Can you tell me about it?
You know my husband, Jim, she said, sitting up. He’s a test pilot at the base. He came home once, few years ago, with bright red eyes. You’ve never seen anything like it; I thought his eyeballs had burst or something. He’d been pulling heavy negative g’s. They call it red out; the blood vessels in the eyes rupture. He looked terrible. Skin was so gray. He just sat in the kitchen, drinking a glass of milk. I asked him what had happened and he said, nothing much, bit of a corner; managed to luck out of it. A corner. Lucked out of it. I couldn’t blame him, or Jack—his engineer—for wanting to beat Scott Crossfield’s Mach two record, especially with the Wright Brothers’ big anniversary thing coming up a few days later and the celebration the navy had planned for Scotty, but the Bell guys, the engineers who built the plane, told them—told them straight—the X1-A could be pretty … unforgiving at speeds above Mach two; that it might, uh, go divergent. Which is a pretty little way of saying the airplane might suddenly lose all aerodynamics and fall out of the sky like a brick. Air’s pretty thin at seventy-five thousand feet. Sky’s purple, stars are flickering. You slide around like a car on ice. Every airplane has a performance envelope, its critical limits. Jim says flight test is all about pushing the outside of the envelope. That’s what they all talk about. That’s all they talk about. Well, in this case, the envelope didn’t want to stretch at all. At seventy-five thousand feet, above Mach two, the envelope was full of holes. Those Bell guys were right. The airplane just … uncorked. Started pitching and yawing and rolling, all at the same time. There isn’t anything you can do to maneuver out of a hypersonic tumble. In fact, almost anything you do try is going to make things a whole heap worse. They call it inertia coupling, but that don’t do a real good job of explaining what actually happens. You fall out of the sky, rolling and spinning and tumbling, end over end. Jim was thrown around so violently that he busted the canopy with his helmet and was knocked unconscious. He fell ten miles in seventy seconds before coming round at thirty thousand feet in an inverted spin. You wouldn’t wish an inverted spin at that altitude on anyone, but an inverted spin is something he knows how to get out of. So he wrestles the airplane into a normal spin then pops out of it, twenty-five thousand feet from the farm. You know what the sonofabitch says on the way down? That they won’t have to run a structural integrity test on the airplane now. It was a joke. He was making a joke. He put her down on the lakebed and everyone said, how the hell are you still here? He was home for lunch. I didn’t find out about the new record until I ran into Jack the next day. Mach two point four. Fastest man alive. They gave him the Harmon International Trophy. That was nineteen fifty-three. I had nightmares about it for a year. And then he shows up again, yesterday lunch, with bloodred eyes.
She started to cry, then stopped herself.
You know, she said, we went to this party, the year before, I think, old friend of mine; she’d moved east, New York, after the war. She was a journalist, worked at Time and a bunch of other places, then managed to get a job copywriting for one of those big advertising agencies on Madison Avenue. She spent the whole evening telling me how ruthless it was, how cutthroat and dog-eat-dog. I asked her how many of those men would still go into a meeting if there was a one-in-four chance of them not making it out alive. We lost sixty-two men over a thirty-six-week stretch once. That’s nearly two a week. I had to buy another black dress; I couldn’t get the one I had clean and dried in time. So I had two, on rotation. You want to know why I’m here? I remembered something. Back in fifty-three, Joe Walker, good friend of Jim’s, test pilot for the NACA—the NASA now—came over when he heard what happened to Jim in the X1-A. Tells Jim inertia coupling hit him hard a couple of times too. Jim asks how he got out of it. Joe pulls that big Huck Finn grin of his across his face and says, the JC Maneuver. In the JC Maneuver, he says, you take your hands off the controls and put the mother in the lap of a su-per-na-tu-ral power.
She gave a little laugh.
Sorry, Reverend, she said. I remembered that yesterday.
She looked down again at the hard stone floor.
Kinda thing I could use right about now, don’t you think? she said.
I’m glad you came back, Irving said. And I’m glad you’ve shared this with me. Where did you grow up?
Midwest. On a ranch. My father didn’t hold much with church. Figured that, with his mother outliving his wife, there wasn’t much of anyone watching over him.
I’ve met Jim before, he said, few times, over at Pancho Barnes’s place. He still the fastest man alive?
She smiled.
Mel Apt beat him to Mach three in fifty-six, she said, but … Mel bought it with that one. It had a seat, and Mel tried to eject, but …