She smiled back uncertainly.
Beyond him, a gleaming toy on the tarmac, was the T-38 itself. The trainer was an intimidating white dart. The wings were just little stubs, incredibly short, and the sleek white shape had more of the feel of a rocket about it. It seemed incredible, against intuition, that such a small, compact machine could support itself in the air and fly.
You’re getting down to the wire, Natalie. You say you want to be an astronaut. You mock the hero-pilot tendency. That’s fine.
But it means you have to cope with experiences like this.
Two techs helped her climb up and lower herself into the cockpit. The T-38’s white-painted walls were only just far enough apart for her to squeeze in. She would actually be in a separate cockpit behind Stone’s, under her own little bubble of glass.
Stone clambered aboard, in front of her, and spoke over the intercom. “Natalie, can you hear me?”
“Sure, Phil. Loud and clear. And I—”
He cut her off. “Final safety instructions,” he said. “I’ll tell you when to close your canopy bubble. Do it slowly, Natalie. Now, your parachute is set to open as soon as you eject. That’s appropriate for low altitude. Later I’ll tell you when to change the setting to high altitude, when you need to have a delay between ejection and the chute opening; you do that by fastening the hook to that ring on your chute, and…”
And the noise of the jets rose to a roar, drowning out his words.
The plane started to taxi.
Stone, sitting in his bubble ahead of her, looked out calmly, his motions deft and precise. The controls before her moved in sympathy with Stone’s, working themselves like a high-tech pianola.
She felt her pulse rate rising, her breathing deepening, and the rubber stink of her oxygen mask grew sharper; she felt sweat pool under her goggles, on her squeezed-up cheeks.
She consoled herself that she was going on a ride which few people would experience: high, fast, probably extraordinarily beautiful. Even if she left the corps tomorrow, she would have that to take away from there.
Yes, but I’m pretty sure I could get by without it…
Without warning, the plane threw itself down the runway, pressing her back into her seat. Within a few seconds she could feel the wheels leaving the ground.
The plane pitched upward steeply, and she lost sight of the ground.
There was a layer of cloud above, lumpy cumulus. The clouds seemed to explode at her, and she shot into white mist. She was through it in a second, emerging into bright, clear sunshine.
She glanced down: the land was already lost, remote, a patchwork of faded brown with the gray shadows of clouds scattered over it.
The T-38 rose almost vertically, like a rocket. In a few seconds, the sky faded down to a deep purple.
The surface of Earth was remote, small, the works of humanity already reduced to two-dimensional splashes of color. It astonished her to think, given the facility with which she had leapt from the ground, that just a century ago no human on the planet had undergone such an experience.
Scientist-astronauts no longer had to slog through the hell of flight school. But they still needed to go through dynamic situations: to gain experience of microgravity and acceleration, to recognize the symptoms of airsickness and hypoxia. So, the price the scientist-astronauts had to pay was regular hours of flying backseat in a Northrop T-38, the most advanced jet trainer.
Experienced astronauts were encouraged to take up the rookie scientists. And once you were up there, they could do whatever the hell they liked with you.
But she trusted Stone. She appreciated the fact that he was taking time out of his own Moonlab/Soyuz training for this piece of nursemaiding.
“How about that,” Stone said. “Forty-eight thousand feet. Higher than you’ve ever flown before, Natalie.”
So high she was already in the stratosphere, higher than the tallest mountain, so high she couldn’t breathe unaided. The edge of space, right? Welcome to your new home, spacegirl.
“Okay,” Stone said. “Let’s start gently. We’ll slow her down. Can you read the airspeed?”
“Sure.”
“Follow what I do.”
When the jet got to under two hundred miles an hour, it bucked and juddered, as if the air had become a medium of invisible lumps.
“She doesn’t like being reined in,” Stone said. “So—”
He opened up the throttle and the plane surged forward. Sunlight gleamed from the carapace around York, and the Earth curved away beneath her, brilliantly lit.
“Slow roll,” Stone said.
The Earth started to tilt, sideways. It wasn’t as if she was rolling at all; York felt only a slight increase in the acceleration pushing her into her seat.
The horizon arced around her, tipping up, and the bruised purple of the stratosphere slid beneath the belly of the plane.
Then the plane righted itself, sharply. The roll had taken maybe fifteen seconds.
“Snap roll,” Stone said.
This time the plane twisted over in a second, land and sky and sun rolling around, the light strobing across her lap and hands. Her stomach resisted the roll as if she were suddenly filled with mercury.
After one and a half turns the plane finished upside down. When she looked up, she could see the Gulf of Mexico, set out like a huge map painted across a misty ceiling. Gravity plucked at her — one negative G — and her shoulders strained against the seat harnesses, and her helmeted head bumped against the canopy. The blood pooled in her head, making her feel stuffy, as if she were developing a cold.
“Just like the tilt table, huh, Natalie,” Stone said drily.
He snapped the plane through a fast half roll, righting it; the plane settled onto the level, rocking slightly in the air.
For a second they were still. Stone’s precision and control were remarkable, York thought -
And then Stone threw the plane down on a dipping curve, diving down toward the remote ground; the noise of the jets increased.
“Parabolic curve,” Stone called over the jet noise.
So I should be weightless. She relaxed her arm, and watched her hand drift upward. “My God.” She felt the weightlessness in her gut; it was as if her organs were climbing upward, inside her chest cavity.
“You feeling queasy?”
“A little.” She reached down, checking that she could reach the bag in the pocket on her flight suit leg.
Stone made no signs of taking the plane out of its dive. “Ah, you’ll be fine. If it gets too bad, just watch the instrument panel; don’t look out of the window.”
“Okay, but—”
Her sentence fell apart as Stone threw the plane into a ferocious S-shaped curve. She was turned every which way, and the glowing landscape wheeled around the canopy.
And then he took the plane into a straight dive, accelerating at the Gulf of Mexico. The ocean shone like a steel plate, far in front of her face.
At twenty thousand feet Stone hauled the nose of the plane upward. The jets howled, and the Gs shoved her hard into her seat; her head was pushed into her shoulders, and her vision tunneled, walled by darkness.
The T-38 leapt back up to the sky, and the light reverted to its deep purple.
She tasted saliva at the back of her throat, sharp, like rusty iron. “Phil, I don’t feel so good.”
“If you have to barf, take off your oxygen mask.”
I would if I knew how.
“And turn the mix in your mask to a hundred percent 02,” he said. “Turn on your cold air blower.”
When she tried that, taking deep breaths of the oxygen, the pressure on her throat lessened.
“Anyhow,” he said, “you wouldn’t want to miss this next part.”
“Huh?”
At forty-five thousand feet, Stone lit the afterburner. Over her shoulder York could see white condensate blossoming behind the T-38. She watched the airspeed climb up toward six hundred miles an hour, higher, higher.