He pulled up the nose; he muttered a short, obscene prayer as the controls responded to him. He reached the correct twenty-degree nose-up angle of attack, and opened the air brakes, flaps on the plane’s rear vertical stabilizer. A sensation of speed returned as deceleration started to bite, and shoved him forward against his restraint. The leading edges of his wings were glowing a dark, threatening red.

The sky brightened quickly. He could see Edwards, a grid laid out over the desert below, 260 miles from his takeoff point.

At 18,000 feet he pulled in his air brakes and hauled on the aerodynamic controls to initiate a corkscrew dive. The idea was to shed more speed and energy as fast as possible.

At a thousand feet above the dry lake bed he pulled out of his dive and, with the slipstream roaring past his canopy, jettisoned his ventral fin. He extended the landing flaps and pulled up the scorched nose, blistered from the reentry. Chase aircraft settled in alongside him.

The X-15 hit the dirt. The skids at the rear sent a cloud of dust up into the still desert air; Stone was jolted as the crude skids scraped across the lake bed. The nose wheel stayed up for a few seconds, before thumping down to add to the dust clouds.

A mile from touchdown the X-15 came to a halt. The chase planes roared overhead.

As the dust settled over his canopy, Stone switched off his instruments, closed his eyes, and slumped back in his seat.

The ring of his pressure suit dug into the back of his neck.

Stone had proved himself as a pilot today. But a flight like today’s wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good with NASA. I got out of a supersonic spin! I got my hide back down, and if I can figure out how I did it, I’ll be in the manual. But I screwed up. I didn’t finish the science; I didn’t make it through the checklist. And for NASA, that was what it was all about.

A fist banged on his canopy. The ground crews had reached him; through the dusty glass he could see a wide, grinning face. He raised a gloved hand and joined thumb and forefinger in a “perfect” symbol.

All in a day’s work, in the space program.

Monday, April 13, 1970

FISH HOOK, CAMBODIA

In 1970, Ralph Gershon was twenty-five years old.

He had grown up on a farm in Iowa, surrounded by near poverty and toil, dreaming of flight. As a kid he’d gone to Mars with Weinbaum and Clarke and Burroughs and Bradbury; later, he’d followed the emerging space program with fascination. He’d gotten himself some flight experience, had crammed his head at school, and — in the face of a lot of prejudice — had finally made it into the academy, and the Air Force.

He’d been following a dream.