Here Comes John Henry

Begin. This is Carter, John Henry, Captain, U.S.A.F., Moon Shot One. Re-entry having been effected, this craft is now 30.25 minutes away from touchdown at Point Pin Point and all systems are go, I am in good health, discounting a possible mild case of space euphoria, am observing Earth at this moment, repeat have Earth in range on my view screen, reception clear, and a mighty pretty gal she is, too, my oh my, smiling up at me, big as life, right underneath me, fat and sassy as ever, a sight for sore eyes Old Mother Earth, I'm telling you. This here is Carter, John Henry, Cap--or did I identify myself already?...Anyway, this is Atlanta's favorite son and--excuse the expression--fair-haired boy, a genuine Yankee Doodle Dandy, born on the Fourth of July, 1945, full-fledged citizen of the U.S. of A. and the first man to set foot on the Moon. Correction. First man to set foot on the Moon and come home to tell about it. The real first man on the Moon was my buddy, that other John Henry, and since I've got (continued on page 118) John Henry (continued from page 115) another half hour till I touch down and there's still about 600 feet of tape left on the reel here, I figure I may as well tell you all about it. Because once I home in for that famous pinpoint landing this fancy new chariot is capable of, once I get down there where those cameras are snapping and the band is playing and all the big brass is standing at attention and the biggest brass of all is waiting to pin a medal on my chest ... by that time, it will be too late.

Let me fess up and tell you that I didn't warm up to the idea at first. Oh, I knew I wouldn't be taking the 239,000-mile trip to the Moon alone, I knew I'd be one half of a two-man team, all through my training I knew that, but it sure took me by surprise when they told me that the other stud on that team was going to be one of them!

I mean, me?--riding to the Moon alongside a Russian? Whooo-eee! What a combo!

Of course, I get used to the idea pretty quick. I dig that Darwin quote: "Adapt or die." So I go along with the gag--symbol of international understanding, pledge of mutual trust, peaceful coexistence, hands across the sea, the whole scam (man, there was some mighty fancy language flying!). And I dig why they pick me, too--Mammy Carter's li'l pickaninny, John Henry. Great public relations, you know? I bet the propaganda boys sat up all night thinking up that one. The Black and the Red. The Darky and the Russky. Tovarish and the Tar Baby. The Comrade and the Coon. A little cornball for my taste, a little obvious, wouldn't you say? But I'm a good boy, I go along.

Of course, mixed in with all this spirit-of-cooperation stuff there's a king-size slug of the old Red, White and Blue, too. Just to give the milk of human kindness a little kick, I guess. I mean, I get some pretty strong hints that even though I'm supposed to be buddies with this guy, nobody's forcing me to forget all that good old game spirit I learned back in Boy Scouts, nobody's telling me I have to take a back seat to anybody, nobody's ordering me to jettison all the natural sibling rivalry out of this nice little package of brotherly love. But this new added ingredient isn't obvious at all--it's very soft sell. Still, I get the drift. It would be oh, so nice, they're telling me, if the American half of this team could somehow end up Number One Boy in the eyes of the world. I keep a straight face while they feed me all this farina. Not long after, I meet my teamie for the first time.

Now, first thing I notice about this cat is that he's a John Henry, too--Ivan Genrikhovich, John son of Henry, just like me, my daddy's name is Henry, too. Ivan Genrikhovich Yashvili. What a handle. We start out real formal--Captain Carter, Tovarish Kapitan Yashvili--but pretty soon he says to just call him Vanya and I tell him to call me John Henry, which he does, almost: Johngenry is the best he can do; but shucks, who am I to complain? One thing I got to say for him--he can talk English a damn sight better than I can talk Russian.

All through indoctrination and dry runs, we stay pretty formal except for that first-name stuff. And then the big day comes. We smile and shake hands for the reporters. We cram our tails inside this mother and strap ourselves into our custom-made couches--they're personally tailored, you know; sliding into that couch is like slipping a gingerbread man back into the cookie cutter, old man Schirra said back in '62, and it's the best description I've heard yet, and here comes the countdown, that nerve-racking ride to zero that seems to take a lifetime, and then POW!!!--lift-off!

Man, the noise! The vibration! Millions of pounds of thrust turn this thing into a Mixmaster! Our body weight doubles, then redoubles as the g forces squash us back into our couches! Like a ton of anvils dropped on us! We force ourselves to breathe, strain to open our lungs against all those g anvils pressing down and doing their best to flatten us out and squeeze the air out of us, breathe, that's all you can think of, breathe, baby, breathe; because if you don't, you'll slip into a grayout and then you'll be knocked cold completely. And the g anvils keep dropping on us, g after g after g....

In two minutes we're going 6000 miles an hour, the booster engines drop off and this stripped-down tin can of ours keeps building toward peak velocity ... we hit it, 25,000 mph ... we almost black out....

And then all those g anvils are gone and the noise has shut up and the only thing holding us to our seats are the straps, because we're lighter than a couple of soap bubbles. Zero gravity. I check the instrument panel and take a slug of o.j. from the squeeze bottle and turn and grin at Vanya. He grins back. We're on our way. The First Men In The Moon.

It's hard to stay formal when you're cooped up in a thing like this, and there's not too much to keep us busy right now, all the automatic gizmos are ticking along A-OK, so pretty soon we begin to loosen up and talk.

He rubs my fur the wrong way when he calls me an African, but I can see he doesn't mean any harm by it, he's just trying to tell me that one of their big Russky poets, sort of like their Shakespeare, was part African, this Pushkin cat. I tell him that's real fine, I bet he was a swinger. Then he asks me if I'm the son of a slave. That tickles me so much it makes me laugh out loud--shows he's got U.S. history all telescoped into a few years--and I tell him, no, but my great-great-granddaddy was a slave. He nods his head and says, "My father's father was a serf."

That kind of breaks the ice, and pretty soon I'm asking him where he's from, what part of Russia. He says, "I not Russian, Johngenry. I from what Russians call Gruziya, what my people call Sakartvelo. You call it, I think, Georgia."

That really cracks me up. "You, too? Just a couple of li'l ole Georgia boys, that's us!" And I start singing in my best down-home drawl--

Jawjuh, Jawjuh, No peace Ah fahnd, Jes' an ole sweet song, Keeps Jawjuh awn mah mahnd....

"You grow any cotton over there in your Georgia, Vanya? Any corn or tobacco?"

He says, "Corn, tobacco, yes. Cotton, no. Also oranges and lemons, like your California and Florida. Also tea, almonds, silk, sugar beets, wine!"

"What part of Georgia you come from? You a farm boy?"

He shakes his head. "From city, big city, capital. Tbilisi, what you call Tiflis."

"Don't that beat all. I'm from the capital of Georgia, too."

He smiles. "From my home comes Dzhugashvili."

"You don't say. That some kind of vodka?"

He laughs. "No! Is Stalin, Yosef Stalin!"

"Well, why didn't you say so in the first place? Say, was he some kind of kin to you? That name of yours, Yashvili, it sounds like his, sort of chopped down."

"In my home, many names sound so. Cholokashvili, Orachelashvili, Baratashvili, Taktakishvili. But not only Georgians live in Georgia. Is like your country, melting pot. Sixty-five percent, Georgians. Ten percent, Russians. Rest, Armenians, Ossetians, Abkhasians, Ukrainians, Azeri Turks, Jews, Greeks, Kurds. Many peoples."

And that's the way it goes, the first few hours out from Earth, until that bad time comes, that first real bad bad time.

Now, the big problem on a trip like this, you know, isn't air--the life-support system includes tanks of a compound that absorbs the carbon dioxide we exhale and releases simon-pure 100-percent oxygen. As for food, we only need like less than a week's worth, because the whole round trip to the Moon, going and coming, is only 130 hours--which is 14 hours short of six days--so food storage is no problem, either. (Hell, even if they forgot to store food aboard, we'd make it...we'd be mighty hungry and mighty skinny by the time we got back, but we'd make it--five and a half days? It would be rough, (continued on page 209) John Henry (continued from page 118) no fun, but not fatal.) So air and food, like I say, are no problem. The problem is fuel.

Storing enough fuel for two lift-offs, enough to push this bucket of bolts plus a pair of grown men up and out of a gravitational field--twice--that's the problem. We need every speck of fuel we can cram into this thing. Those slide-rule boys downstairs have got it figured down to the last drop--and there's no margin for error, no room to spare for a safety factor.

That's why I'm a mite upset, I guess you could say, when, second day out from Earth, I take myself a good long glim at the fuel-storage gauge. "Vanya, old buddy," I say, "looky here."

He looks. He shakes his head. "I see nothing, Johngenry."

"Figure it out, buddy. Figure out how much fuel we need to get where we're going. Then, making allowances for the lesser gravity of the Moon, figure out how much we'll need to get back. Then look at this gauge again."

He uses pencil and paper. He double-checks his figures. Then he looks up at me with a big frown. "You are right, Johngenry."

"Not enough fuel to get us back?"

"Not enough fuel to get us both back," he says.

Talk about conversation stoppers. We just sit there, sweating. Oh, the air conditioning is working fine, but we're sweating. We're thinking about weight--each other's weight--we're thinking about how that medium-size hunk of muscle and bone strapped in the next couch is going to make all the difference between the other one getting back to Earth or dying on the Moon. Weight: just a few pounds; just the difference between life and death. And we don't say a thing for a long, long time.

Finally, he breaks the silence. "Johngenry, this is ... accident, you think?"

"Sure. What else?"

"I do not know. But how can it be accident? All is done with precision, with mathematical precision, after many tests. How can it be accident?"

"Hell, man, what else could it be?"

He turns to me. "Johngenry, before I am coming to join you, when I am still in Moskva, I am told much about international cooperation and coexistence. But I am told also, in subtle ways, of wholesome competition, that it is socialist realism to be friends with my partner yet loving rivals. There must be a total dedication on my part, it is suggested, a healthy striving to be best--not for myself, not for vanity, but for glory of all Soviet peoples."

"Sounds kind of familiar, Vanya," I say.

"You also?"

"Me also. What are you getting at, buddy?"

"I do not know," he says, turning away from me. "I do not know what I am ... getting at."

A long silence sets in. We just do our job. We don't say anything we don't absolutely have to say. But upstairs, in the old head-bone department, each of us can almost hear the other guy's wheels just a-clickin' away: Each of us knows that his survival, his own personal survival, depends on teamwork--up to a critical point, that is, the exact moment of which neither of us has figured out yet. At any time before that point, neither of us can destroy the other without destroying his own self. But we know, both of us, that when that critical moment comes--in the next hour, or the next day, before we land on the Moon or after--with cold, clean scientific ruthlessness (made acceptable, you dig, by the knowledge that there's no point in both of us cashing in), one of us will decide that the other is suddenly expendable. Clickety-click. Those wheels keep turning.

Sleep? Forget it.

•••

So it's a couple of tail-dragging travelers who set down on that chunk of green cheese right on schedule, just 65 hours after lift-off from Earth. The blasts from our new-style vernier rockets are like columns of fire, burning holes in the Moon as they pinpoint us gently down to the surface. We open the hatch. Vanya steps aside and waves me ahead. I hang back and we do the old "After you" routine. Neither of us wants to turn his back on the other. Finally, Vanya climbs out of the hatch and becomes the first human being to set foot on the Moon. He whips around right away, of course, and watches me as I follow close behind him.

I won't go into all the jazz about the weird sensation of Earth-minus gravity and the way that Moonstuff crunches soundlessly under your boots--you'll get all that in the official log tape; and besides, you've seen it in old movies. But the thing you don't get in the log and the movies, the thing you'll never get unless you stand up there yourself with your body one sixth Earthweight and nothing, not even air, between you and the stars, and see old Earth hanging like a big dinner plate in the black sky, is that feeling of ... hell, I don't know what to call it. Anything you've ever been, any ego you ever had, any high-and-mighty opinion you ever had of yourself is all wiped away by a big eraser, and you're naked, you're something else, you're not even you anymore, you're very small and very big at the same time, you're humble and glad about it, you're brand-new, clean, purged, free, fresh, reborn.

Vanya feels that way, too, I can tell. I can tell by the look on his face through the helmet. Well, we snap our pictures and dig up our samples and tape our notes. It doesn't take very long, we're not supposed to stay there very long, and then it's time for us--for one of us--to climb back into the bucket and lift off for home, sweet home. That means it's zero hour, the moment of truth, time to separate the men from the boys.

We face each other. I hear him over the helmet radio, not saying anything, just breathing. I don't know how long we just stand there.

"Buddy," I say. Just that, no more. Then, "Buddy, we can't let them do this to us. We can't let them ... manipulate us like this. We can't play into their stinking hands."

"I do not know what you mean, Johngenry."

"The hell you don't. You almost said it yourself, out there in deep space, when you said, 'How can it be an accident?' You were thinking it, but you were afraid to say it, because you couldn't believe it, you couldn't believe anyone could be low enough to pull a dirty stunt like the one they pulled on us, any one, least of all your glorious People's Republic...."

"You are not rational...."

"People's! That's a laugh! It's just a government, baby, just a government that's no different from any that ever was or ever will be. Ask that serf grand-pappy of yours about governments. Ask anybody of my color. Ask the red Indians about the treaties they signed with governments. Ask ... hell, ask yourself. Ask yourself what you meant when you said it couldn't be an accident."

"But this ... what you are suggesting ... is ... monstrous."

"Monstrous? Hell, no, Vanya, don't be square, it's just politics, expediency, a little game they play, a game with you and me as chesspieces."

"Why?"

"Aw, come on, baby, you're not that dumb. They want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to make a big show of cooperation, but that's all it is, a show. Two or three cats at the very highest level, they put their heads together and they say, 'Look, pal, you know and I know that all this lovey-dovey crap is for the birds. There's got to be a winner and a loser, that's what makes the world go round, that's what keeps us in our jobs ... so let's fix it so there will be a winner and a loser, but let's not tell anybody, least of all the chesspieces, let it be just our little secret....'"

I'm getting to him, I can tell. He hates to admit it crossed his mind, hates to think both our governments deliberately double-crossed us and are in cahoots to play off one man against the other, astronaut against cosmonaut, survival of the fittest, may the best man win.

"If this is true--" he starts to say.

I needle him: "You know it's true!"

"If this is true ... then no useful purpose will be served by both of us dying. But we must not part as enemies. We must not fight each other. We must not--if what you say is true--give them that satisfaction. We must draw lots. That is rational, that is socialist realism...."

"Yeah, sure, or Yankee know-how or French logique or British bulldog spirit or you name it. Knock all that crap out of your head, Vanya--you're only half right. Why should even one of us live? If you really want to show them something, why don't we both elect to die, right here, together?"

I got him now. He's hooked. He digs. "You are saying we allow neither side to triumph. Only humanity to triumph. Together we radio back to Earth our decision to face death together here, in brotherhood to each other...."

"That's it...."

"A brotherhood transcending political ambitions...a loyalty to something higher than governments...."

"Now you're talking...."

"I do not know, Johngenry, I do not know ... it is not an easy thing...."

"Hell, I know that! You think I want to die? But we've got to! We can't let them get away with this! We've got to show them!" I put my gloved hands on his shoulders. "Vanya ... I saw your face ... just after we landed ... I know you felt the same way I did ... like you'd been washed clean, made over again, forgiven...isn't that right? Isn't it?"

"Yes ... yes...."

"Look at it, Vanya, look at it all. Above us, all around us, the stars, the planets, all of it bigger than anything we could ever dream...call it infinity, eternity, call it God ... look at it, buddy...."

He does. He turns around and looks up, and out, and beyond; and when his back is turned, I twist that little valve on his helmet and all the air rushes out into the vacuum and he explodes silently inside his suit and he falls, kind of slow and easy, like a big feather, to the crunchy soil of the Moon. It's all over before you can say Tovarish Kapitan Ivan Genrikhovich Yashvili.

•••

And now here I am, easing this crate down to Mother Earth, settling it down to the landing pad careful and gentle, like a momma robin dropping a precious egg in her nest. I'm so close now I can see them, I can see it all. The flags flying--Vanya's and mine. The big shots--ours and theirs, military and civilian. There's the President, by God, just like they promised; there he is, The Man himself, waiting to pin a medal on me. And there's the Premier. And there's the band playing, those shiny butterscotch trumpets and trombones and tubas polished like rows and rows of yellow mirrors--I can't hear what they're playing, but I'll give you odds it's that same tune we sang down home a long time ago when I was in the children's choir and the church put on this oratorio thing by Handel or whoever. I remember it real good--

See, the conqu'ring hero comes!

Sound the trumpets, beat thedrums....

Yes, I'll just bet that's what they're playing down there. Well, you keep on sounding those trumpets and beating those drums, because I'm coming, all right. And you're not going to like it one little bit. I suppose the story will go out that this bucket went out of control, but that will be a lie, because I've got it in complete control. It's doing everything I want it to do, this baby, this precision instrument. Of course, maybe some smart reporter will search the wreckage and find this tape and break the real story. That'd be nice. But, either way, you folks down there are in for the surprise of your lives. All you generals and Senators and public-relations sharpies, and you, too, Mr. President and Mr. Premier.

I do worry a little about one thing Vanya said, "You are not rational," he said, and, you know, he may have been right. Maybe the slide-rule brigade did make an honest mistake. Or maybe there was a slow leak in the fuel line, nobody's fault, and we lost some that way. If so, I suppose you could say what I'm about to do is pretty rotten. But is it really? Does it really matter if I'm right or wrong in this one particular case? Look at it this way--if I'm wrong about this, if I'm "not rational," if I'm crazy as a bedbug, then let's just say I'm getting back for a whole mess of shoving around that the big-brass types have been dishing out in one way or another for a long time.... Hell, just say I'm getting back for a lot of folks in, oh, there's plenty to choose from, the Novgorod Massacre, the Black Hole of Calcutta, the Hungarian Revolution, Vietnam, Dresden, Hiroshima, Babi-Yar, the Niseis in Double-U Double-U Two, you pick it, all those folks sautéed in a big frying pan by Ivan the Terrible, roasted by napalm, char-broiled by incendiary bombs. If I'm right, of course, so much the better; but even if I'm wrong, I'm settling a whole lot of old scores.

Well, here we go, time to set 'er down....

Vanya, old buddy, I'm sorry about what I did to you, but it was the only way I could be sure of getting back here and doing what I knew I had to do. Sorry about all the reporters and boys in the band, too--that's right, play your hearts out, you cats--

Myrtle-wreaths and roses twine To deck the hero's brow divine.

Like I say, sorry about you boys, but you'll just have to take your chances. Because, man oh man, when I tilt this bucket and turn these vernier rockets on that pretty flag-draped platform where all those big shots are standing, all kinds of flaming hell are going to bust loose. I'm making for damn sure that this particular conquering hero goes out in a blaze of glory, and I'm taking as many of you with me as I can. Hold onto your hats, you son of a bitches, here comes John Henry!