by Randy Moffat
Jeeter started in on his relaxing the nervous passenger technique by telling jokes. He spoke for some minutes dropping old aviator saws steadily.
“Folks . . . make sure your seats and tray tables in the upright position . . . Your seat cushions can be used for flotation, and in the event of an emergency water landing here in the Mojave desert, please take them with our compliments . . . We do feature a smoking section on this flight; if you must smoke, please contact a member of the flight crew and they will escort you to the designated smoking area on the wing of the airplane . . .” The saws droned on as the altitude climbed.
Suddenly they found that had reached their planned altitude of 46,000 feet and Jeeter effortlessly put the plane into a huge oval racetrack pattern in the sky while finishing his patter, stale humor old when planes had two and sometimes three wings.” . . . We have reached our cruising altitude now, so I am going to switch the seat belt sign off. Feel free to move about as you wish, but please stay inside the plane till we land . . . its kinda cold out there, and if you walk on the wings it affects my controllability.” He leered over his shoulder at Johnson who tried hard to grin encouragingly around the green on her gills.
Then, his duty done for passenger comfort, he looked expectantly at Bear.
“Give her five minutes at this altitude and let me know if anything about her feels wrong.” Bear said and Jeeter nodded. “Mr. Jeeter and Mr. Aziz! Read out all your data so the recorders can have voice readout of instruments just prior to our test. OK?”
Aziz nodded to and both began speaking in alternate patterns reading out instruments. The five minutes zoomed by and at the last Jeeter spoke up.
“She is good to go as she lies, Bear . . . she’s holding even flight with a lot of left trim, but she is flying fine and the instruments are green.”
Bear nodded.
“Mr. Aziz! Are you ready?”
He smiled and said simply “Yes! All the readouts are within projection” like a guy running a rat through a maze and taking prim notes carefully. He was a model of the scientific mind now.
Bear looked at Johnson who looked deeply unhappy and worried, but was struggling to put on a game chicken face.
Bear considered a moment or two and then mentally threw caution to the wind.
“Mr. Aziz, start your sequence.”
‘The Sequence” was a slow build up to execution of the dual accelerators that he and the eggheads had worked out. The idea was to give the operator a few minutes to monitor all other related systems as it counted down to activity. Aziz cheerfully activated the process with a keystroke—a true member of his generation, blithely modifying reality with a keyboard without real understanding of any secondary and tertiary effects that might occur. In this case even most of the primary effects were unknowns too.
“Mr. Aziz, call down the last minute of time please and let me know if anything is not as planned immediately so we can abort if possible. It might prove important later. Mrs. Johnson, things may happen fast so will you please assist him by keeping an eye on things he is not able to?”
It was make work, but gave her purpose.
Bear bridged the generations by coaching the older pilot to come out of the turn and level the plane at the one minute mark. Jeeter could fly a 200,000 pound aircraft and tons of fuel with aplomb but hated computers with a passion. He was kind of pissed that the attention was focused on the back and not the front for the test, but there was nothing for him to do about it. Aziz and Jeeter were two sides to the same human reality.
“Straighten her out when we hit the last minute.” He told Jeeter. “There may be some minor advantage to being straight and level during it . . . if only on coming out of the Alcubierre field.” He spoke with a confidence he did not feel. For all he knew they would shut down the field to find themselves upside down and inside out.
All of a sudden they heard Aziz switch from readouts being discussed and checked off to “57seconds . . . 56 . . . . 55 . . .”
Bear sat up straight.
“Everything is green on the software, Bear.” he heard Johnson murmur. The sunlight and shadow in the cockpit had been shifting for the last few seconds as Jeeter was in the middle of one of his curving turns at the end of the racetrack in the sky, but the light stopped shifting as he went wings level. “42 . . . 41 . . . 40 . . .”
He keyed his cell phone. There was going to be a pleasantly whopping bill—he hoped the minutes they had paid for was up to it.
“You still there Zero Niner?” Bear asked the void.
Wong answered immediately.
“Roger . . .”
“We are wings level at 46 angels . . . the plane is running pure and clean. Tell O’Hara she sure can pick em down at the used car lot . . . the plane is primo with no problems. Aziz is counting down, but Johnson says we have a green board on the fancy software Van Ziegler made up for us from the commercial bits and pieces . . . I . . .”
“12 . . . 11 . . . 10 . . .”
“We will go hot in about ten seconds . . .”
He kept the mike keyed knowing much of what he said was being recorded back at Edwards as well by Maxmillian with a machine patched through Smith’s board.
“4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . Zero”
Someone was eager. It was on ‘1’ that the universe ceased to be the way it had been.
Two separate fields of graviton particles hammered the space time matrix at each end of the airplane into a particular shape. The one at the front duplicated what had happened in the cave, while the one at the rear did too, but had been flipped upside down. The pipes at the ends of the plane sprayed particles out much like water from a fire sprinkler. The effect was that it pushed messenger particles out from front and back like two umbrellas whose edges met. There were relatively more particles at the front and up at that back but an eggshell shaped field of them enclosed the ship. The old aircraft ‘sat’ in a spot of calm rather like an eye in a hurricane of gravitons that were busily bending the space time matrix up at the back and down in front. The whole plane was isolated temporarily from the surrounding reality of space-time and rested instead in a tiny new pocket universe inside. That pocket was in the universe but not of the universe for the blink of an eye that the plane generated the particles and the computer program automatically turned it off. The wave created by the greater mass of particles shoved out at the bow and stern built up the space-time ‘surf’ and the bubble shot forward. Space-time at the front pressed down and the bubble fell into it, sliding down its slope. The plane shot forward without any motion relative to the pocket of air that immediately surrounded it inside the bubble, but with massive motion relative to everything else on the planet and in the universe.
To the people in the plane the world outside appeared to flicker or a fraction of a second.
Outside observers had a different perspective.
In the RAPCON everyone had overheard one end of the cell phone conversation with Bear and Jeeter’s radio calls and were watching the radar screen, well, raptly. The plane was a clear blip on the second but when they all heard ‘ONE” through the radio speakers the blip disappeared instantaneously and the voice on the phone and radio ceased abruptly.
‘Holy crap!” Wong said and he was drowned out in a babble of voices from the Q-Kink team and the air traffic controller Smith repeatedly calling on the radio and Wong shouting into the phone. Generally the RAPCON was deeply concerned when the air traffic they were controlling was no longer under control. Smith was straining so hard forward you could hardly count the crows on his shirt. Wong was trying the cell phone methodically with no response.
Even buried inside the RAPCON they heard the distinct distant boom several seconds later. It sounded like an explosion.
Inside the cockpit of the B-52 eloquence too was achieved without thought.
“Holy
Crap!” Jeeter shouted as the engines began to choke and cough. He looked around frantically at his gauges, trying to find out the cause for the flame out. “Fuel’s good!” he articulated to himself. “Engine temps and pressures were all good until we turned on the damn gizmo.” He was frantically reaching for circuit breakers with one hand, feeling without luck for one which may have popped out which would explain his apparent loss of combustion when Bear slapped his arm and pointed to the one gauge he had not thought to consult. The altitude indicator showed them at 79,000 feet. This was about 20,000 above the aircraft’s service ceiling and a good 25,000 above where they had been when they started the experiment the merest fraction of a second before.
“Holy CRAP!” Jeeter said just for emphasis as the last engine extinguished from lack of oxygen and the plane’s controls also found out where they were and went mushy in the now frighteningly thin air. He locked his hands on the yoke as her airspeed bled. At this altitude the engines hadn’t enough air pressure coming into their front ends to compress and push out their back ends. A wing dipped and she plummeted earthward while idiot lights began to twinkle like a merry Macy’s Christmas display on the instrument panel. Bear was pressed hard back into his seat. A combination of his legs forcing him back in a spasm of fright combined with the plentiful force of gravity and acceleration they had suddenly gained. Water filled the view out the windshield as they plunged directly at it. It also rotated dizzyingly as the plane spun lazily.
Jeeter’s eyes kept flickering at the instruments and glancing at the circuit breaker panel and his arms quivered on the controls like a man who had done a thousand pushups. He finally gasped out some instructions.
“Grab the yoke and pull back like hell!” His teeth were gritted, but Bear heard him well enough and followed instructions like a good soldier.
Bear grabbed the hitherto unused co-pilot’s control handles in front of him and tugged fiercely. It felt Sisyphean and impossible, like he was pulling on a boulder buried in the ground. He could feel Jeeter doing the same thing and both thought nothing would come of it. Ever so slowly however, the wallowing plane responded. It did so especially after both of them planted a boot on the dash and used it to shove backward too, using the combination of arms and leg muscles as leverage to get the huge airplane to pull up. Eventually the plane moved from a 70 degree angle of fall to a something around twenty degrees.
“Keep it up.” Jeeter called out and let go of his own yoke. He began to slap switches and play with gadgets busily while Bear stared interestedly at what he took to be the Pacific Ocean now only mostly, instead of completely filling the wind screen. At about 50000 feet the pilot had thrown enough switches that the engines responded and coughed like a twenty year smoker on a jog. The plane, now finding sufficient amount of much thicker air rushing into the engine’s hungry mouths felt the return of forward thrust as they returned to their duty and under Jeeter’s insistence reluctantly regained life. Unfortunately Jeeter had not given further instructions to Bear and as soon as the plane got thrust and controllability it responded to the force of Bear frantic heaving back on the yoke. Since he was not a pilot he had taken to looking at what Jeeter was doing rather than staring out at the anus tightening vision of the planet’s biggest ocean rushing up to meet them. Under the force of his arms and legs the plane rotated unobserved out of her dive and swooped into a nose up climb that reached thirty degrees up angle with a beautiful view of the upper atmosphere through the windscreen before Bear glanced outside again, realized what was going on and suddenly over compensated by pushing hard forward on the yoke. He did this a nanosecond before Jeeter looked outside from his own fixed tunnel view focus on the instruments in front of him, yelled ‘Holy Crap!” and instinctively did the same thing. Three out of the four newly started engines which had not reached full compression groaned into a stall and turned themselves off again under pressure of the unprecedented climb converted to a dive as the keystone cops at the controls forced the machine to roller coaster.
Bear had enough sense of self preservation not to fight Jeeter and took his hands off the yoke as Jeeter finally yanked back on the yoke to pull her out of this steep fall using the single engine still operating to reduce the angle of descent gradually to a rough 20 degrees again—finally putting the plane within the realms of normal operating parameters and general sanity. Bear watched him as he evened it up to an even more modest descent and started the engine restart process for a second time on the other three engines. He kept muttering, powerful epithets without keying his mike but Bear could kept hearing snatches of something that rhymed with ‘duck’ over the engines thunder and various whines. Bear glanced back. Aziz was staring interestedly at the computer monitors hanging from the wall and writing notes on a small pad as if nothing had happened. Bear imagined he had not even noticed the pilot seat struggles. Johnson on the other hand was staring forward, her pale complexion now Albino white and her eyes like two fired eggs on a paper plate. Bear reached back and patted her knee and she refocused on him instead of the roller coaster ride she had witnessed out the windscreen. He was pleased to see her flush as he fondled her knee. There was blood in her yet.
He keyed his mike.
“He has the engines pretty well restarted now. You should work on restarting your heart.”
It was funny to Bear already. It would take a while longer for Johnson.
The RAPCON had become pandemonium the moment the plane disappeared from the scope. Wong stood still while all about him lost their heads.
“Quiet!” He roared after a minute and such was the surprise of the Q-Kinkers at hearing their normally mild mannered executive officer yell that they actually complied where another might have failed.
“Let Smith work!” He commanded. “If you have to talk keep it to a whisper.”
He was annoyed when the whispers started, but at least Smith could hear him.
“Where are they?”
Smith was cycling his radar through higher and higher altitudes that let him see greater and greater areas. Eventually they hit a view that reached all the way to the coast and a bit of the Pacific on the edge—his maximum range.
“It’s gone!” Smith’s voice was an expulsion.
“Where has it gone?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Could the plane have exploded or something? Was the sound we heard the aircraft exploding?” Wong asked what had been in most of their minds reluctantly.
Smith shook his head.
“It was just under 50 angels when it disappeared. We would have seen the pieces falling from that high . . . not just vanish from the screen. Pieces of a plane that big still have radar reflectivity. I know . . . I’ve seen it happen. There was nothing like that.”
“Huh! So it is still intact?”
Smith looked at him askance.
“Is it a stealth plane or something?”
“Or something . . .” Wong agreed.
The cell phone rang and Wong answered it like lightening.
“Hello, Number One.” Bear said cheerfully.
“Holy Crap!” Wong said.
“‘S funny that is precisely what Jeeter said. In fact, he just invented a new airplane maneuver that we have voted henceforth to call the ‘Holy Crap Parabolic Jeeter!’ It beats anything Six Flags has.” Bear said mildly.
“Where the hell are you? The radar here lost sight of you in . . . like . . . an eye blink. I am guessing you moved out of our vision here between two sweeps of the radar.”
“GPS here says . . . Northeast of Hawaii . . . the Island and the state.”
“Hawaii!”
“Right—we are closer to them than LA, but only by a hair . . . call it 1300 miles or so. Luckily with our altitude I am line of sight to the big island and am getting a weak tow to three bar signal strength on the old phone from some Aloha cell tower, so I cou
ld call you. We will land on Hilo or someplace, refuel, check the plane, and then come back to KC tomorrow for a complete once over at the rebuild facility. I do not think we need it, but I want to be damn sure. We gave the plane a . . . workout. Gather up the team and bring them to meet us tomorrow night late. Now that we have a baseline we can figure out just how well this thing works and go on from here.”
Wong was looking stunned as it sunk in that they had been successful. It was a bonus that they had not killed the boss in doing it.
“Roger.” He said and signed off to see all the Q-Kink team looking at him expectantly.
The first face he looked closely at was Smith’s.
Smith was gazing up at him confusedly his face lit eerily by the radar’s green glow. O’Hara was looking relieved behind him.
“Hawaii?” The radar man said stunned, having heard Wong’s side of the conversation. “Hell that is 2500 miles from here. How does a plane go 2500 miles in a few minutes? Hell, how does it go that far in a few seconds?”
Wong focused on him and got very serious.
“It doesn’t. You never saw anything like that.” He waved his fingers in front of Smith’s eyes in his best Jedi imitation. “It was just a practical joke we are playing on you.”
“But the plane was . . . .”
“A stealth plane—A new kind of stealth . . . it’s still out there, it’s just blinding your radar and is invisible and the guys are playing a joke on me.”
“You can’t bullshit me, I . . . .”
Wong caught and held his eyes.
“It was gas on a weather balloon. Right? There is no way a plane can go to Hawaii in a few seconds. That was my buddy making shit up on the phone. Go back to sleep . . . it is just a bad dream. You don’t want to have bad dreams at work do you? Your boss might think he has to get rid of you.”
Smith started to look pugnacious. Wong shifted tack from threats.
“On the other hand . . . a great radar operator might overlook the new invisible airplane weather balloon sneaking around out there in the desert just at the edge of the base and nowhere near Hawaii. He would think, ‘Gosh. I’ll bet if I kept my mouth shut someone might leave 5000 dollars on the counter as they left and I could take that money and be not just a great radar guy, but in addition I would be a superb top secret employee who saw nothing . . . nothing at all forever and ever. To be superb though I would have to be smart and realize that five K is the down payment on the Winnebago I have had my eye on . . . though it will mean I will not talk to anyone about what I saw, especially not my other buddies at the RAPCON let alone anyone else who asks. That is what newly wealthy radar operators who are superbly top secret do. See?”
