They had been talking for over an hour when a young enlisted man opened the door and stuck his head in. “Captain Grafton? There’s an Admiral Dunedin on the phone for you.”
“Tell him I’ll be right there.”
On the way down the hall he told Toad, “You go check on Rita. I’ll see you in a bit.”
The phone was in the duty officer’s office. Jake held it to his ear as the air force officer, a woman, closed the door on her way out ‘This is Captain Grafton, sir.”
“Admiral Dunedin, Jake. We got your message about the crash. How’s Moravia?”
“In a coma. It’s an open question whether she’ll pull through. She ejected too low and her chute didn’t fully open before she hit the ground. She’s got a fractured skull, damaged spleen and a variety of other problems. Five or six bones broken.”
“And Tarkington?”
“Not a scratch.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, sir, the way it looks right now, the fly-by-wire system is suspect. We were having troubles with the control inputs — they were too much at low speeds — so we went with new E-PROMs. Now, all those parameters are supposed to be trouble-shot and double-checked on the bench test equipment and all that, but something went wrong somewhere. The plane got away from Rita in a high-G maneuver and went into an inverted spin. She recov- ered, then it departed again when she pulled G on the pullout. Coming out of the second spin, she just ran out of sky. It flipped on the pullout and Toad punched.
“Hindsight and all, they should have ejected on the second de- parture, but … They were trying to save the plane. Now it looks like Toad may have punched too late for Rita.”
“How’s Tarkington taking it?”
“Blaming himself. I might as well tell you, if you didn’t know, they’re married.”
There was a pregnant silence. “I didn’t know.”
“Yeah.”
“Did that have any bearing on this accident?”
“Not that I can see. They stayed with the plane because it was a prototype and they were trying to save it. Rita thought she could save it all the way down. The last departure at five thousand feet above the ground made it a lost cause, so Toad punched them both out while they still had a little room left in the seat performance envelope. Apparently they were closer to the edge of the envelope than he thought”
“TRX doesn’t have another prototype.”
“I know. We’re going to have to go with the data we have. I’ll get started on the report as soon as I get back to Washington. But I would appreciate it if you would get a team of experts from the company that made that fly- by-wire system out here, like tomor- row. Have them bring their test equipment We need some instant answers.”
“You have the box?”
“One of them, anyway. It’s a little mashed up, but all the cir- cuitry and boards appear intact. l’m hoping they can test it”
“Why not just put it on a plane to the factory?”
“I want to be there when they check it out. And just now I can’t leave here.”
“I understand.”
They talked for several more minutes, then hung up. Both men had a lot to do.
Toad wandered the corridors, looking in on Rita from time to time. A nurse was with her every minute. The evening nurse was a woman in her thirties, and she never gave him more than a glance. Rita was in good hands, he told himself. But she didn’t move. She just lay there in the ICU cubicle with her eyes closed, her chest slowly rising and falling in time with the mechanical hissing and clicking of the respirator. The IVs dripped and the heart monitor made its little green lines on the cathode-ray tube. What he could see of her face was swollen, mottled.
So after looking yet again at Rita and her bandages and all the equipment, he would wander off down the hall, lost in his own thoughts.
Hospitals in the evening are dismal places, especially when there aren’t many visitors. The staffers rush on unknown errands along the waxed linoleum of the corridors. In the rooms lay the sick people with their maladjusted televisions blaring out the networks’ mixture of violence and comedy and ads for the consumer trash of a too wealthy society. The canned laughter and incomprehensible dialogue float through open doors and down the dean, sterile cor- ridors, sounding exactly like die insane cackling of a band of whacked-out dopers. No one in the captive audience laughs or even chuckles at the drivel of the screens. It’s just noise to help survive a miserable experience. Or background noise while you die.
Toad hated hospitals. He hated all of it — the pathetic potted plants and cut flowers, the carts loaded with dirty dinner trays, the waiting bedpans and urine bottles, the gleaming aluminum IV frames, the distant buzzer of someone trying to summon a nurse, the moans of some poor devil out of his head, the smell of disinfec- tant, the whispering — he loathed it all.
He relived the final minutes of the flight yet again. It didn’t matter that he was in a hospital corridor with the TV noise and the nurses talking in the background: he was back in the plane with the negative Gs and the spuming and Rita’s voice in his ears. In his private world the events of seconds expanded into minutes, and every sensation and emotion racked him more powerfully than before.
He found himself in the staff lounge. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but he wasn’t hungry. He got a pop from the machine and sipped it while he inspected the bulletin board. Apparently management was having the usual trouble keeping the staff lounge clean. And the bowling league still needed more people. Come on, people! Sign up and roll a few lines on Thursday nights and forget all these bastards here in the hospital for a little while. They’ll still be here on Friday.
He thought about calling Rita’s parents, and finally decided to do it. He tried for three minutes to persuade the long-distance operator to bill the call to his number in Virginia, and when she refused, called collect. No one answered.
Back down the corridor to check on Rita. No change. Another glance from the nurse.
He walked and walked and flew again, spinning wildly, out of control, the altimeter winding down, down, down, out there on the very edge of life itself.
“So what are the possibilities?” Jake addressed the question to George Wilson, the aerodynamics expert. The group had watched the videotape made by the chase plane flown by Smoke Judy.
“It’s an inverted spin, no question,” Wilson said.
“Why?”
“The plane has negative stability. All these low-observable de- signs do. The fly-by-wire system is supposed to keep it from stall- ing and spinning, and obviously it didn’t.” Everyone there knew what the term “negative stability” meant. If the pilot released the controls, a plane with positive stability would tend to return to a wings- level, stable condition. Neutral stability meant that the air- plane would stay in the flight attitude it was in when the controls were released. Negative stability, on the other hand, meant that once the plane was displaced from wings- level, it would tend to increase the rate of displacement if the controls were released.
“So the fly-by-wire system is the first place to look,” Jake Graf- ton said, “Smoke, you saw this whole thing up close and personal. Do you have anything you want to add?”
“No, sir. I think the movie captured it, got even more of it than I remember seeing at the time. We could sit and niggle over her decision to recover from the second spin instead of ejecting, but I doubt that would be fair. It was a prototype and she’s a test pilot”
Jake nodded. He agreed with Smoke, as he usually did. He had tried keeping Smoke Judy at arm’s length after that night he saw him in West Virginia, yet except for that unexplained sighting, he had nothing else against the man. Judy was proving to be a fine officer and an excellent pilot, a man whose opinions and judgment could be trusted. Which was precisely why Jake had assigned him to fly the chase plane.
They discussed the test results they had and decided how to proceed. As Jake had told the admiral, his report was going to be written with the data the group had gathered. The reason for the crash would have to be included, if it could be established by the time he was ready to submit the document. So this evening he assigned the bulk of his staff to compiling test results and the rest to investigate, or monitor the contractor’s investigation of, the crash.
