“I see,” Henry said. “So you don’t aim for the geese, but where they’re going…”
All of a sudden, his voice trailed off, and his eyes widened as if something had just occurred to him. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly. “It can’t be that simple.”
“What? What’s not that simple?”
Henry got up from the chair and began to quickly walk back to the lodge. “C’mon… I think I just figured out how to take down Silver Bird.”
SIMULATION OF THE VOID
OCTOBER 3, 1942
Skid Sloman sat in the cramped cockpit and gazed out at space that wasn’t space, Earth that wasn’t Earth.
The stars were realistic enough as they slowly rotated above him, until they passed across one of the welded seams in the hemispherical sky. When that happened, the slight yet discernible way the ceiling warped them revealed that they were nothing more than pinpricks of light cast by a planetarium projector. When he looked down, he could see Earth beneath him, as seen from a suborbital altitude of about forty miles. It was a clever replica, too, but this illusion had its limits as well. Not only did it not move, but because no man-made object had ever gone this high, the artists who’d painted the simulator floor had only maps to guide them. So the lakes and rivers were just a bit too well-defined, and there was never a cloud anywhere above North America.
Skid didn’t care. This was his nineteenth simulated journey into space, and it wasn’t going much better than the eighteen he’d made before.
“Desert Bravo to X-1, do you copy?” Jack Cube’s voice crackled in his headphones. It, too, was probably more clear than it ought to be. In fact, it would be a miracle if the ship’s wireless system worked well enough for him to maintain ground communications.
“Roger, Desert Bravo.” As he spoke, Skid was careful not to snap his gum. Everyone had been on his back lately about his chewing Juicy Fruit while in the simulator. He couldn’t smoke here, though, and considering how many times he’d flown this stupid thing already, he needed something to help his nerves.
“Report position.”
Skid glanced down at the radium dials of his compass and gyroscopic altimeter. “Azimuth 88 degrees northeast, altitude 40.2 miles.” This was nonsense, of course; his instruments were displaying only what the controllers were feeding the simulator. But Jack was doing this to get Skid into the habit of radioing his bearings to home base, something military pilots didn’t often do.
“Roger that, X-1. Prepare for your target run, over.”
“Wilco, Desert Bravo. Hit me with your best shot.”
False bravado, which Skid soon paid for. Right hand on the stick, Skid craned his neck as much as the high seatback would allow and searched the fake sky. He’d just lost the flavor of the gum he was chewing when a familiar shape appeared almost directly above him: a luminescent silhouette of the Silver Bird, much the way he was supposed to see it if everything went well.
“Silver Bird sighted,” Skid said. “Vectoring for attack run.”
As gently as he could, he pulled back on the stick, squeezing the red trigger within its pistol grip. The cockpit shuddered slightly as the simulator faked his reaction-control rockets firing, then it tilted back on its rotary gimbals. Below him, the painted terrain fell away, disappearing from sight as the simulator “climbed.” The change in attitude was easy enough to perform, but the stick was incredibly sensitive. It was designed to emulate the lack of atmospheric resistance his craft would experience, and Skid had learned that any careless movement could send the ship wildly off course. Once again, he clenched his teeth as he tried to line up the crosshatch painted inside the canopy with the Silver Bird silhouette.
For a brief instant, he almost had it, but he was a half second too slow firing the RCRs again to stop the upward pitch. Skid watched helplessly as Silver Bird started sliding downward until it vanished beneath the prow, meaning that his craft was now on a trajectory which, if uncorrected, would cause it to fly over the enemy vessel.
“Hell’s bells!” Skid pushed the stick forward, and an instant later the silhouette reappeared. But it was larger now, and off-center as well. Skid pushed the stick to the left, and the starboard RCRs fired—Newton’s third law was something he always had to keep in mind—but even though the turn was successful, he was now in danger of going into a barrel roll.
“Well, okay then,” he muttered, “let it roll.” Skid had been thinking about this since the last time he’d climbed into the simulator and had come up to a tentative hypothesis: a sustained roll along the craft’s long axis might actually stabilize him, just the way a bullet is spun when fired from a gun. Sure enough, even though the eight-ball attitude gauge was spinning like a top, and the cockpit was cartwheeling, the prow had neatly lined up on the silhouette.
“Gotcha.” Skid reached for a pair of toggle switches on the instrument panel. If he could keep this up just long enough to get within range and send the rockets on their way…
Suddenly, the cockpit seized up on its gimbals. Before Skid could react, his seat was yanked upright as the simulator returned to its starting position. From the other side of the canopy, he could hear servomotors whining as they lost power. Someone had thrown the switch on him.
“Aw, c’mon!” he yelled. “What was wrong with that?”
“Nothing, except that maneuver would’ve killed you,” Jack Cube replied.
“Like hell! The roll wasn’t nothing I couldn’t handle…”
“Except the way you were going, you would’ve slammed into the upper atmosphere and burned up like a torch. Maybe you didn’t notice, but Silver Bird was beginning its next skip when you started your run. That’s why you overshot it. By the time you reacquired the target, you wouldn’t have been able to pull out in time.”
“At least I would’ve shot it down,” Skid grumbled.
“If you were lucky, maybe… but I’m not training you for a suicide mission. Now, c’mon, climb down from there. I’ve got a couple of people I want you to meet.”
Ceiling lights flashed on, wiping away the starscape and revealing the dull grey interior of the metal sphere surrounding him. The simulator cockpit was held in the sphere’s center by two horizontal spars jutting out from either side of the dome; a motorized yoke held the cockpit in place, its gimbals allowing the pilot to practice maneuvers with a nearly full degree of motion. The whole thing was an ingenious—and expensive—means of training a spacecraft pilot, but Skid had lately come to regard it as his own personal torture chamber.
As he unbuckled his seat harness, a technician walked across the narrow catwalk on top of the starboard spar. He unlocked the canopy and slid it open, then reached down to help Skid out of the cockpit. The test pilot followed him back across the catwalk, taking a moment to spit his gum over the side. It landed somewhere in Ohio; the technician glared at him, and Skid grinned. The simulator team really hated it when he did that.
The technician unlatched the egress hatch and pushed it open, then led Skid down a rollaway service tower. The thirty-foot-diameter sphere stood upon a concrete pedestal within an enormous hangarlike building. The control station stood to one side; scientists and engineers in white lab coats were huddled over its consoles, examining the results of the last test. They barely looked up at Skid as he walked down the ladder, and once again the pilot wondered if they considered him to be a slightly more intelligent version of the chimpanzees they’d used in the first phases of ground tests.