Books: I Have Left the World

THE LONELY SKY (316 pp.)—William Bridgeman and Jacqueline Hazard—Holt ($3.95).

Test Pilot William Barton Bridgeman, 38, is the first flyer to write a book telling how it feels to ride a rocket aimed at space and fight the sky at 1,200 miles an hour. In his autobiography Pilot Bridgeman (TIME, April 27, 1953) describes a three-year skirmish in the U.S. campaign against the unknowns of speed and space as a personal battle. The result: one of the year’s most fascinating adventure stories.

The rocket ship which Bridgeman jockeyed to speed and altitude records (79,494 ft., 1,238 m.p.h.) in 1951 was the third stiletto-nosed, dull white Skyrocket built by Douglas for the Navy.* It could fly for three minutes under full power after it had been dropped from the bomb bay of a B29, but it took weeks to prepare for each 180-sec. flight, including replacing the 15 coats of lacquer burned off in every run.

Angel with a Drawl. Even fueling the Skyrocket was an unearthly business. Men dressed in hoods with glass faceplates, plastic coveralls and heavy gloves worked more than three hours before dawn to do the job. Writes Bridgeman of the first time he saw it done: “The minus-297-degree-below-zero liquid oxygen was introduced into one of the large twin tanks that sit two inches apart from each other. If the liquid oxygen should be contaminated, it would blow the plane, trailer, crew and spectators off the desert floor . . . Once in the tank, the liquid oxygen boiled off continuously at one pound a minute [causing] the weird shriek I heard early this morning . . . The gauges . . . were watched as cautiously as those in a surgery . . . Once the very nervous hydrogen peroxide was in the Skyrocket, a speck of dirt in the … tank or in any of the myriad tubes and lines, and the little research ship would be blown to dust. Two models of the Air Force’s X-I . . . had blown up in launching last year . . . The pressurizing gases—helium and nitrogen—were sieved through Kotex . . . That explained why I had seen cartons of the incongruous supplies stacked in the hangar.”

But the machines were no more fantastic than the men who uneasily controlled them. The Air Force’s “Chuck” Yeager (TIME, April 18, 1949), first man to hurtle through the sound barrier (in Bell’s X-I), makes an entrance in Bridgeman’s book that is worthy of jet-age grand opera—and typical of Yeager. As Bridgeman started his first rocket flight in the Skyrocket, bright sunlight made it difficult to read the dials in the cockpit. Suddenly a shadow hovered over his face, and a relaxed voice came over the radio: “Is that better, son?” Yeager, flying chase in an F-86 jet, had screened the sun. It was Bridgeman’s introduction to Yeager. From then on, he hovers over many of Bridgeman’s flights, a calm, wisecracking guardian angel with a West Virginia drawl.

Ghost on My Shoulder. Pilot Bridgeman tells his story with pride but not conceit. He tells of the things he had to learn till they became second nature, e.g., reverse breathing at high altitude, when a tank forces oxygen into his lungs and he has to breathe it out. He explains how many hours he spends studying and how many sweating. Every two weeks for three months he climbed down from the B-29 into his rocket ship. Each time the flight was called off. Finally he began to toss a utilitarian Dixie container, betraying his nervousness, over the side. But perspiration and micturition were rewarded.

Bridgeman proves the necessary role of man even in the most highly developed planes. Engineers said the Skyrocket could not survive a spin. Bridgeman fell 7,000 ft. in ten seconds in a spin—and survived it. Another time engineers said the Skyrocket would not handle badly if sent into a sharp pushover at high altitude, but Test Pilot Bridgeman discovered: “Harder she rolls, harder and faster. The flat horizon line flips wildly through the squinting slit windows. I fight the crazy gyration with the ailerons. They are no weapons. They are feathers in a windstorm … I release my hand from the aileron control and try to get out of phase with the roll that snaps me violently back and forth in its teeth … A toy in my hands to fight the whole Goddamned sky that has turned on me.” Yet he won with flying skill. On the next flight, he set a record of 1,258 miles an hour.

High spot in the book is Bridgeman’s record altitude try. Writes Bridgeman: “I have left the world . . . Every cell, fluid, muscle of my body is acutely awake. Perception is enormously exaggerated— black is blacker, white is whiter. Silence is more acute . . . Fear seems to be independent, a ghost sitting on my shoulder . . . Time is now. Nothing but this experience is significant … It is intensely bright outside . . . There seems to be no reflection; it is all black or white, apparent or nonapparent. No half-tones … I roll to the right and there it is. Out of the tiny window slits there is the earth, wiped clean of civilization . . . The earth curves to the south. It is as if I am the only living thing connected to this totally strange, uninhabited planet 15 miles below me.”

* Both records have since been broken; the latest, some of them presumably made by Bridgeman in the Douglas X3, are classified information.