light — brilliant blood red.
She smoothly pulled both throttles to idle, then secured the right one. Nose held off until the main mounts were firmly planted, decelerating nicely, speed brakes and flaperon pop-up deployed, five thousand feet of concrete remaining, slowing…
“Ginger aborting,” she broadcast on the radio. “Fire light, right engine, roll the truck.”
Nose wheel firmly on the concrete, Rita applied the brakes with a firm, steady pressure. She rolled to a stop and killed the remain- ing engine as she opened the canopy. The fire truck charged to- ward them.
Rita pulled her helmet off. “Any fire?” she shouted at the man on the truck as the engine noise died. Without conscious effort, her fingers danced across the panels turning off everything.
“Not that we can see.”
“Let’s get out anyway,” Rita told Toad, who had already tog- gled his quick-release fittings and was craning out of the rear cock- pit, looking for smoke.
Standing beside the runway, perspiring profusely as the summer desert sun cooked them, Rita and Toad heard the news five min- utes later from Harry Pranks. A swarm of technicians already had the engine bay doors open. “Electrical problem, I’m sure. We’ll tow it into the hangar and check it out. Nice abort,” he added with a nod at Rita. “You two want to ride back in the van? It’s air- conditioned.”
“Yep,” said Tarkington. “Nothing like air force hospitality.”
They flew the plane for the first time the following day. Rita came back from the flight with a large smile on her face. “Captain,” she told Jake Grafton as she brushed sweat-soaked hair from her fore- head and eyes, “that’s one sweet machine. Power, handling, plenty of G available, sweet and honest. A very nice airplane.”
Before Harry Franks’ grin could get too wide. she started detail- ing problems: “Controls are oversensitive. Twitchy. Flying the ball is a real challenge. The left generator dropped off the line twice, which was maybe a good thing, because we found the power relay works as advertised; the inertial stayed up and humming. Toad got the computer running again without any problem each time. And the rudder trim…”
When Rita paused for air. Toad chimed in. “I’d like to go over how those fiber optic data buses work with someone, one more time. I’m still trying to figure out how…”
The routine was exactly like it had been a month before. Teleme- try, videotapes and the Flight Data Recorder info were carefully reviewed and the data compiled for a later in-depth analysis. Those problems that could be fixed were, and major problems were care- fully delineated for factory study.
Jake Grafton demanded all his people quit work at 9 P.M. He wanted them rested and back at the hangar at six each morning. Harry Franks worked his technicians around the clock in shifts, although he himself put in eighteen-hour days and was on call at night.
Toad tried to get out of the hangar as often as possible. The air force was using this field for stealth fighters — F-117s — and several other low-observable prototypes, including the B-2. Every so often if he was outside he would hear a rumble and there, before his very eyes, would be some exotic shape that seemed to defy the laws of gravity and common sense as it cleaved the hot blue desert air. He felt vaguely guilty, and slightly naughty. To satisfy his idle curios- ity he was seeing something that the Powers That Be — Those Who Knew — the Appointed, Anointed Keepers of the Secret — didn’t think his little mind should be burdened with. So he stood and gawked, curious and mystified, a little boy at the knothole, watch- ing the love rites of the groping teenagers. He would go back to work shaking his head and trot outside again, hopefully, several hours later.
He bumped into Jake Grafton on one of these excursions. The captain stood with his hands in his pockets watching a pair of F-117s come into the break.
“Amazing, huh?” Jake said.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve been flying for twenty-five years,” Grafton said, “and read- ing everything I could about planes for ten more. And all this time I never even dreamed…”
“I know what you mean. It’s like science and technology have gone crazy in some kind of souped-up hothouse. The technology is breeding, and we don’t recognize the offspring.”
“And it’s not just one technical field. It’s airframes and engines, composites and glues, fabricating techniques, Computer-Assisted Design, avionics and computers and lasers and radars. It’s every- thing! In five years everything I learned in a lifetime will be obso- lete.”
Or less than five years, Jake told himself glumly as the bat- winged B-2 drifted quietly overhead. Maybe everything I know is obsolete now.
When Toad Tarkington thought about it afterwards, he remem- bered the sun. It was one of those little details you notice at the time and don’t think about, yet remember later.
He had seen the sun many times before in the cockpit, bright and warm and bathing everything in a brilliant, clean light, its beams darting and dancing across the cockpit as the plane turned and climbed and dived. A clean light, bright, oh so bright, warm- ing bodies encased in Nomex and sweating inside helmets and gloves and flying boots. This was part of flying, and after a while you didn’t notice it anymore. Yet for a few seconds that morning he did notice it The memory of it stayed with him, and somehow, looking back, it seemed important
He was deep into the mysteries of the radar and computer and how they talked to each other, acutely aware of how little time aloft he had. The radar’s picture was automatically recorded on videotape, but he muttered into the ICS — the audio track of the tape — like a voodoo priest so he would know later just what the gain and brightness had been for each particular presentation. He worked fast. These flights were grotesquely short.
Rita concentrated on flying the plane, on keeping it precisely on speed and on altitude, exactly where the test profile required. She was extraordinarily good at this type of flying. Toad had discov- ered. She had the knack. It required skill, patience and self-disci- pline as one concentrated on the task at hand to the exclusion of everything else, all qualities Rita Moravia possessed in abundance. The airspeed needle stayed glued on the proper number and all the other needles did precisely what they were supposed to, almost as if they were slaves to Rita’s iron will.
Toad also kept track of their position over the earth, and every now and then wasted three seconds on a glance over at the chase plane. Still there, precisely where it should be. Smoke Judy was a no-nonsense, Sierra Hotel pilot who had almost nothing to say on the radio; he knew how busy Rita and Toad were.
Periodically Toad reminded Rita of which task was next on the list. He could just see the top of her helmet, partially masked by the top of her ejection seat, if he looked straight ahead. He could also see the upside-down reflection of her lap and arms in the canopy, weirdly distorted by the curvature. Her hand on the stick — he could see that because in this plane the control stick was where it should be, between the pilot’s legs.
And the sun. He saw the brilliance of the sun’s gaze as the sublime light played across the kneeboard on his right thigh and back and forth across the instruments on the panel before hiro.
“How’s control response?” he asked.
“Better.” In a moment she added, “Still not right, though.”
He would never have known it from the sensations reaching him through the plane. The ride was smooth as glass. “I told Orville and Wilbur they were wasting their time. They wouldn’t listen.”
“What’s next?”
She already knew, of course. She had prepared the flight profile. To humor her. Toad consulted his copy. “High-G changes.”
“Okay.”
He felt the surge as the power increased. Rita wasted no time. He saw her glance at Smoke Judy, assuring herself the F-14 was clear, then the left wing sagged gently as the nose began to rise and the G increased. The G came on in a steadily rising grunt as the horizon tilted crazily. Rita was flying the G line on the holographic HUD. Toad temporarily abandoned his radar research and strained every muscle in the classic M-l maneuver, trying to retain blood in his head and upper body as he forced air in and out past his lips. The inflatable pads in his G suit had become giant sau- sages, squeezing his legs to keep the blood from pooling there.
This maneuver was designed to allow Rita to explore the limits of G and maneuverability at ever-changing airspeeds. Toad felt the nibble of the stall buffet, and for the first time felt the wings rock sloppily, almost as if Rita were fighting to control their position.
“I’m having some troub—” she said, but before she could com- plete the thought the plane departed.
The down wing quit flying and the upper wing flopped them over inverted. The plane began to gyrate wildly. Positive Gs mashed them for half a second, then negative Gs threw them up against their harness straps, but since
