The Espionage Game

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  He then addressed Jerry Rodell. “Jerry, I want you to meet Fred Kelder, and don’t bother saluting him, he wouldn’t know how to return it.”

  Both Fred Kelder and Winslow laughed at Winslow’s remark; Fred extended his hand to shake Jerry Rodell’s. “Welcome to the Way Out Zone,” he quipped cheerfully. Dressed in baggy and unpressed fatigues, Kelder also wore a non-regulation pale-blue v-neck cardigan sweater under his grease-stained lab coat. He completed his display of a decidedly casual attitude toward military decorum with gray and white running shoes. Jerry noticed the Medical Corps insignia on the right lapel of his shirt collar.

  “Dr. Kelder?” he inquired.

  “I guess you can say that. But, please, just call me Fred.” His grin accented his bright blue eyes and tannish gray hair. Jerry couldn’t help but return the infectious grin. It was then he realized that Fred Kelder was at least a month overdue for a haircut.

  “Let’s go to my office, and I can explain what this is all about,” Fred suggested, pointing at the door. “Go through the revolving door, and I’ll give you a quick tour of the computer room. Then we’ll go to my office.”

  Jerry peered through the open door and saw a glass vestibule with a rotating glass door, like those found in the entrances of hotels and department stores. Beyond was a large room filled with computer equipment, with about a dozen people milling about. Every one of them was wearing a sweater of some kind.

  Kelder and Winslow led the way, charging through the revolving plate-glass doors. Jerry followed and instantly discovered why Kelder and his staff all wore sweaters; the temperature in the computer room couldn’t have been over sixty. The noise from all the equipment was deafening. Jerry covered his ears, as much to protect them from the noise as from the cold.

  “Jeezus,” he complained.

  “We have to keep this room cold because it makes the computer much more reliable,” Fred yelled to be heard over the noise.

  “We have over one hundred systems, ranging from PCs to three Crays over there,” he shouted, standing on his toes to point at the far corner of the room. “We have a monster air conditioning plant outside, and we can make it cold enough in here to freeze meat. Let’s go into my office, where it’s warmer and a whole lot quieter.”

  Jerry nodded. Both Colonel Kelder and General Winslow had already started down the aisle toward a second glass revolving door. Mindful of the sergeant’s repeated warnings about staying within ten paces, Jerry hurried to catch up.

  Colonel Fred Kelder’s office was far more habitable. It was lined with bookshelves stuffed with books and stacks of magazines and medical journals. A battered wooden desk sat at one end of a room while a set of Salvation Army living room furniture filled most of the other end. As they entered, Fred gestured toward the well-worn couch.

  “You’ll find the couch the most comfortable, gentlemen,” he said while standing just inside the doorway. “There’s fresh coffee and doughnuts on the table by my desk. Please be seated and make yourselves comfortable.”

  Fred sprawled into one of the battered club chairs, his right leg dangling over its arm. He eyed Jerry while he munched a doughnut.

  “Jerry,” he asked, “have you ever flown in actual combat?”

  “Just the Red Flags,” Jerry answered with a puzzled look.

  “I read most of your records,” Fred continued, “and I just wanted to be certain that I didn’t miss anything. I guess I should tell you a little about myself first.” He unbuttoned his cardigan sweater and exposed the pilot’s wings over his left breast pocket.

  “I joined the Air Force back in 1964, right out of college. I was in ROTC and fortunate enough to get into the pilot-training program. I flew F-4s for two tours of duty in ‘Nam, an experience I hope nobody ever has to repeat.” He shook his head sadly.

  “I spent most of my time there dropping five-hundred pound bombs onto rice paddies in the south, but I did get my fair share of trips to Hanoi. It was the first trip up there that made me what I am today. You asked if I was a doctor a few minutes ago. The answer is yes, twice. I have a medical degree as well as a Ph.D. I’m specializing in the biological limits of mankind in high-performance aircraft. It all came about on my very first trip to Hanoi. I was a wingman, and I had to watch my lead fly straight and level while a SAM-2 climbed into his tailpipe. An instant later, a two-thousand-hour pilot with three victories against MiGs in Korea was history. Post-mission analysis of the recording tapes from my plane as well as from several other guys in our formation proved that I gave him several very clear warnings about the SAM over the radio. Why do you think he died, Jerry?”

  Jerry shrugged. “I don’t know, sir.”

  “The name’s Fred,” Fred Kelder insisted pleasantly. “And the answer is that he was saturated with information. We had dozens of things making noise in the cockpit, just like they do today. Things went click, things went buzz, other things flashed and blinked. Then there was the goddamn radio. We were often listening to five or six conversations. Very quickly, we learned to turn off all of those neat gadgets designed by engineers to save our lives, and went back to our own senses. We turned off everything but one or two channels on our radios, just so we’d have time to think while fighting.”

  Fred Kelder leaned back in his dilapidated chair. “It’s part of the biggest problem we have as military men, the limits of man in modern fighting machines. Some call it the Biological Barrier, but that’s too grandiose of a title for me.”

  He paused to take a bit out of his donut, eyeing Jerry while he chewed it.

  “In any case, I returned from ‘Nam in one piece and put in for postgraduate training. The Air Force agreed and paid for my education. In return, I stayed in and have had a ball for the last thirty years or so.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Flying, mostly,” Fred responded with a grin. “I’m checked out in every aircraft in our inventory, plus everything here.”

  “Everything?” General Winslow queried. Although his voice was stern, there was a definite tinge of envy.

  “All in the name of medical science, General,” Fred replied with a knowing smirk. He glanced toward Jerry and added, “He’s jealous because I found a way around the ‘old-farts’ regulation that prohibits us old guys from flying high-performance aircraft. I get to do it under the guise of aerospace medical research.”

  “Does that includeMary Lou ?” Winslow demanded.

  “Last week,” Fred answered with an ear-to-ear grin. “For about an hour.”

  “You bastard.”

  “Privileges of rank have their limits,” Fred Kelder commented smugly. “Scientific endeavor has no such limits.”

  “Get on with the briefing,” Winslow grumbled. “Jerry is anxious to see CLEO.”

  “Okay,” Fred Kelder agreed as he shifted his weight in the chair. “There are two important aspects to the so-called ‘Biological Barrier.’ The first, as we have seen, is information overload. The second is, as you well know, excessive g’s. Man was not designed to fly at high-g loadings.”

  Jerry nodded.

  “Well, with the advent of better and better missiles, flying an airplane in combat has become almost suicidal. Some joker fifty miles away locks-on to you with his radar, launches a missile and heads home, confident that the missile is going to take you out. Of course, there are all sorts of counter-measures, but there is only one that’s foolproof. And that simply is to dodge the damn thing. It’s with that philosophy thatMary Lou was designed. She can turn so fast that any missile with its tiny little wings will simply skid out of control as it tries to follow, and so loses its lock-on.

  “Unfortunately,” Fred added emphatically as he picked the now- empty saucer off his knee and put it on the coffee table in front of him, “that means twelve to fifteen g’s—an impossibly high loading for any mortal human. Agree?”

  “Yes.” Jerry eyed Fred Kelder.

  “Well, until now—or so we think,” Fred continued as he casually dusted some crumbs from
his trouser leg. “There are three possible answers to this problem. The first is to make warplanes remotely piloted.Mary Lou is an example of this effort. Although she has incredible maneuverability, just about any manned aircraft was able to blast poorMary Lou with its guns in a dogfight because the remote pilot couldn’t see what was going on.

  “The second solution was to develop a silicon pilot. That was a very interesting effort, because we made some fundamental discoveries about what makes a good fighter jock. Would you believe that every really successful fighter jock is an artist of some kind? For example, Jerry, I know that you’re a sculptor.”

  “How did you know that?” Jerry exclaimed.

  “Easy,” Fred laughed in a friendly manner. “Last year, when you were on TDY at Brooks for the Energy Straining Maneuver training, we left you and the rest of your group in a day room for about two hours while we were ‘getting ready’ for the next test. With nothing else to do, most of your group started to amuse themselves with whatever they found. You went for the modeling clay. It was actually all part of the research we were doing.”

  Fred Kelder paused and studied Jerry Rodell.

  “However, I digress,” he continued. “The point is that most good pilots are right-brained, as one popular psychological theory puts it. Right-brained people are intuitive, creative people. Left-brained people are more deductive, bureaucratic. Simply put—artists verses accountants. Well, what we discovered is that computers are innately deductive and bureaucratic. That means that while they are fine for doing the accounts receivable, they make lousy fighter pilots. You see, even if we ever perfect computers to the point of thinking as well as a human, they will be deductive thinkers—they won’t have insight, intuition. They won’t wake up one day like Descartes and say ‘Cogito, ergo sum.’”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Jerry asked.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Fred apologized, “it’s Latin for ‘I think, therefore I am,’ a rather profound insight for Descartes’ day.”

  “You’re saying that fighter jocks are by nature intuitive?” Jerry inquired skeptically.

  “I think I’ve made that point clear,” Fred responded with some surprise, “At least the good ones.”

  “I always thought that it would be the engineers.”

  Fred Kelder shook his head. “They make great test pilots and transport pilots, not combat fighter pilots. You don’t have time to analyze everything when you’re in the furball of a dogfight. It’s like when you sculpt: you don’t use calipers to measure everything, you do it by eye, by intuition. While you’re eyeballing your opposition and making your move, an engineering type is worried about bending his airplane. He gets waxed.”

  “Okay,” Jerry agreed, although he wasn’t totally convinced, “I accept that computers wouldn’t make great fighter jocks. Now that we’ve eliminated remote control and computers, what’s the third solution?”

  “Use fighter jocks.”

  Jerry shook his head in confusion. “But you just said a few moments ago that, in order to survive in modern air combat, the aircraft would have to pull twelve to fifteen g’s just to avoid missiles.”

  “That’s right, I did.” Fred agreed. He was smiling, confusing Jerry even more.

  “But how can a human survive those sorts of loads?” Jerry demanded.

  “Actually, quite easily,” Fred answered. “Back in 1954, one of my predecessors, Colonel John Paul Stapp, rode a rocket sled and experienced forty-three g’s. He lived to tell about it. The problem is not surviving twelve, fifteen g’s—it’s staying awake.”

  Fred Kelder made himself more comfortable in his chair. “As you know, most pilots will black out at nine or ten g’s. As it turns out, the easiest fix is to lay the man down so his head is only slightly higher than his heart and his feet are slightly lower. Basically, this means he can’t stick his head up in the canopy to see.”

  “No disrespect, sir,” Jerry responded, “but good luck on that idea.”

  “I know,” Fred replied quietly, gesturing to his own pilot’s wings. “However, we think we have a suitable substitute for having the pilot stick his head up to see. It’s called CLEO, for Computer Linked Electro-Optics. Would you like to see it?”

  Jerry blinked while he pondered the offer. Instinctively, he wanted to decline. There was something alien about flying an airplane that you couldn’t look out of. “Yes,” he finally agreed.

  “Good,” Colonel Kelder said as he got up. “If you’d follow me.”

  Chapter Five

  “My god,” Jerry exclaimed in awe when he saw the simulator. It was unlike any other he had ever seen before. Instead of a white-painted cab standing on a set of long-legged hydraulic rams with many fat rolls of cables hanging down to the floor, the simulator was in the middle of a massive steel frame that reached nearly eighty feet to the roof of the hangar. Inside, mounted in a pair of large titanium rings, one vertical and the other horizontal, was a cylindrical object.

  “It looks like the nose section ofMary Lou ,” Jerry noted, pointing to the cylinder.

  “That’s exactly what it is,” Fred Kelder replied as they stood side- by-side studying the machine. The word “CLEO” was painted in three- foot-high block letters on the side of the aircraft nose section. “We call the simulatorMary Sue , short forMary Lou Pseudo . The simulator’s cockpit is an actual aircraft cockpit, and given the limits of the mechanical systems that drive the movement, you get a surprisingly realistic ride inMary Sue .”

  Jerry turned to examine the rest of the simulator chamber. The room was big, at least six stories high, extending clear to the roof of the hangar. He imagined that it was quite a sight when the simulator was performing some of its more violent maneuvers.

  “Bring it down, Roger,” Fred shouted to a man seated in a control booth behind them. The machine suddenly swooped down to the ground like a hawk and almost as silently.

  “That’s fast,” Jerry remarked at the speed of the machine.

  “It can pull four g’s upward for almost thirty feet,” Fred said. “That’s not bad for a simulator, but still it’s nothing like the real thing. Come on, help me get the ladder up, and we’ll take you for a ride.”

  It took the two men only a few minutes to push the roll-around service tower to the side of the cylindrical aircraft fuselage section and climb the ten feet to the top. Fred pressed a pop-open access panel, reached inside, and pushed a button. A hatch on the top of the fuselage swung upward, exposing what appeared to be an aircraft cockpit.

  “All right, Colonel Rodell,” Fred Kelder ordered exuberantly, “in you go, and be ready for the twenty-fifth century.”

  Jerry peered down into the cockpit dubiously.

  “Don’t worry,” Fred insisted encouragingly, “it’s just a simulator; it won’t hurt you. You can take my word on it.”

  “What about him?” Jerry queried. He pointed to the air police sergeant. “He’s supposed to shoot me if I get more than ten feet away from him.”

  “Sergeant,” Fred shouted, “is it true you can’t let him get more than ten feet away from you? He can’t fly this with you aboard.”

  “No, sir. That’s not true,” the sergeant responded. “It’s ten paces, sir.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I guess, sir,” the sergeant answered with a grin, “it means whatever I want it to mean. It’s all right if he gets into that thing—as long as I know where he is. If you don’t mind, Colonel, I’ll just sit in the back of the control room and watch.”

  “That will be fine, Sergeant,” Fred replied; then he turned to Jerry Rodell.

  “No more excuses, now, Lieutenant Colonel Rodell, in you get.”

  Jerry scrambled in and soon found himself nestled comfortably in the pilot’s seat, or rather, couch for he was lying in a reclined position. In front of him was what appeared to be a curved movie screen. He moved his head and quickly discovered that the screen wrapped completely around him, covering the entire wall and ceiling of the
surprisingly spacious cabin. Only the open hatch over his head broke the continuous expanse of white.

  “Where would you like to go?” Fred asked casually as he poked his head down through the hatch. “How about the Grand Canyon?”

  Magically, they were there an instant later. The image projected on the screen was a perfect simulation of them flying through the air in the Grand Canyon. Jerry looked around and smiled like a happy baby. Then he realized that the illusion was too complete. It appeared as though he were flying in the pilot’s couch by itself, with no airplane around him. There was no trace of the airplane nor the expected view of the cockpit with its myriad of dials, screens and switches.

  “I call this ‘the magic carpet,’” Fred explained, watching through the open hatch. “It’s just as though your seat were a magic carpet, flying by itself through the air. Now, I suppose you’re going to be a spoil sport and insist that you see the airplane around you,” Fred said nonchalantly, as though he’d been through the demonstration a hundred times before.

  “Of course,” Jerry replied, half-surprised that Fred had anticipated his next question.

  “Translucent or opaque?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s do opaque first, then,” Fred suggested.

  Again, the scene changed. This time the outline of the canopy frame of an F-22 appeared around Jerry Rodell. He started to reach out to touch the metal and make certain that is wasn’t real when Fred uttered, “Translucent.”

  The effect was startling. Jerry glanced outside the aircraft and realized that he could see through the apparently solid sides of the fuselage.

  “Neat, ain’t it,” Fred murmured from his vantage point in the hatch. “This is the way I like to fly it. You can see threats approach from any angle, including straight down if you could lean forward and look between your legs. Also notice that your rearview mirrors can now look through the aft fuselage so you can check your six, both high and low.”

  Jerry glanced up and saw the twin rudders and aft fuselage appear as though they were made of smoked glass. Except for a slight gray tinge where the airframe should be, he could see everything behind perfectly.