The human organism is still the most reliable of all mechanisms in spite of the strides that had been made in automation. Rather than load the aircraft down with servomechanisms and complicated gear to perform many of the tasks that the pilot could do, the designers had opted for the human factor.
The A-17 had been on the threshold of man’s ability to control under the difficult and microsecond decision points that had to be reached and gated properly when the aircraft was closing on its target at nearly four thousand miles an hour. The elapsed time from the moment a ground target — often less than a hundred feet across — came into sight until the A-17 had left it behind was often no more than four seconds. During this time, the information displayed on the screens had to be accepted, interpreted, a decision for action made, and the decision implemented; all with enough time remaining to allow the cameras and other recording devices to do their job.
Even in those instances where circumstances dictated that Teleman could loiter the aircraft over the target and select his objectives, someone had to decide what should be recorded, what must be searched for to make the picture complete, and handle the volumes of data that poured in, constantly interpreting, re-deciding and shifting objectives — and often targets. No computer could handle this job. Teleman was trained in the use of certain psychic energizer drugs of the amphetamine and lysergic acid families that could boost his body system output to fantastic heights in relation to normal physiological response. The LSD derivatives extended his powers of concentration and, through their hallucinogenic effect, made him feel that he was actually part of the aircraft. They also increased his comprehension and ability to deal with a multitude of facts in a very short time.
The amphetamines provided the same effect for his bodily responses, increasing his reaction time and slowing his time sense to compensate for the demands of the aircraft’s speed.
Teleman’s physiological and biochemical status was monitored constantly during the mission through a specially tailored system of instruments blended together to form the Physiological Control and Monitoring System. At the start of the mission, an intravenous catheter was inserted into the superior vena cava vein through a plug implanted surgically in his shoulder. A glass electrode was brought into intimate contact with his bloodstream at this nearest acceptable point to the heart. Through the electrode a series of minute pulses, set up by an electrochemical reaction with his blood, informed the computer continually of his body status. The computer was programed to receive inputs directly from various parts of the aircraft’s controlling instrumentation that, coupled with The in vivo status reports, determined the time and dosage of the drugs he received. If the instrumentation, directed by the flight plan or by instructions from Teleman, called for a state of physiologically alert and expanded consciousness, proper drugs were fed into his bloodstream through the catheter and his body responded accordingly. Because of the duration of the flights, often lasting six to seven days, when Teleman was not needed to respond to specific tasks, the computer instructed the PCMS to feed in barbiturate derivatives and he slept. Teleman had once calculated that at least 65 percent of all of his missions were spent sleeping. Although great pains had been taken to develop a high tolerance in Teleman to the drugs he was constantly being infused with, he was thoroughly poisoned by the end of a mission.
In short, Teleman was carefully tailored to the aircraft and its missions. The reach the drugs allowed was marginal, yet enough to provide the control needed to handle his craft as no other airplane had ever been flown. Drugs kept him awake, or put him to sleep, instantly. Others kept him at the peak of alertness for as long as required and his mind focused on his Mission, his instruments, and his aircraft
CHAPTER 5
The great bend in the Oh River, one hundred miles east of the Siberian city of Tomsk, lay 180,000 feet below when the PCMS nudged Teleman out of sleep. Within three seconds he was awake and scanning the information displayed on the screen. The Electronics Countermeasures (ECM) bank had detected a series of searching radar beams within the past few minutes. Teleman got busy with the source detectors, concentrating closely on the sweep of the searching finger on the ECM screen. So far the radar beams were searching below eighty thousand feet, well below his present altitude. After a few minutes of concentrated work, he tracked the radar signals to their location — about where he had suspected. Four hundred miles farther down the Ob was the ancient city of Novosibirsk, one of the oldest of the tsarist Siberian exile camps. Now it was a booming industrial and mining center, containing one of the largest Soviet air bases. Novosibirsk was located at 800 miles north of the Soviet-Chinese border, and he suspected that the local commander of this tempting target was feeling just a bit jumpy this close to a hot war.
At the moment it appeared to be nothing more than routine searching by omni-radar. But the closer he approached to Novosibirsk, the more intense the weaving net of radar became and the greater the search altitude. For a minute his feeling of apprehension tightened, and Teleman wondered if they were on to him.
Fifteen minutes later he was approaching the northern rim of the Altai Mountain chain that ringed the western rim of the Mongolian Plateau. Beneath, the ground was still shrouded in darkness, sparsely broken by patches of light signifying inhabited communities. As he flew farther across the mountain range the lights became more and more scattered, until finally they ceased altogether. Now, far on the eastern horizon, he could make out the darker band of horizon that in less than an hour would be touched by the first tinges of dawn. The night-light television cameras displayed a scene of hellish grandeur in the uninhabited recesses of this most desolate of mountain ranges. The Altai range sprawled to three hundred miles wide on, its north-south axis, with peaks of thirteen thousand feet and higher thrusting jaggedly into the black sky. On either side of the range, deep, forbidding stretches of badland had been strewn about as if by a giant’s hand. The southern reach of badland and foothill was Teleman’s immediate destination, the stretch of land between the Altai and the smaller, but no less lofty, Tarbagatai range. More out of curiosity than anything else, he cranked the image up, increasing the magnification and resolution on the electronic telescopes until he was watching a strip of land less than three hundred yards wide slipping past. He was still on the northern face of the range, the gentler side, if that term could be applied to this waste of rock and ice. A few stunted trees, in miniature, appeared here and there. But nowhere could he find a trace of human habitation. This range of mountains was so barren that it was shunned even by the nomadic tribes of Mongolian sheepherders who drew a living from the wastes of the Gobi.
For the next half hour the A-17 passed over the mountains thirty-six miles below, until, on the eastern horizon, Teleman could make out the first indications of the approaching dawn. It would still be another hour and a half before the sun would reach into the valleys and canyons of the Tien Shan ahead, but the aircraft, reacting to the carefully prepared flight plan, began to throttle back and lose altitude. For long minutes Teleman watched the far-off ground sliding past; he was too slept out to sleep any longer and loath to request a barbiturate from the PCMS. As he sat debating with himself, the radar panel blipped for attention and projected a stream of swiftly flowing data that told Teleman that a flight of Soviet fighters was patrolling at thirty thousand feet. Teleman flipped a number of switches and got the radar tracking to trace their flight patterns. They were ahead and below nearly 130 miles south when first spotted. He was less than two hundred from the confluence of the Soviet, Mongolian, and Chinese borders and, as he guessed, the planes were merely another border patrol on a dawn sweep. Shortly, he was over the border into Red China, still at 140,000 feet and watching the Tarbagatai Mountains rounding on the horizon.