He watched their relative positions on his computer display, projecting the widest variation possible of Wilma's maneuvers. Relative to Earth below—you always had to have a relative position to conceive of up or down—Wilma would come after him in a classic diving, curving attack. It was the classic rule that the machine that had the height advantage in an opening gambit of a fight, especially if it had greater power or thrust, had the advantage, and Wilma had those on her side. Buck fairly banged his fist against the computer, getting an immediate readout as to what maneuvers would keep him out from under the guns of the opposing Asp.
It didn't look good. Wilma held every advantage, and she was pla3dng it to the hilt. A kill seemed right in her bag.
Buck smiled, then broke out into a laugh. He forgot his radios were on active throughout the engagement. "What's so funny, flyboy? Or is that your way of admitting defeat? You've got six or seven seconds, Buck, no matter what evasion you take, before I lock you into my sights. Then it's bye-bye, baby."
Buck's laugh dwindled to a chuckle. He was suddenly too busy to laugh. There's always a new maneuver, or a twist on an old gambit, in the book of every pilot ever born. When he saw the computer readout that might just as well have read "YOU'RE A DEAD DUCK, ROGERS," he knew he had to dig into his bag of tricks.
"Computer—" He stopped, cutting off the radio so he wouldn't transmit into the open to Wilma. "Computer, display area of escape or evasion from attacking Asp."
The screen flashed through a series of colors and numbers. The answer came in a limited block of space with another discouraging reply from the electronic brain: 'TOU ARE DEAD."
We'll see about that. . . .
"Computer, using full-range photon beams for the attacking Asp fighter, display maximum killing range."
One mile! That was practically slingshot range, like tossing pennies into a bucket. Great!
"One more question, computer. What's the longitudinal rate
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of roll of this buggy? Nose over tail, and figuring no use from main thruster. Compute at maximum flip rate to end with a sight lock for our photon beams set at maximum range effectiveness."
"Nose over tail, employing nose-up, tail-down thrusters, one point six seconds."
"Whew! That kind of acceleration is going to knock me cold." He thought furiously for a moment. "Computer! Set up that maneuver when I press automode. Complete the end-over-end through one hundred eighty degrees under computer control. I'll be off the controls at that time. When the flip maneuver is completed, what will be the bearing on my photon beams relative to the other Asp fighter?"
"Within three seconds of completion of flip maneuver, the opposing spacecraft will be six degrees, closing for a direct line of sight and fire."
"Great. As soon as the opposing Asp comes into line of sight and fire, fire three bursts of photon beams. If necessary, make whatever corrections you need and then fire off those three blasts." He thought for a moment. "Repeat and confirm."
The computer voice repeated his instructions exactly.
"Computer, the attacking fighter is on a trailing pursuit curve. How long before it is in position to fire at us?"
"Seven point three seconds."
"Execute my orders when it is five seconds from firing angle and I go into automode."
Just over two seconds. An old memory had flashed through his mind. It was a highly complex maneuver by German fighter pilots in the Second World War called the Luftwaffe Stomp, used mostly by their best pilots. When they were being pursued in a steep climb, they timed their distance carefully. With an opposing Mustang or Spitfire in pursuit, still out of firing range, the German pilot would move his controls swiftly and violently, spinning the Messerschmitt about its axis, virtually swinging around with the nose ripping to the left. In seconds, the Messerschmitt would reverse its position, with its nose—and weapons—now pointing downward at the pursuing enemy. In its climb, its maneuverability restricted, the enemy plane would fly right into the gunsights of the German pilot. One good burst of machine guns and cannons and it was all over. The hunted had become the hunter. One more victory mark to be added to the tail of the Messerschmitt.
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They didn't teach that maneuver in the American or British fighter pilot training schools, and they sure weren't teaching it now. . . .
Buck took a deep breath, tensed his body, and stabbed the automode button.
Tiny tongues of flame spat upward from the nose and downward from the tail. Forward speed never changed, but in the sudden whirling-dervish maneuver, the Asp reversed direction.
Before Wilma could fully realize what Buck had done, trying desperately to get out of a situation she had never before encountered, the photon beams lit up her fighter with their deadly glow.
Wilma slumped in her harness. How had he done that? She was wiped out through some crazy maneuver she hadn't yet figured out.
Buck flipped his radio on. His voice sounded groggy, as if he were emerging from a g-induced blackout, but there was no mistaking the triumph in that voice.
"Tag, baby You're dead."
She came around in a skidding wide turn to join up with Buck in formation. There was no more weaving or juking; the mock battle was over, and she was the loser. She punched in formation automode; the computer would hold position with Buck.
"Just how in God's name did you do that?" she exclaimed. "I had you in a box. There wasn't any way for you to get out." She cut herself short. "Obviously there was a way. This time you be the teacher. Mister."
"Buy me a drink when we land?"
"Done!"
Buck's boyhood dream came true three weeks later. After his mastery of Wilma's attacking Asp spacefighter, Commodore Kane judged Buck ready for fast-paced indoctrination in spatial navigation and the piloting of larger spacecraft. He met with Buck, Wilma, and Admiral Frank Bemis, who was the lead commander of very heavy spacecraft—floating fortresses, really— employed for deep forays through the solar system and especially as a cruising battlewagon in the asteroid belt to protect Amerigo Federation mining activities. The great VHS—Very Heavy
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Spacecraft—were all too few and far between.
"You can compare them to the biggest and heaviest nuclear aircraft carriers of your time," Bemis explained. "One of your big carriers had a crew of more than five thousand highly skilled people, everything from pilots to navigators, ordnance teams to cooks, doctors, launch crews. But I'm sure you know that system by heart. According to your records, you were an exchange pilot from the Air Force for a while with your navy. Right?"
"Yes, sir. We kept up a complementary exchange so we'd all be familiar with what our other people were doing."
"Any cats?"
"Yes, sir. Twenty catapult launches, ten fighters and ten bombers."
"Hooks?"
Buck nodded, a wry look on his face. "Ten landings with hook snatch. I didn't like a one of them, especially three at night, one in a bad storm. It was really an iffy proposition."
"All that will help. The comparison between our Truman class space heavies and your carriers is pretty accurate. We only have seven in our entire space fleet. We try never to land them on a planetary or moon surface. Down there they'd be open targets."
"Like our carriers in drydock," Buck offered.
"Precisely. Now, you'll spend some time cramming in astronavigation. It's really an extension of your own stellar navigation in night flight over Earth, but you'll need to know more about orbital mechanics. Then there's docking an Asp or other fighter, or even a heavy scout, aboard one of our Tru-mans. My own vessel is the Truman, and Kane, here, has recommended both you and Wilma for duty aboard her. She's a fine craft. One more thing. The Mongols don't have more than four of their own heavies left. These vessels are just too massive and too costly to keep producing them. Losing one is like losing a major battle when you factor in the investment, not only in pilots and air crews but in an entire
staff of five thousand. If we were to lose two or three Trumans, the whole balance of power between us and the Mongols, who are very strong on Mars and expanding their numbers through the asteroid belt, would be drastically altered. I want to be sure you and Colonel Deering understand that the safety of the VHS craft has the most important priority in all our combat. If
Buck Rogers
it's a matter of losing your life and preventing the loss of a Truman heavy, we expect you to not only risk your life but to yield it to the better good."
"One life for five thousand," Wilma said. "Sounds reasonable to me."
"Are either of you two history buffs of the Second World War?" Bemis asked. "I expect Brigadier Rogers would be the most likely candidate."
"Yes, sir, I am. It was one of my majors when I went through the Air Force Academy."
"Do you remember the Battle of Midway in the summer of 1942?"
"Yes, sir. We considered it the pivotal point of the Pacific War."
"It was," Bemis replied, "and the lessons of that battle are applicable today. Your navy—our navy—was outnumbered and outgunned. But you tell me what happened, Rogers."
"We lost one carrier, a hell of a lot of planes and crews, and Midway was torn up pretty bad, but—"
"But?" Bemis prompted.
"We sank four Japanese carriers. They lost hundreds of planes and thousands of men, but their biggest loss was more than three hundred of their most skilled and combat-experienced pilots. That battle broke the back of the Japanese navy and turned the tide of the whole Pacific War."
"Neatly summarized," Bemis complimented him. "Now, use the term space dreadnoughts instead of super carriers, and conceivably we might find ourselves in the same position. Pilots like you and Deering are our best defense against just that happening. We could lose not only this world but a hell of a lot more than that." Bemis glanced at his watch. "Got a meeting. Big powwow." He rose to his feet and shook hands with Buck and Wilma.
"Welcome aboard. See you two in the great beyond."
Three weeks later Buck and Wilma found themselves in the second-pilot seats of a light battle cruiser ready to launch from the great spaceport spread across the Pennsylvania hills. Buck had always thought of leaving Earth as a fiery, thundering
A Life in the Future
rocket blast in a wild vertical ascent. The last thing he'd expected was a smooth elevator ride.
Speedboat was an unexpected name for a space battle cruiser, but she had been so christened. More heavy fighter than a massive spacecraft, Speedboat was studded with ray weapons, beam weapons, batteries of missiles, and generators that spewed forth both nuclear radiation and fierce sprays of electromagnetic radiation that could jangle the brains of any crew of an enemy vessel that got too close to it.
Commander Regina Blackwell directed the battle orders for Speedboat missions. She commanded rather than flying herself. From her command seat, she overlooked and directed the actions of her pilots. Seated up front, viewing the world and space through a heavily armored glassite bow and a long bank of video screens that enabled vision in all quadrants were Arny Serold and Mel Cosgrove. Buck and Wilma sat in command seats behind and higher than those of the pilots, with duplicate controls. They were to watch, learn, and advance steadily but slowly into their own piloting of the cruiser. The spacecraft, with its crew of sixty-two men and women, sat in a huge cradle deep in the rolling hills of the Pennsylvania countryside. Buried deep underground were antigrav generators and microwave-beam energy lifters.
They watched Serold order the Inertron strips around Speedboat activated to lighten the ship to perhaps ten percent of its normal weight. "Initiate antigrav," Serold ordered.
"Antigrav on," confirmed Cosgrove. "Lifting beams on line and ready."
Commander Blackwell leaned forward. "This is a shakedown cruise. Speedboat has been in dock for a month for refitting, maintenance, and some new weaponry. We'll do the lunar flight and landing, do a recheck of everything, and then take her out for a maximum speed run. We'll do that angling sunward. Wilma and Buck, you'll have a chance then to take the controls and get the feel of her."
"Commander, we didn't get a complete briefing on the propulsion system. What's the main drive?" asked Buck.
"Variable nozzle."
"Like some sort of super afterburner?"
Blackwell's expression showed her surprise and pleasure. "Very well put, Rogers. That's it exactly."
Buck Rogers
"Have you gone to max drive with her yet?"
"Only once. We slipped down well below the plane of the ecliptic, away from any visuals the Mongol ships could use to track us. To cover what we were doing, we generated a gravity fabric weave—"
"I'm over my head. Commander."
"Sorry. It's a disrupter that creates a brief but very intense gravitational effect in a confined area. It warps all electromagnetic variation in the area, so light gets garbled, just like any optic or electromagnetic system. We fuzz up any attempt to track us."
"Then you went to max?" asked Wilma.
"Just that one time. W^e let her run until we had one million miles per hour. Any faster than that during starting and our drive would have brought on excessive g-loads. Once we reached the one million mark, we opened her up to a steady four-g acceleration." Blackwell leaned back and smiled. "We eased off the power at fourteen million."
Buck's eyes widened. "Miles per hour?"
"At max drive, we were maybe five minutes from Earth to the sun, although we never did that. The idea was to find out through an actual flight drive test what we could really do. If we figured horsepower at that speed, it would be in the trillions. That was enough. The Mongols don't have anything like Speedboat, but then this is our only on-line ship like this. Amerigo could build four dreadnoughts for what this baby cost."
"Ready for lift," came the call from the pilot.
"Commence liftoff," Blackwell said curtly. She was all business now, her conversation with Buck and Wilma put aside completely.
Inertron energy diminished the huge ship's weight. The cradles of thick coils, open at the top, surrounded the ship and fed anti-grav power to the entire structure. Weight-wise, Speedboat was now very close to the levitating ability of an ancient dirigible, yet she still hung solidly in the anti-grav coils. The idea now was to raise the ship in a smooth, direct ascent until Speedboat was out of the atmosphere. Here the microwave energy beams came into play. Powered by huge underground generators, the
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system fed a repulsive power to receiving points all along the hull of the cruiser. Microwave power—really an immense radar current—can boil water explosively in seconds or, directed against living creatures, including man, explode their bodily liquids and turn their skin, intestines, all internal organs, and the brain to mush. But beamed tightly and absorbed by the receivers along the hull of Speedboat, the microwave energy exerted a powerful upward lift to the cruiser. With almost magical levitation, silently except for the deep thrumming sound of the generators and receivers and the voices of the flight crew on the control deck. Speedboat seemed to hang in midair unmoving. It was amazingly like departing from Earth in a blimp or a helium balloon, which Buck had done many times.
You do not move . . . the Earth recedes beneath you, ever so gently, everything within view diminishing in size, faster and faster, until you're aware that you are high above Earth and accelerating steadily. It was nothing like the Asp fighters, which employed these same systems on a lesser scale for liftoff, then became blazing upward-streaking meteors as their main drives cut in.
"Commander," came Amy Serold's voice. "Two zero miles to diminished microwave beam."
"Acknowledged," Blackwell answered. "Bring up the aft thrusters. Three-g acceleration, angled ascent ten degrees."
"Confirmed," Serold replied, the numbers appearing magically on his heads-up display before his eyes.
"We'll fly a curving ascent stea
dily from propulsion start," Commander Blackwell explained. "You already know there's no such thing as a straight line in space. Everything is curved; everything warps to gravity."
"Everything is falling around something else, from pebbles to entire galaxies," Buck added.
"Precisely. So if we wanted to climb straight out to the moon, we'd be off in the boondocks somewhere. We follow a path dictated by both centrifugal force, from propulsion, and ^avity, and we balance neatly between the two. The computers, which do our astronavigation for us, keep us automatically on track. On this kind of trip, the human crew performs as watchdogs over the computer pilots."
"Do we get a bone if we do a good job?" Buck smiled.
Buck Rogers
"If you're real good at it. Speaking of bones, let me ask you something that's often a bone of contention."
"Go ahead."
"To leave the Earth we had to ascend, to go up."
"Okay."
"So up we go. But without changing attitude, if we care not to, when we reach the moon for a landing, we're going down. When did the shift take place?"
Buck laughed. "You're not going to catch me on that one! You're always going up or down, but only relative to what particular surface you choose to measure from."
"The brigadier gets his bone," the commander said with a smile.
"What I still find hard to believe," Buck said, shifting topics, "is that it takes us only a few hours to reach the moon. Back in the old Apollo days—"
"When you people flew those strange space-going Toonerville trolley antiques," Wilma teased.
"I know, I know," Buck admitted, "but everything in those days had to take into account available energy. We had so much fuel and energy in the bank, and that was it. You'd leave Earth at seven miles a second, cut power, and you'd have to drift the rest of the way to the moon, slowing down the whole time."
"I understand you've flown the Asp fighter?" Commander Blackwell said.
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