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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.
无论如何，他都完成了在双子星10号的舱外任务，从报废的阿金纳火箭中取回了陨石收集器，神一般地庄严而从容地从漆黑的夜空中划过。阿波罗11号任务结束后，人们并未记住他的名字，但他毫不在意。那么就做登月第三人也不错，因为是他们一起完成了约翰·肯尼迪总统在1961年所说的：在这10年结束前，美国要实现人类登月，而且（暗示）要比苏联人提前。
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.
听闻这个挑战的时候，他正在加利福尼亚州的爱德华空军基地受训，正在莫哈韦沙漠上空试验战斗机。虽然爱德华基地的一些人对此嗤之以鼻，觉得这只是把人关在容器里，绕着地球像弹药一样被弹来射去，但是他却非常渴望加入这个宇航员计划。他梦想能像约翰·葛伦一样绕地球整整90分钟；他迫不及待想探索童年英雄巴克·罗杰斯到达过的地方，故事里的罗杰斯乘着太空船，打败了来自火星的老虎人。
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.
他只需要大量的运气就能实现。在他看来，自己没什么过人之处，非要挑出点优势的话，手球打得还凑合。学生时代，他很容易对很多事情感到厌倦，尤其是不得不手动将大量飞行数据做成报告时，又或者是宇航员训练期间，不得不忍受枯燥乏味的地质学讲座时。数学计算破坏了万物的美妙，他宁愿用这时间来读《失乐园》。35岁的他已经为双子星计划做好准备了，这个机会来得正是时机。
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.
现在，他要开始用自己躯体对抗外太空完全真空的环境了，身上只穿着薄薄的一层金属服，或者说压力服。飞向月球再返回地球的整个过程就像冗长、易断的菊花链一般，每个动作完成后要跟上下一个动作，每一步都必须精准，完美。如果某个环节出错，那么其他环节就都无效了。尽管他担心自己会连累别人，但他当时操作缜密、一丝不苟。执行双子星10号任务之前，他在笔记本上写满了138个可能会出现的问题，每排除一个隐患，他就划掉一个。执行登月任务期间，他独自一人坐在哥伦比亚舱内，脖子上挂着一个小袋子，里面装了18种不同的救援方案，其中有些十分古怪，他们还没有机会实施过。
译文由可可原创，仅供学习交流使用，未经许可请勿转载。
