_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [25]
He reached for the filter knob and as he did, the pressure gauge on his left wrist bumped against the abort handle. He chastised himself. Sure, the escape tower was gone, and hitting the abort handle might not be a problem, but this was not the time to play guessing games.
Shepard looked again through the periscope. Even through the gray, the sun’s reflection from Earth below was enough to give him a picture.
“On the periscope,” he radioed. “What a beautiful view!”
“Roger.”
“Cloud cover over Florida, three to four-tenths on the eastern coast, obscured up through Hatteras.”
Shepard spoke of the rich green of Lake Okeechobee’s shores and the spindly curve of the Florida Keys. He shifted his eyes to see the Florida panhandle extending west and saw Pensacola clearly. On the horizon he caught a glimpse of Mobile and said, “There, just beyond, just out of my view is New Orleans.” He gazed across Georgia, to the Carolinas, and saw the coastline of Cape Hatteras and beyond.
Then he looked straight down and studied the Bahamian islands through broken cloud cover. “What I’d give,” he said, “to have that filter out of there so I could see the beautiful green Bahamian waters and coral formations around those islands.”
He was now at his highest point, 116 miles. He reminded himself he had duties. Freedom Seven, obeying the intractable laws of celestial mechanics, was swinging into its downward curve, calculated to carry Shepard directly to the navy recovery teams waiting for him in the waters near Grand Bahama Island.
He was on the stick again, moving Freedom Seven to the proper angle to test-fire the three retro-rockets. “Five, four, three, two, one, retro angle,” Mercury Control confirmed.
“In retro attitude,” Shepard reported. “All green.”
“Roger.”
“Control is smooth.”
“Roger, understand. All going smooth.”
“Retro one,” Shepard shouted. The first rocket fired and shoved him back against his seat. “Very smooth,” he added.
“Roger, roger.”
“Retro two.” Another shove backward.
“Retro three. All three retros have fired.”
“All fired on the button,” Mercury Control confirmed.
The weightless wonderland vanished. Gravity was back. Freedom Seven was plunging into the atmosphere.
“Okay. This is Freedom Seven… my g-buildup is three…six…” His voice began to falter. “Nine…” he grunted, using the proven system of body-tightening and muscle rigidity to force the words through his throat.
“Roger,” Slayton acknowledged.
“Okay…Okay…” Shepard’s voice rose as the intensity of the struggle increased. Eleven times the normal force of gravity, getting close to “weighing” a full Earth ton. But he had pulled eleven-g loads in the centrifuge, and he knew he could keep right on working now.
He did.
“Coming through loud and clear, Seven.”
“Okay,” came the grunt.
“Okay…” They noticed the change in his voice. Lower pitch. The g-loads were fading.
“Okay…this is Seven, okay. Forty-five thousand feet. Uh, now forty thousand feet.”
Shepard was through the gauntlet. He had handled the punishing g-forces, the eye-popping deceleration, and 1,230 degrees of blazing reentry heat. He felt just dandy because during the scorching dive, his cabin temperature hit a peak of only 102 degrees while inside his suit the temperature rose to only 85. Just nice and toasty, he thought.
His altimeter showed 31,000 feet when Slayton’s voice reached him again. “Seven, your impact will be right on the button.”
Great news. Flight computations were perfect. So were the performances of the Redstone and the spacecraft. Freedom Seven was heading directly for the bull’s-eye on the Atlantic recovery-area target.
“This is Seven,” Shepard called. “Switching to recovery frequency.”
“Roger, Seven, read you switching to GBI.”
Slayton was eager to cut the hell out of Dodge as fast as he could. Shepard laughed aloud. He knew Gus would be right there with Deke, and the two would be burning sky, blazing their way to Grand Bahama Island so they could be on the ground when he arrived.
“Seven, do you read?” came a new voice on the GBI line.
“I read,” Shepard called back.