by Ben Bova
He found Colt’s home. The lights were still on downstairs, so he knocked on the front door.
Mrs. Colt came to the door. She was slim and pleasant-looking, her dark skin a good contrast to the bright-colored dress she was wearing.
“Is the Major in? I’d like to see him. I’m Paul Sarko.”
She looked surprised for a moment, then puzzled. But she said, “Come on in, I’ll call him.” There was a hint of the south in her voice.
She showed Sarko to the small but comfortable living room, then excused herself and went to the kitchen. In a moment, Colt came in. He was wearing a sport shirt and slacks.
“I wasn’t expecting a visit from you,” he said. His face looked wary, on guard.
Sarko said, “I . . . I think I owe you an explanation.”
“Sit down, sit down.” Colt pointed to the sofa. He pulled up a rocker for himself as Sarko tried to relax on the sofa.
“Would y’all like something to drink?” Mrs. Colt asked from the doorway.
“How about some beer?” the Major suggested.
Sarko nodded. “Sounds fine.”
Mrs. Colt soon returned with the frosty glasses. Then she went upstairs. The Major said, grinning:
“She knows we’ll be talking about Air Force business, and she shouldn’t hear it. Gets her awfully curious, though.”
“Look,” Sarko began, without any buildup. “I don’t want you to think that I’m just running out on you. Or that I’m afraid that I’d find that my metals caused the crashes.”
Colt took a sip of beer. “Okay, just why are you going?”
“I made a decision,” Sarko said, still feeling nervous, “more than a year ago. I decided that I’m finished with Air Force work.”
“Oh?”
“I spent six years with Ratterman, working on those alloys. I came straight out of the university to this base. For six years I worked on making metals that would allow a plane to fly steadily at Mach 3. Okay, you’ve got the metals now and you can do whatever you want with them. You can make fighters or bombers or missiles or anything you want. You can use them in that game you play over the Arctic.”
Colt looked at him oddly, but said nothing.
“Six years of my life is enough,” Sarko went on. “I want to do other things now. I want to help build transport planes that can fly at Mach 3. Or maybe work on something completely different. There’s more to the world than making war planes!”
“Sure,” Colt said softly. “But we’ve got a bad problem on our hands and we need you to help us find the answer.”
A mosquito buzzed by Sarko’s ear and he waved his hand to chase it. “But it’s not my problem!”
“You’re half right,” Colt said. “It’s an Air Force problem, and we can’t force you to help us. But if they’ve got a bomber that can knock down the Cobra. . .”
“I know, I know . . . you’ll want to figure out some way to stop their bomber. Another move in your game.”
“We’ve got to balance the books, Paul,” Colt said seriously. “It’s a lesson I learned a long time ago. The other side has got to respect you, or else he’ll push you around as much as he can. Right now, the other side thinks they’re one move ahead of us. They’ve knocked down three of our best planes. We’ve got to show them that they’re not ahead of us. If we don’t show them, then we—all of us, including you—we’re in deep trouble.”
“I don’t like your game,” Sarko said.
The mosquito buzzed into view again and settled on the side of Colt’s neck. With a lightning-like crack! he crushed it in his open palm.
“I don’t like the game either,” the Major said, scraping the bug off his hand and into an ash tray. “But it’s something like this bug. Let him have his own way and he’ll take the blood out of you. So you stop him.”
“By killing him.”
“Sometimes that’s the only way to do it. But don’t think that you have to fire a gun or fly a fighter plane to kill people.”
“What do you mean?”
Colt edged forward tensely. “How do you know that you didn’t kill those six men?”
Sarko felt his temper blaze up. “I told you that the metals are all right!”
“You told me what you believe,” Colt snapped.
“But you don’t know for sure. Maybe you killed those men. And maybe your supersonic transport plane will kill hundreds of people, if you don’t find out what’s wrong with the Cobra. Ever thought of that?”
Sarko started to answer, shut his mouth, finally spat out, “That’s the lowest blow I’ve ever seen!” Colt shrugged. “We’re at war, buddy. All’s fair.” With trembling hands, Sarko put his glass down on the coffee table. “All right, Major. You win. I’ll stay and help you find out why the planes crashed. And the minute I do . . . I’m leaving here so fast that your head will spin.”
Colt stood up. “I’ll keep a helicopter waiting for you, so you won’t have to waste any time . . . after you’ve found the answers we need.”
Sarko got to his feet and angrily stormed out of the house.
Chapter four
The radio announcer was saying, “It’s a perfect afternoon for baseball . . . bright and warm. The weatherman promises beautiful weather right through the Memorial Day weekend, as the Reds take on the Dodgers for a big four-game series . . .”
“Why don’t you turn that thing off?” Paul Sarko asked.
At the other desk in the small office, Martin Arnold clicked the transistor radio shut. With a sad shake of his head, he put the little black portable into a drawer.
“It’s too nice a day to work,” he said.
Sarko glanced out the room’s one window. It was a fine day. The base was practically deserted.
“You can go if you want to,” he said to Arnold. Martin Arnold was about Sarko’s age. He was a shade shorter than Sarko, and starting to get puffy around the middle. He had a long face, with a big toothy grin. His high forehead made him look as though he was starting to go bald.
He wasn’t grinning at the moment. Looking out the window, he said, “We could get to the ball park in time to see the second game.”
Sarko shook his head. “No thanks. Not me. There’s too much to do here.”
The room was air conditioned, but the two engineers were in their shirtsleeves. Sarko had his rolled up. His desk was covered with papers, reports, photographs, and his notes. A movie projector was set up on a table behind his desk, aimed at a screen that covered the opposite wall next to Arnold’s desk.
Looking at Arnold again, he said, “Listen, Marty, you can go if you want to. Nobody’s keeping you here. When I asked for you to be my assistant on this job, I didn’t expect you to work seven days a week.”
“But you do,” Arnold said.
Sarko shrugged.
“And you’ve been working just about twenty-four hours a day. Paul, you’ve got to rest! You’ve been driving yourself for two weeks now . . . you can’t keep going on like this much longer.”
“General Hastings is calling a meeting Monday to review the progress we’ve made on the problem,” Sarko said wearily. “Ratterman, Colt, and all the experts. I want to have something concrete to tell them. Not just another round of blank stares.” Rubbing his high forehead, Arnold said, “But we’ve been over every scrap of information dozens of times. There’s nothing new. We just don’t have enough to go on!”
Sarko frowned. Then, in a quiet voice, he asked, “Marty . . . you worked with me for more than two years on the Cobra’s metals. What do you think? Did I goof somewhere? Did the metals cause the crashes?”
For a long moment Arnold didn’t answer. “I can’t really tell, Paul,” he said at last, his eyes avoiding Sarko’s. “My honest feeling is that the metals are okay; but I don’t have any evidence to back up that feeling.”
“I guess you’re right . . .”
“There’s no real evidence the other way, either,” Arnold quickly added. “Nothing to show that the metals failed.”
<
br /> “There’s no real evidence of anything,” Sarko slammed his hand on the desk top. “Radar tracking showed the planes operated normally . . . until the instant they broke up.
“The wreckage we’ve got back shows everything was normal. Controls were okay, fuel okay, engines okay . . . nothing wrong anyplace. But the planes crashed.”
“Whatever happened,” Arnold said, “happened in an instant.”
“I know,” Sarko agreed. “Not like a normal emergency in a plane. Usually there’s time for the pilot to try something, or at least to hit the eject button and get out of the plane. But here . . . one minute everything’s fine, and an instant later—the plane’s fallen apart.”
“Maybe they were hit with a small nuclear warhead?”
“No,” Sarko shook his head. “There are no signs of blast, no radioactivity. Besides, the ground radars would’ve picked it up.”
“Small high-explosive shells? They wouldn’t have to hit the plane, just go off close enough to knock it out of control.”
“Then why didn’t the pilot get the plane back under control? Out of the three planes, at least one of them should’ve been able to do it. And why did all the planes fall apart? Why didn’t the electronics men get off some kind of message? Even if a plane’s power-diving, it takes a few seconds to get down to sea level. Somebody should’ve hollered something! Even the movie film that the Navy recovered from Cobra Three blanks out just when the trouble happens.”
“The radio man on Cobra Three did say something, though,” Arnold said.
With a nod of his head, Sarko leaned across his desk and punched the on button of the tape recorder there. The speaker crackled and hummed for a few moments, then the voice of the Cobra Three crewman said:
“We’ve made visual contact with the bogy . . . delta-winged . . . looks like four engines on her. Definitely a long-range bomber. We’re both moving in closer. Cobra Two is in the lead, we’re foil . . . Omygod! She’s hit . . . she’s falling apart! Flash . . .”
The rest of the tape was a garbled mixture of sounds: perhaps voices, perhaps screams. It ended in less than three seconds.
Arnold looked pale as Sarko turned off the machine.
“Every time I hear it, it bothers me,” Arnold said, his voice trembling slightly.
“Most of the structures people on the base think that the metals failed,” Sarko said grimly. “They figured out that all three planes crashed after just about the same number of hours of flying time.
They’re talking about sonic fatigue, or heat fatigue, or whatever kind of fancy name they can think up for it.”
“But the guy on the tape said Cobra Two was hit with something,” Arnold said.
Shrugging, Sarko answered, “They figure that when he saw the plane start to fall apart, he got excited and thought the enemy plane was shooting at them.”
Arnold said nothing.
“What bothers me, though,” Sarko went on, “is the last word on the tape that you can hear clearly. Sounds like ‘Flash’. What did he mean by that? And why did the movie film blank out—just about at the same instant, too?”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Arnold said.
“Not yet,” Sarko agreed. “We don’t have enough information.”
“And we’re not going to get any more. Cobra Four is grounded.”
“I know. But maybe we can squeeze more information out of what we’ve already got.”
“We’ve been through it for two weeks straight now. There’s nothing new to find,” Arnold said.
“Maybe,” Sarko said. “Maybe. But there must be something. What about the medical report? They found one crewman out of the six. What about him? What killed him?”
Arnold shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Sarko reached for the phone, then stopped. “Probably nobody over at the medical building this afternoon who can give me the report.”
“Come on, Paul,” Arnold said. “All you’re going to get out of this is a king-sized headache. Let’s take the rest of the afternoon off and see that ball game.”
“You go, Marty. I want to think about this some more.”
Chapter five
The meeting the next Monday was very much like the meetings of the two Mondays before: long, and —to Sarko—pointless.
The conference room was crowded, hot, and stuffy. General Hastings kept chewing his cigar and saying that something had to be done. The experts kept repeating that there was no new information, no new ideas.
One or two of the men at the long conference table said that the only possible answer was that the metals had somehow failed.
“How?” asked the General.
No one knew.
“Dr. Sarko, you’re the expert on metals,” the General called down the table. “What’s your story?”
“I’ve reviewed all the tests we’ve ever made on those alloys,” Sarko answered. “According to everything we know, the metals are okay.”
“But suppose there’s something that we don’t know about?” the General asked sternly.
Sarko looked straight at him. “General Hastings, there’s obviously something here that we don’t know about. And that something caused the crash. But it wasn’t the metals. I’m sure of that.”
The meeting dragged on for another hour, then finally broke up. The General’s last words were:
“If you don’t find the answer soon, we might all end up doing work in bomb shelters, because the Reds will be able to fly their bombers anywhere they choose to!”
As Sarko left the building where the conference had been held, Major Colt called to him.
“Going to lunch?”
“Not yet,” Sarko answered. “I want to get the medical report on the crewman they found.”
Colt fell in step alongside him and they walked across the parking lot toward the hospital building. “You onto something?” asked the Major.
With a shake of his head, Sarko replied, “Just grabbing for straws . . . anything.”
Colt was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “You really sure that the metals didn’t break up?”
“I don’t have anything that shows that they failed.”
“But you can’t prove that they didn’t fail.”
“Now look . . .” Sarko began.
Colt held his hands up and grinned. “Hold it, hold it. I’m not trying to start a fight. I know there’s not enough evidence to hang a cloud on. . . . What I want to know is how you feel. Do you think the metals could have fallen apart?”
Sarko stopped walking and looked at the Major. He was serious, in spite of his grinning.
“I don’t think it’s the metals,” Sarko said firmly. “Not by themselves, anyway. They didn’t fail. Something might have been done to break them . . . but they didn’t fail by themselves.”
They started walking again. Colt said, “Most of the experts at the conference thought the metals failed.”
“They don’t know what else to say.”
“I think you’re right,” Colt agreed. “But unless we do something to show them they’re wrong, the blame’s going to be put on the metals. And you’ll get stuck with the job of proving it isn’t true.”
“How the heck can I . . .”
Grinning again, Colt said, “I’ve got it all figured out. They claim the metals fail after the plane’s been flying a total of about a hundred hours at Mach 3. Okay. Cobra Four has logged about eighty hours at Mach 3. All I’ve got to do is put in twenty more hours, and we’ll see if they’re right or wrong.”
“But Cobra Four’s grounded,” Sarko said.
“It is now. But I’m having lunch with the General. I think maybe I can get her flying again. I wanted to know how you felt before I sat down with the Old Man. See you later.”
Major Colt turned and headed back for the General’s office, leaving Sarko standing in the middle of the parking lot. He stared at the blue-uniformed figure until it disappeared inside the building.
Only then did Sarko re
alize that the Major was offering to risk his life on the strength of an engineer’s feeling.
Coming in from the hot, glaring parking lot to the cool, soft-green lobby of the medical building was a welcome change. After a few minutes of searching through the quiet hallways, Sarko found the office he was looking for.
It was a small outer office, with bigger rooms opening off doorways on either side. Seated at the office’s only desk was a good-looking redhead.
“I’m here to pick up a report that Dr. Nash left for me,” Sarko said to her.
The girl smiled prettily. The nameplate on her desk said R. Stefano.
“You’re Dr. Sarko?” she asked.
“Paul Sarko.”
“Well, I’m glad to see you!” she said. “I’ve been waiting nearly an hour. It was starting to look as if I’d miss lunch.”
“On my account?” Sarko asked.
With a nod that tossed her red hair, she said, “This report you’re picking up is Top Secret. I can’t leave it just lying here. You’ve got to sign for it.”
She pulled a thick envelope, big enough to hold a good-sized book, from the top drawer of her desk. Clipped to it was a white slip of paper, with several other papers of different colors underneath it. Sarko looked it over, then signed his name.
“All right,” the girl said, as she separated the different pieces of paper. “You keep the yellow one. I get the blue one. The white one goes back to the Security office.”
Sarko lifted the heavy envelope. “Look,” he said, “since I’ve made you wait so long, the least I can do is take you to lunch.”
It took her only a moment to make up her mind.
All right,” she said, reaching for her handbag on the end of the desk. “I guess it is the least you can do.”
Sarko laughed. “Right. What’s your name, anyway?”
Rita,” she said. “Rita Stefano.” She put the accent on the “a” in the middle of her last name.