One Is the Loneliest Number Read online

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  There was, of course, no hope of Maj’s findings doing the Valkyrie itself any good, for it would never fly again. The only remaining one, AV-1, stood silent and thoughtful at the Modern Aviation hangar at the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson, a faint air of tragedy and sorrow hanging about her. She was the last of her line, for her younger sister, AV-2, had somehow been bumped by a F-104 Starfighter doing chase-plane duty on her forty-first flight. With the stabilizers torn off one wing by the collision, she could not be saved from the inverted flat spin that ensued. She’d crashed, killing one of her two pilots who was unable to eject in time. And before that had happened, AV-3 had been stillborn, her funding axed before she was built.

  Together, for Maj, the three aircraft drew a picture of tremendous potential that, due to bad luck, shortsightedness, and a design too advanced for that time’s materials technology, had never been realized. You could sit and mourn that lost potential and do nothing more about it, or you could rebuild it, and get it as right as it could have been gotten, and offer the result up on the altar of possibilities yet to come. “Doing something,” her mother had said to her one evening, passing through the simulation on her way to a meeting to pick up some recipes, “matters … even when it doesn’t seem to.”

  “It’s a lot bigger than a Blackbird,” said Sander as the group paused under the towering twin tail, fifty feet above their heads at its top, and now blazing in the early sunshine. He had done a Blackbird sim some while back, and it had been a lovely one, mimicking the graceful old plane right down to the way it sat on the tarmac and leaked fuel out its joints before the heat of supersonic flight “grew” the plane a foot longer and into its proper shape. Flight crews had given it some rude names because of this habit. All Maj knew was that she kept smelling Avtur for about a week after spending time in that sim with Sander and the others. It was probably psychosomatic, she kept telling herself, much preferring that idea to the thought that her brain was starting to lose the ability to tell the difference between real and virtual experience.

  “The fuel it carries,” Maj said, “weighs as much as the Blackbird did, just by itself. She was designed for situations where they didn’t feel they could count on midair refueling.” Because civilization might already have been destroyed in the exchange of missiles …

  They all walked on, down around the tail and up the other side. The frost was already vanishing off the tarmac as they left, leaving only the occasional wet patch where it had been particularly thick. The sun glanced off that single coat of white paint, blazing. The needle nose was almost invisible in the bright day from this angle. Maj hoped they could see what she saw .. . that the Valkyrie was just a desperately cool plane.

  One of the things that had attracted Maj to the XB-70, besides the plane’s fraught history, was simply how beautiful she was. She had the look of the old SSTs that were (in a way) her children: that same long, straight, patrician needle nose that dropped for landing, and the slender body and huge graceful delta wing reminiscent of the better-known Concordes. Maj had fallen in love with those old passenger planes long ago, even though they had been in retirement for years, and when she had accidentally discovered this discarded, lovely stepmother to their line, she had sworn to simulate it properly. The discovery that the plane had been trouble to its designers from the word “go” had only made Maj more determined to make her fly again.

  Commercial aviation had gone in far different directions, taking up again another nearly lost heritage, the flying wing. Now huge subsonic lifting-body-based craft, Boeing-MDD’s replacements for the old 747’s, routinely and economically carried thousands of people at once to their destinations; and the much faster and much more expensive hypersonic suborbital craft—aerospace planes—had made their debut a few years back, in their design and general looks more stepchildren of the Space Shuttle than of the XB-70. None of them, though, had the elegance, the cachet, of the Valkyrie … at least not to Maj’s mind. And it looked like some of the others agreed with her.

  “Those are some wings,” Fergal said.

  “They keep them straight for takeoff and landing,” Maj said. “But they flex down at the tips, about a third of the way down—about twenty-five degrees for speeds between 300 knots and Mach one-point-four, and then down to sixty-five degrees for the run up to Mach three. They’re the largest movable aerodynamic device ever used … twenty feet wide at the trailing edge.”

  “Very impressive,” Roddy said in that slightly sneering voice that meant he might be impressed but wasn’t going to show it.

  Maj ignored him. They stopped again beside the cockpit ladder. “She’s a nice one,” said Sander.

  ” ‘She,’ ” Roddy said, his voice mocking.

  “What else? Ships and planes are always she,” Maj said calmly. “Call them ‘he’ and they crash and burn. Not an opinion, just the truth. ‘You can’t have opinions about the truth…. ‘ ” It was a favorite quote of her dad’s, attributed to some dead musician.

  Roddy snorted and turned away. “Okay,” Sander said. “We’ve all read the code. We’ve seen the craft, and physically she matches your stats—that’s plain. So what’re you going to do?”

  “I’m going to do what they did the first time out,” Maj said. “Take her up and see how she does.”

  “You’re not going to break the sound barrier?”

  “Chicken,” Roddy said, and began to cluck.

  Fergal looked at Roddy coolly. “Revealing your true colors again, are you, our Roderick?” Fergal’s Yorkshire accent went broader than usual. Maj got the feeling, as she occasionally had before, that Fergal didn’t care much for Roddy either.

  “Rhode Island Red,” Maj said. “As for not going supersonic, au contraire, mon vieux Sandre. I intend to take her to Mach two and hold her there for what they later referred to as a ‘heat soak’—some of the parts never really functioned correctly until they’d had time to settle into their proper shapes at the kind of high heat you get from running supersonic for prolonged periods. Naturally, she will give me trouble when I try this. She gave them trouble too. But I believe I can handle it better than they did.”

  “Didn’t the landing gear burn up?”

  “Not quite,” Maj said. ‘There was a pressure surge in the brake system. It locked the rear wheels of the left-side main gear, and the tires caught fire. I think that was due to a mismanagement of one of the hydraulic systems. I’m going to see if I can correct it this time out.”

  “Where’s our focus?” Fergal said. Normally when you had a number of people preparing to experience a simulation all together, and when the simming area was cramped, you elected a “focus” point from which they would appear to experience it.

  “Back of the cockpit,” Maj said, “as if against the end of the canopy. There’ll also be a secondary focus in one of the chase planes.”

  Very suddenly, and Maj hoped showily, they appeared on the tarmac as they were mentioned: a threesome of F-104 Star-fighters, their brushed chrome gleaming blindingly in the sun and their engines already wound up and screaming with mechanical enthusiasm. Everyone winced and covered their ears. Maj flushed again with embarrassment. She had forgotten to turn the environmental sound down; it had been so quiet before dawn. She said, “Down sixty decibels, please.” The environment obliged her, and the triple scream of the Starfighters backed itself down to a trio of elegant laryngitic whispers.

  “So,” Maj said, “if you all want to make yourselves comfortable …”

  Eight chairs of wildly varying kinds appeared well away from the Valkyrie, and the Group of Seven went off to settle themselves in them. Maj found herself standing there alone, and feeling, for the first time this morning, somewhat scared.

  Why? There’s nothing to be scared of… .

  Except that she hated not getting things right. .. especially in front of people. And if anything went wrong with this—

  She breathed in, breathed out, and turned back to the ladder, which was now
wet and slick with the melted frost. As she put her hands on the rung at eye level to start climbing, Maj thought, This really is a good simulation. They won’t be able to see how much my hands are sweating… .

  She settled herself into the left-hand seat, breathed in, breathed out again, and started doing up the six-point restraints. Her counterpart had already done this.

  “Engine start?” said Maj Two.

  “Start the list,” said Maj.

  “Final fuel weight—”

  “One hundred thirty-two thousand pounds.”

  “Nose ramp—”

  “Down.”

  “Flap position—”

  “To auto.”

  “Wing-tip fold—”

  “To auto.”

  “Engine number one start.”

  “Starting.”

  The whine, the sudden shudder through the airframe, never failed to catch her by surprise—it was the concentrated sound of rising adrenaline, and she could actually feel it at both sides of her middle back, a rush of paradoxical heat. Rosweisse was alive. “Fuel mix—”

  “Full and rich.”

  “Hydraulic pressure—”

  “Primary system is coming up.”

  Maj was astonished at how dry her mouth was getting. It’s not like I haven 7 been through this before, she thought. But some sims are less simulated than others, I guess —

  “Flap pos,” she said, and it came out strangled.

  Her other self laughed—possibly the wisest response under the circumstances, and certainly something Maj would have done herself if she were calmer. Well, I just did it myself. Oh, never mind!

  “Full play, position to auto,” Maj Two said.

  “Rudder—”

  “Full play, position to auto.”

  “Engine one heat?”

  “She’s on the line.”

  “Good. Engine number two start.”

  “Starting. Mix rich and full—”

  The whole aircraft shuddered with the torque of the quick-start sequence, the far starboard-side engine whining into life and the whine rapidly becoming a scream balancing the yell to port. “Mach repeaters—”

  “At zero-point-zero … Alert!” said Maj Two as a subdued squawking started in the cockpit. “Failure in number two engine’s cooling loop.”

  “Shut down and restart.” This was in the original flight. Maj had not yet tracked the cause of this particular problem to its lair, and there was nothing to do but run the simulation “around” it. Fortunately, the problem had not affected anything important in reality.

  Maj Two shut down the number-two engine, and she and Maj started to wait the mandated two minutes. Down on the tarmac, Maj could see some heads craning as people not yet riding inside the cockpit at the “focus” started wondering what was going on. From behind her, though, Fergal’s voice said, “You change your mind, Mads?”

  “It’s in the schedule,” Maj said, with only slight annoyance. “Check the code. Restart?”

  “Restarting.”

  The shudder came again, and the engine came up screaming. This time the note it sang was steady. “Time check?”

  “Seven fourteen.”

  “Perfect. Engine three start.”

  “Starting. Rich and full—”

  “Engine four—”

  “Starting—”

  “Canopy,” Maj said, and her counterpart reached over and hit the toggle. The shudder repeated once with each engine, the scream scaled up even through the cockpit’s sealing, and the sound of it changed a little as the cockpit pressurized. Maj swallowed, swallowed again. Her ears popped.

  “That everything?” she said to Maj Two.

  “Nothing left but to roll.”

  “Let’s roll then,” Maj said, gripping the yoke. “Chocks away.”

  The chocks vanished. Slowly, an inch, two inches, five, a foot, Rosweisse rolled forward and began to gain speed.

  “Muroc Control, this is AV/1,” Maj said. She always smiled a little when she called them. “Control” was a single tin shed with a radio and a bored duty officer. “On the apron, for taxi way one zero.”

  “Air Vehicle One, you are clear for taxi on one zero to active four left, cleared to take off at your discretion,” said the dry voice—yet another purveyor of the worldwide air-traffic-control accent, the same middle-pitched easygoing drawl wherever you went.

  “Roger, Muroc Control, thank you very much and good day,” Maj said, and was glad she had nothing else to say. Her mouth felt dryer than the whole Mojave Desert around her. She swallowed one more time, a fairly hopeless business— there was no spit left in her.

  Maj concentrated on taxiing, which was more than enough of a problem. This early in the Valkyrie’s development, no one had yet figured out why she was such a beast to taxi. Her front gear in particular developed a terrible and violent chatter at low speeds, which meant that it took hundreds of feet to brake at speeds as low as five miles an hour. For the moment, all Maj could do was set her teeth, which her counterpart was doing as well, to judge by the strained look on her face. “End of one zero coming up,” said Maj Two after a moment, her voice wobbling amusingly with the wobbling of the aircraft.

  “Left turn and turnaround at the end of four,” Maj said. Her counterpart nodded. They had been through this part of the drill often enough.

  They wobbled and wobbled and wobbled as the turn came up. “Did they ever figure out what this problem was?” said Alain from “behind” them.

  “Not that I know of,” Maj said. “I think all the pilots needed dentures after they retired from flying this plane.”

  Maj cranked the yoke around as they came to the turn. The wobbling got much worse, as it always did, and then slightly better as they straightened out. It was a longish run down to the end of the runway, but not one of the watching simmers spoke. They were all used to prolonged quiet periods in some simulations, since all too many great events consisted of periods of frantic action interspersed with much longer periods of mind-dulling inactivity.

  “Let’s bring her around,” Maj said to Maj Two at last. The two of them hauled on the yokes together; the Valkyrie had a poor turning circle, and her hydraulics were not at their best when working inside such a tight radius. After a few minutes, taking their time—for Maj had no intention of making the plane wobble any worse than it was already doing—they lined up on four left and sat still a moment.

  Maj looked down the long silvery expanse of dried salt pan reaching away before them. Even this early in the morning, heat was beginning to shimmer down the length of it, a silvery curtain through which the distant dun-and-beige mountains wavered indistinct and unreal.

  “Time check,” Maj said.

  “Eight twenty-four.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Maj said, for that was exactly the time when the test flight in question had begun her takeoff roll. She reached to her right for the six throttles, folded her hand around them, and made sure of her grip—they were a handful. “Ready?”

  “Ready!”

  Was that other voice sounding a little dry, a little squeaky, as well? Maj grinned, and shoved the throttles forward to the pre-afterburner maximum.

  Rosweisse started to roll. The wobbling got much worse— then slowly as she picked up speed, it got less, then suddenly went away altogether. “Ten knots,” said Maj Two. “Fifteen. Twenty—”

  Maj swallowed, hopelessly, one last time, watching the ground-speed indicator and airspeed indicator inch upward in tandem. “Forty. Fifty—”

  The scream of the engines blotted out the rumble of the runway now. The slightest change to the feel of the aircraft had already started, that lightening, the sense that she wanted to be up, would be up, any second now—she was fighting with gravity, and winning. “One hundred knots. One-ten— one-twenty—one-fifty—”

  “Vee one,” Maj said, watching the silvery baked mud-salt surface pour past them, too fast for her to focus on anything further away than fifty feet or so. Joshua trees flic
ked past like broken-armed stick figures as the aircraft passed stall speed and continued to accelerate, those big wings biting the wind now, the craft bucking a little as the pre-takeoff turbulence started to build over the airfoil. Only the mountains ahead and to the sides seemed to remain unmoving. “One-seventy—”

  Maj tried to swallow and failed. “Coming up on rotate,” she said, and tightened her grip on the yoke.

  “One-ninety. Vee two—”

  “Rotating,” Maj said, and pulled back, watching the angle-of-attack meter closely. Too sharp and Rosweisse would flip over; she’d tried to do that before—“AOA nine degrees—”

  The nose started to lift. There was a sudden decrease of noise behind them as the nose gear, far behind them, lifted free of the ground. The yoke shook in Maj’s hands. She held it steady as her seat seemed to tilt back and the front of the cockpit window filled with hard blue sky. “Two hundred—”

  —and then came a kind of sudden bound, and the runway rumble was simply gone entirely. Nothing remained but the scream of the engines far behind, and a relentless, wonderful pushing in the small of Maj’s back as the Valkyrie lifted into the air and soared up away from the runway. Trans-sonic vapor erupted in the airstream over the Valkyrie’s wing-roots, the vapor streaming out behind her in broad, flat twin plumes that instantly tattered away in the back blast from the engines.

  “Two-oh-five,” said Maj Two.

  “Roj that,” Maj said. They were matching the original flight in all important particulars so far. “Turning right out of pattern. I’m going for altitude.”

  “Roj. Two-fifty now. Nose coming up on auto.”

  “Up and locked. Come up to three-ten and hold her there.” Maj stepped on the rudder pedal as the plane’s “droop snoot” came up and locked into place, then turned the yoke and pulled back. Both engines answered instantly and with ease. There was such a profound difference between the way this aircraft handled on the ground—like an overweight cow—and the way it flew. As she turned, Maj looked out of the canopy and saw the chase planes following her without too much difficulty. Later, though, she would give them a run for their money.