at the Cape that wants any part of taking an armchair theorist and slapping him into space—into the kind of a mission you've cooked up. Somebody's going to get hurt out there, because you aren't fit for the job. Now, physically, yes, you have the capacity. But emotionally and environmentally, you simply don't add up. ”

“ Sid said, not quite so emotionlessly. "Are we ready to move?"
"What for?" I asked him. "Until we get me some steering fuel, I'm useless."
"I thought we'd abort this mission before we were through," he sneered.
"Not so fast. You've got the same rig on your suit. All we have to do is put your fuel tanks on my suit."
"Are you nuts?" he demanded.
"What's the matter with it? Those tanks aren't welded to you, and I've got tools."
I could see him shake his head in the dim light from the instrument panel. "You know those fuels ignite on contact with each other," he pointed out. ”

“ I protested. "And how can we? There's zero gravity—zero pressure—all sorts of things going on out there we can't duplicate in a lab."
"I really don't care how you do it," he said. "But if it were my job I'd just light my pipe and sit here and think for a week or so. Why don't you try it?" ”

“ One of the bonuses America got from its poor rocket booster performance, as compared with the Russians, was a forced-draft course in miniaturization. Our engineers have learned how to make almost anything about one-tenth the size you'd think it ought to be, and still work. To get all these tiny parts into a total system, they are assembled in racks. In the Telstar each of these long skinny sticks of perforated magnesium alloy is hinged to the main framework so that it can be swung out for testing or for replacement of parts, which is why the engineers call each component a "gate." ”

“ In the meantime I got a daily phone call from Paul Cleary. That I could have snarled off, but Sylvia always came on the line first, and there was a minute or so of chit-chat before she cut her boss in on the line. I'm sure she listened to all the calls. But her first words were deadly. For example:
"Mike! Hi, Mike. Mr. Cleary wants to see how you're doing."
"Good. Put him on."
"In a minute. I think it's so wonderful you passed the final physical, Mike. You're really so deceptive. I never had imagined you had such a steely physique."
"Clean living," I said. "No girls." ”

“ Say I'm a built-in hazard and let it go at that." I grinned at him. I was learning from Paul Cleary. I figured how space-jockeys would react to that.
He told me: "Do you think any of these men would admit they are not up to a mission a mere technician is ready to try? No! I can't get them to beg off, either!"
"When do we go?" I asked.
Sid Stein was assigned as my pilot. He had made the trip into orbit and back four times with the Dyna-Soar rocket, and was considered the best risk to get me there and get me back. He was also the least convinced I had any right to sit beside him in the cabin. ”

“ If you haven't made at least three orbits, she won't even have dinner with you."
I stopped at Sylvia's desk with half an idea of asking her for a date. "Well, Dr. Seaman," she demanded as I chewed on my pacifier. "What did you learn?"
I thought about it. "That a lot depends on knowing where to put your feet," I said, puffing smoke. "And my name is Mike."
She sniffed. "If you think Paul Cleary hasn't been around long enough to catch Fred Stone trying to fake him out of position with a meaningless test," she said, "you have another think coming!" ”

“ It's black. Nothing—nothing you have ever seen will persuade you how dark it is out there. That was my first big shock. Oh, I had practiced in the dark, with only my helmet light to guide my tests and assemblies, but this was a different kind of dark. Our light had no visible beam—you couldn't even tell it was working. At first I had the idea we'd see the satellite occulting some stars, but a little mental arithmetic told me that an object six or eight feet in section would not subtend much of an angle of vision at half a mile. ”

“ He nodded. "You may be right, Mike. But do you know how much it costs to send a manned satellite aloft?"
"Oh," I agreed. "There are cheaper ways. We can beef up every part in that gate, test it much tougher than we already have, and when we get the gate to where all seven thousand components can stand any imaginable strain, we can rebuild the twelve Telstars we haven't launched yet and be pretty sure they won't have switching failures. ”

“ No, the problem was to get a glove that stood up to a pressure difference of three or four pounds per square inch and could still be flexed with any accuracy by my fingers. We could make a glove that was pretty thin, but it stiffened out under pressure and made delicate work really tough. It was a lot like trying to do brain surgery in mittens.
They eventually gave me a porous glove that leaked air when you flexed your fingers. Air, they said, could always be gotten from the Dyna-Soar rocket that would be hanging close at hand in space. ”

“ I said, hoping I wasn't plaintive. "I work under orders. The director of assembly asked me to test the part to destruction. I tested it. I'm sorry that it wasn't a soldered joint that failed. It wasn't. It was a solenoid. What has that got to do with me?"
"Nothing, maybe," Cleary conceded, pushing himself up out of his chair. He went to his window to stare out at the parking lot. "You can be a test engineer all your life, if that's what you want."
"It isn't."
"And what do you want, Mike?" he said, turning back to face me. ”

“ Because of this speed we'd be somewhat more eccentric—maybe swing out a hundred miles beyond the birds we're chasing. Are you making it?"
"Easy, Sid. Do we slow down yet?"
"I'll fire the retros and retard us to the speed of what we're chasing," he said. "That will equalize our orbits very nearly. Get busy on that scope if you're up to it. I'll compute my retro."
They had made an amateur radar operator out of me, because it was easy to do, and gave Sid more time for actual rocket valving. ”

“ My navigating in space was a lot better, and I didn't use steering fuel as wastefully as the first time. Still, when we dogged down to chase after the final bird, the cabin gauge said that I had less than half my load of steering fuel left. Equally glum, Nelly herself was even lower on steering fuel. Neither Sid nor I had been as expert as we were supposed to be. ”

“ And Paul Cleary, who had been in charge of design, insisted that faulty assembly was to blame. Well, somebody would make up his mind pretty soon, and my evidence would have a lot to do with it. I had done the appraisal tests of the circuit in the test lab once the bug had been detected, and now Cleary was going to smoke it out of me.
"Mr. Seaman," Sylvia Shouff said to me, kind of waking me up. "Mr. Cleary will see you now. Have you ever met?" she added, as I came toward her desk.
I shook my head. "I'm a working stiff," I said, "I never get to meet the brass." ”

“ My earphone spoke.
"Mike!"
"Roger, Sid. What's up."
"Take it easy on your steering fuel. You're getting low."
"Roger."
I had to wait for the sun before I could start work. When it came up, heating seemed quick. First a test with a thermocouple showed that Telstar's surface was warming nicely and would soon support the pressure-sensitive mat I was going to stick to some of her solar generators. When the 'couple said Telstar had reached zero centigrade, I pulled the mat loose from where it was stuck to my left leg and plastered it above the gate I was going to open. ”

“ They got a team assigned to figuring out if the Dyna-Soar rocket could be modified to make the three contacts around the orbit, carry two men and enough air and fuel for the job, and at COMCORP we appointed a crew to figure out what it meant to make the repair in orbit.
Cleary put me in charge of our crew. They gave me a full-size Telstar satellite for my lab, and I went to work.
Fancy electronic equipment consists of millions of parts, and Telstar is no exception. ”

“ These space-jockeys have their own vocabulary, and their own oh, so cool way of playing it during the countdown. I'm pretty familiar with complex components, but they were checking off equipment I never heard of. We had gyros—hell, our gyros had gyros. And we had tanks, and pressures and temperatures and voltages and who-stuck-John. It was all very impressive.
There were suited men up on the gantry unplugging our air feed and closing our hatch. Sid was straining up from where he lay on his back to dog it down tight. ”

“ I guess that's why he was in charge of final assembly of the Telstar satellites for COMCORP.
"Don't worry about what Paul Cleary can do to you, Mike," he suggested. "Think a little bit more about what Fred Stone can do for you. Cleary is only a year or so from retirement, and you know it."
"He could make that an awful tough year, Doc." I said. "You told me he won't hear of design bugs in that solenoid. He'll insist something went wrong in assembly."
Doc Stone smiled thinly at me and brushed at his blond crew cut. "It is a tough spot, Mike," he agreed. ”

“ Is that all COMCORP got for three days' pay?"
"A confession of ignorance is a hell of a lot more revealing than a solid error," I snapped. "The honest answer that I get out of the telemetry data is that something in that gate broke the circuit and the switching operation failed. I think there are about seven thousand components in the gate. I don't know which one failed. A few I can rule out, because they would only cause part of the gate to fail. ”

“ I hung behind him long enough to tell Sylvia about the Chincoteague oysters they put in the stew at Grand Central Terminal, and got a dinner date. That was all, just the date, because Cleary was itching to take me to see a man.
Politics must be an awfully large part of business. The man we went to see was the government side of COMCORP, and I guess he had had to do as much explaining about Telstar failures to a Senate Committee as Paul Cleary had had to do to the Western. ”

“ Say an hour or so."
"You had to apply the vibration throughout the whole test period to get these failures?"
"Yes, Mr. Cleary."
"Then how do you explain how vibration during no more than six or eight minutes of blast-off and launch could have the same effect on the actual installation on M1537 in a satellite, Mr. Seaman?" Smoke poured from the curve-stem.
"I don't have to explain it," I said, beginning to get a little hot. "All I have done is find a way to make one part quit. I haven't said it did quit in use, or that it could be made to quit in use."
"Then what the hell are you good for?" ”

“ He took his coat off again, hung it on the clothes tree, came back to his desk and got on the phone.
"Sylvia? Have Fred Stone come up, and you come in with him, eh? That's a dear."
He racked up the instrument and smiled at me as he stoked his pipe into more activity. "Relax," he advised me. "It always takes a while to round up Fred Stone." ”

“ Our Dyna-Soar had been modified to some degree for this mission. It's essentially a big delta-winged glider with a squarish fuselage in the center. The mods had consisted of tying a third rocket stage out behind, so that Sid could move us around the orbit from one Telstar to the next if my work on the first one proved out. The retro-rockets had several times their normal complement of fuel, so that he could stop after he got started. The same was true of our steering jets. ”

“ What is it?"
"Have you gotten to that solenoid yet?"
"Yes."
"What can you tell me?"
"That you're a fathead. Now shut up. I'm busy."
"Roger, Mike," Paul Cleary acknowledged quite meekly.
So I started again, reaching with my leads from point to point. After a certain number of tests, I had the area isolated, but not the part. From here on it would have to be disassembly. Every tiny screw had to be heated, then teased out with a jeweler's screwdriver. Some took my patented ratchet extension. The big miracle was that I didn't break anything. ”

“ The space medic wasn't any better. The mission chief insisted that it wasn't safe to put anybody in a satellite who couldn't pass the physical. I guess you know that about one man in a thousand can qualify. ”