Project Argus had as its basis a theory that was proven completely unsound six years ago. It was proven unsound by Dennis Lynds. He got killed doing it. It had to do with return vehicles from capsules traveling at escape velocity, being oriented and controlled completely by telemetering devices. It didn't work. This time, the monkey was used for newspaper consumption. I'm sure Bannister would have preferred it if the monkey had been killed on contact. It would have been simpler that way. No mass hysteria about torturing a poor, ignorant beast. A simple scientific sacrifice, already dead upon announcement, would have been a _fait accompli_, so to speak, and nothing could overshadow the success of Project Argus. But Project Argus was a failure. Maybe someday you'll understand why. Because of the monkey? Possibly. You see, I flew the second shot after Lynds got killed. After that, came the hearing, and after that no men flew in Bannister's ships anymore. They proved Lynds nuts, and got rid of me, but nobody would try it, even with manual controls, where there is no atmosphere. When you're putting down after a maximum velocity flight, you feed a set of landing coordinates into the computer, and you wait for the computer to punch out a landing configuration and the controls set themselves and lock into pattern. Then you just sit there. I haven't yet met a pilot who didn't begin to sweat at that moment, and sweat all the way down. We weren't geared for that kind of flying. We still aren't, for that matter. We had always done it ourselves, (even on instruments, we interpreted their meaning to the controls ourselves) and we didn't like it. We had good reason. The telemetry circuits were no good. That's a bad part of a truly classified operation: they don't have to be too careful, there aren't any voters to offend. About the circuits, sometimes they worked, sometimes not. That was the way it went. They wouldn't put manual controls in for us. It wasn't that they regarded man with too little faith, and electronic equipment with too much. They just didn't regard man at all. They looked upon scientific reason and technology as completely infallible. Nothing is infallible. Not their controls, not their vehicles, and not their blasted egos. * * * * * Lynds was assigned the first flight at escape velocity. They could not be dissuaded from the belief that at ultimate speed, a pilot operating manual controls was completely ineffectual. Like kids that have to run electric trains all by themselves, playing God with a transformer. That was when I asked them why bother with a pilot altogether. They talked about the whole point being a test of man's ability to survive; they'd deal with control in proper order. They didn't believe it, and neither did we. We all got very peculiar feelings about the whole business after that. The position on controls was made pretty final by Bannister.