The Story of Enos the Chimp

...So I had a few hours to kill this morning, and I was browsing the shelves in this bookshop, and I came across this book by Tom Wolfe. Called 'The Right Stuff', it tells the story of NASA's Mercury Program, which got the first American into space, and included a few spacewalks and stuff too. And being a sucker for anything to do with the space movement, I opened it at a random page. Now I can't quote exactly, but I'll give you the gist of the story I read:

At the time of this particular tale, the Russians were the masters of space. Under the guidance of the anonymous Integral Designer, they'd first put Yuri Gagarin into orbit, and then put Alfkjsdfgkjsdgj Titov (can't remember his first name) into orbit for an entire day - seventeen orbits! The Americans were badly shaken. Kennedy was furious. He puts a rocket under NASA's ass, and they start planning to get their first man in orbit. Under pressure, the scientists dig their heels in and insist that before any human can go up, they have to send up an animal - specifically a monkey. They put a whole squad of chimps through the whole astronaut training program - centrifuges, jet flights, the works - and also train them to operate a special monkey-friendly space capsule. This consists of various tasks like pulling the right lever to indicate the odd one out when a series of symbols light up, and so on. Training them is done on a punishment system; get it wrong, and the monkeys get electric shocks applied to their feet.

Top candidate for the job is Candidate 85. He's a complete whizz at the control board. None of his colleagues are anywhere near as fast or as accurate... but none of them could be less cooperative. From the moment he's taken from his cage, he fights the scientists tooth and nail, biting and scratching. At the controls, he withstands the electric shocks and grins fiercely at them. He'll do just enough to get by, then as soon as he's finished he'll turn round and fight and bite and scratch all over again. He's the prisoner-of-war who can't be broken.

Eventually,the scientists put him in a box for a week, with only his own urine and faeces for company. That calms him down a little. He really doesn't want to go back in the box. By now he is definitely top candidate, and finally he's ready for launch. His blood pressure is dangerously high, but this is a problem for all the monkeys. They reckon it's the blood pressure cuff they're using which is scaring the little animals. Candidate 85 is renamed Enos, which I believe is Greek for 'man'. They stick needles in him, monitoring blood pressure and lots of other medical stuff. They put a urinary catheter in. Finally they strap him into his little capsule, and wham, off to the final frontier... Where no man (from the free world) has gone before.

For the first orbit, everything goes smoothly. Enos performs perfectly, the ship is fine, all goes well. But by the time they're going round a second time, things are going badly wrong. The punishment system is malfunctioning, so Enos gets shocked whether or not he pulls the correct lever. Worse, the boosters on the side of the ship are spasming, causing the ship to rotate alarmingly.

Enos,though, is still performing like he's on rails. He's ignoring the punishments and pulling the right levers anyway. Every move he makes is perfect; even though he's getting random shocks through his feet and the capsule, in zero gravity, is spinning madly, it's still better than the Box. The ship is clearly falling apart, though, and the mission is aborted.

Enos' capsule ditches in the sea. The explosive bolts which are supposed to blow the hatch off, don't. By the time they pick him up, Enos has pulled out every single catheter he can reach. His monitoring jacket is scratched to ribbons and torn apart. The needles he can't pull out he's damaged irreparably. Most amazingly of all,he's pulled out the urinal catheter, which must have been an incredibly painful process.

Enos fulfilled his mission. More importantly, though, his experiences led to the first real research into the link between stress and high blood pressure. The ordeal of punishment that all those monkeys underwent, and the amount of rage that Enos had to swallow, made scientists wonder about his permanently increased blood pressure. Monkey-in-space had an important lesson for man-on-earth.

I'd like to think that Enos went to some Happy Home for Retired Astromonkeys. Somehow, though, I doubt it.

Why am I telling you this? Because I got halfway through telling my Dad this story over lunch, and got so choked up with emotion I had to pause to get control again. Is it just me? Or is this the sort of story which men get emotional over? I don't know, but I remembered some clip from a comedy show years back, about weepy movies; the girls are discussing Sleepless in Seattle, and sobbing buckets. The men watch in incomprehension, until one of them mentions the Great Escape, and then they're off, quoting Donald Pleasance ("I can see. I can see perfectly") between hiccuping sobs...