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In any case he had already had his own extra-vehicular adventure on the Gemini 10 mission, going out to retrieve a meteorite-collector from a dead Agena rocket, gliding across the night sky with perfect and stately grace, like a god. It didn’t matter that, after Apollo 11, people struggled to remember his name. To be third man then was fine. Together they had done what President John Kennedy had told them in 1961: put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, and (implied) before those Russians did.
無論如何，他都完成了在雙子星10號的艙外任務，從報廢的阿金納火箭中取回了隕石收集器，神一般地莊嚴而從容地從漆黑的夜空中劃過。阿波羅11號任務結束后，人們并未記住他的名字，但他毫不在意。那么就做登月第三人也不錯，因為是他們一起完成了約翰·肯尼迪總統在1961年所說的：在這10年結束前，美國要實現人類登月，而且（暗示）要比蘇聯人提前。
He was at Edwards Air Force Base in California when that challenge came down, testing fighter planes over the Mojave desert. Though some at Edwards scorned the thought of being locked in a can and fired around the world like ammunition, he burned to get into the astronaut programme. He dreamed of circling Earth in 90 neat minutes, like John Glenn; he hungered to explore the realm where his childhood hero Buck Rogers had roared around in his space rocket, tackling the Tiger Men from Mars.
聽聞這個挑戰的時候，他正在加利福尼亞州的愛德華空軍基地受訓，正在莫哈韋沙漠上空試驗戰斗機。雖然愛德華基地的一些人對此嗤之以鼻，覺得這只是把人關在容器里，繞著地球像彈藥一樣被彈來射去，但是他卻非常渴望加入這個宇航員計劃。他夢想能像約翰·葛倫一樣繞地球整整90分鐘；他迫不及待想探索童年英雄巴克·羅杰斯到達過的地方，故事里的羅杰斯乘著太空船，打敗了來自火星的老虎人。
All he needed was a lot of luck. By his own lights he was nothing special, though ok if you were looking for a handball game. As a student he was easily bored, especially when he had to process reams of flight data by hand into reports, or when, during astronaut training, he had to endure mind-numbing lectures on geology. Mathematical calculations destroyed the wonder of things; he would rather read “Paradise Lost”. By the age of 35 he was ready for the Gemini launch, but just as well it came no sooner.
他只需要大量的運氣就能實現。在他看來，自己沒什么過人之處，非要挑出點優勢的話，手球打得還湊合。學生時代，他很容易對很多事情感到厭倦，尤其是不得不手動將大量飛行數據做成報告時，又或者是宇航員訓練期間，不得不忍受枯燥乏味的地質學講座時。數學計算破壞了萬物的美妙，他寧愿用這時間來讀《失樂園》。35歲的他已經為雙子星計劃做好準備了，這個機會來得正是時機。
He would now pit his little pink body against the hard vacuum of space, with nothing between them but a thin shell of metal or a pressurised suit. The whole business of going there, each manoeuvre leading to the next and each needing to be perfect, was like a long fragile daisy chain looping from Earth and back. If one link failed, all the rest was useless. Rather than be a weak point, as he worried he might be, he was now rigorously precise. Before Gemini 10 he filled a notebook with 138 potential problems, crossing each off as it was solved. Alone on Columbia during the Moon mission, he kept a packet of 18 different rescue plans tied round his neck, some so outlandish that they had never practised them.
現在，他要開始用自己軀體對抗外太空完全真空的環境了，身上只穿著薄薄的一層金屬服，或者說壓力服。飛向月球再返回地球的整個過程就像冗長、易斷的菊花鏈一般，每個動作完成后要跟上下一個動作，每一步都必須精準，完美。如果某個環節出錯，那么其他環節就都無效了。盡管他擔心自己會連累別人，但他當時操作縝密、一絲不茍。執行雙子星10號任務之前，他在筆記本上寫滿了138個可能會出現的問題，每排除一個隱患，他就劃掉一個。執行登月任務期間，他獨自一人坐在哥倫比亞艙內，脖子上掛著一個小袋子，里面裝了18種不同的救援方案，其中有些十分古怪，他們還沒有機會實施過。
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