He told me: "Do you think any of these men would admit they are not up to a mission a mere technician is ready to try? No! I can't get them to beg off, either!"
"When do we go?" I asked.
Sid Stein was assigned as my pilot. He had made the trip into orbit and back four times with the Dyna-Soar rocket, and was considered the best risk to get me there and get me back. He was also the least convinced I had any right to sit beside him in the cabin.
His final briefing was a beaut: "This is a spaceship, doctor," he said frigidly. "And I want you to remember the 'ship' part of it. I'm in command, and my every word, my every belch, has got to be law. Do you understand that? This is my mission, and I'll tell you where to put your feet."
"Sure," I said. "Who wants it?"
"Can't figure out why you do!"
"I'm just paying somebody back," I said. "Is it tomorrow?"
The start was a drag. Eighteen hours before blast-off Sid and I went into a tank so that we would get rid of our nitrogen. We breathed the standard helium-oxygen mix at normal pressure until about four hours before H-hour. They wouldn't even let me smoke. Then we suited up and were lifted by a crane and stuck in the control room of Nelly Bly, as I had named our Dyna-Soar rocket-glider. The hatch stayed open, but we were buttoned up tight in our suits. They had a couple of mods that were supposed to fit them better for the mission. Instead of the usual metal helmet with face plate, we had full-vision bubble helmets of clear plastic. The necks were large enough so that we could, in theory, drag our arms out of our suits and clean the inside of the bubbles. That was in case I sicked up out in space, which all experience said was a real enough hazard. They figured that filling me full of motion sickness pills was partial prevention.
These space-jockeys have their own vocabulary, and their own oh, so cool way of playing it during the countdown. I'm pretty familiar with complex components, but they were checking off equipment I never heard of. We had gyros—hell, our gyros had gyros. And we had tanks, and pressures and temperatures and voltages and who-stuck-John. It was all very impressive.