No, he didn't flash that famous Smilin' Al Shepard look until he stepped out of his airplane Away from Home—and most especially at the Cape. Then Al looked like a different human being, as if he had removed his ice mask. He would come out of the airplane with his eyes dancing. A great goomba-goomba grin would take over his face. You halfway expected to see him start snapping his fingers, because everything about him seemed to be asking the question: "Where's the action?" If he then stepped into his Corvette—well, then, there you had it: the picture of the perfect Fighter Jock Away from Home.

But now, in this room at the Konakai Hotel, it was the Icy Commander who stared back at Glenn. Commander Al, the colonel's son, knew how to put on all the armor of military correctness, in the stern old-fashioned way. He informed Glenn that he was way out of line. He told him not to try to foist his view of morality on anybody else in the group. In the succeeding weeks the Glenn position and the Fighter Jock position began to form, with various hands adding their own amendments. As for the Fighter Jock position: The seven of them had volunteered to do a job and they were devoting long hours of training to prepare for it and were doing many things above and beyond the strict call of duty, such as the morale tours of the factories, and forgoing flight pay and vacations and any semblance of an orderly family life—and that therefore what one did with what little time he had to himself was his own business, so long as he used good sense.

Shepard had struck the tone of the by-the-book commander. He sounded as utterly convinced and correct in his own fashion as Glenn did in his. Commander Al was capable of a rather formal rhetoric in discussions of this sort, complete with a little litotes.

There was no reason why one should have an aversion to the company of women, so long as one's acquaintanceships did not impair one's performance in the program or reflect adversely upon it.

John Glenn, however, was buying none of that. He stared back at Smilin' Al of the Cape and the Icy Commander, both of them, with John Calvin's own eyes. As time went by, the Glenn position became: Look, whether we like it or not, we're public figures. Whether we deserve it or not, people look up to us. So we have a terrific responsibility. It's not enough not to get caught. It's not even enough to know to your own satisfaction that you've done nothing wrong. We've got to be like Caesar's wife. We've got to be above even the appearance of doing wrong.

It went on like that, with neither giving an inch. That line about "Caesar's wife" would not be forgotten. Everybody knew there was something to what the fellow was saying… Nevertheless… Could you believe it? Could you believe that the day would come when, you would actually see a pilot, an equal among equals, give his comrades a little sermon about keeping their hands clean and their peckers stowed? Where did he get off setting himself above them this way, and what was his real game?

Glenn knew he was making no friends with this approach. Yet there were key moments in a military career when a man had to assume leadership. That was the essence of leadership caliber, and surely that fact would be appreciated-—if not by the pilots themselves, then surely by… others who would hear about it. The competition for the first flight was not a popularity contest among the troops, after all. Bob Gilruth and his deputies in the Space Task Group would make the choice. Glenn had never been afraid to alienate his peers when he knew he was right; perhaps this, too, had always impressed his superiors—and he had never been left behind. His faith in what was right was part of his righteous stuff.

Glenn had one great ally among the other six, and that was Scott Carpenter. Carpenter looked up to him and backed him in the debate. Wally Schirra and Gordon Cooper tended to back Shepard, arguing that when you were on duty you should be a model of correctness, but that when you were off duty your personal life was your own lookout. Schirra was finding Glenn more and more irritating. Who the hell did he think he was? After a while, they barely spoke to each other unless the job forced them to.

Grissom and Slayton somewhat dourly sided with Glenn on this particular point. Since he was making such a federal case out of it, they would acknowledge the soundness of his logic. But this didn't mean they idolized him any more than Schirra or Shepard did. A basic division was building up in the group. It was the other five against the pious fair-haired boy and his sidekick, Carpenter. Some of them seemed to derive some satisfaction from lumping Carpenter with Glenn. What was Carpenter even doing here! They couldn't get over the fact that Scott and his wife, Rene, had flamboyant cushions on the floor of their living room and they actually sat there while Scott played the guitar and Rene sang. The fact that she had a trained voice made no difference. It was beatnik stuff. Not only that, Carpenter was a great pal of the doctors. He and Glenn were both like that. They went out of their way to cooperate with the Life Sciences people, too.

Glenn and Carpenter were even willing guinea pigs for the two psychiatrists who had just come on board, Sheldon Korchin from the University of California and George Ruff, who had been in charge of the psychiatric testing at Wright-Pat. Both men were likable enough as individuals, but this thing of submitting to psychiatric study seemed dispensable to some of the boys, particularly Schirra and Cooper. The two psychiatrists were continually having you urinate into bottles so that they could analyze your urine for corticosteroid levels, which supposedly were an index of stress. But Carpenter thought this was terrific stuff, too. He even talked to them about it!

What some of the other five found eccentric in Carpenter was what Glenn (and the doctors) found interesting. Scott was about the only one you could sit down with and talk about the broader and more philosophical sides of Project Mercury and space exploration. Scott was the only one with a touch of the poet about him, in the sense that the idea of going into space stirred his imagination. He would even go out at night and prop a telescope up on top of his car on a tripod and just stargaze and let himself drift into the most profound speculation of astronomy: What is my place in the cosmos?

Just try to imagine Grissom doing that! If Gus had a telescope, he might use the small end of it to try to whack a turkey joint out of the maw of the Disposall if the thing was stuck, but that would be the end of that. Gus and Deke were the duo at the other end of the spectrum. The main thing was to ride the bird up there into space and get the job done and get back, and let's hold the Mickey Mouse down to a minimum.

Shepard and Wally Schirra were paired somewhere in between. It was not that they were inseparable pals or even buddies, however. Shepard had no intimates, so far as anyone knew, and Schirra probably spent as much time wondering what made Shepard tick as the rest of them did. It was just that they came into the astronaut corps with similar backgrounds. There was no particular advantage to forming a clique in this seven-man corps, because only one man could win the competition, i.e., get the first flight, and it wasn't a voting situation, in any case. Nevertheless, if any such situation came up, Al and Wally would probably tend to side with Deke and Gus… As for Gordon Cooper, he seemed to be regarded as the odd man out. One got the impression that he was not in the running. As far as Gordo himself was concerned, however, he sided with Gus and Deke and Al and Wally on most of the pertinent questions, from the business of medical experiments to life after hours.

They were all beginning to realize that the stakes were tremendous. With the first flight into space, the holy first flight, one of them would become not only the pre-eminent astronaut… but also the True Brother at the top of the entire pyramid. The first American into space—who might very well be the first human being to go into space—would have an eminence that not even Chuck Yeager had ever enjoyed, because he would belong not just to the history of aviation but to world history.