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So it was with a mainly academic fascination that the boys at Edwards followed the second Project Mercury chimpanzee flight. For nine months the veterinarians at Holloman Air Force Base had been putting their colony of chimpanzees through the operant conditioning regimen in preparation for an orbital flight. The training included all the things that had gone into the training for the first suborbital flight, the centrifuge runs, the weightless parabolas, the procedures-trainer sessions, the heat-chamber and altitude-chamber sessions, plus some intelligence tests. In one test the ape had to be able to judge time intervals. The signal light would go on, and he had to wait twenty seconds before pulling the lever or he would receive the ever-cocked electrical shock. In another the animal was required to read the instrument panel and throw a switch. Three symbols would flash on the panel, two of which would be identical, such as two triangles and one square, and the animal had to pull the lever under the odd one or receive the shock in the soles of his feet.
By the begi
By now, November of 1962, he had been through 1,263 hours of training—the equivalent of 158 eight-hour days. For the equivalent of 43 days he had been strapped in one simulator or conditioning apparatus or another, whether the centrifuge, the jets, or the procedures trainer. He was a marvel. The only problem was his blood pressure. Back in June of 1960, two months after his training began, they had put a blood-pressure cuff on him and obtained a reading of from 140 to 160 systolic. This was certainly high, but it was hard to tell with Number 85. He had fought every medical examination as if it were an assault. It took two or three people just to restrain him. Three months later they were getting readings from 140 to 210; by now they were ru
Number 85 went through procedures trainer drills out in the vans behind Hangar S right up to the eve of the flight. He was still the pick of the litter. He must have been wound up tighter than a window-shade spring, judging by the systolic readings.
Just before the flight his name was a
The flight did not attract much interest. The public, like the President, was impatient with the tests, especially since it was already November 29 when the ape was launched and it was becoming clear that there would be no ma
During the second orbit the wiring went haywire. When Number 85 did the odd-symbol exercise, he started getting electrical shocks in his left foot even when he pulled the correct lever. He kept pulling the correct levers, nonetheless. He was unstoppable. His suit started overheating. He didn't even slow down. Now the automatic attitude controls began malfunctioning, so that the capsule kept rolling over forty-five degrees before the thrusters on either side would correct it. It kept rolling back and forth. Didn't throw Number 85 out of his routine for a second. He kept reading the lights and flipping the levers. It would have to get a whole lot worse than this before it was as bad as the box.
Because the rolling was using up too much hydrogen peroxide—they had to be sure there was enough left to position the capsule correctly, blunt end down, for reentry—they brought the capsule down after two orbits, into the Pacific, off Point Arguello, California. Number 85 bobbed around and the capsule bobbed around in the ocean for an hour and fifteen minutes before a ship arrived to retrieve them. The capsule had an explosive hatch, but it did not "just blow." Nor had Number 85 thrown up (like Titov) because of weightlessness or erratic motion. He had been weightless for a full three hours during the flight. He was calm when they removed him from the capsule. There was evidence, however, that he had had a merry old time for himself out there in the water. He hadn't just cooled his heels. The little bastard had ripped through the belly panel of his restraint suit and removed most of the biomedical sensors from his body and damaged the rest, including those that had been inserted under the skin. He had also yanked the urinary catheter out of his penis. To just pull it out like that must have hurt like hell. What came over him?