Thomas Hoover: Project Daedalus

"We can send a memo to Engineering," the radio voice replied. "Though there may not be time."

"Tell them they'd better make fucking time. Say I want it done." Not enough time? What in hell was going on?

He took one last look at the high-definition video screens-one for each eye-inside the helmet that would be the vehicle's "windscreen," then flipped the snap and began shoving it up. He hated the damned thing, thought it made him look like a giant high-tech moth.

"Shall we power-down the centrifuge now?" the voice continued, unfazed.

"Take it down. I'm ready for lunch. And a bottle of juice. 'Peit budu ya!'"

"I read you," the radio voice chuckled once more, knowing there wasn't any vodka to be had for a hundred miles around the facility. Reports were the project director had heard too many stories about Russian drunkenness and somehow always forgot to include liquor in the supply requisition. "I hear there's borscht again in the mess today. Petyr just came in from the North Quadrant. Said it tastes like piss. Bastards still haven't learned-"

"Pomnyu, pomnyu." He found himself longing for real food, seemingly impossible to produce here. Just like a drink.

He waited a few seconds longer, till the huge white centrifuge had come to a complete stop, then shoved down the metal hatch release and stepped out. He looked up at the high-impact glass partition of the instrument room, waved to the medical team, and began unzipping his flight suit. It was only half open by the time the technicians marched in, anxious to remove quickly the rubber suction cups and wires he was wearing on his head and chest, the instrumentation probes for their body monitor system. They wanted to reclaim them before he ripped them off, something he frequently had been known to do. Androv always said he was there to fly whatever plane nobody else had the balls to, not take a physical, so he wanted the goddam things off, and fast.

Air Force Major Yuri Andreevich Androv was thirty- seven, tall, with the studied swagger all Soviet test pilots seemed to acquire after a few years. His dark eyes and hair were set off by a high forehead and long, lean cheeks, and behind those cynical eyes lurked a penetrating intelligence. There was something else too, the most vital attribute a test pilot can have: a perfect, natural integration of the two sides of his brain.

Soviet medical studies had shown that the best pilots were artists, because handling a plane at three times the speed of sound was primarily a function of the intuitive right side of the brain, the side that provides the instincts, the seat-of-the-pants judgment. The left brain, in contrast, handled a pilot's rational functions-it was his data management system, his computer.

Flight instructors for tactical aircraft at the Ramenskoye Flight Test Center south of Moscow knew that a pilot lost his edge when his brain started getting its signals mixed, when it was no longer sure which side was in control. They called it the biology barrier. The result of information overload in a stress situation, it could lead to a total breakdown. The brain went haywire.

Yuri Androv was one of the few Soviet test pilots who never reached the biology barrier. He was, in fact, the best.

He knew that his gift was one of the reasons he had been specially selected for this project. Another was experience. Over the years, he'd flown them all-the Tupolev Blackjack, the MiG 25 Foxbat, even the ultra-secret new MiG 31 Foxhound. But this hydrogen-fueled, scramjet-powered monster opened the door to another world. Above Mach 5, you were no longer merely supersonic, you were hypersonic-where no air-breathing vehicle had ever ventured.

Could it be done? He had to admit the technology was awesome-all the aerodynamic design by supercomputer, the new ceramic composites for the leading edges, the Mach 13 burst-tests in the hypersonic wind tunnel, the scramjet static-test power-ups at the aeropropulsion facility…

This was supposedly just a space-research vehicle, for godsake. But it had twelve engines. And whereas the MiG 25, the USSR's fastest fighter-interceptor, topped out well under two thousand miles per hour, this space-age creation was capable, theoretically, of speeds almost ten times that.

The schedule agreed upon called for the certification of both the prototypes in their lower-speed, turboramjet mode, and then the commencement of hypersonic flight tests in the scramjet mode. That second phase wasn't supposed to begin for three months.

But now the project director had ordered the test program accelerated, demanding the hypersonic test flights begin immediately with the one prototype now certified-in ten days.

Maybe, just maybe, it could be done. Of course, everybody else would be sitting safely in Flight Control there in the East Quadrant when he kicked in the scramjets at sixty thousand feet. His ass would be the one in the cockpit.

This was the riskiest project of his life. Until the operational shakedown, nobody actually knew whether or not those damned scramjets would produce a standing shock wave in their combustion chamber, creating a supersonic "compressor" the way the supercomputer promised they would.

And what about somebody's brilliant idea of using the plane's liquid hydrogen fuel as coolant for the leading edges, to dissipate the intense heat of hypersonic flight? Had to do it, they claimed. Computer says there's no other way. But that was about as "brilliant" as filling your car radiator with frozen jet fuel! He'd be flying in a cocoon of liquid hydrogen… and, even scarier, he'd be doing it blind, with no windscreen. If he burned up he'd have to watch it on television.

He glanced back one last time at the white centrifuge, a fifty-foot propeller with the simulated cockpit on one blade and a counterbalancing weight on the other. The centrifuge itself was pure white enamel, spotless, just like the room. A little honest Russian dirt would actually have made him feel better. Riding in that "cockpit" was like being strapped inside a video game, all lights and nothing real.

Frowning, he shrugged and passed on through the door, greeted the milling technicians, and tossed his crumpled flight suit toward two medics from the foreign team who caught it in midair, bowed, and hurried it into the medical lab for… the devil take it, he didn't know and he didn't care.

The fluorescent-lit hall was crowded with white-shirted technicians returning from the morning's test in Number One, the big hypersonic wind tunnel. Everybody was smiling, which told him the final run-up of the model must have gone without a hitch.

That was the last segment of the revised schedule. The hypersonic test flight was on, in eighteen days.

What in hell was the sudden rush? What was everybody's real agenda? Nobody was talking.

That was what really bothered him, had bothered him from the start. This top-secret vehicle wasn't destined to be some kind of civilian space-research platform, regardless of what anybody claimed. Who were they fooling? The ultimate weapons delivery system had just been built here, a high-tech behemoth that married advanced Soviet thruster and guidance technology with a hypersonic airframe and scramjets created by the world's leading manufacturer of high-temperature alloys and supercomputers. And it was all being done here, the one place on earth with the technology.

Here. The trouble was, this wasn't Russia.

So Daedalus devised his winding maze; And as one entered it, only a wary mind Could find an exit to the world again… Ovid, The Metamorphoses

Wednesday 7:33 A.M.

"You're lucky I love this spot," Vance said, gazing out over the city. "Nothing else on the planet could have got me up this early in the morning."

"It's the one place I thought I could persuade you to meet me." The bearded man sighed, his dark eyes grim. The accent was Russian, the English flawless. "I have a problem, a very big problem."