The Gemini Divergence (40 page)

He returned a polite chuckle, and then
changed the subject, “What were you looking so disappointed for
when you were inspecting that forward landing carriage? That’s a
new plane, isn’t it? I thought you were a mission equipment tech,
not an airframe or power plant technician.”

Gus groaned and then explained the air crew’s
pie wheel tradition, and how Gus was in a very peculiar loosing
streak since they started flying the new plane.

Everett burst into laughter, then teasingly
enlightened Gus, “Those new planes have an intercom system so that
the pilot can now talk with the wing walkers while they taxi, and
the lead walker is standing directly in front of the plane, he can
see that front wheel as he converses with the pilot while they
bring the plane to a stop… It would be very easy for the pilot to
tell the lead walker to watch out for somebody’s name and halt the
plane when it was on the bottom of the pie.”

Gus immediately turned to the plane he just
walked from, sneering in the direction of where the pilot had been,
but he was now gone. There was just a ground crew washing the
fallout particles from the aircraft into what looked like a blow up
kiddy pool that was fashioned in the same shape as the
airplane.

“Don’t worry. I’m sure that you will think of
some way to get even… I see that you are a technical sergeant now.
If I recall, you were a staff sergeant last time I saw you.”

“Yeah, I got this last stripe earlier this
year. I’ve almost been in the service twelve years now. Jack, the
guy that was with me last time you saw us, got promoted as well.
He’s a Staff Sergeant now.”

Gus looked back at the flight line and
watched another plane taxiing in. He watched the ground crew as
they plugged a chord into a small compartment on the front of the
plane connecting to the pilot.

Then He got an idea and spoke it out loud,
“I’ll leave a note for the ground crew in that intercom connection
compartment. I’ll offer them something if they put the captain’s
name on the bottom instead of mine.”

“That’s a great idea. He’ll never know what
hit him.”

“I’ll have to give that a try on the next
mission. I think we fly a sortie against the ‘Diablo’ test event on
the 15
^th
.”

Everett smiled suddenly at Gus’s slip and
cracked, “The what?”

Gus, suddenly realizing his gaffe as he
turned red with embarrassment, blurted, “Nothing… never mind.”

Everett, continued with the cracks, “Well, I
guess I better remember to bring an umbrella on the
15
^th
”, making reference to the debris on the tarmac,
“but, back to the other quandary, I think a note would be
hilarious, at least your pilot will never try that ignorant crap
again.”

Gus smiled for a minute as he basked in the
glory of his idea, then he watched the Lockheed crew work for a
moment and asked, “When are they going to stick some of our air
samplers on that thing?”

Everett looked up at Gus with a bewildered
look in his eyes and said, “I thought you already knew… Our
engineers finessed or finagled one of the samplers that you built
for the B-36 and made a miniature copy of it that will fit into the
Q-Bay of this plane.”

Gus looked stunned, and then asked, “Where is
this new platform?”

Everett climbed down from the U-2 as he wiped
off a wrench with a rag and smiled, “Would you like to see it?”

“Yes. Is it here?”

“Sure is… over there, in that hanger.”

“Do you have the keys?”

“Yep.”

“Are you going to tease me all day or show
the damn thing to me?”

“Come on.”

They walked over to the nearby hanger and
entered. There was equipment placed as neatly as possible but still
chaotic in appearance.

Everett pointed to something on a dolly
covered with a tarp, against the wall.

Gus helped him remove the tarp, and then he
saw it. It was a beautifully made insert for the Q-Bay of the U-2,
and all of the equipment on the platform was contractor quality
reproductions of the devices that Gus had developed over the
years.

“Well, if I didn’t have a secret job working
for the Air Force, I would suppose I could be pissed that somebody
copied my ideas like this,” Gus joked. In reality he took it as a
fantastic compliment. He also had great admiration for the quality
of the work. He knew that, even though he came up with the ideas,
he could never do precise machining like this on his own.”

Everett joked, “If one were to take a picture
of a girl sprawled across it, it would be a perfect image for a
calendar spread, wouldn’t it?”

“I’d Say, but then you would have to stamp it
secret and stuff it in a safe… Say, who’s going to wrench on this
thing anyway?”

“You are, I heard.”

“Like, I don’t have enough to do already.
Does Mr. Volmer know about this?”

“I have never met him, but Mr. Johnson has
talked with him on the phone an awful lot during the design of this
thing. I think he was referred to him by General Lemay.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. They keep so many
things secret from me. I never completely know what’s going on. I’m
just a mushroom.”

“A mushroom, what do you mean by that?”

“I’ll have to tell you some other time.”

Everett laughed with curiosity as they
returned the tarp and walked back outside.

“Speaking of secrets nobody will tell us
anything about, what the hell are those things?” Everett asked as
he pointed to a saucer hovering over a nearby ridge, “If I were any
place else but here, people would be freaking out that flying
saucers hover around here every day, but the people here act like
they are not even there. Do you know what they are?”

“Yes, but I can’t tell you. The people around
the base have nicknamed them the Overseers, because they always
appear to be watching over your shoulders as you work.”

“I’ve heard that already… Are they little
green men?”

“No. they’re people, just like you and me,
but its secret. I still have Lemay’s number in my wallet, if you
want to give him a ring.”

“No thanks, I have enough headaches.”

*~*

Later, on the 15
^th
, the crew was
getting ready for the ‘Diablo” test.

Gus deliberately procrastinated so that he
could be the last one onto the plane. He waited until everyone else
had climbed aboard, and then opened the communication portal and
inserted a note. He then closed the compartment and quickly boarded
the plane.

The mission went like clockwork. Everything
was working perfectly as planned.

When they finished taxiing to the flight
line, the captain joked at Gus, “What is with you? Usually you’re
the first one off the plane to see who is buying.”

Gus just looked confidently at the captain
and responded, “Oh, I just learned a magic trick.” He waved his
hands like a magician and said “Poof, now ‘you’ are the one buying
the beer tonight.”

The captain laughed and said, “We’ll see
about that. Come on, let’s have a look-see.”

When the captain got to the wheel, he dropped
his bags in disbelief. After a moment he started looking around for
the lead wing walker.

The wing walker walked right past the
captain, smiling as he asked, “Who’s Gus?”

Gus smiled ear to ear and held up a five
dollar bill as he said, “That would be me.”

The wing walker gave Gus the note and took
the money. Gus then handed the note to the captain.

It read, “The captain of this plane has been
playing cruel jokes on me and I want to get him back, so whoever’s
name he asks you to place on the bottom of the wheel, make it his
name. If you do I will give you five dollars. Just ask for Gus when
we de-plane.”

The captain looked up in bafflement at
Gus.

Gus smiled and said, “I know that this is
going to be the best beer I’ve ever had.”

The whole crew started to laugh as they
patted the captain on the back.

*~*

The Plumb-bob tests continued throughout the
rest of the summer of 1957and played havoc with the ongoing U-2
testing, causing constant interruptions.

The next test was ‘John’, which was a test of
a rocket launched bomb, it detonated at 18,500 feet.

After that, it was ‘Keplar’, which was an
ICBM warhead tested on a tower.

‘Pascal-A’ was the very first contained
underground explosion. Information about this event was released in
a report titled ‘Caging the Dragon’. This test’s success led to the
eventual banning of atmospheric tests.

On August 7, 57 ‘Stokes’ was suspended from a
weather balloon and detonated at 1500 feet.

‘Shasta’ and ‘Doppler’ were both repeats of
previous tests used to confirm information.

The Last test was another underground test
officially named ‘Pascal-B’, which accidently launched a cement
plug into space.

High speed cameras recording the event were
used to calculate the velocity of the plug leaving the hole, which
was figured at six times the velocity needed to escape the gravity
of the Earth without orbiting, then traveling forever into deep
space.

Air Force technicians nicknamed the test
‘Thunderwell’, and joked in later years that they beat Sputnik into
space by two months.

It has also been rumored for years to be the
inspiration for the Ian Fleming book, Thunderball, as well as the
later James Bond movie,

~~~**^**~~~

~~~**^**~~~

The Space Race /
Sputnik

4 October 1957

The people of the Earth were awe struck with
the potentials, good and bad, of a small object circling the planet
above them in space. Amateur radio operators around the world
listened for the faint continuous beeping of the small object
launched by the Soviet Union.

Some had glorious visions of a future utopia
in space, others wondered if the Russians could now drop bombs on
America from space, or take pictures of them in there own back
yards.

Von Braun… was livid. Co-workers and military
officers assigned to the Redstone project tried to calm him as he
was catapulting objects against his office wall whilst throwing a
huge tantrum.

“How could they do this to me?” he hollered.
He was boiling with rage because he had been hounding officials
since 1954 that he was ready to put a satellite into space, but
Lemay and the others said no, because that would alert the
Raumsfahrtwaffe to our capabilities.’

Inside of Von Braun’s thoughts, he fumed
silently within his outer tantrum, as he felt that this is the
second government that had betrayed his research for their own
selfish needs.

To add insult to injury, Von Braun, had also
just found out that the Air Force was conducting a secret project
named A-119, started in 1954, to use one of Von Braun’s Redstone
rockets to carry a nuclear weapon to strike the Germans on the
moon, and Von Braun knew nothing about it until now.

The Air Force had been keeping everybody
involved in the dark, trying to keep the fact that they could
deliver a nuclear tipped rocket to the moon, secret from the
Overseers.

But now, the Space Race was on, and Von Braun
felt like he had been benched during the best play of the biggest
game of his life.

President Eisenhower had been kept in the
dark about the Redstone capabilities as well, but he now wondered,
in the light of the recent Soviet success, how long it would take
for us to respond and send a satellite of our own?

Von Braun answered quickly with a bid that he
could launch a satellite within a week.

Eisenhower was shocked with the response and
queried his generals. “How is this possible? Could we have beaten
the Russians?”