Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins

Author:Michael Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

All that from the cockpit of a Spitfire. What could he have said after one orbit? I cry that he was killed.

* * *

Day 4 begins with the usual bugling from below—“Gemini 10, Canary CAPCOM”—over and over until we answer. We’ve only been asleep a few hours, but no matter—today will be short, just a few experiments, retrofire, and … God, if they’d only give you a few minutes to wake up, but no. “Cryo quantity switch to the O2 position?” “Roger, will do.” Breakfast is the last meal up here, the ground reminds us, and I am enjoying it thoroughly, perhaps too much, as John wryly observes. “Shoot, you should see him; he’s eating my last meal too.” After breakfast I hook a full urine bag to the overboard dump valve and am rewarded with the usual snowstorm of escaping white particles. The constellation “Urion,” as Wally Schirra has dubbed it, is formed by the instantaneous freezing of the urine stream as it reaches the vacuum of space and breaks into thousands of individual miniature spheres. Cascading out in an irregular stream, they whiz past the window and tumble off into infinity, glistening virginal white in the sunlight instead of the nasty yellow we know them to be. The fairytale quality of this transformation is typical of this place, an unreal world far above the unseen squalor below.

This morning everything seems to be going well. We find the right stars in the right places at the right times, and we cheerily wade through the remaining experiments until, suddenly, we are on our last circle before retrofire. This is traditionally a time for a little formality, to thank the ground crews who may have spent weeks in Kano, Nigeria, or on a small ship in the middle of the Indian Ocean, in support of our flight. “Gemini 10, Canary CAPCOM.” “Go!” “O.K., we have nothing for you. We’ll be standing by. Have a good trip home.” “Roger, thank you very much. Enjoyed talking to you. It’s been a lot of fun … want to thank everybody down there for all the hard work.” John isn’t kidding. Without some very precise and rapid calculations on the part of the troops in Mission Control, we would not have been able to press our Agena into extra duty to compensate for our own fuel shortage. Of course, that cat down there in the Canary Islands didn’t do it, but his people in Houston did, and they saved our ass. Over Kano I announce to the world, “Boy, I really hate to come back. This is really something up here.” “Take more groceries next time,” I am advised. Wise bastards. This should have been a full four-day flight anyway; we have just been too harried to do all of it well in … let’s see … it’s now 69:21:05 … retrofire is at 70:10:25.

The weather is supposed to be good in our landing area: scattered clouds at two thousand feet, visibility fifteen miles, wind

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