Garnett carefully locked the door behind him and limped out to his car which greeted him like an old friend as he settled into the seat. He slid it meticulously through the Sunday evening traffic, not risking an encounter with the police, and reached the works in reddish evening sunlight. A patrol officer saluted as he drove through the main gates and threaded among the silent workshops on his way to the field. The square-finned shape of a T.6 crouched outside the flight shed, impassively drinking in the contents of a mustard-coloured fuel bowser. Garnett was too far from the men who moved around it to decide if they were the regular ground crew or Xoanon-controlled draftees. Scanning the line of parked vehicles he found what he wanted—the white sports car belonging to Bill Makin.
Garnett slipped into the test pilots’ building by the rear entrance, went along the corridor and stopped outside Makin’s office. There was the question of how much feedback was built into Xoanon’s control system—if the spacecraft acted as a sort of clearing house for sense impressions then every man under control might know what was happening to all the others, in which case Makin could be expecting him. He extricated the heavy weapon from his belt, thankful there had been no necessity for a quick draw, and gently opened the door. Makin was already in his silver pressure skin and was bent over his personal computer, waiting tensely. Beyond the Venetian blinds the evening sky was turning peacock green.
Garnett levelled the automatic.
“Don’t move, Bill. Don’t make a sound. You’ve got a passenger on this trip.”
Makin remained hunched over the machine, but he shook his head without turning round. “I have—but not you, Tony. The wing unit is strapped into the second seat. Even you couldn’t get in there with it.”
“I don’t think you understand—I’m not permitting delivery of the unit. You’re taking me in its place.”
“What makes you think so?”
The task of thinking up a direct verbal reply which did not sound like something out of an old film was too much for Garnett’s patience and imagination. He stepped forward and gently laid the gun muzzle against Makin’s neck, but the time for words or any other sort of reply had already passed. Makin slid down on to the floor and lay, like a doll, with both arms reaching blindly into the air. As Garnett stared down at him, remembering Elkin, the fitter who had also been ‘switched off’, the computer chimed softly and rolled out a curling tongue of grey paper. Garnett snatched it and ran his eye down the printed figures—they were a complete set of parameters defining the flight profile for a maximum altitude T.6 sortie.
A few minutes later Garnett limped out of the test pilots’ building, doing his best to imitate Makin’s careful walk. The pressure skin was several sizes too large for him but none of the ground crew seemed to notice anything wrong. Garnett discovered that the loneliness of the astronaut, the age’s solitary hero figure, began from the moment he donned his egg-shell head and silver limbs. The T.6 waited for him, its belly replete with fuel, and the late sunlight splayed across the sky, masking everything that lay beyond.
Garnett had never actually flown a T.6 before and the fact that he was able to consider doing so, even with his experience in the aircraft’s simulator, was a tribute to the way in which the aircraft industry had tackled one of its oldest problems. Even before the end of the era of the reciprocating engine the demands upon the pilot of the large, fast transport were nearing the theoretical maximum capacity of the human nervous system. A limiting factor had been the sheer quantity of eye movements the pilot was called upon to make as he gathered discrete information from his instrument array and processed it into control movements. The answer had lain in a new philosophy of cockpit design which ushered in the age of the black box, starting with the first autoland systems. Its culmination was the fully automated cockpit which was the most valuable part of the machine and which could be lifted bodily out of any aircraft and installed in any other type, allowing the pilot to concentrate on where he was going and not on the mechanics of getting there.
The ground crew stood around disinterestedly as Garnett walked to the aircraft and worked his way up the spring-loaded hand and toe holds to reach the open cockpit. Actually, due to the fact that the T.6 was a true self-starter, there was nothing for the crew to do once the fuelling operation was completed. Now that he was about to take its controls into his own hands Garnett was impressed as never before by the machine’s sheer power. The huge cylinder was literally nothing but an engine and fuel system, with a contrived niche on top for two men and an assortment of mountings below for weapons. It was not armed, being still in final development, but it was one of the most fantastically extravagant products of a society with the arm-bearing mentality.
As he slid into the front seat Garnett realised, with a keen sense of shock, that he disliked the T.6 and all it stood for. Thoughts like that had never crossed his mind until now but then, as Dermott had explained, an outsider had been ‘nudging’ his ideas towards a certain end. It was difficult to comprehend that the whole twenty-metre wing project had been brought into being at the instigation of an alien figure known as Xoanon. Men’s lives had been twisted to meet that end and a girl called Janice had died. Garnett felt the gnawing bitterness of regret for everything that might have been. Up there, up in the lofty three-hundred kilometre orbit, Janice’s death probably seemed an infinitesimal event, but it had been an important one in his life. Soon he would be up there himself, though, and then he was going to make Janice important to Xoanon as well. The automatic in his belt was a pretty insignificant payload for the T.6 but, properly used, it should be sufficient.
Garnett wanted to unload the crated twenty-metre wing unit but doing it might have attracted too much suspicion, so he sealed the cockpit and checked over the flight plan. It called for a takeoff at seventeen-fifty hours, gradual climb to twenty thousand metres to clear the denser air strata, and then a fully boosted ballistic-style climb to engine shutdown at 250 kilometres. This would give enough momentum for the ship to coast the remaining fifty kilometres to what presumably was rendezvous altitude. He was more than ten minutes too early and was tempted to blast off anyway then adjust the flight path to suit, but there was the danger of alerting the whole of Regional Command. The flight was bound to be illegal—Makin had not had time even to file a flight plan—but as long as he did not loiter around at medium altitudes there was little anybody could do to stop him. They were unlikely to loose one of their robotic nimrods on an unidentified aircraft flying out of the country. There was also the danger of alerting the spacecraft but he had a feeling Xoanon already knew what was going on—the precious wing unit would be his guarantee of safe conduct.
At zero minus five he flicked over a series of toggles and the great engine, which extended from the ship’s nose, under his seat and all the way back to the tail, cleared its throat and gave voice, an indefinitely prolonged explosion even at minimum power. Keeping the radio switched off to eliminate distracting queries from the tower he released the brakes and steered the T.6 out to the end of the main runway. The configuration scope showed that the machine’s invisible wings were spread to their full extent.
Poised at the end of the runway, staring into the flame-coloured feathers of the sunset, Garnett was suddenly afraid to make the flight. The feeling was something like the one which had followed Dermott’s first grazing shot across his chest. He wanted to get away, escape into normal life, not project himself into the inhuman, anti-human coldness of the three-hundred kilometre orbit. But when his chronometer said it was time to go he kicked off the brakes and let the machine do all his thinking and worrying. The sound of the engine faded out a few seconds later as the T.6 went supersonic. He barely had time to get it on to the south-easterly bearing specified in the flight plan, and check his course, when the altimeter registered twenty thousand metres. At that point he surrendered all authority to the black boxes.