I noticed that my head was completely cleared from the night before. I didn’t know whether it was the altitude or the pull-out. One or the other, or both, I decided, was good for hang-overs.
I climbed back to fifteen thousand feet and stuck her down to three hundred and twenty miles an hour. I horsed back quick on the stick this time. I overshot six and a half and hit seven before I released it. I could feel my guts being sucked down as I fought for sight and consciousness, but the quicker pull and the earlier release worked, and I was able to read the instruments at the higher g.
I brought the ship down for inspection. Everything was all right. I went back up again and did the next two. They sure did flatten me out, but the ship took it fine. I brought it down for a thorough inspection that night.
I felt like I had been beaten. My eyes felt like somebody had taken them out and played with them and put them back in again. I was droopy tired and had sharp shooting pains in my chest. My back ached, and that night I blew my nose and it bled. I was a little worried about that nine-g business.
The next morning was one of those crisp, golden autumn days. The sky was as blue as indigo and as clear as a mountain stream. One of those good days to be alive.
To my surprise, I felt fine. “Those pull-outs must be a tonic,” I thought.
I went out to do the terminal-velocity dive with the nine-g pull-out. I found that the last dive I had done the day before had flattened out the fairing on the belly of the ship. The sudden change of attitude of the ship in the eight-and-a-half g pull-out had pushed the belly up against that pretty solid three-hundred-and-sixty-mile-an-hour blast of air and crushed the metal bracings that held the belly fairing in shape as neatly as if you had gone over it with a steam roller. It was not a structural part of the ship, however, as far as strength went, and could be repaired that day. They decided to beef up the bracings when they repaired it.
While I was waiting on the repair I talked with a navy commander who had just flown up from Washington. I told him my worry about the nine g. He said to yell as I horsed back and it would help. I thought he was kidding me. It seemed so silly. But he was serious. He said it would tense the muscles of the abdomen and the neck and preserve sight and consciousness longer.
Somebody during that wait told me about an army pilot who, several years before, in some tests at Wright Field, had accidentally got too much g, due to a faulty accelerometer. He got some enormously high reading like twelve or fourteen. He ruptured his intestines and broke blood vessels in his brain. He was in the hospital about a year and finally got out. He would never be right again, they told me. He was a little bit goofy. I thought to myself that anybody doing this kind of work was a little bit goofy to begin with. I decided not to get any more than nine g if I could help it.
That afternoon I went up to eighteen thousand feet again and rolled her over and stuck her down. Again the dead, still drop and the mounting roar. Again the flickering needles on the instruments and the job of reading them. You never see the ground in one of those dives. You are too busy watching things in the cockpit. Again the tensing fear for thirty whining, screaming seconds while your life is a held breath and the fear of your death is a crouching shadow in a dark corner. Again the mounting racking of the ship until it seems no humanly built thing can stand the stress of that speed much longer.