CHAPTER
10
For the next
month, about the only sound Wentz remained cognizant of was the
tick of the clock. Time.
Time was
life.
His quarters,
his office, every briefing room and every training cove—there was a
general issue Air Force clock on the wall,
ticking.
The tick of the
clock sounded like dripping blood.
Every night
when he slept, the commitment he’d made dug his heart out. He knew
he was doing the only thing he could do, but there was no solace in that, not at night
when he was alone. He dreamed of teaching Pete how to drive the new
dirt bike, he dreamed of Pete’s high school graduation, sending him
off to the prom, sending him off to college, and all of the other
things he, Wentz, would never really see.
He dreamed of
making love to Joyce…
All lost, all
ashes.
And then he’d
waken, in darkness. He’d bring his hands to his clenched face, but
the hands only had three fingers on each. And then he’d hear
it.
He’d hear the
only thing in the world that never changed: the tick of the
clock.
tick tick tick
drip drip drip
S-4 had a
psychiatrist and occupational therapist. Both Ashton and “Jones”
urged him to see them—“to adjust to the necessary period of mental
and physical refraction,” Jones had said—but Wentz said “Fuck that
shit. I don’t need any damn shrinks. I’m a U.S. Air Force Senior
Test, I’m not a nut.”
He knew what
he’d done, he knew what level his duty had taken him to (and he
knew why). So Wentz did what he always had.
He did his
job.
He spent a week
on Unisys flight simulators, programmed for the OEV. It was cake.
Two more days training with demolition-block material, fuses,
detcord, blasting caps and primers. Eight hours a day for a week
bobbing in a cylindrical water tank for zero-gravity
familiarization, then several sessions in the cargo hold of a C-131
nose-diving from 40,000 feet to 5,000 feet (the latter was fun, the
former…not so fun). Another cake-walk was the MMU training. An MMU
(for Manned Mobility Unit) was NASA’s latest, state-of-the-art
“space suit”—over $10,000,000 per suit.
Wentz dug
it.
Days lapsed as
they always had in the past, a new joyride, a new thrill. Duty,
yes, but the adrenalin always made it better. At forty-five years
old, Wentz scored higher on the spirometer, the MMPA, the MMU field
test, and the technical diagnostic batteries than most of the
country’s active astronauts.
“Looks like
you’re ready, General,” one of the training tests told
him.
“You think?”
Wentz had answered. “It might look like it, but this ain’t a
lug-wrench in my pants, son.”
No, even a day
after the surgery, Wentz never doubted himself. He was going to
this job like he’d done every job in his
career.
The best job.
His “shit” was
“square.”
And on the day
before his first live test flight of the OEV, unfazed by the
deformity of his hands, General Jack Wentz looked straight in the
mirror with a leveled eye and said: “Hardcore. I’m fuckin’
there.”
Yes, that was
how the days went. He was the best pilot in the world, and they
were great days.
The only thing
that bothered him were the nights. When he’d dream and later wake
up to the sound of dripping blood…
««—»»
Wentz sat
strapped in to the operator’s seat, a modified job by Hughes
Aircraft. He wore a visorless helmet and standard Air Force
jumpsuit. Ashton wore the same, sitting beside
him.
They felt the
modest vibration as the platform elevator lifted them up thirteen
nuke-proof levels through this underground
complex.
When Ashton
glanced at his bare, three-fingered hands, he moved them
away.
“Don’t be
self-conscious, sir. It could debilitate you, it could degrade your
performance.”
“I’m not gonna
fuck up your goddamn UFO,” he snapped back. He looked at her with a
sly grin. “I’m gonna fly this thing better than Farrington ever
dreamed.”
“Fine. Don’t
talk about it. Do it.”
Bitch, he thought. I’ll show her
ass.
The elevator
droned upward, then shuddered to a stop.
“This is a
daylight test flight,” she reminded. “This is strictly
familiarization. Fly slow, fly stable. This first run is just for
you to get the feel of the OEV. If you fly too fast in daylight,
you’ll burn the camouflage paint off the hull, then we could be
spotted by the KH-12 and Russian surveillance
satellites.”
“Yeah,” he
said. “I hear ya.”
The elevator
had lifted them up into a hangar-shaped structure, covered with
sand. Just another dune.
Then the dune
began to open.
Wentz glimpsed
the beautiful desert beyond. The hangar door held open like a
stretched jaw.
“Go for it,
General. Place your hands into the detents…and fly.”
Even after all
of the simulations, Wentz froze for a moment. All of his instincts
were different now—
“Raise the
craft and move forward out of the hangar,” Ashton
said.
“I
know!”
No stick, no
throttle.
“Give me a
sec,” he said.
“Let your mind
do the work, sir. We can go back down if you’re apprehensive, give
it another shot tomorrow.”
Bitch, he thought again.
And then he let
his mind do the work.
Wentz lightened
the pressure of his hands into the detents. He
thought.
Immediately a
dark garnet-tinged light filled the interior, behind a very low
sub-octave thrumming sound. Then the craft raised a foot off the
elevator platform and began to move forward out of the
hangar.
“Good. You’re
doing it.”
“Charlie-Oscar,
this is Jonah One,” Ashton transmitted from her CVC mike. “Request
permission for take-off.”
“Roger, Jonah
One. Permission granted.”
Wentz eased the
OEV fully out of the hangar. It’s working,
he thought, dumbfounded.
I don’t believe
it… He moved
the entire craft out into the high, sweltering sun. Beyond the
OEV’s strange windows, the desert shimmered. Wentz remained in
partial stasis as the craft just sat there and
hovered.
Behind them,
the opening to the phony sand dune drew closed.
Wentz gazed at
the desert.
“General, we
can sit here all day if you like,” Ashton said. “You’re the boss,
you know? But I kind of thought that you might want to do something
other than hover.”
“Oh. Yeah,”
Wentz replied.
Then the OEV
essentially disappeared from its former stance. There was no roar
of an engine being throttled to the max. There was no inertia
crushing them back into their seats. There was only sky which,
within minutes, faded away as Wentz took the OEV out of earth’s
proper atmosphere.
Within minutes,
they were in space.
Wentz could
feel his mind become part
of the vehicle, like a jump board,
like a guidance microprocessor. The processor was
Wentz’s brain, and his brain’s connectivity to the rest of the
ship were his hands pressed into the detents.
“Damn it,
General!” Ashton snipped.
“What? You told
me to get moving, so…I got moving.”
“I expected a
little discipline. This is a first test run. It’s a familiarization
sortie, for you to get the hang of the OEV’s basis navigational
possibilities. I told you not to accelerate too drastically, so not
to burn the paint off the hull. You’ve just shot us out of
orbit!”
“Hey, paint’s
cheap,” Wentz said.
“Maybe, sir,
but since you’ve burned it all off in a hyper-velotic cruise, that
means we can’t return to the atmosphere until after sundown—six
hours. Otherwise the satellites might see us.”
Wentz chuckled.
“Six hours? In this
rig? I could do sixty before I started
to get tired. We’re cruisin’,
Colonel. And
I’m the driver. So just sit back and enjoy
it.”
An endless
scape of stars stretched before them.
You gotta be shitting
me, Wentz
thought, staring outward.
For the last
twenty-five years, he was limited to the sky. Now he had the entire
universe.
««—»»
In only a week,
Wentz learned to operate the OEV to a degree that he thought there
was nothing he—or it—could not do. It was all a mind-set, not that
different from a high-tech fighter, the only difference being that
the detents reduced reaction time to zero. His brain no longer
needed to command his hands on the controls.
Instead—now—his
brain was plugged into the aircraft.
Not only could
Wentz command the OEV with his mind, he could
tease it, jink
it, execute maneuvers that would not
have been possible by stick-control or fly-by-wire. The physical
human body was simply not capable…but with Wentz’s
mind functioning as an integral component of the OEV’s
flight systems—
Wentz couldn’t
imagine the full-scale possibilities.
Barrel-rolls in
space, true-toe vertical thrusts, FLOTs and FEBAs and flat-spins
and “skidder-turns.” Wentz performed aerial moves, within the
atmosphere and without, that were
unprecedented.
At least by a
human.
He wondered how
he’d fare compared to the true pilots of this vehicle.
“What were they
like?” he asked on his seventh test flight. He was encircling the
earth at a 23,000-mile geostatic orbit-track. He wasn’t
sure—because the OEV had no true-speed indicators, altimeters, or
azimuth gauges—but it seemed that each revolution took but seconds.
The harder he thought, the faster he went.
“The native
operators?” Ashton asked.
“Yeah. Little
green men? Silver skin? Big black almond-shaped eyes?”
“I don’t know,”
Ashton confessed, “because I never had a need to. I only know they
were air-breathers, bipedal, and warm-blooded. One of the bodies
was cryolized, and the other was autopsied, at
Wright-Patterson.”
“Why do you
think they came to earth?”
“Who knows? A
field survey, probably. Probably monitoring our technological
progress with regards to weapons of mass destruction. The Edgewood
Arsenal? You don’t even want to know what kind of stuff we’ve got stored
there.”
“You’re right,”
Wentz said. “I don’t want to know.” Wentz took his three-fingered
hands out of the detents, leaving his last guidance thoughts in the
system: continue following the orbit-line. “How far advanced do you
think they are?”
“Probably a
thousand years, something like that.”
Christ…
“The seal of
the egression hatch is so minute, we couldn’t even get molecular
wire to run a patch to the outer-hull,” Ashton remarked. “And even
if we could, the hull is impenetrable, no way to mount anything on
it.” She pointed to the meager bank of readout gauges and VDU’s
above the detent panel. “A brace-frame holds that stuff in place,
same for the storage racks and lockers in back.”
“If the hull’s
impenetrable…how do we have radio contact with S-4?” Wentz
asked.
“Luck. Radio
waves pass through without any detectable distortion. It’s just a
standard SINGARS radio we’ve got installed… You hungry?”
“Sure.”
Ashton unhooked
her safety belt, walking normally to the rear of the craft, in
spite of its tremendous speed and gyrations.
When Wentz
wasn’t looking, she popped a small pill into her
mouth.
Moments later,
she returned to her seat, bearing two packs of
MRE’s.
“Ah, Meals,
Ready to Eat,” Wentz recognized the o.d.-green wrappers. “You got a
hot dogs and beans there?”
“Live it up,
sir,” she said, and passed him the pack. “And you can have my
chocolate disk—”
“The hockey
puck?” Wentz exclaimed. “Shit, in the field, guys would sell those
things for fifty bucks! You don’t want yours?”
Ashton passed
him the green cellophane packet, which read CHOCOLATE, ONE (1)
DISK, 104 GRAMS. “I don’t eat chocolate,” Ashton said in a vehicle
that was probably surpassing 250,000 miles per hour. “It makes my
face break out.”
««—»»
Later test
flights would prove equally flawless. Wentz flew to the moon, the
Alpha-Centauri double-star system, to Venus.
On the moon, he
EVA’d, performing several familiarization sessions in the most
technologically advanced “space suit” known to
man.
This is a trip, he thought, skipping through dust and an age-old
volcanic ejecta in the Aristarchus plains. He picked up an oblong
rock close to the shape of a football; he threw it and watched it
disappear.
Eat my shorts, Eli Manning,
he thought.
You ain’t
shit.
««—»»
The next day,
Wentz was cleared for the mission.