There was more than an aesthetic and mechanical reason why older men like Grady who flew the Vindicator loved the plane. They realized, some of them, with all the agony of a doomed love affair, that it was probably the last of its type. Maybe the RS-70 would be something like the Vindicator, but the old-timers knew they would not fly them. For them the Vindicator was the last plane. The Vindicator had pushed the cooperation between men and machinery to its uppermost limit. The next plane would surely be so fast, complicated, and intricate that it would be flown without humans aboard. The plane would, in fact, be a guided missile.
But the Vindicator crew, Grady thought proudly, still exercises judgment, the plane still responds to our bands. Our eyes scan the countless instruments. We must bring her screaming and protesting in for taut landings.
The bombardier and weapons operator walked by Grady and climbed into the plane. Like most of the younger airmen they did not glance at the Vindicator. They squeezed into the plane, map cases in their hands, eager to get into their burrows, fasten on their helmets and set about their tasks.
Grady looked up once more at the molded perfection of the Vindicator’s shape, ignoring her ungainly landing gear, and climbed aboard. Two minutes later he had her screaming down the runway. Behind him five other Vindicators leaned into the takeoff. Three hours later they were 60,000 feet in the chill air over Alaska. It was just turning daylight.
Once seated and strapped into the Vindicator, the three-man crew cannot move about. The plane is so full of machinery that the three tiny places which the men occupy hold them as tightly as individual burrows. They can talk on the intercoms and they can, if they wish, also talk normally to one another by removing the lower part of their face plates. But the crew almost never talk except over the intercom; in fact, the crew members make very little small talk with one another, partly because their training has discouraged it, and partly because they are seldom close friends.
It had recently become SAC policy to circulate crew members at random among planes. The objective was to get identical performance from all men so that they acted as identical units of a class rather than as individual personalities. Given the cost and the speed and the importance of a Vindicator, no one wanted to count on camaraderie or crew morale for a mission to be successful.
There were no brothers-in-arms aboard a Vindicator, Grady thought. He had met his two crewmen before, but had never talked with them at any length. He would not, he knew, talk much to them while aloft. Each man’s burrow was also his duty. Within eyesight were hundreds of dials to watch, gauges to check, knobs to turn.
In case of a fatal emergency each man’s burrow would be automatically catapulted out from the plane at an enormous speed and, containing its own oxygen and control system, would bring the crew member safely to earth, or sea. At least that was the theory, but no one had yet been catapulted at maximum speed from a Vindicator without sustaining grave injuries. At maximum speed the ejection capsules were traveling faster than bullets, and the air, so soft and gentle when still, was suddenly hard and brutal. When ejected a man was whacked around unmercifully in the tumbling, spinning capsule. It was something Vindicator crews tried not to think about.
For all these reasons the crewmen of the Vindicator were a proud and highly qualified lot. Even in their loneliness they took a pride, for the great glistening smooth-packed machinery they flew also gave them a sense of self. The fact that they were locked into the mechanism, embraced by it, yet in control while at their positions gave them a feeling both of individuality and of being bound tightly to an organization.
At 0580 the flight of Vindicators was topped off with jet fuel from two huge jet tankers. They performed the operation flawlessly, sucking thousands of gallons of fuel from the tankers in a matter of minutes. They continued their orderly flight plan, each plane locked into the V-shape of the group, not varying position by more than a few feet although they were flying at over a thousand miles an hour. Beneath them the darkness of the land began to break, immense chains of mountains shouldered up into the faint light, a glacier glittered icily.
They received the radio order to fly toward their Fail-Safe point without comment. They had all done it before. Grady led the group in a great sweeping arc through the sky. They picked up speed and still maintained flawless position. Grady felt the pride of a perfect performance as they completed the change of course. They flew in a nonevasive arrow straight line. Evasive action was useless at this point and merely expended fuel.
Captain Thomas, the bombardier, handed Grady a form which said “Fuel range past Fail-Safe estimated 8,020 miles.”
Grady came up on the intercom and acknowledged the written form.
“Thomas seems all right,” Grady thought to himself. He looked over at the captain. All he could see was a pair of fine brown eyes, dark eyebrows, and a few square inches of white skin. The rest of Captain Thomas’ face was covered by. a helmet, oxygen mask, and microphone. Grady looked back at Lieutenant Sullivan, the weapons operator. Seeing only the eyes, he realized with a shock that their acquaintance was so slight he could not even reconstruct in his mind what Sullivan looked like. But he was impressed with Sullivan’s hands: they had long sensitive fingers and when they moved, to touch a knob or control, they moved with an absolute precision and a definite and utter mood of assurance.
Grady, Thomas, and Sullivan, grady thought to himself. No good war novel here. The whole damn crew is Anglo-Saxon. What we should have is a Jew in it and an Italian to give color. He almost came up on the intercom to mention this, but stopped himself short. Because of his seniority, Grady had missed the intensive indoctrination which the younger crew members had gone through at various training centers around the United States. He had noticed that they seemed to have almost no sense of humor about their work, and besides, these boys hadn’t read the war novels. For a moment, a quick piercing slice of time, Grady felt like an old man, part of an older generation.
In the next moment he forgot everything, for Thomas handed him the clipboard with the information that they were a hundred miles from the Fail-Safe point. At once, with a sense of exquisite control which was very deep in. his muscles and his brain, he began a long sweeping curve which would bring him just to the edge of the Fail-Safe point. He knew without having Thomas check that the other five Vindicators had begun to turn with him. This, for Grady, was why he had joined the Air Force. It was an act of pure artistry and it filled him with a thrill of pleasure. He felt the Vindicator tilt, saw the wings move, felt a slight change in pressure against his harness and knew that they had probably lost 125 miles an hour by their long skidding maneuver movement across the sky. Grady hoped that they would stay at the Fail-Safe point for a few minutes this morning. It was the one time when he could still fly the plane with a sense of independence and autonomy. For at the Fail-Safe point the group commander could fly random patterns at random speeds as long as he did not go beyond the Fail-Safe point, and did not vary his altitude by more than 1,000 feet.
The sun shone jaggedly on the western horizon. It shot out long rays of bright light which illuminated the high darkness, but left the land black. The outline of distant mountains was etched sharp. Once, by some mirage of refraction, a whole glacier flamed blue-white for a moment and then died. The flash of the glacier reminded Grady that the people on the land were still in darkness and it gave him pleasure. In a few more minutes they would be in first light, but now the great altitude of the Vindicators gave them sole possession of the light. The knowledge of dark and lightness allowed Grady a sense of satisfaction. He knew it was a childlike sense of superiority. It meant nothing. But it was precisely for these seemingly childlike reasons that Grady had wanted to fly. This time his pleasure was short. At once he was thinking of the day when planes would fly themselves; when flying would become a combination of engineering and science and men would be merely spectators.