Страница 57 из 94
"What a beautiful view!" he said.
He could hear Slayton say: "I bet it is."
In fact, there was a cloud cover over most of the East Coast and much of the ocean. He was able to see the Cape. He could see the west coast of Florida… Lake Okeechobee… He was up so high he seemed to be moving away from Florida ever so slowly… And the inverters moaned up and the gyros moaned down and the fans whirred and the cameras hummed… He tried to find Cuba. Was that Cuba or wasn't that Cuba? Over there, through the clouds… Everything was black and white and there were clouds all over… There's Bimini Island and the shoals around Bimini. He could see that. But everything looked so small! It had all been bigger and clearer in the ALFA trainer, when they flashed the still photos on the screen… The real thing didn't measure up. It was not realistic. He couldn't see anything but a medium-gray ocean and light-gray beaches and dark-gray vegetation… There were the Bahamas, Grand Bahama Island, Abaco Island… or were they? The pale-gray cloud cover and the medium-gray water and the pale-gray beaches and the medium-gray… the grays ran together like goulash… He didn't have time to fool with it. He had a long checklist. He was supposed to try out the roll, yaw, and pitch controls. They were all operating automatically up to now. He switched over to manual one at a time and tried using the hand controller.
"Okay," he said into his microphone, "switching to manual pitch."
And the capsule nosed up and then down.
"Pitch is okay," he said. "Switching to manual yaw."
All this he seemed to have said a hundred, a thousand times before, in the procedures trainer. And the capsule yawed from side to side, and he had felt it a thousand times before—on the ALFA trainer. Only the sound was different. Every time he turned the manual control handles, hydrogen-peroxide jets discharged outside the capsule. He knew it was happening, because the capsule would pitch, roll, yaw, just as it was supposed to, but he couldn't hear the jets. On the ALFA trainer he had always been able to hear the jets. The real thing was not nearly so realistic as that. The capsule pitched and yawed just like the ALFA… no difference… but he couldn't hear the jets at all because of the humming, moaning, and whining of the inverters and gyros and fans… the busy little kitchen.
Whuh?—before he knew it the ride was practically over. It was time to prepare himself for re-entry into the earth's atmosphere. He was descending the arc… just like a mortar shell on the way down… The ground was starting the countdown for the firing of the retro-rockets that would slow the capsule down for re-entry through the atmosphere. There was no need for them on this flight, because the capsule was going to come back down in any event like a ca
What i