CHAPTER 44 “Prophecies of the Next Age”

The explosion of X⁠-15 number three had a curious impact on me personally. For the first time in my flying career I was foggy-minded. I could not recall immediately exactly what happened, although in aerial emergencies in the past my mind always ticked on, recording even the most obscure gauge readings. Locked in the room with Q.C. and the others during the post-accident investigation, it took me fully ten minutes of thoughtful reconstruction to lay out the exact sequence of events that took place in the X⁠-15 cockpit.

Flying home from Edwards late that night, I found my thoughts taking another unusual turn. Although I seldom think about death, my mind recreated in vivid detail the one death that stands out in my mind more than all others, that of my father.

He died on October 21, 1954, during the time I was flying for NACA at Edwards, six weeks or so after I drove the F⁠-100 through the hangar wall. He had sold the farm at last, for a handsome profit, and moved to the California desert to be near his children and grandchildren. He dreamed of touring the United States in a trailer in the evening of his life. But it was too late. The more than nineteen years of hard physical labor on the farm drained his body of strength. After examining my father, one doctor told me: “He is the most worn-out man of sixty-three that I have ever seen.”

Soon he fell quite ill. My mother was just recovering from a stroke, and we brought in a nurse to help out. Toward the end, I spent almost every night in his house, sleeping on a cot next to his bed. I was there primarily out of love, to do what I could for him. But there was another reason. I was curious to see whether in his final hours this unwavering, iron-willed man would reveal any weakness. If I saw the slightest hint, I would find a way to head it off, or at least obscure it from him. For sixteen years or more I had been searching for a break in his strength. I never found it. I didn’t really expect him to ask for quarter now.

When I saw him on the morning of the 21st, I felt that he would not last the day. I was scheduled for a Skyrocket flight that morning and was on the verge of putting through a call to Walt Williams to cancel it when my father called for me.

“What were you supposed to be doing today?” he asked. “Why haven’t you gone to work?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said. “Just a routine flight. I can cancel it with no problem.”

“I want you to go ahead and do your job.” His voice was low but firm. His request was a command. There was no hint of quarter.

“Okay. But will you wait for me?” We both knew what I meant.

“Yes.”

I drove to the field and made the flight. My father waited, as he promised. As I soon learned from a telephone call, he died at the exact moment the Skyrocket’s wheels touched down on the lake at the conclusion of my flight. He died quietly and bravely, without a single compromise on his conscience. That he found what he sought in the next life I have no doubt, for he was an honorable man and a Christian.

Returning home that night after the X⁠-15 explosion, the real significance of my own life, which I had pondered for so many months at Edwards, came to me as though crystallized by the accident. My own life, in a different setting in time and circumstance, was an imitation of my father’s, a striving toward unattainable perfection. As nature had sealed Bill Young’s eyes and then mysteriously opened his ears to sounds beyond the experience of other men, so nature wounded me in childhood and then mysteriously endowed me with a special spirit that put fear beyond my experience and spurred me to improve everything that crossed my path. Who can presume to know why? Nature and God are one. If there is an imperfection, it is not there by accident. Perhaps He intended that by my example the wounds of others lacking in this special spirit might be healed. I honestly cannot believe that my being present at the birth and growth of the X⁠-15 was an accident. This blending of man and machine in a common cause must be a part of His grand design.

My father may have fallen short of his goal. I have fallen short of my goal, probably I always shall. It may be that only ignorant men reach goals. The important thing, I think, as with the X⁠-15, is the striving itself. Each of us who strives toward the unattainable contributes to man’s ever-growing reservoir of knowledge and fact. Each drop, however small, is vital for those who follow behind us. Without it man must inevitably atrophy. Thus, as Emerson says, “Men walk as prophecies of the next age.”

I realized that night that my new circle, the meaning of which I had so intensively probed during the long months at Edwards, was boundless. It was, in a few words, more of the same on a grander scale. The details were not important. The ultimate end was not a fixed slot, which I imagined in my youth to be the satisfying end, a life devoted not to the specific but to the infinite, to the collection of a few drops for that vast and wonderful pool. A small contribution which would ease my children’s way, or perhaps in time open men’s eyes to a part of the grand mystery.

It was quite late when I pulled into our driveway in Westchester. I strode briskly to the front door and entered quietly. The children were asleep. I mixed a drink and Alice and I relaxed in the living room.

“Well, you look all right to me,” she said.

“There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“So what’s next?” It was many years since she had put that question to me.

“I don’t know.” A thousand thoughts flashed through my mind. A thousand imperfections, a thousand horizons, a thousand Mount Everests, the story of man since time began. I was in a strange mood.

“Well,” Alice said, “they say life begins at forty. You’ve got a full year and a half to make up your mind.”

“You know what I’ve been thinking,” I said absently. “This house is getting pretty crowded with five lads. Maybe we ought to add a new wing. Then there’s another thing I’d like to do. Maybe we could build a little summerhouse out in the back yard—you know, one of those lattice-work things—with a tower, or cupola, on top. If we built one tall enough, we could see over the shrubbery and the fence. We could sit up there and watch the airplanes taking off and landing at the airport. We could see the sky and the horizon unobscured.”

The tower is not yet begun. But that is a new story, another dawn.