Operator B

sun. Beyond the OEV’s strange windows, the desert shimmered. Wentz remained in partial stasis as the craft just sat there and hovered.

Behind them, the opening to the phony sand dune drew closed.

Wentz gazed at the desert.

“General, we can sit here all day if you like,” Ashton said. “You’re the boss, you know? But I kind of thought that you might want to do something other than hover.”

“Oh. Yeah,” Wentz replied.

Then the OEV essentially disappeared from its former stance. There was no roar of an engine being throttled to the max. There was no inertia crushing them back into their seats. There was only sky which, within minutes, faded away as Wentz took the OEV out of earth’s proper atmosphere.

Within minutes, they were in space.

Wentz could feel his mind become part of the vehicle, like a jump board, like a guidance microprocessor. The processor was Wentz’s brain, and his brain’s connectivity to the rest of the ship were his hands pressed into the detents.

“Damn it, General!” Ashton snipped.

“What? You told me to get moving, so…I got moving.”

“I expected a little discipline. This is a first test run. It’s a familiarization sortie, for you to get the hang of the OEV’s basis navigational possibilities. I told you not to accelerate too drastically, so not to burn the paint off the hull. You’ve just shot us out of orbit!”

“Hey, paint’s cheap,” Wentz said.

“Maybe, sir, but since you’ve burned it all off in a hyper-velotic cruise, that means we can’t return to the atmosphere until after sundown—six hours. Otherwise the satellites might see us.”

Wentz chuckled. “Six hours? In this rig? I could do sixty before I started to get tired. We’re cruisin’, Colonel. And I’m the driver. So just sit back and enjoy it.”

An endless scape of stars stretched before them.

You gotta be shitting me, Wentz thought, staring outward.

For the last twenty-five years, he was limited to the sky. Now he had the entire universe.

««—»»

In only a week, Wentz learned to operate the OEV to a degree that he thought there was nothing he—or it— could not do. It was all a mind-set, not that different from a high-tech fighter, the only difference being that the detents reduced reaction time to zero. His brain no longer needed to command his hands on the controls.

Instead—now—his brain was plugged into the aircraft.

Not only could Wentz command the OEV with his mind, he could tease it, jink it, execute maneuvers that would not have been possible by stick-control or fly-by- wire. The physical human body was simply not capable…but with Wentz’s mind functioning as an integral component of the OEV’s flight systems—

Wentz couldn’t imagine the full-scale possibilities.

Barrel-rolls in space, true-toe vertical thrusts, FLOTs and FEBAs and flat-spins and “skidder-turns.” Wentz performed aerial moves, within the atmosphere and without, that were unprecedented.

At least by a human.

He wondered how he’d fare compared to the true pilots of this vehicle.

“What were they like?” he asked on his seventh test flight. He was encircling the earth at a 23,000-mile geostatic orbit-track. He wasn’t sure—because the OEV had no true-speed indicators, altimeters, or azimuth gauges—but it seemed that each revolution took but seconds. The harder he thought, the faster he went.

“The native operators?” Ashton asked.

“Yeah. Little green men? Silver skin? Big black almond-shaped eyes?”

“I don’t know,” Ashton confessed, “because I never had a need to. I only know they were air-breathers, bipedal, and warm-blooded. One of the bodies was cryolized, and the other was autopsied, at Wright- Patterson.”

“Why do you think they came to earth?”

“Who knows? A field survey, probably. Probably monitoring our technological progress with regards to weapons of mass destruction. The Edgewood Arsenal? You don’t even want to know what kind of stuff we’ve got stored there.”

“You’re right,” Wentz said. “I don’t want to know.” Wentz took his three-fingered hands out of the detents, leaving his last guidance thoughts in the system: continue following the orbit-line. “How far advanced do you think they are?”

“Probably a thousand years, something like that.”

Christ…

“The seal of the egression hatch is so minute, we couldn’t even get molecular wire to run a patch to the outer-hull,” Ashton remarked. “And even if we could, the hull is impenetrable, no way to mount anything on it.” She pointed to the meager bank of readout gauges and VDU’s above the detent panel. “A brace-frame holds that stuff in place, same for the storage racks and lockers in back.”

“If the hull’s impenetrable…how do we have radio contact with S-4?” Wentz asked.

“Luck. Radio waves pass through without any detectable distortion. It’s just a standard SINGARS radio we’ve got installed… You hungry?”

“Sure.”

Ashton unhooked her safety belt, walking normally to the rear of the craft, in spite of its tremendous speed and gyrations.

When Wentz wasn’t looking, she popped a small pill into her mouth.

Moments later, she returned to her seat, bearing two packs of MRE’s.

“Ah, Meals, Ready to Eat,” Wentz recognized the o.d.-green wrappers. “You got a hot dogs and beans there?”

“Live it up, sir,” she said, and passed him the pack. “And you can have my chocolate disk—”

“The hockey puck?” Wentz exclaimed. “Shit, in the field, guys would sell those things for fifty bucks! You don’t want yours?”

Ashton passed him the green cellophane packet, which read CHOCOLATE, ONE (1) DISK, 104 GRAMS. “I don’t eat chocolate,” Ashton said in a vehicle that was probably surpassing 250,000 miles per hour. “It makes my face break out.”

««—»»

Later test flights would prove equally flawless. Wentz flew to the moon, the Alpha-Centauri double-star system, to Venus.

On the moon, he EVA’d, performing several familiarization sessions in the most technologically advanced “space suit” known to man.

This is a trip, he thought, skipping through dust and an age-old volcanic ejecta in the Aristarchus plains. He picked up an oblong rock close to the shape of a football; he threw it and watched it disappear.

Eat my shorts, Eli Manning, he thought. You ain’t shit.

««—»»

The next day, Wentz was cleared for the mission.

—