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Chapters 
80
less the next thing the town heard was that he was flying an F-86 Sabre jet out in Korea and stopping the Communist MiGs 
from crossing the Yalu River. It had taken a series of moments and emotions, not all of them logically linked, to get him there, 
and if Spike tried to reduce his life to a comic strip, as he sometimes did, he would first of all see himself standing on the dunes 
at Kitty Hawk, looking out to sea; then grabbing at Mary-Beth's breast without being rejected and thinking, `God can't strike 
me dead for this, he can't'; and then driving at dusk with Buck Weinhart waiting for the early stars to come out. Love of 
machines was there too, of course, and patriotism, and a strong feeling that he looked pretty cute in his blue uniform; but in a 
way it was the earlier things he remembered the more vividly. That was what he meant, when he gave his first appeal for funds 
in 1975, about your life coming back to the place where it started. Wisely, no doubt, he didn't translate this general sentiment 
into particular memories, else he probably wouldn't have gotten a contribution out of Mary-Beth for one thing. 
Along with his father's car and a resentful Mary-Beth, Spike had left his faith behind when he quit Wadesville. Though he 
dutifully filled in 'Baptist' on all the Navy forms, he didn't think about the Lord's commands, or the blessed grace, or being 
saved, not even on the bad days when one of his fellow-aviators - hell, one of his friends - bought the farm. That was a friend 
gone, but you didn't try to raise the Lord on the radio. Spike was a flier, a man of science, an engineer. You might 
acknowledge God on paper forms just as you deferred to senior officers around the base; yet the moment you were most you, 
when you were really Spike Tiggler, the kid who'd grown up from a borrowed car on a quiet road to a roaring fighter in an 
empty sky, was when you'd climbed hard and were levelling out your silver wings, high up in the clear air south of the Yalu 
River. Then you were wholly in charge, and you were also most alone. This was life, and the only person who could let you 
down was yourself. On the nose of his F-86 Spike had painted the slogan `Drive it or Milk it!' as a warning to any MiG 
unlucky enough to catch Lieutenant Tiggler nearly up its ass. 
[p. 255] 
After the war in Korea he transferred to the Navy's Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland. When the Russians 
launched their first Sputnik and Project Mercury got under way, Spike volunteered, even though something inside him - and 
quite a few aviators outside him - insisted that on the first flights they might as well use a chimpanzee, hell, they were going to 
use a chimpanzee. The job was just riding a rocket; you were a piece of cargo with wires sticking out, a lump of meat for the 
scientist to study. Part of him wasn't disappointed he didn't make the first seven to be chosen, yet part of him was; and next 
time around he put in again and got himself accepted. It was front-page on the Fayetteville Observer with a photo, which made 
Mary-Beth forgive him and write; but seeing as his new wife Betty was going through a jealous period he pretended he'd 
forgot this particular girl from Wadesville and her letter received no reply. 
In the summer of 1974 Spike Tiggler stood on the surface of the moon and threw a football pass four hundred and fifty 
yards. Touchdown! This was during a thirty-minute period when no specific tasks had been assigned and the two fellows on 
the surface were allowed to follow up anything that made them curious. Well, Spike had always been curious to see how far 
you could throw a football up there in the thin atmosphere, and now he knew. Touchdown! The voice at Mission Control 
sounded indulgent, and so did fellow-astronaut Bud Stomovicz when Spike said he was going to hop on over and get his ball 
back. He set off across the dead landscape like a jack rabbit with tubes. The moon looked pretty rough and beat-up to Spike, 
and the dust he stirred, which settled back in slow motion, was like sand from a dirty beach. His football lay beside a small 
crater. He kicked it gently into the arid hollow, then turned around to examine the distance he had come. The lunar module, 
almost out of sight, seemed tiny and precarious, a toy spider with a wheezing battery. Spike was not much given to private 
thinking on a mission - in any case, the work schedule was devised to discourage introspection - but it struck him that he and 
Bud (plus Mike still circling above in the command module) were as 
[p. 256]
far as you could currently get from the rest of the human species. Yesterday they had watched the earth rise, and for all their 
bagful of jokes it had been an awesome sight which turned your head upside down. Now, right here, he felt at the very edge of 
things. If he walked another ten yards, he might just fall off the world's wingtip and spin boots over helmet into deepest space. 
Though he knew such an occurrence to be scientifically impossible, that was how it felt to Spike Tiggler. 
At this exact moment a voice said to him, `Find Noah's Ark.'
`Don't read you,' he replied, thinking it must be Bud.
`Didn't say a word.' This time it was Bud's voice. Spike recognized it, and in any case it came through his earphones in the 
usual way. The other voice had seemed to come direct, to be around him, inside him, close to him, loud yet intimate. 
He'd made it a dozen or so yards back towards the LM when the voice repeated its command. `Find Noah's Ark.' Spike 
carried on doing his aerated moon-hop, wondering if this was somebody's joke. But nobody could have put a recorder in his 
helmet - there wasn't room for it, he'd have noticed, they wouldn't have allowed it. You could drive someone nutsy with a trick 
like that, and though one or two of his fellow-astronauts had a pretty curveball sense of humor, it mainly stopped at hollowing 
out a plug in your melon slice, slipping mustard into the hole and replacing the plug. Nothing as big-league as this. 
'You'll find it on Mount Ararat, in Turkey,' the voice went on. `Find it, Spike.' 
There were electrodes monitoring most of Spike's physical reactions, and he guessed they'd see the needles jumping all 
over the graphs when this part of the mission was reviewed. If so, it wouldn't be beyond him to dream up a cover story. For the 
moment, he just wanted to think about what he'd heard, what it might mean. So when he returned to the LM he made a crack 
about a fumble by the wide receiver, and went back to being a normal astronaut, that's to say test pilot turned chimpanzee 
turned national hero turned stuntman turned prospective congressman or if not that then future decorative board member of a 
dozen corporations. He hadn't been the first man to stand on the 
[p. 257]

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J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½