“Bravo to Linda.” Jack Cube’s voice was thin and distorted by static, yet still discernible. “Coming up on main engine cutoff.”
“Roger that, Bravo.” Skid checked his instruments. Yes, his altitude was nearly thirty miles. Time to cut the main engine. He raised his right hand, found the engine’s toggle switch. “Cutoff in five… four… three… two… one…”
He snapped the switch, and instantly everything became still and silent. The vibration ceased entirely, and there was no more noise; the g-force pressure left his body at once, leaving behind a strange and ethereal sensation of lightness. It was free fall, of course; he’d felt this before, in fighter planes he’d put into power dives, but never quite like this.
No doubt about it. He was in space.
Skid laughed out loud. “Zero g and I feel fine. Tell Mutt and Jeff they’ve nothing to worry about.”
A moment passed, then he heard Jack’s voice again. “I’ll let ’em know. They’ll be happy to hear that. We got a lot of people down here gnawing their fingernails. Want to tell us your position, just so we know you’re not really in Texas?”
Skid looked at his instruments again. Without a functional pitot, his air altimeter and airspeed indicators were useless; the gyroscope, compass, and theodolite were his primary navigation instruments. But there was an easier way of figuring out where he was.
He toggled another switch to activate the orbital maneuvering system, then grasped the stick and—ever so carefully, the way he’d spent countless hours learning in the simulator—moved it to the left. Lucky Linda made a slow roll to starboard, maneuvering thrusters along its midsection silently firing to change its attitude. As Skid looked up through the canopy, his breath caught in his throat as Earth rolled into sight, a vast panorama of green, brown, and tan, traced by rivers and spotted with lakes that reflected the early-morning sun. The horizon was curved slightly at the ends; it stretched away for miles and miles and miles, farther than he’d ever seen before. There was a thin blue haze above the limb of the Earth, and it took him a moment to realize that it was the atmosphere.
“Oh, wow,” he murmured. “Jack, you gotta see this.”
“If you’re trying to make me jealous, you’re doing a good job. What’s your position?”
Checking the compass, Skid confirmed that he was on a fifty-seven-degree north-by-northeast bearing, then he peered more closely at the ground below. No oceans in sight; he must be somewhere over the American heartland. Yet there was a long, twisty river just ahead, with another river converging upon it from the west. He grinned with recognition: the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.
“I’m above Missouri,” he said, “just about to fly over St. Louis.” The city was too far below for him to see; he was relying on his memory for geographic location. Something he’d read in the paper came back to him and he grinned. “Hey, I think the Yankees are playing the Cardinals today. Maybe I’ll drop in for the game.”
“Roger that.” Jack’s voice was terse. “Doctor G says to stop kidding around.”
Skid rolled his eyes. Goddard had no sense of humor. “Understood, Bravo,” he said. They were right, though. He had work to do.
Skid moved the stick to the right again, and once more Lucky Linda rolled around. Earth disappeared from sight; Silver Bird wouldn’t be coming from that direction but instead from somewhere above. That was where he needed to look for it.
He reached to his left side, unfolded the collapsible handle of a small, vertically mounted wheel, and began to slowly turn it. From just behind his head there came a small thump as a hatch in the cowling was opened; Skid twisted his head around as much as his helmet would let him and saw that the periscope had been successfully deployed. He had to strain against his pressure suit to reach the horizontally mounted eyepiece and telescope it over his right shoulder, but once the L-shaped reflector was in place, he had an adjustable rearview mirror to show him what was going on above and behind the ship.
The helmet had to go. He wouldn’t be able to use the periscope well while he was still wearing it. A quick glance at the interior pressure gauge to make sure that the cockpit hadn’t sprung a leak, then he reached up and twisted the helmet away from the suit-collar ring. A slight hiss, then his ears popped; he took a deep breath, then shoved the helmet between his legs and shut off the suit air. He adjusted the eyepiece and nodded to himself. Yeah, that was better.
Skid snapped another toggle switch, and the small radar screen in the center of the instrument panel glowed to life, tiny concentric circles pulsing outward every fifteen seconds. Nothing yet, but he knew Silver Bird was out there.
“Lucky Linda to Desert Bravo,” Skid said. “Time to go hunting.”
Silbervogel fell toward Earth.
Horst Reinhardt’s suit was plastered with sweat, so much that he’d decided to trust the cockpit’s integrity and remove his mask and goggles. The sweat didn’t only come from the heat generated by the seven atmospheric skips his craft had made in the past hour and twenty-two minutes. It came from the effort it took for him to keep the ship on course as it circled the globe.
Reinhardt had been warned that Silver Bird would be difficult to fly, so he’d prepared for that. During the months spent training for this mission, he’d had countless sessions in a cockpit simulator, learning how to navigate with only a few instruments and celestial bearings to rely upon; he wouldn’t be able to use the bombsight periscope until he opened the bomb bay doors, and he couldn’t do that until he completed his final atmospheric entry. He’d become adept at instrument flying during the simulator sessions, yet even so, actual practice was proving to be more difficult.
Silver Bird had no maneuvering thrusters other than its auxiliary engines, and he’d used up the rest of his fuel in the first minutes of his flight. Inertia, gravity, and the aerodynamic properties of his craft were the factors keeping it airborne. Each time gravity pulled Silbervogel back into the upper atmosphere, the ship would lose a little more momentum and altitude. Each of those dives tested Reinhardt’s abilities to their limits; he had to carefully watch the angle of pitch and yaw, since too steep an attitude would cause him to burn up during reentry, while at the same time making the minute course corrections that would keep him on a precise east-by-southeast heading. And it didn’t help that the damn ship handled more like a brick than a bird; Reinhardt was glad that he’d committed a couple of hours each day to weight lifting and running track because he needed all his strength to control the yoke during the skips.
Somehow, he’d managed to maintain a suborbital trajectory that had carried him across the southern Soviet Union, Mongolia, northern China, and the Pacific Ocean to the shores of hated America. His last skip had been just east of the Rocky Mountains, somewhere above the Black Hills of South Dakota; he was beginning to make his final descent, the one that would take him into the atmosphere one last time, on his way to New York and victory.
According to his instruments, his altitude was approximately eighty kilometers, his velocity nearly 2,700 km per hour. Silbervogel’s prow was pitched downward, and although he couldn’t see straight ahead, his view through the side windows showed him the sunlit curve of the horizon slanting toward him at the desired angle. Through most of the flight, the stars had been his best means of checking his position. This close to Earth, though, at this time of day, he discovered to his dismay that the morning sun all but obliterated the stars, making all but the brightest difficult to see.