Blue Sky Dream (13 page)

If such a life seems an unlikely choice for an impatient young man, my father embraced it without reservations. A few weeks on the job convinced him that a successful blue sky career, which he surely wanted, meant tackling abstractions with the
same can-do spirit he would bring to flying a jet or fixing a car. He understood, too, that for reasons of national security (and what could be a more excitingly important reason than that?), his work must be, in Lockheed language, “highly compartmentalized.” Whenever the upper reaches of the corporation handed down to him a new, cleanly circumscribed task, he would be told only what he needed to know to do his job and nothing more. By the same token, he was to tell fellow workers only what
they
needed to know. Compartmentalization ensured that each worker was allowed to feel his part of the elephant but never to see the entire beast in the light of day. This made it possible to harness the skills of thousands in order to achieve a single blue-sky goal while reserving for the very few—those who conceived and controlled the overall project—answers to the big questions: How will this ultimately
work?
What is this ultimately
for?

My father accepted this culture of compartmentalization on terms an aspiring systems engineer could understand. Secret information was like any other volatile substance, he reasoned. A system built to manage its flow must be designed for maximum control and safety. What my father liked about this system was that he could imagine a path of progress for himself within it. He understood that the honeycomb of compartments was organized by a hierarchy of security clearances, at bottom Confidential, then Secret, and, highest, Top Secret. Clearances were known as “tickets” at Lockheed. To get his first ticket, a Secret-level clearance, my father had told the government investigators all they wanted to know. He had listed every place he had lived over the past ten years and he had sworn to them that his family was clean of foreign nationals. My father was only too happy to oblige. What had he to hide? Nothing, and everything to gain.

The vetting finished, my father had been given papers to read and sign, understandings that if he spilled certain details to the wrong person, if he breached the walls of his information compartment, he would land in Leavenworth prison. He signed the papers and thought to himself, “I’ve been admitted into the inner sanctum.” Of course the innermost sanctums required a
Top Secret clearance, but my father had no doubt that if he proved himself, he would eventually earn one. My father was impatient to prove his competence within Building 104, where competence proven won this reward: further progress into a realm of hidden work, a career track leading to the heart of, as Lockheed language termed it, the Black World.

I
learned early to study my father’s face as he came through the door after his Lockheed workday. If his eyebrows were where they should be—at rest on a line-free forehead—there was every chance of the usual Dad, the wisecracking Dad, who would want to know all about how “life around here” had gone that day. If he gathered up my mother in a languorous kiss and called her one of his nicknames, if he said to her
What’s new, Scrappy?
as he pulled from the cupboard the glass bubble for mixing martinis, if he filled the mixer with ice and liquor and stirred this all around with the glass wand, if he lifted a child into one arm while he loosened his tie with the other hand and then took a lip-smacking sip of his drink, if he did such things, then prospects for the night ahead were excellent. He might even be coaxed after dinner to transform himself into the Hairy Umgawa, the monster who wrestled all comers on the shag carpet of the living room until, inevitably, he lay panting and defeated under a pile of children.

But what if, when my father came through the door, the eyebrows were not where they should be? What if a critical mass of lines had gathered on his forehead and pressed the eyebrows together and down? What if he stepped through the door to the commonplace sound of a pot clattering or a baby crying and those eyebrows darted low even as the eyes seemed to widen and show too much white? These were indicators that my father was this night, at some point, likely to erupt in rage. I remember many dinners that went from happy chatter to grim conflagration in the instant it took a child to knock over a small glass of milk.
Cripes sake!
my father would yelp, shoving himself off his chair, grabbing for a dishrag at the kitchen sink, flinging the rag at the table, at all of us, it seemed, just for being at the same table where a glass of milk accidentally had been spilled. He’d sop up the mess in a matter of seconds, but the acrid mood he’d created would settle over everything, saddening my mother, who had expected a better reward for her dinner making.

Whenever my father’s impatient anger would find a target in me, my day would disintegrate, laid flat by a blast of browbeating. The touch-off might be the skid mark I made on the driveway with my bike tire, or the screwdriver I had forgotten to return to its hook on the wall, or the grass clumps I had unwittingly tracked into the house from the backyard. It might be the unmade bed that caught his eye at eleven
A
.
M
. on a Saturday morning or the noisy tussle I was having with my little brother on the same shag carpet where the Hairy Umgawa had been last night. Whatever did set him off was likely some bit of disorder that hadn’t much bothered him the day before, but this day his impatience had the better of him and I hadn’t taken proper precautions and therefore he now was standing over me, his eyes with far too much white in them, his face inches from my own.
Useless ninny!
he was shouting.
Giiiyaaad!
—a yell that trailed off into a gagging sound. That I did not think clearly, that I did not make myself useful, that I was a whiner in the face of duty, these were the contemptuous accusations my father the engineer would level at me when he was really worked up.
Giiiyaaaad you’re useless! Useless! Have you a brain in your skull?!
I would find it impossible not to cower, not to cry, so I would cry and that only ever redoubled the onslaught—
Stop your pathetic blubbering!
—until my head ached and the world was red-tinged by tears and everyone within range was utterly miserable.

And so to prevent any such scene from suddenly happening, I watched, I listened, I fine-tuned my powers of surveillance whenever possible. If I had a clear view of my father’s face, I studied the forehead, the eyes, the corners of the mouth that
might tighten and dip. If I was coming upon my father from behind, I observed the neck. Was it rigid? Did the neck seem to retract at the sound of my feet and my voice, cock just a bit to one side, making it easy to believe that the eyes I could not see were now clenched shut against my very presence? If his legs were all I could see, sticking out (as they often were) from beneath an automobile in the garage, the thing to do was to listen for his grunts, the tone of them as my father grappled with the repair job. Some grunts, the favorable ones, were rounded, open
uhhh
s resonating with satisfaction at progress made. As often, though, they were bitten off growls of frustration, the surest sign that I should not say whatever I had come to say, that I should move on and not let my father know I had ever been there.

Sometimes, that option was denied me. “Dave! I need your help here!” my father would call out. Perhaps he had dived, fearless, into a jumble of wires inside the living room wall, or he had winched the car’s impossibly complicated guts straight out of its engine compartment, or he had opened the back of a television set and was probing that inscrutable landscape with yet another strange and new tool. At times like this my father who could do anything would tell me to stand by him and hold a flashlight beam on the exact spot where he was performing his mysterious manipulations. At these moments, when I was granted so close a view of my father’s secret powers, their source remained tantalizingly beyond my understanding all the same. My father was not one to teach as he worked; impatience prevented that. “Damnit, Dave, put the light right
here
,” he would say as my attention inevitably atrophied and my aim relaxed. I could have tried to learn what he was doing by asking questions, of course, though I knew that if I asked one too many at the wrong time, there was always the chance that my father’s impatience might jump like electricity from the task that frustrated him and over to me. And so, at times like those, I watched the lines on his forehead and listened to the tone of his grunts while asking little, my father offering little, father and son collaborating on the day’s important project, each of us operating strictly on a need-to-know basis.

S
amos not only worked as intended, the satellite became America’s most famous spy for a time. As any layperson could read in the
Los Angeles Times
in October of 1960, Samos was meant to keep “this Nation informed of vital military installations and build-ups behind the Iron Curtain.” There was no attempt to hide the project’s Cold War nature. All the world knew that the Soviets had in May of 1960 shot down the U.S. pilot Gary Powers in his high-flying U-2 reconnaissance airplane. Now it was publicly understood that Samos satellites would carry on the espionage from a height truly out of reach, flying through what Eisenhower had declared the “Open Skies” of outer space.

By summer of 1961 a Samos satellite had made some five hundred passes over the Soviet Union. The pictures Samos 2 took helped give a lie to supposedly “superior” numbers of Soviet nuclear missiles, a superior strength that the Kremlin and the Pentagon alike had been proclaiming, a “missile gap” that Kennedy had sounded alarms about in his presidential campaign. When Kennedy and his brass got their pictures back from space, such scare talk immediately cooled, and Americans breathed easier. Samos, it seemed, had pulled off the gambit that good spy stories turn on, the unmasking of the enemy’s bluff, the stealing of secrets to shift the balance of power back to the good guys.

My father felt glad, his first year at Lockheed, to know he was part of this high drama with a national pride ending. This seemed a more romantic start to a career than had he been assigned to, say, Discoverer, a Lockheed satellite project underway literally next door to Samos. Discoverer, which had been fraught with fizzles for years, was said to carry into orbit capsules containing mechanical “mice” wired for biomedical data or sensors for measuring space radiation, the sorts of Science for Peace experiments that Ike and JFK and Khrushchev all declared they wanted of their space programs. After a time in orbit, Discoverer would drop its capsule back toward Earth, an airplane trailing a
scoop would catch it out of the air, and humanity would have gained some new bit of knowledge about ourselves or the cosmos. That was how Discoverer workers would explain it to my father if he happened to chat with them on the way to the doughnut wagon. They told him just what America had been told, that Discoverer, for all its troubles, was the friendly, civilian face of America’s space effort.

What my father found out some years later—and America many more years afterward—is that he had been lied to on the way to the doughnut wagon. Samos had not been America’s premier spy satellite after all. Just a few months after Samos’s first success, friendly Discoverer, its bugs ironed out, began dropping spools of exposed film, spy photos with sweep and resolution far better than Samos could ever achieve. While Samos certainly made a contribution, it was Discoverer that decisively debunked the missile gap, and while the Samos program was curtailed in 1962, Discoverer spy missions, under the code name CORONA, continued on in Black World secrecy until 1972. Looking back to his very first months at Lockheed, my father remembers strangers coming and going in the halls of the Discoverer project, officious men he might have guessed were intelligence officials from Washington. There were enough clues at the time, my father now sees, that he probably could have guessed that Discoverer was for spying, and that his coworkers on the project next door were lying to him as they were required to do. The reason he did not guess this is that he would not allow his mind to wander beyond the compartment Lockheed had assigned it. My father knew that he did not need to know.

All this about Samos and CORONA and my father’s relationship to the projects I say because my father has spoken freely about it, a luxury allowed him because Samos was so well publicized, and CORONA, just recently, has been declassified. There is very little else I know about my father’s projects during his thirty years at Lockheed. I know that he continued to punch a time card at the Satellite Test Center for at least seven years after Lockheed hired him, and that after Samos he worked for a while
on Vela, an unclassified satellite capable of detecting a Soviet nuclear detonation. I know that one day in the early years of his career my father announced to us that he had managed to wangle a transfer to a particularly exciting Lockheed project, a nuclear-powered rocket to the moon called RIFT. I know he and my mother attended a big going-away party for him on Friday, and that the headlines in Saturday’s newspaper announced that the nuclear rocket program had been canceled, which meant that my father resumed his job, on Monday, at the STC.