by Randy Moffat
Smith looked thoughtful and then pulled his ear.
“Now that you mention it, the whole thing is kind of crazy.” He said as he made up his mind.
Wong patted him on the back.
“Yeah! Positively psychotic . . . . thanks. If your boss asks, tell him the experiment was probably a failure because we all looked really down hearted and disappointed and we appreciate his support.”
He waved to the grinning and backslapping Q-Kink team to leave the RAPCON ASAP. As he left Wong laid five thousand dollars discreetly on the counter of the radar station where no one else could see. Smith flashed teeth and the bills disappeared somewhere beneath his mighty gut.
Wong patted his arm.
“Thanks. Say goodbye to the nice tourists.”
Smith looked at him happily.
“I’m sorry. Who are you again, sir?”
Wong grinned.
As he walked past the RAPCON supervisor’s office he stuck his head in, thanked him, told them were leaving, and then added, “That Smith. He is a superb radar operator. I’d make sure I kept him if I were you. Too bad about our experiment—chalk it up to experience.” He put on his best sad little face, slumped his shoulders dejectedly and went out to join the distant sounds of a happy noisy party outside.
Bear looked at the pencil diagram Aziz had made while they bent over a pad of paper on the wing of a beech craft that somehow had been parked in their hanger in Kansas and never removed. He whistled. Arrayed around him to look on were Petrovski, Jeeter and the rest of Q-Kink Kommand.
Petrovski was nodding in agreement with what Aziz was saying, O’Hara looked somewhere between interested and relieved, Jeeter looked tired and funnily enough a little scared while Wong only looked tired.
Bear whistled through the theme of the Rocketeer and thought.
The diagram showed an arc with an X above one section of the curve and another X above another section further around the curve with a straight line connecting the two ‘X’s. The straight line between the Xs represented the flight path the B-52 had taken and the arc was the curvature of the earth. The straight line shaved very close to the edge of the curve between the ‘X”s . . . almost passing through it.
“How close did we pass to the actual planet?” Jeeter demanded.
“I would guess our altitude was lower than 5000 feet, perhaps as low as 2500 feet above the ground . . . . or rather ocean.” Aziz said calmly, it was a mathematical problem to him, not a personal one even though he had been sitting in the back of the cockpit.
“So if I get this right we went 1347 miles in about a microsecond, but we did it in a straight line?”
Petrovski confirmed it.
“Yes . . . it is an interesting ratio. The paperclip drives created the Alcubierre anomalies as planned and the ship moved as planned and it appears that if acceleration had been maintained you would have reached something like light speed in about 138 microseconds—essentially instantaneously from a human perspective. You moved so fast that the people at the Edwards RAPCON faintly heard what outside some later observers said was a thunderclap a lot like a plane going supersonic. That loud sound was a clap of air rushing into the void created by nearly instantaneous movement of the ship out of that space.”
“Either that or it was Jeeter’s voice they heard—I seem to recall he made plenty of loud noises about that time.” Bear said absently.
Someone tittered.
Jeeter spoke up.
“But I didn’t feel any movement . . . no acceleration!”
Petrovski nodded.
“That is within parameters. You see the nose and tail boom are constructed to spread out gravitonic particles around the aircraft. Most go . . . fore and aft, but a lesser number are made to spray around the plane creating a . . . ‘bubble’ effect that encases the airplane and a small region of the surrounding space. It is this space inside this bubble that moves under the impetus of the two waves at front and back . . . not the airplane alone. In effect, the airplane remains stationary in the space within the bubble and you feel no acceleration since it is the bubble moving—while the space within remains motionless relative to the capsule of gravitons, though not relative to the rest of the universe of course. To the rest of the universe it is moving like a horse at the derby whose ass is on fire.”
Jeeter looked at him as if he were cracked.
“You’re cracked.”
Petrovski looked chagrined.
Bear clapped Antonin on the shoulder and grinned.
“Get used to it. Everyone says I’m crazy too. Hell! Jeeter was inside the damn thing and he thinks you are crazy—Wait’ll you have to talk to someone who hasn’t been there.” He turned to Aziz. “How about the capacitors—did they completely drain themselves?”
Aziz shook his head.
“No. We did pretty well. The energy drain for the short time we used the accelerators which was nanosecond or so was a trifle more modest than we predicted. We could just have made a second flight back if need be. Just made the flight anyway . . . but I suspect we could have made it.”
Bear grinned.
“Perfect. Still we could only make the two trips. I want to take a week or ten days and modify the plane still further. I want to double or if it at all possible triple the capacity of electrical energy we can carry. I want to turn the plane into the world’s biggest flying battery.”
Jeeter exclaimed behind him sounding a little alarmed.
“That will mean we will have to change the weight and balance completely! The damned thing is logy as hell as she lies right now. Add in more weight and you’ll make her a flying brick!”
Bear looked at him, but gave him no relief.
“Do what you have to, fill in every space with electricity—drop fuel if you have to, drop lots of fuel to compensate . . . whatever it takes to squeeze in more juice.”
Jeeter looked ready to protest, and then looked thoughtful instead.
“We used to have a water injection system on the old models. The planes had tanks on the wings and the pylons are still there. If we installed pods out there and put capacitors in them we could put some more electrical stowage outboard on the wing.”
“Could you replace some in-wing fuel tanks too?”
Jeeter looked really concerned then—he had to fly whatever monster they created.
“Say! How little flight time do you want to cut us down to anyway?”
“About an hour’s worth . . . in the atmosphere.” Bear said.
“Damn!” Jeeter said. He had been flying the big machines too long for huge distances to like being in one made not to fly long distances. Then he stopped. “Whatta you mean in the atmosphere?”
Bear went on without answering directly.
“I want the capacitors able to operate in cold too. We’ll need heating blankets of some similar solution to keep the capacitors and inboard and outboard operational in extreme cold. Ditto the cockpit. Make sure the cabin pressurization if in tip top order too.”
Jeeter looked suddenly less pugnacious and more worried as the implications soaked in.
“Just how high do you want to fly this thing?”
Bear looked thoughtful.
“How high is the sky?”
“You’re crazy!”
Bear sighed and then smiled at Petrovski.
“See what I mean.”
Po saw Nyon in the Liquor store. Nyon started talking to him without prompting somewhere between the Leibfraumilsch and the Gin.
“I spoke to my cousin Sho Fu. Sho works at the place in the south where the stones are red.”
Po pondered that for a little. He was intellectually aware of Redstone Arsenal, but since his awareness and his intellect were both impaired at the moment and Fuk Bao’s artistic name for it did litt
le to provide clarity, it took some serious consideration. Eventually he made the intuitive stumbling leap of imagination and correctly guessed what the Viet lunatic was talking about.
“Uh!” He said noncommittally—the Gettysburg address for a man in his condition.
Fuk Bao simpered at the recognition. He was broke and hoping Po would buy some bottles and they could go on drinking well into the night.
“Cousin Sho says there was great excitement some weeks ago by the admiral who commands there. These . . . these . . . Kink people have made some kind of breakthrough and he appears to have been really interested in it. Sho overheard him talking to one of his masters on the phone.”
Po actually looked interested. “Who is the leader of these Kinks then?” He demanded relentlessly.
Fuk Bao stroked his chin.
“Cousin Sho says it is a man named . . . Mac . . . Mo . . . ran.” He sounded the name phonetically.
Po grunted.
“And what is this breakthrough?”
“Cousin Sho does not know. There was great excitement though. Something odd and unexpected happened and . . . .”
“Find out more.” Po said.
“Will we meet at the place in the wood tomorrow?”
Po shrugged.
Nyon smiled in memory of their last meeting.
“We will meet tomorrow.” Nyon said. He was broke, but had a taste for the finer things. “Bring the bottles with the black labels again.” He was stating his price. “I will write my cousin.
Twelve days later she was ready—‘she’ was the correct pronoun for a cold hearted jury rigged bitch of a hunk of magnesium-aluminum alloy without a spare millimeter of space within her heart for the warmth of human kindness—and barely any for humans themselves either. Every square inch of her guts was now crowbar packed with electric storage. Nothing made this clearer than how the flight team actually got into the plane. Previously they had entered via a door located on the fuselage underside offset to starboard and hinged at the rear. Now the space there was literally a wall of capacitors and they had been forced to prop a wooden ladder up the outside of the fuselage to get to the aircraft top side instead, right on the roof of the crew cabin. Once there, the copilot’s ejection seat panel in the roof of the cockpit that would formerly have blown clear was now a simple hatch with Zeus fasteners on the outside that would be dogged shut by someone after the crew boarded. On the inside was a second airtight panel that the crew also dogged shut with an adjustable crescent wrench after climbing in. In an emergency the only way out was for the pilot to eject while everyone ducked into their twelve inches of spare space trying not to be incinerated and then climbed out through the resulting smoking hole. Either that or they sat calmly through a crisis as the copilot took his wrench and slowly untorqued the hatch nuts while flames presumably licked around their ankles and they commented dryly on the problems inherent to experimental flight. In short, she was a death trap. She was a death trap oddly full of volunteers.
Bear, sitting in that co-pilot’s seat was by definition the last to drop through the top hatch since everyone else had to step on his seat just to get in.
“Hey!” He complained to the crowd already in there. “Somebody put footprints all over my seat cushion!”
Everyone laughed except Jeeter who watched him sealing them in with a dour face. Safety was something he had spent a lifetime enforcing. Here it was utterly secondary to function.
He gave reserved thumbs up in response to Bear who finished turning bolts—a task he was getting good at. By instinct Jetter glanced at his ‘crew’ all of whom were useless to his portion of the flight—They ranged from completely worthless to atmospheric flight to utterly and totally useless on a scale of flying ability. Bear knew he had job security as co-pilot; he had actually touched the controls on the last flight so by Q-Kink standards he was fully licensed. Bear had relented and let Petrovski come along this time if only to quiet his sulking and he was dutifully monitoring the accelerators in back. Wong had actually threatened Bear’s life and the tires of his car so he was along for this ride too and they had rearranged the electrical system monitors so that he was had the nominal duty of monitoring that system too—splitting the task with Antonin that Aziz had done alone. Bear had intended to make that the entire crew, but O’Hara had mutinied when she found out both her fellow Q-Kink Kommand members were going and began a campaign of busting his balls relentlessly 24X7 for four days. At one point she had literally had his balls in her hand and at that moment he finally relented and made her ‘Cameraman’ to film the whole thing. It was tough sleeping with person you wanted to leave behind. Actually sleep deprivation was part of her apparent training at Lubyanka because any time he threatened to doze off she had poked him with a verbal, or several times with an actual sticks to keep him awake. Sheer exhaustion is a great motivator for compromise. She was now jammed onto a little stool behind Bear and Jeeter, but in front of Petrovski and Wong. It was a tight fit, and Bear imagined that her buttocks were resting comfortably on Wong’s leg while she sucked on her own knees. He was jealous of his XO . . . a new sensation. If he could have gotten away with it he would have taken her up front in his lap.
Jeeter grunted and they rolled out of the hanger and onto the taxiway parallel to the runway. He spoke into the sole remaining radio, since the rest had been ditched to save some more weight. He got his takeoff clearance from the tower. It was midnight and the airfield was deserted so Bear figured there was little chance they were observed.
Jeeter took off and they climbed as aggressively to 45000 feet as a behemoth which only marginally met the characteristics of an airplane could. It was more of a long slipping wallow through the air than true flight. The fuel gauge was not a source of warmth and comfort either since they were flying almost dry to save every ounce of weight possible and the damned thing looked like it read empty most of the way up.
“How is she handling?” Bear asked casually.
“Don’t be stupid.” The old man said. “It’s like flying a fucking gypsy camp. I’m not sure the sky is big enough to hold her.”
Jeeter’s face looked strained and Bear could tell the plane was barely flyable by the way that the pilot’s muscles were tensed as he fought to keep the plane straight and level despite its inclination to dip its right wing and nosedive. Talking about it would not help and annoying Jeeter would serve still less function.
Hardly anyone talked after that, but Bear made the two in back describe their readings as they climbed that last 5000 feet.
What happened next was modest. They leveled out and Bear made the two men in back return an OK with their fingers. Once they did he said simply—“Stand by the accelerators!”
Petrovski sang out.
“Accelerators ready.”
“Heaters on?”
“Heaters on and operational” Wong declared.
He smiled at O’Hara.
“Camera’s running?”
O’Hara grinned back and joked.
“Camera’s been on and running since the hanger—You’ve got a great profile.”
Bear smiled. It was strangely comforting to know that women were always thinking about their men too. He kept the goofy grin through his next command.
“Pilot, begin your maneuver.”
Jeeter grunted and the aircraft swung up and beyond a normal angle of climb reaching 500 foot per minute, then a thousand, and finally a fifteen hundred foot per minute rate of climb. Then Jeeter reached up and threw rows of switches. The reassuring roar of the engines suddenly ceased and Jeeter pulled the yoke all the way back to his stomach so that the plane lurched on as much towards upright as its tremendous bulk would allow which ultimately wasn’t very perpendicular to the Earth’s surface, but it would have to do.
“Mr. Petrovski!” Bear said trying to sound calmly cavalier. “Be so
good as to engage the accelerators.”
Mr. Petrovski did not answer—verbally. The world outside flickered and suddenly the sky was full of stars. In fact, there was no sky, but only stars. To a man and a woman they gasped and lost weight.
“Holy . . .” Jeeter started.
Bear held up his hand.
“Don’t say it . . . different maneuver.”
“Space!” Jeeter muttered. “I’m in fucking outer space!”
Bear glanced at him and grinned at the boyish look on a 70 plus year old’s face.
Jeeter was smiling as beatifically as any choir boy.
He looked at Bear and there was a glint of tear at the corner of one orb.
“Thanks, kid.” He said unashamedly, there was not a real pilot in the world who would not have surrendered a limb to trade places with him at that moment.
“Sure thing!” Bear replied. “I am going to try the squirt bottles.”
The superstructure of the aged former aircraft creaked ominously. Bear had anticipated that the hull of the plane around the pressurized cabin might split its seams outward once in space so the team had strengthened it with numerous wrappings of metal banding tape to keep it squeezed shut once the outside air pressure disappeared. It worked but was undoubtedly leaking and tended to make the kind of alarming noises that miners probably heard before a cave in. It was good enough for a short flight though.
