“The Righteous Stuff” – Chapter 18

The Righteous Stuff

by Jeffrey D. Waggoner

based on characters and situations in the

“Domination of the Draka” novels written by S.M. Stirling

 

CHAPTER 18

Excerpt from The X-Planes: America’s Dark Guardians, by Elliott Miller

San Diego University Press, 1968

The XB-60 was a technology without a mission; it was conceived during the Eurasian War, but not ready for testing until early in 1952. By then the unmanned jet-powered bomb was so highly developed that the US Government phased out most plans for high-speed manned bomber runs into Draka territory. “Cruiser bombs” could travel at over Mach 1 long enough, and low enough, to elude the shoreline electrodetection apparatus, and they were cheap enough that saturation bombing was considered practical. Granted, Air Force General Curtis LeMay lobbied for a large manned supersonic bomber force, but he was overruled by the Joint Chiefs, the President and the Senate. (It is widely thought that his run as an America First Party Presidential candidate in 1956 was a direct result of his frustration with his superiors over the Strategic Bomber Command issue.)

By the time the mission changes were made, development of the Mach 3 bomber was well advanced. All the wind tunnel work was complete and the prototypes were under construction in Oakland, California. The Joint Chiefs decided to complete the two test articles and use them for testing of materials and unique wing structure in the high supersonic realm.

It is unknown how such a secret aircraft could have become known to so many, even before a single plane had been built. Rumors flew up and down the West Coast, and were even repeated in Aviation Week before their offices were reportedly visited by the OSS. Finally, the Pacific Aircraft test group at Rodriguez Dry Lake was able to persuade the Air Force to release one of the planes for use as a carrier for the hypersonic planes.

The plane was the largest supersonic manned aircraft built until 1977; it was over 200 feet from nose to tail, with a wingspan of 115 feet when the wingtips were fully extended. It was originally powered by six Curtiss and Whitney turbojets of 32,000 pounds of thrust each. The nose was over thirty feet above the ground when at rest. The engines were upgraded on tail number 77542, the second prototype. It received structural strengthening on the top of the delta wing and a 45-foot mount for the X-14. The improved Curtiss/Whitney RX-37K engines were capable of 38,000 pounds of thrust at 104 per cent power, with afterburner. Weighing just over 200 tons fully fueled, the plane had to lift the weight of the 40-ton X-14 as well. Unloaded it could fly over 2,000 miles an hour at over 70,000 feet.

Unique to the XB-60 were articulated wingtips, which could drop as far as 65 degrees for flying at Mach 3. The aircraft was among the first to use “compression lift,” in which some lift was generated by the shock wave created by the plane in supersonic flight. (A similar effect was later used in the generation of “shockrider” hypersonic aircraft).

Unfortunately, the size of the aircraft generated tremendous stress on the airframe, and the wafer-thin stainless steel and titanium honeycomb structure deteriorated rapidly. 77541 was retired in June of 1956 after only 98 test flights. 77542 was used in the X-14 program until it was destroyed in August of 1955.

 

USAF EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT TEST FACILITY

RODRIGUEZ DRY LAKE

CORUM, CALIFORNIA

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

APRIL, 1953

 

“Piece of shit,” muttered Bob Hoover under his breath. “Come on, goddamn it, fly, you mother.” He was hunched over the little sidestick controller in the XB-60 in an awkward posture, as if he could pull the plane from the ground by body language alone. He hated the –60, more than he ever hated anything. He was a fighter pilot, for gossake, not some delivery boy. And this was the ultimate delivery wagon, Two hundred feet long, painted gleaming white, roaring like a sonofabitch as it tried to gain enough lift to take off. Hoover was convinced this plane would kill him, not because he was stupid–he was never stupid–but because it was a horrible, demonic piece-of-shit hardware.

The plane shuddered as it ran over a ripple on the lake bed. Such imperfections on the dry lake were few and far between, but this plane was so ungainly that driving it over a cockroach would probably knock it over. It had been rolling on full afterburner for almost a mile, and still hadn’t reached takeoff speed.

“Three hundred. Steady on, there, Bob, and you’ll have her off the deck in no time,” reported Northfield, much more cheerfully than Hoover liked. Like he could do anything else. Keep her nose on the white line, mash the throttles to the wall, and pray. That’s what this one was about.

“Three twenty. Three twenty-five…you could give it a try now, you know.” Northfield was the right-seater for this trip, but had never flown the beast. Shut up, Al, thought Hoover. I know what I’m doing.

“Give me a minute. She doesn’t feel like she’s pullin’ away yet.” Bob Hoover was said to have a sixth sense about planes, He could feel them, without looking at a single gauge. He was almost never wrong, whether he was estimating Gs on a turn or rate of descent. He was the most intuitive pilot ever to show up at Rodriguez, and still knew the technical stuff cold as well.

Finally he sighed, relaxed a bit, and leaned back. He tapped the controller lightly with his left index finger, and the delta-winged giant leaped into the air. Right where I knew it would be.

“Flight says 6,500 feet of runway. And I read three-forty on the airspeed.” Northfield wrote the numbers on the notepad strapped to his thigh. “Nice job, Bob.”

“She still wallows like a damn cow,” Hoover grunted. “The rate of climb stinks, and I feel her starting to slip again. Let’s drop the wingtips.” The XB-60 had a tendency to sideslip at subsonic speeds, and again at over Mach 2. No one knew why. Current engineering theory was that the delta wing and engine configuration below it was creating some sort of turbulence. She always slipped to the left, though, and that made it all the more confusing. Dropping the 20-foot articulated wingtips seemed to help, a little, as well as providing more lift. He would have taken off with the wingtips down, but they would have dragged in the lake bed…

“Still climbing. Heading of 22 degrees, rate of climb just over 700 feet per minute,” Northfield called out, to verify the telemetry the computer was sending to the base. At this rate it would take over an hour to climb to the bomber’s operational altitude. They had fuel for maybe two hours, a little more if subsonic. “Four hundred.”

The plane looked like an equilateral triangle with a thin tube on the front end. The huge delta wing, over a hundred feet in span, with the six huge jet engines enclosed in two boxy enclosures formed the main fuselage of the aircraft. The long, thin neck and its two small trapezoidal canards looked like an afterthought. The nose actually drooped, and would be raised in a few minutes to cruise mode. Right now it was addingslightly  to the lift the plane needed to climb.
“Gear up. We have a green gear up light. Tips at fifteen degrees.” The plane made so much noise, and was so long, that the crew had no idea if the gear was up or down. It handled so slowly, with so much time lag, that the drag caused by the extended gear was impossible to detect. “Chase plane verifies gear up.”

The plane was still climbing, but the slideslip continued to force the plane to the left. Hoover fought to control it, nudging with the slightest movements of the sidestick. He preferred the old-style stick used in the fighter planes he was trained in. The feedback was almost undetectable with this controller, and that could spell disaster. Hoover knew he was the best choice for pilot for this flight, with his ability to fly by the seat of his pants in the largest of aircraft. He just didn’t have to like it.

“I’m trying to keep from overcontrolling this pig, and it really needs the feedback loop redone. I can barely feel it at all. Tell those guys this just will not work once we put the Demon on it.” Hoover kept looking at the artificial horizon indicator, since the nose was so long his view of the real horizon was completely obstructed.

“The Demon?” Northfield raised an eyebrow.

“It needs a name. It looks like the meanest flyin’ thing ever, and is supposed to fly like a bat outa hell. Only problem’s the dummy is painted white…I hope they paint the real thing black.”

“They’ll have some good reason to paint it orange, or purple, or something.” Northfield was trying to see over the long, pointed nose. Even in drooped position it was hard to see the horizon. “Demon is a pretty good name for that one. Funny nobody’s used it before.”

Hoover snorted. “Nothin’ was that mean before. Five-fifty, isn’t it? Let’s get the nose up a little.” He flipped the toggle on the panel. A simple “UP” and “DOWN” were painted there. The nose only had two positions, and only one speed as the hydraulics struggled against the airstream outside.

“Rate of climb is increasing. She’s running a bit more efficient. I can’t wait to see how it’ll handle with the…Demon on top.” He flipped the toggle off as the nose came all the way up. That made it harder to see. “You know, this would really be a horrible bomber. You can’t see anything. Without the chase planes, we’d be completely lost!”

“When you pack nukes, nobody argues much about where you drop them. The way this thing handles, I’d just as soon drop ‘em in Oakland.” Curtiss-Convair had a huge factory complex outside of the city, and both XB-60s were built in Hangar 13–not a good sign, if you asked the pilots. “Altitude?”

“Twenty-eight thousand. Airspeed six-ten. Should be getting bumpy soon.”

The big bomber did start to shake about then, and continued to wobble a bit until it passed Mach one. Then it smoothed out, and Hoover finally relaxed somewhat. “Check with the chase planes and get me a heading. I suppose we should try to maneuver this witch sometime.”

As the aircraft gained altitude and speed, both pilots felt more at ease. The ride was better, even though the vibration from the six engines could be felt over a hundred feet away in the cabin. The turns Hoover executed were smooth and accurate, and he began to feel as if he was flying a real, responsive aircraft again.

“Time for the speed run,” Hoover told his copilot. “Let’s open her up and see what this beast can do.”

Slowly he pushed the throttles forward, not to the afterburner position, but to full normal throttle. The plane seemed to ignore him at first. Slowly, both men began to feel acceleration. It was somewhat like riding in a large autosteamer. They were pressed back into the ejection seats, but not slammed into them they way a fighter, or even a normal bomber would.

Northfield called off Mach numbers every thirty seconds or so, and made his written notations. At Mach 2.4 Hoover called for the full extension of the wingtips. Again, no real change in motion could be detected by either man. The wingtips slowly extended to a downward angle of 65 degrees. Twenty feet of wingtip on either side of the plane–forty per cent of the wing span–was now hinged downward. The plane was moving faster now, appreciably so, from the Mach meter notations Northfield was making.

Northfield looked thoughtful. “Looks like the guys from Convair were right. This baby does fly better at maximum speed. The lift effect really does work!”

“Just so I can still handle her with this stupid stick,” grumbled Hoover. “I still hate this thing. I hope they fix the feedback loop, or whoever has to fly the stack’ll be in big trouble.”

“Ridley always said that’s been the biggest problem he’s had to handle, no matter what he’s been flyin’,” replied the copilot. “He thinks it’s the computers–he thinks we just don’t have the computer power to really make this feedback thing work.”

“I don’t doubt it. Everything we’ve been doin’ for the last five years has been hurry-up, hurry-up. We always get the right hardware one plane behind. Mach number?”

“Two point nine. Throttles at a hundred per cent.”

“Crap. She’s supposed to make Mach three at full normal.”

“The chase planes let us go. They can’t keep up. They’ll pick us up in Utah.”

Hoover looked over at Northfield. “Full afterburner?”

“OK. I’ll watch the meters.”

Hoover pushed the throttles to full afterburner, theoretically 110 per cent of full power. The plane kicked ahead and the vibration they felt through the seats changed.

“There you go, Bob. Mach three point zero. But you know, we’re eatin’ fuel like a sonofabitch.”

“Good thing this plane don’t have to get to Africa…she’d never make it. I’m not crazy about flyin’ her over the Gulf, though, to drop the Demon.”

Northfield laughed. “The Demon’ll never make orbit, Bob. Too heavy, by probably fifteen per cent, easy. Unless they come up with some kind of miracle airframe, or somethin’.”

“You never flew the X-6, did you? I swear that ’chine was bewitched. Too hot for anybody to fly but Ridley…and that’s sayin’ a whole lot. Most guys wouldn’t even try to fly her. Ridley almost killed himself every time, smackin’ his head on the canopy…anyhow, the experimental skin on that thing was damn spooky. All silvery, sorta smooth. Warm, not cold, like metal. Dornberger never did tell us what it was made of. I’m backin’ her down, now. Let the chasers catch up.”

The pilots brought the airspeed to just under Mach 1 for the one-eighty that would take them back to the dry lake. The plane turned smoothly with the wingtips back at 25 degrees. Hoover pushed it back up to Mach 1.8 and ran some maneuvering tests on the way back to Corum. Finally, he lined the plane up with the runway with the help of the chase planes. He still couldn’t see much with the long nose in the way.

“Bob–Clint in Chase One says we don’t have the gear down.” Northfield was studying the lights on the panel.

“I put ‘em down. Cycle ‘em again.”

Northfield flipped switches. “Main gear are still up. Nose gear is still up. Aux gear down switch has no effect. Wait one–info from Flight.” He was all business now, speaking in the clipped pilotese that only seemed to show up in times of real trouble. “Flight thinks it’s a circuit breaker. I’ll go look. Get on channel six so the chase planes can turn you. We’ll make another pass.” He climbed between the seats, musing that even in a two-hundred-foot aircraft, there was no room in the cabin.

Past the cabin there was a narrow passageway. The passageway ran about forty feet back down the fuselage, with cables and pipes running under the floor grid. There was supposed to have been a flight engineer station here, but since the plane was retasked and not longer considered a real bomber, the panels were never installed. A navigator station was half-completed just past the bulkhead, which struck Northfield as a stupid place to put the only guy who knew where they were going, but he knew he was just a pilot, and nobody ever asked pilots anything when planes were designed. Well, Ridley, sure, everybody talked to Ridley. All the engineers talked to him about everything. They almost considered him one of them. Al Northfield wondered if he would ever get the same kind of attention. After all, he had a damn engineering degree too. It wasn’t as if he was trained in architecture, or something like that…

He came to the electrical breaker panels. He had no idea why they were here, either. He opened the third box and hunted for breaker 347. Sure enough, it was popped open. He flipped it full open, then closed, and watched it for a minute. It didn’t move. He made his way back to the cockpit.

Hoover barely glanced back at him. “Chase planes say nothin’. Nothin’ at all. And we got about eighty thousand pounds of fuel left. We’d make a hell of an explosion, comin’ in on our belly. Wait–come here. Talk to Flight.”

Northfield wrapped himself halfway around the seat, shoved his helmet on his head so he could hear through the earphones. He frowned. “Huh? Are you guys serious? With what? We don’t even have a tool kit on this plane!”

“What do they want, kid?” Hoover asked, as he make yet another left bank to bring the plane around.

“Aw, crap. Lemme see what I got here.” Northfield dragged his flight case out from behind his seat, and started rummaging around. “Flight? Nothin’ Nothin’ at all.”

Northfield turned to Hoover. “They want me to short circuit the gear wiring, back in the junction box aft of the breaker panels. Trouble is, no one thought to give us any tools, any wire, anything!”

Hoover laughed. It was a strange sound, Northfield thought, for this particular spot they were in. “Wire. All you need is a li’l bita wire?”

“Paper clip!” Northfield pulled out a wad of papers, grabbed an extra-large paper clip off it. He tore the helmet off, pitched it onto the seat, and dove through the hatch.

Of course, the panel he needed to open was almost–but not quite–impossible to get to without tools. He finally bent the clip into a U shape, and squeezed it into the gap. The space was so small he had to take off his gloves. He wrapped the clip in a piece of paper, all he had with him. Now all I need is to be electrocuted, he thought. Three-cent paper clip, half-billion dollar airplane. Right. He jammed it into the spot the flight director had told him to. He was rewarded with a large blue spark. He almost dropped the clip as the shock bit him in the hand. He felt no rumble, and of course could hear nothing but the roar of the engines. The main gear were still about seventy-five feet behind him, and thirty feet below, in the main fuselage. He held the clip in place for a count of sixty, then climbed back to the cockpit.

“They’re down! Chase One says gear down! I don’t know if they’re locked, but we’re goin’ in! Strap in, boy! Oh…and thanks!” It was the most animated Northfield had ever heard Hoover, who had that good-ole-boy drawl down pat, just like Ridley. Of course, he was a Tennessee boy. If only I was from “Ohiah,” south of Co-lumbus, thought Northfield. Then I would sound like the guys with that righteous stuff.

“Tell Clint Baker to stay the hell away!” Hoover was suddenly angry. “He’s too close! We don’t know what kind of turbulence this thing creates!”

Northfield passed on the information, and the chase plane slowly backed off. Northfield apologized for the pilot. “He was just watching the gear, you know.”

“I know. But this wing isn’t like anything else I’ve ever flown, and he could get pulled right into it! He needs to stay away!”

As the bomber touched down, Hoover let out a sigh of relief. The gear were locked down fine, and the drogue chutes deployed on time. The bomber still took over ten thousand feet of runway to stop, but it was smooth as could be. Hoover still grumbled about the brakes. “Gotta be careful, boy, with them brakes. Gotta touch ’em real light, take ’em real easy.”

Yeah, thought Northfield. Touch ‘em real light, take ’em real easy. Piece of cake, Bob.

 

Jack Ridley watched the fire trucks pull up to the bomber, a half-mile away on the glaring white runway. “You know, Walter, we may just be back on schedule after all.”

Dornberger was visibly agitated. “No, it is too fast, too fast! We cannot check out each aircraft enough! And this should prove it to you! We almost lost the plane and the crew, and years of work! Five hundred million dollars in design and construction! This pace is impossible, with the few people we have to check everything over!”

Stoddard looked at the other two men. “He may be right, Jack. We don’t know if that problem was a design flaw, a manufacturing defect, or…”

“I know, I know, sabotage.” Ridley waved his hand, as if waving off the idea. “You see saboteurs behind every bush, Nate. I know it’s what you do, but this could be just a lazy technician in Oakland, you know. And,” turning to Dornberger, “I still think we’re on schedule.” He turned and walked back to the hangar.

Dornberger shook his head. “He is driven by the desire to be the first in orbit. They all are. I want them to get there, too. But you know, Mr. Stoddard, I spent a good portion of my life designing and building machines that killed people. Some died accidentally, many more as a direct result of my skills. I have to live with that for the rest of my life. I want to put Ridley and his friends into orbit. I have the dream, too. But I also have other dreams…dreams I would like to make go away. It is most likely my penance that they never will. And I still think the pull to the left is dihedral effect…” He turned, muttering to himself, and walked away.

Stoddard kept looking at the white plane on the runway, surrounded by crash trucks that, this time at least, were not needed. “And I have no dreams left, except to keep my country safe. I guess that’s good enough for me.”

He turned, and went back to work. The X-14 would arrive in less than thirty days.

The Party on the Capitol Steps on November 5

 

Jon Voight rallying the troops!

This image is the only one I could find Googling all the appropriate search terms. Once again, our news media didn’t cover it much, just like with 9/12. 20,000 peaceful people, meeting and then going to visit their congresscritters – it ain’t news, yo.

Jon Voight was there, Michele Bachmann (R-MN) organized it, Mark Levin was there…I wish I could have seen this.

Obviously this wouldn’t affect Pelosi or Reid. It could make the Blue Dogs think twice about voting for this health care non-bill. That, plus the craziness in NY 23 and the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races, should let them know that de pepul ain’t necessarily willin’ to go with whatever the lefties want to do…you like your job, you stop votin’ de crazy.

 

TRS Update

 

One of a whole bunch of spaceplanes I've looked at.

I’m at over 105 K words and cruising down the home stretch…Northfield is ready to take his orbital flight, most of the other loose ends are tied up, some things are set up for the second book…and today two new books came from Amazon. One is Flying the SR-71 Blackbird, by Col. Richard H. Graham, USAF (ret.). The other is Contrails over the Mojave, by George J. Marrett. Marrett’s book has to do with flight testing in the 1960s at Edwards AFB, so it could be useful in getting a feel for Edwards. I’ve not been there, unfortunately. I’ve been to Nellis, in Las Vegas, which is another air base in a desert, but the Edwards area looks different. The other is a step-by-step description of a typical reconnaissance flight in the 1960s in the Blackbird, which could be very helpful in making scenes flying high-performance jets more believable.

 

I have to do Northfield’s flight, then a few wrapup items. I think it will wind up just over 110 K words, maybe 115K. That’s within Baen’s recommended guidelines, so I’m good there. I don’t think the story will be hurried at all.

I’ve found it difficult to pace the story. This book is written scene-by-scene, usually jumping ahead by several months, if not years. As I’ve closed in on the orbital flight – which is the climax of the book, of course – the intervals have been shorter and shorter. That doesn’t automatically translate to an impression of the book picking up any speed.

That sort of pacing is easier to do in a first-person book, especially a thriller. Action increases as the climax is reached. This book is a collection of moments, all of which are important – like chopping up a biography and only keeping the moments that pertain to a specific climactic event.

Even if I get bogged down reading these two books – or at least the Mojave book – before I finish, I can be done before Christmas. Ten years, off and on, I think, since I wrote the first scene. I think it was 1999 when I started this thing. I could be wrong. I do know it sat there for a couple of years without writing anything. I feel a lot better about it again, now.

“The Righteous Stuff,” Chapter 17

The Righteous Stuff

by Jeffrey D. Waggoner

based on characters and situations in the

“Domination of the Draka” novels written by S.M. Stirling

CHAPTER 17

USAF EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT TEST FACILITY

RODRIGUEZ DRY LAKE

CORUM, CALIFORNIA

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

JANUARY, 1953

 

Most people who arrived at Corum first asked, “When can I get out of this dump?” For Allan Northfield, the metal hangars and tired-looking cinderblock buildings looked like heaven. As he jumped out of the transport steamer a shining silver shape was screaming off the north-south runway, faster than Northfield had ever taken off from Pax River. He raised his free hand to shield his eyes enough to try to see just what was flying, but by the time he could focus on it, it was only a bright speck in the northern sky. He dropped his hand, and shouldered his bag again. The driver had said “straight down this road.” There didn’t seem to be any other roads.

The nearest building was about a half-mile away. The bus had already turned around and left, heading back to the Army base twenty miles away that served as a cover for Corum, among other things. Northfield shrugged and started walking, knowing that his uniform would be soaked with sweat before he got to a checkin point. It had to be over ninety degrees, and it was only eleven o’clock in the morning, and in January, yet.

Before he could walk a couple of hundred yards, he heard another set of jet engines wind up on the other side of the hangars. He still couldn’t see what was over there, and he figured that was intentional. The hangers were numbered, with large single digits painted black on their white-painted sheet metal roofs. The other buildings had no distinguishing markings at all from this distance. Northfield hoped he could find his commanding officer. It was bad enough for a Navy man to be stuck out in the desert, but to be commanded by an Air Force officer…the things a man would do to fly into space.

If anyone would get into space, from anywhere in the Alliance, it would have to be from here. No other Alliance country had anything like the American technological advantages, nor did they have the added advantage of almost a hundred former German rocket and aircraft scientists. How that had happened was still highly classified, all these years later, but rumors got out.

It had apparently been a very near thing. The US Army Airborne got to Peenemunde just ahead of a Draka strike force. It was hard to believe that the Draka were more interested in killing these men than using their skills and knowledge, but the Draka were not consistently known for military foresight. Some of the Nazi officers—there were few civilian scientists working in the rocket program—managed to hide from the Americans. They foolishly thought they could negotiate an escape with the Draka. As American troops attacked from the west, the Draka came in larger numbers from the east, and finally took over the factories, launch facilities and research laboratory. There was a rumor out there that some of the Nazi scientists actually wanted everything destroyed, so they could leverage a better position with the Draka, but no one in the Alliance really knew for sure.

Northfield had met a couple of these “Operation Paperclip” scientists. They were interesting and intelligent men, mostly unashamed of the fact they had willingly worked for the second-most brutal government on Earth. While Northfield found that hard to understand, it was very easy for him to identify with their burning desire to get into space, no matter what the cost. They seemed happy enough to work for the American government instead of Hitler, but Northfield thought they would have worked for Satan Himself if he gave them the supplies and workers they wanted without a lot of paperwork.

Am I really that much different? he thought. I’ve moved all over the country, put my body in machines that had killed other people, and now I want to fly into vacuum. And nobody is going to stand in my way!

He reached the first cinderblock building, which was sort of covered in peeling white paint. It had a couple of window air conditioners laboring in the small windows that faced east, toward the road and the hangars. A small, hand-painted sign said “Operations,” so Northfield went in the door.

“’Morning,” he said to the secretary in the outer office. “I’m Lieutenant Allan Northfield, ma’am, US Navy pilot. I was told to report to General Boyd.”

The secretary looked up at the young blond man. He looks like a pilot, she thought. He’s not very tall, but athletic, with that open but almost stupid look. She sadly shook her head. “Sorry, son. This is the Operations Office for Pacific Aircraft. We build planes and test them here. You’ll probably fly some, before long. But if you’re supposed to report to the General, you need to walk down the street to the fancy new building, with the big windows.” She fanned her face with a file folder. “It’s also the one with real air conditioning. It’s about a half-mile that way.” She pointed farther north.

“Thank you ma’am. I expect I’ll see you later.” Northfield grinned at her in what he always thought of as his “fighter pilot smile,” though he didn’t have any real combat experience. It was part of the stuff that made pilots pilots. He pulled his bag back onto his shoulder and went back out the door.

The door had hardly swung shut before a voice called from down the hall. “Sarah, was that the Navy kid?” Ridley came down the hall to her desk.

“Um, yes, sir, it was Lieutenant, um, Northfield, sir,” the secretary stammered. “I sent him to General Boyd’s office. Was that wrong?”

“No, no, you were exactly correct. I just thought I could catch him. When did he leave?”

“Just a minute or two ago.” She was talking to Ridley’s back. He had been told Northfield was a “special project” of the General’s, and he figured he should get to him right away.

 

“Lieutenant? Lieutenant?” Ridley trotted down the road, catching up with Northfield.

The Navy pilot turned. “Yes?” He squinted into the sun.

“Lieutenant, I’m Captain Jack Ridley, US Air Force, retired, sort of. I’m to be kinda your buddy around here, according to the General.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir.” The two men shook hands. They were about the same height, but Ridley was dark-haired and still had his Oklahoma twang. Northfield had a little bit of a drawl, but not quite from the south. Ridley couldn’t place it.

“Where you from, Northfield?” Ridley asked as the continued down the road toward the two-story glass structure.

“Ohio, originally.”

“Southern Ohio?”

“Nope. Northern, almost on Lake Erie. Learned to fly AT-8s there.”

“No shit? You flew Stout ATs?” Ridley couldn’t believe the kid was old enough to fly the classic trimotor aircraft.

Northfield looked a little smug. “From when I was fifteen years old, sixteen officially. Flew ’em commercial, too, passengers, mail, food, dogs, chickens…you name it, we flew it.”

“Damn. You gotta tell me about those old planes. Woulda loved to have flown one.” Ridley and Northfield continued down the road, Northfield excitedly recalling the “good old days,” ten years before.

 

“That,” declared an obviously proud Jack Ridley, “is the X-7a. I think it’s gonna be a stone bitch to fly, not the best design idea I ever saw.”

Northfield walked around and around the silver wedge-shaped aircraft, running his hands over the fuselage surface. He turned his head just a bit in Ridley’s direction. “Two seats. Does it somehow take two pilots to fly it?”

“Not supposed to.” Ridley chuckled ironically. “I personally think with five people in there, you’d still have to eject. There’s some kind of theory the design people in La Jolla have that says one pilot, and a computer, can handle it, with the computer doing most of the flying. They call it ‘fly-by-wire,’ ’cause you don’t really control the surfaces. You just…”

“Send the information down the wire to the computer, yeah, I’ve heard of it.” Northfield was still running his hands over and over the skin of the plane. “I flew some demonstrators at Langley and at Pax River that used it. You can get used to it, after a while. Kinda have to adjust your response to the feel of the plane, though. Use your butt more than feelin’ the stick.”

Ridley looked at the younger pilot with more respect. “Yeah, that’s what they told us. They don’t think the feedback system will give us a good feel for the plane. That’s one of the things we have to try out. As we go faster, there’s less time for us to screw up.”

Northfield turned to him. “What’s this thing made of?”

“Um…I don’t exactly know. Everybody asks. It’s a ceramic-metallic composite. I think it’s from outer space. Never even heats up.”

“You may be right. I’ve heard rumors…but that’s probably just what they are. You know how the hangar rats are.” He abruptly changed the subject. “But the second seat?”

“The back-seater monitors some computer displays, navigation, stuff like that. I had a devil of a time finding my way around in the X-7, since the scramjet enclosure doesn’t allow for windows to be very low on the plane. It was almost impossible to see the ground. This thing has a little camera and screen, but there’s so many instruments on the pilot’s instrument panel they put it back here. The back-seater gets to tell the pilot how to land.” He snorted. “That’s what worries me.”

“It might work.” Northfield was back at the rear of the plane, looking into the scramjet engines.

“Glad you think so, ’cause from what I hear, we’re gonna have to try it out.”

Northfield’s head popped up from behind the plane. “Really? You mean, you and me, fly it together?”

“That’s what they tell me. And you’re the pilot. I have to fly with the kid, and go along for the ride. The brass seems to really like you, kid. On the other hand, I happen to like me, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t get me killed.”

“V,” Episode 1

Laura Vandervoort in "V"

Well, it’s prettier than the 1983 original. And the TV anchor dude looks kind of like Marc Singer. And as I predicted, Anna the Boss Alien Chick is the most intriguing character on the show. Most of the rest of the characters are pretty stereotypical. The plot moved fast – we know the aliens are really big lizards (thanks, Dr. Venkman), and there are little topical bits thrown here and there. I just don’t know if there will be enough intrigue to keep it going.

One of the problems with shows like this – and a lot of genre shows with arcs, nowadays – is the balance between giving you new information and keeping you hanging.I found Lost to be too drawn out and I gave up watching it. I think Fringe strikes a successful balance. When you do a remake, you have to figure out how to maintain that mystery balance. Ron Moore figured that out, by going in a new direction in Battlestar Galactica. (Some would say, and I half-agree with them, that he held the final pieces of information to the end and then didn’t quite deliver.) This one is going to be dicey. Good luck, writers!

The inclusion of Alan Tudyk as an FBI agent/lizard is a pretty good casting decision, though. Now that I think about it, replacing the cast of this show with the cast of Firefly would have been a plus: Sean Maher (Simon in Firefly) could have covered the TV anchor part as well as the Shep Smith lookalike. Nathan Fillon could have played the FBI agent. Yeah, I know it’s a female character in the show. All I say is: Starbuck. So could Gina Torres.

Hmm. Where does Ron Glass fit in? He would be another really imposing Visitor, maybe. Jewel Staite is just so dang cute she could handle a part like the blond V chick above.

Well, I can dream.

Gold at over $ 1000 an ounce?!

Back in ‘79-80, when I was in graduate school, I remember waking up every day and hearing that inflation during the Carter Administration was causing the little money we had to lose value on a daily basis. In fact, I had to cut my graduate studies short and wrap it up in a year because I had to get back into the work force fast – the budget we had planned to use for that year went out the window just because of inflation. We lost almost 20% of the value to our money in a single year.

That spike is what I'm talking about

 

 

One of the big indicators I remember hearing about every morning was the price of gold. It was over $ 300 an ounce, and rising fast. I thought that was a bad thing.

I heard this morning that gold is over a thousand dollars an ounce. You can check on that price here. The rise in the price of gold makes me fear that overall inflation can’t be far behind, and that is a scary thing, friends. I’m no economist, but I sure would like to see some other direction in government  - almost any other direction! – instead of the nuttiness we have going on right now.

10 year gold prices

 

 

“The Righteous Stuff” – Chapter 16

The Righteous Stuff

by Jeffrey D. Waggoner

based on characters and situations in the

“Domination of the Draka” novels written by S.M. Stirling

 

CHAPTER 16

USAF EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT TEST FACILITY

RODRIGUEZ DRY LAKE

CORUM, CALIFORNIA

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DECEMBER, 1952

 

General Boyd walked into the cinderblock office building that housed the Pacific Aircraft offices. It was almost comfortable, although the aging air conditioners made the air a lot more humid than it ever was outside, on the desert. He smiled at the receptionist. “Alice, is Jack Ridley here?”

“Yes, sir, just one moment.” She picked up the phone, spoke quietly. “He’ll be out in just a moment, General.”

“That’s okay, Alice, I know the way.” Boyd breezed past the secretary, who was too in awe to protest. He walked back down the narrow hallway to the last door on the left, and met Ridley as he was coming out the door.

“Sit down, Jack. I’d rather speak to you here if I could.”

“Well, sure.” As Ridley backpedaled into the small office, he had to make room for Stoddard, who was right behind him. The three men shuffled around the room, already full of papers, a drafting board, and a filing cabinet. Stoddard went out into the hall and returned with another metal folding chair.

Once the dance was over, and all three were seated, Boyd handed a thin manila folder to Ridley. “Jack, I need a favor, and I’d like it to be kept quiet.”

“Whatever you need, sir.” Ridley glanced down at the folder, opened it and scanned the contents.

“Now, I know you’re not Air Force any more, Jack, and I can’t order this. Still, I think I can help you and you can help me.” He paused, while Jack finished leafing through the pages in the folder. “You know we’re eating up pilots ’way faster than we wish we did out here. People in New York are actually starting to notice. The Congress has made some inquiries, and I’m afraid some loudmouth Congressman is going to start an investigation. We lost sixteen pilots this year, out of a total of only about fifty. That’s too many good men gone, and too many planes lost as well.”

“General, you know as well as I do that you have to test prototype planes until they break. That’s how you reduce your losses in the field. You have to accept that some of us aren’t coming back. We don’t like it either, but we all know that it’s the way it is. Nobody is more careful than an old test pilot.”

Stoddard snorted. “Jack, there are no old test pilots. You’re not even forty!”

“And I plan to be older. Anyway, what does any of this have to do with this Northfield guy?”

Boyd sat back and waved at the folder in Ridley’s hand. “This young man is the most intuitive pilot our folks have ever seen. He started flying at fourteen, near as we can figure, and was flying old Stout trimotors commercially before he was out of high school­–legal or not. Lots of stuff like that happened during the war, in out-of-the-way places like that.” He shook his head. “He’s been prime test pilot for the Navy for the past six months at Pax River, wringing out all their new carrier planes.”

“A squid?” Jack, all Air Force, raised an eyebrow.

“Some of my best friends are Navy, Jack,” Stoddard reminded him.

“Went to engineering school at Patrick Henry U in Cleveland, of all places, and they only had Naval ROTC. Naval ROTC, on a lake! It was his ticket off the farm, I gather. Lots of farm boys join the Navy, for some reason.” Boyd chuckled. “Probably better than lookin’ at the ass end of a mule all day, even bein’ a squid.”

“So we get this Navy hotshot. Am I supposed to babysit him?” Ridley was starting to get annoyed at the prospects of taking care of some Admiral’s fair-haired boy.

“Nope. I’m assigning you two to the same team. I just thought you would like to know more about him, and maybe help him feel a little more at home. Us blue-suiters could give him some serious trouble, and I don’t want him getting killed trying to prove himself to you guys.” Boyd was about to go into commanding-officer mode, Ridley knew, and even if Ridley was a civilian contractor’s employee, they served at the pleasure of the Air Force. Ridley never forgot that, nor did he ever forget his Air Force training.

“Yes, sir. I’ll watch out for him. But if he’s as good as this says–and you say he is–I won’t be much use. Squid or no squid, he’s a pilot. He’ll test himself, as well as the planes.” He paused, then said thoughtfully, “But you mentioned assigning us to a team…”

“Right. You, he, Hoover, Ehricke, Stoddard here, two guys from out west. You’re the test team for the X-14 prototype. It’s time to get it out of the hangar and into the air.”

“You’re joking! The bomber…”

“Is just about ready. It should be out here in February. Before that, you get Al checked out in the X-7a. It should be ready to go for hypersonic the end of January, after the deck is tight again.” The winter rains would begin soon, and the hard desert surface they used for runways would be mud for a couple of weeks to a month. It was the closest thing to a vacation anyone ever got, here.

“Hoover and I were supposed to fly that one…”

“Hoover’s going to be checked out by the Convair boys as test pilot for the bomber. At Mach two, carrying that monster on its back, that’s the real problem–not flyin’ a plywood glider.” Boyd stood, and the others stood with him, old military reflexes kicking in. “I know Bob Hoover won’t like it, but it’s the biggest high-performance airplane in the world, and I think he’ll get over it once he sees the thing. It’s pretty impressive.”

Suddenly a tremendous boom rattled the windows and bounced the coffee cup on the file cabinet. All three men looked out the window, even though it faced away from the flight line. The sound of the fire trucks and ambulances came almost immediately.

“Take care of this one, Jack,” said Boyd. “We need all the great pilots we can get.” He sighed. “ I best get out there and see.”

“V” remake on ABC tomorrow night…

Diana from the old series

I don’t know if the new series will be any good or not. The old one started out trying to serious, with references to the Holocaust and such, but unfortunately spiraled down to camp. The new one is supposed to have great “production values,” which means they spent real dollars on CGI, but that’s not enough to keep it going. They did do one brilliant bit of casting, though:

Morena Baccarin

She was gorgeous and cool in Firefly, and was understated but showed acting talent in Heartland. She’s done a bunch of other stuff that I didn’t know about until I looked her up in IMDB. She might be the producers’ secret weapon.

“The Righteous Stuff” – Chapter 15

The Righteous Stuff

by Jeffrey D. Waggoner

based on characters and situations in the

“Domination of the Draka” novels written by S.M. Stirling

CHAPTER 15

USAF EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT TEST FACILITY

RODRIGUEZ DRY LAKE

CORUM, CALIFORNIA

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

NOVEMBER, 1952

 

Nathaniel Stoddard sat in the air-conditioned office of the head honcho, as he liked to think of him, Major General Albert Boyd, the Director of the Flight Test Facility. The Facility had no real name, since it in many official ways didn’t really exist. Stoddard assumed they were waiting for a really important pilot to get himself killed, somebody famous, and then name the place after him.

The trouble was that nobody here was famous, he thought. Probably every world flight record was broken here every week, and nobody outside of here and maybe Langley knew anything about it. The whole place was so hush-hush it didn’t even appear on any maps. There was a huge desert area marked “US Army Proving Ground,” but even with the six long runways marked on the dry lake, this facility took up less than a tenth of the area the Army declared as off-limits.

That was fine with Stoddard. It made his job–his real job–that much easier. His cover, that was something else again. He had spent the last six weeks getting up to speed on aircraft maintenance from men who didn’t even know what kind of engines they were using here! It was likely he would be discovered, his cover blown, in a day or two. That was fine with him, too. This damnfool stunt was dreamed up by the boys in the OSS in New York, and if it didn’t work out he could go home before Christmas.

General Boyd came back into the office and sat down behind the desk. A fine former test pilot himself, Boyd was much like Stoddard in that he hated to be behind a desk all day. As he started to speak, a set of jet engines wound up outside the building, across the road on the flight line, and Boyd stopped and swiveled his chair to see out the plate glass windows.

The whole building was glass, the new trend in government office buildings. Even though the air conditioning worked reasonably well right now, the high desert of California was a true test of the skill of the engineers who designed the system for this building. In December it was comfortable. Stoddard had his doubts about August. With a little luck, he would be long gone from here by then.

The engines were screaming now, and then, a flash of a white shape between the hangars across the road. Stoddard had no idea what was taking off. It moved so fast even on the ground that he barely saw it at all.

“-9, doing speed runs out on the desert today. Testing the new afterburners. Mach two-five level, one point two on climb. Let’s see the Snakes beat that–supersonic on climb!” Boyd was obviously excited about the plane, and seemed genuinely excited about all the tests going on. “You know, Nate, this is a dream come true for someone like me, except that they won’t let me fly any more. At least, nothing that goes two point five Mach!” He leaned back and chuckled. “I hate it, and I bitch, and I get nowhere. Still, this is where it’s happening, and I’d sure hate to be anywhere else.”

“I understand, sir. It must be exciting for you. For me, it’s somewhat disconcerting. I’m sure my cover will be blown inside of forty-eight hours.” Stoddard’s horse face looked more disconsolate than usual.

It was not enough to spoil Boyd’s mood. “Cheer up, son. It could be worse. You could be in Japan.”

Stoddard had to agree with that. Japan was still a mess, recovering from political upheaval, the nuclear bombings of the war and related radiation deaths, and constant infiltration and sabotage by the Draka’s Asian spies. Even MacArthur had given up in disgust. There was word the new governor would be General Patton, and it was just possible there would need to be another bloodbath before the situation settled down.

Boyd continued, “You obviously wouldn’t work out as an engine maintenance man. I don’t even know how those engines are put together, anymore! I’m going to assign you to one of my best pilots, to be sort of his personal secretary. He’s an engineer besides, damn fine one. And he’s been flying all the really secret stuff. He may just be the first man into space, if he’s careful and lucky. His name’s Jack Ridley, and I’ve already let him know what we’re up to. You’ll like him, I think. He’s a real personable sort.”

“Thank you, sir. This might just work, if no one questions me for any length of time. Ridley might help a lot with that.”

Boyd stood, and Stoddard stood in return. They shook hands, and Boyd called to his secretary to give Stoddard directions as to where he might find Jack Ridley. Stoddard headed out of the building, turned left and walked about a half mile north to the Pacific Aircraft hangars.

 

Pacific Aircraft, the result of a pending merger between Bell and Consolidated Aircraft, had moved their headquarters and manufacturing plants to San Diego a couple of months before. The old Bell Aircraft facilities in upstate New York were too far from any flight test fields that were being used for any of their new designs, and California was the place to be. The complex of hangars here was used for final assembly, and for maintenance of test aircraft. There was also a low, single-story building next to the hangars made of cement block, with small windows mounted high. It didn’t look very imposing for the place where such amazing things were being done. The hangars, six of them, were painted white. The letters “PACIFIC” had recently been painted on them in red, but the paint was already peeling. Stoddard walked past the first three hangars to the white single-story building, which had a low sign out front that said “Operations.”

Inside, the air conditioners were noisy and the air was humid, remarkable in the desert. A tired-looking secretary in her late twenties looked up from her desk.

“I’m here to see Jack Ridley. General Boyd sent me.” Stoddard told the secretary. She nodded, not even speaking, picked up a phone and pressed a single button.

“He’s here.” She spoke quietly, then put the phone down and smiled at Stoddard. She still looked tired. “He’s expecting you. He’ll be here in a minute.”

“Major? I’m Jack Ridley.” Ridley came around the corner from the corridor and put out his hand. Stoddard was surprised how short Ridley was. He was about his age, and tanned leathery from the desert sun. From the briefing materials Stoddard had read, he knew that Ridley had been out here since just after the end of the war. Ace in the war, flying P-42s against Japan. Eight definite kills, two maybes. Somehow he also managed to pick up a degree in aeronautical engineering and another in mathematics. “Glad you could come while I’m still around. Gotta go to Langley for a few days, leavin’ tomorrow. Come on down to my office, and we’ll talk.” Ridley had the Oklahoma drawl of his youth, and Stoddard wouldn’t have been surprised if he exaggerated it for effect. Langley, he thought. Oh…he means the one in the tidewater country of Virginia, where they test airplanes. The other one is supposed to be secret, even from these people.

Ridley’s office was a little bigger than a closet, and had no desk, just a drafting board and mountains of paper. He apologized for the mess and swept a pile of blueprints off a chair, motioning to Stoddard to sit. There were blueprints taped to one wall, a development sequence chart to the other. At least Ridley had one of the small windows, half taken up by a wheezing window air conditioning unit. Through the window Stoddard could see the flight line, with two silver dart shapes on the concrete. They were a couple of hangars away, maybe two hundred yards; one had three technicians looking it over, with inspection hatches open. A couple of carts of equipment were sitting next to the plane. The other plane was sitting alone, without a technician within fifty yards. Security nightmare, thought Stoddard. They think no one wants to come out here and bother them, that they’re safe. “Let’s go outside, Jack,” said Stoddard suddenly. “I’d rather see what’s going on right away.”

Ridley looked surprised, but agreed. “Well, okay, if you want to. I hoped I could give you some background first…”

“Let’s do that on the way. What’s the newest plane out here?”

 

The two men walked past the first dart shape, the one with the technicians working on it. Ridley stopped about twenty feet away, and waved at the techs. “This is the X-7. It’s a testbed for the second-generation scramjet–that’s supersonic ramjet—the engine that Dornberger’s boys have been having so much trouble with. I flew the X-6, with the first generation scram, ten times in the past year. It eats fuel like a bandit, and still is really touchy on the controls, but we went over Mach 4 with it, consistently, flight after flight.” He shook his head. “This little beast is designed to be mostly engine, so it won’t be able to land back here unless we fly it a long ways away hung on the bomber, then drop it and shoot back to Corum.”

“It looks like it’s all engine,” Stoddard remarked as he walked around the plane.

“Practically so. The whole underbelly is a part of the engine, really. It’s really hard to maintain the supersonic airflow through the engine. I flamed the ’6 out a half a dozen times before Ehricke figured out the airflow was dropping subsonic way too early. The design of the plane won’t do it, so they had to start over. Back in the late Forties they thought they had it figured out, but it took years to get it right. The computers say this design will handle really high airflow speeds—the engine will work until the airframe melts.” He chuckled. “That’s what we like to hear. Like there’s not enough to worry about with the plane already.”

Stoddard looked thoughtful. “How do you control something that goes that fast? It seems to me that the control surfaces are too small. Not like the flaps and stuff on a regular plane.”

“At 4,000 miles an hour, it doesn’t take much to turn one of these! The X-6 over-controlled because the linkage was hydraulically-controlled. It felt like it was boosted too much, and they never did get it fixed. This thing has a “fly-by-wire” system, which means the movements of the stick just send electrical signals to the computer. It does all the work. Next, they say they can put the computer in the loop to help control the plane, smooth out all the little wiggles humans put in.” He chuckled and shook his head again. “Sure. But those wiggles helped keep me alive more than once. You gotta feel what she’s doin’, you know?”

They walked over to the second plane. This one was larger than it appeared from the office, but looked a lot like the big brother of the X-7. Ridley waved at it. “This one scares me—even me! It’s officially called the X-7a, because it really is just a bigger, two-place version of the X-7. That worries me, because you can’t just scale up an airplane design—if you could, you could grow grasshoppers the size of locomotives. This stuff”—he walked over and ran his hand over the wing—“is the most amazing material I’ve ever seen. Nobody has ever given me a good story on how it was invented. It’s sort of a cermet, you know what that is?”

Stoddard grunted. “Sort of.”

“Anyway, it’s not like any other cermet I’ve seen, and I’ve seen most of ’em. This stuff doesn’t get hot. The X-6 was the first plane to have it, and I hopped out onto the wing after flyin’ Mach four and it wasn’t even warm! Nobody knows how strong it really is, either. You can’t cut it; it’s forged somehow, into pieces exactly the right size and shape. The good thing is they can make two as cheap as one, so we have spare parts. We just don’t break any!”

“Look, Ridley, you know I’m here to deal with security issues…”

“I know, I know. And it’s just sittin’ here. You can’t tell anything by lookin’ at the plane, and you for sure can’t saw off a piece of this stuff. The extra castings are in San Diego, at the Pacific factory. I suppose you could take pictures—the design is dictated by the airflows, so if anyone had a good computer, they could probably model the same thing.”

Stoddard stopped him. “No, they can’t. Our intelligence says that the Snakes are working on the same kind of things we are. They don’t have our computer technology yet, as far as we can tell. You guys model these airframes in the computer somehow, right?”

“Sure. We have about six different airflow simulators…”

“Well, the Snakes built the biggest nuclear reactor farm in the world on the Dnieper River. We think they built a wind tunnel there, maybe they can get over 4,000 miles per hour out of it. I can’t imagine it! But they have a big military base on the Black Sea, and it would be the perfect place to do the kind of stuff you do here.” He waved his hand around. “After the war, not too many people were left there, you know. It’s a lot like here, in fact. Anyway, they could learn a lot from a few pictures here. As far as San Diego, I’ll make a few calls.”

“Good. That’s the key, really. Without this miracle stuff, we could never build these planes. We were hitting a real brick wall until last spring, when they made this breakthrough. You know, for all I know, this stuff could come from outer space!”

Stoddard let that comment pass. “So when does this one go up?”

“We’re waiting for a new plane to carry it. It’s too big for conventional bombers. The XB-60 will be ready in a month or so. It’s the only supersonic bomber we have, though I don’t know what we need one for. Curtiss­–Convair is building that baby. Lowest bidder, don’tcha know. It’s a big mother, though, ’way over-designed for carrying bombs to Snakeland. Takes too much fuel to make it there and back. I think it’s the orbital carrier, but nobody tells me much.”

“Orbital carrier?”

“Yeah, the plane that will lift the first orbital spaceplane. Miracle stuff or not, we can’t carry enough methane, or hydrogen, for that matter, for a real orbital mission. If we can get a ramjet-scramjet-rocket hybrid working, we can fly it to orbit. It just can’t take off from the ground by itself. The ‘blue sky boys’ are talking about antimatter…” He drifted off, looking at the horizon.

“Blue sky boys. Antimatter. Pulp-novel stuff?”

“Nope, not really. They say it will take a while, and a heck of a lot of energy, but it’s possible. A teaspoon would take that baby to the moon.” Ridley smiled, as he waved toward the plane. “But you need someplace to keep it. That’s the trick. Room-temperature superconductors, magnetic bottles, stuff like that. The Blue Sky Boys are working on it.”

“Who are they?” Stoddard looked puzzled now. He thought that was just a nickname, but now it sounded sort of official.

“Officially, the ‘Advanced Research Projects Agency.’ Sometimes one of them comes out here and briefs Dornberger and Ehricke. Ehricke talks too much. I can’t believe he was a very good Nazi. Anyway, they do all kinds of crazy stuff. They say they’re mapping the next twenty years in space. We had this guy in here a couple of weeks ago, a squid name of Heinlein, a Captain, real stuffed shirt looked like to me. All spit-and-polish, not like us out here. Scared holy hell out of the Germans, too. I don’t know what he told them. Ehricke was real quiet about that one.” They walked off toward the sixth hangar. Unlike the others, the hangar doors were closed.

“I’ve heard of ARPA. They’re based out of Langley, I think. A friend of mine used to work with them. He’s not able to talk about it, but he’s hinted that he had some great stories to tell.”

“I don’t doubt it. I might find out tomorrow, when I go to get briefed. I want you to see this; if there’s anything to protect around here, this is it.” Ridley took out his keys from his pocket, selected two, and unlocked both locks on the passage doors. He opened the door and flipped on the light switches inside.

 

The hangar was filled with a single aircraft, painted gleaming white. Stoddard let his eyes adjust for a moment. The plane barely looked like it would fly. It didn’t even have wings, not really; just small fins on the ends of a big, triangular–shaped box. The box was curved and streamlined, and looked like it was moving even while it was standing still. Instead of landing gear, the plane sat on three large support jacks. The two men walked inside the hangar and Ridley carefully locked the door behind him.

“This one we don’t want the Draka to see. It won’t ever fly, not under its own power. It’s a mockup, mostly plywood over an aluminum frame. It’ll either be the X-11 or X-14, depends on how long it takes to build.”

The plane was easily twice the length of the other test planes Stoddard had seen; maybe ninety to a hundred feet long. The mockup had no markings on it, no tail number, no nothing. It was covered in featureless white paint. It somehow made it look even larger. Stoddard figured it was almost the size of a medium–sized airliner. “Why the numbers?” he asked.

“The numbers up to eleven are taken. Twelve is some kind of unmanned missile, being tested on the California coast. It’s supposed to be smart enough to fly down the street on its own and take out a building. I’ll believe that when I see it.” Ridley turned to him and smiled. “And no self-respecting pilot would fly number 13, no way.”

“So why is the mockup out here?”

“Remember that big bomber they promised? Somehow, this thing is supposed to sit on top of the wing, which is one big triangle, okay? Then the bomber takes off and flies around, to see if it’s stable enough with the mockup on top. The computers say so, but nobody every really knows until we take it out and try it.” Ridley waved up at the ship and continued. “What makes this important to you is that it is a major jump in airframe design. The wind tunnel the Draka built is nothing compared to the computer time that went into the design of this thing. If it works, we’ll be years ahead of them. Even fuzzy pictures could save them months, if not years, of design experimentation. I’ve been griping about the security here for weeks. Hell, that’s probably why you’re assigned to me, to try to keep me happier and shut me up. The pilots don’t worry because they can’t fly it, and the brass think a couple of locks is enough. Dornberger is worried, but they just figure that’s his Nazi paranoia at work.”

Ridley headed for the door, unlocking it and shutting off the lights. “So that’s the crazy stuff. Otherwise, we just fly planes faster than anyone else, and every year, about a dozen of us or more get killed by them. Any questions?”

Apollo 17’s American Flag

This image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the American flag that was left on the Moon by Apollo 17, as well as the Lunar Module Descent Stage.

Americans (and some former German rocket scientists, OK, sure) did this, folks. We could do it again.

Yeah, faked. Riiight.