DESIGN FLAW

THE paint forming the word “EXPERIMENTAL” blistered from the hull as the ship screamed down out of the exosphere, its needle nose and sweeping wings glowing from the ramcompression heat.

Just as predicted decades earlier by Sanger and Tsien and calculated by engineers over their drawing boards, the flow of thin air over the wings caused lift, and the ship eased into a rib-cracking high-g turn as it started the first of the zooms which would carry it along the upper fringes of the atmosphere like a stone skipping across water.

But it didn’t skip; that was not the plan. Once the ship leveled out, Cal Justin fought his way up through the thick pressure of many g’s and kept the nose level.

There wasn’t much air at the altitude the KX-238 was at, but it was enough to sustain the transcontinental rocket in level flight and heat the hull to the point where it was ready to peel from the ship. In addition, the combination of the velocity of the ship, the heat of its hull, and the rarity of the air caused it to ionize a path over a mile wide through the ionosphere like a meteor.

Cal wasn’t very comfortable with the heat and the deceleration due to drag, but he got his breath again and touched the mike switch on the control wheel. “Titwillow Base, this is Santa Claus. Re-entry successful. In level flight and on track. Over.”

An impersonal voice just barely touched with a note of excitement sounded in his headphones, “Roger, Santa Claus from Titwillow Base. Your body-telemetering is out. No carrier on Channel Three; eighty-five microvolts on Channel Two. Can you see the antennas? Over.”

Cal looked out through the double-paned ports over the glowing nose of the rocket, then turned and glanced back along the long, long hull to the swept wings and fins. “Titwillow Base, this is Santa Claus. It looks awful hot around those slot antennas. Over.”

“Roger, Santa Claus. Blue Blazer Range reports they are picking you up on acquisition radar now. Are you ready to sync in with them for approach and landing? Over.”

Concurring briefly, Cal leaned forward to adjust the vernier settings on the approach and landing instruments. Below him, the Ozarks were speeding past and fading into the distance over the curve of the Earth. The Mississippi River was crawling beneath him, and the Atlantic Ocean was just barely visible on the eastern horizon. But he didn’t look; he didn’t have time.

Someday, he told himself, I’m going along as a passenger and rubberneck out the windows. He’d never had a good look at what went on outside, not even during the runs with the Super Skyrocket, the X-12, and the Triple-X. He’d always had his hands full just flying the beasts.

The KX-238 was no exception. The transcontinental rocket was merely a prototype, the pilot model for those which would come later, rolling off the assembly lines by the hundreds to arc over the continents and oceans. But she had to be proved first; she had bugs, and Cal had to ride her to find those bugs.

The ship was lower now, and a new voice came over his headset. “Santa Claus, this is Blue Blazer. We are locked on you. Ready to commence approach phase. Over.”

“Santa Claus ready to commence approach.” The ship was heading for a relatively tiny air base on the East Coast. At the speed the KX-238 was traveling, Cal might miss the coast itself. A souped-up, improved, and purely experimental instrument-landing system would bring him in over the field for a landing.

“Blue Blazer commencing track and guide.”

Little lights and green-glowing screens on the hooded panel before him came to life. Tensely and anxiously, he focused his attention on them to the exclusion of all else and tried to fly the ship by what they told him.

The terrain below began to show the works of men now, had he been able to watch. It was warm in the tiny cockpit, and the drag-induced deceleration kept him thrown forward against the webbing of his harness.

It might have been a combination of these things, he told himself, or the persistent drone of Blue Blazer’s voice over the headphones. But whatever it was, he was getting very sleepy. Not even the vibration of the ship slowing through the transsonic region snapped him out of it.

Then Blue Blazer’s voice became excited in his ears, but he didn’t notice it. The panel began to show danger and warning, but he didn’t notice that either. Instead, he fell slowly and surely to sleep.

 

It was like being at the bottom of a well filled with ink. As he slowly fought his way toward the surface, the voices came to him from beyond the thick, muddy blackness.

“… Was very lucky… straps and harness saved him… that ship must have been stressed better than an ordinary plane—No, nothing a couple weeks here won’t mend—”

The blackness got lighter and gave way to gray.

“… Body telemetry was out, or else we’d have some indication of how many g’s he took on impact… would certainly like to know that—” The gray got lighter. Then it was pure-blinding white. “Hold it! He’s regaining consciousness—”

Now there was pain—pain in his arms and legs and a throbbing, searing hurt in his chest that made it difficult to breathe. Pressure told him he was on his back, and other tactile senses reported he was between linen sheets.

It was like waking from a dream, like waking from—

Only then did he remember: I fell asleep! I cracked up the ship!

He knew he was still alive, but now he wished that he’d died.

“… Still shocky… be all right—”

Another voice, a familiar voice, came through the haze to him. “Cal… Cal, this is Don Karlter. Can you hear me, Cal?” He didn’t remember nodding.

“Good show, Cal! Beautiful landing in spite of the failure—”

Failure? No failure but mine!

“The boys are studying the wreckage now. Dwight says they’ve found the failure. It was mechanical. He says the elevons tore clean off their hinges because the servos—”

Mechanical failure? But I fell asleep! Or did I? It must have been mechanical failure! I couldn’t have fallen asleep! I was too excited to fall asleep! Who’d ever believe I fell asleep?

But as he sank back down into that well of blackness, he knew that he had fallen asleep—because he couldn’t remember having crashed. Illogical… impossible… but it had happened.

 

He felt uncomfortable sitting in the chair. The slings and casts on both arms made him feel helpless, and he was sweating under the elastic bandage wound around his rib cage. Don Karlter put a cigarette into his mouth and lit it for him.

And he had a hard time telling himself to keep quiet. There were serious faces gathered around Don Karlter’s desk—engineers in their casual, open-collared shirts, and the military men in their all-alike, somber uniforms.

“How are you feeling now, Cal?” Don asked him after the group was seated.

Cal rolled the cigarette to the corner of his mouth and grinned. “Outside of the busted wings and a couple holes in my mouth where teeth ought to be, I’m feeling fine—like a duck without feathers!”

“You can consider yourself lucky to get off that easy,” Don said with just the hint of a smile playing around the corners of his mouth. “Not very many guys have survived a smash-up like that. Somehow, you must have been completely relaxed when she hit.” The rocket engineer turned to the group, his undershot lower jaw protruding from his long, thin face. He put on his horn-rimmed glasses, shoved his sparse, sandy hair out of his little eyes, and put his bony hands on the table. “Let’s get to the business at hand, boys. Here’s where we stand: mechanical failure in the wing structure and servo system. We don’t know why. Anybody got an idea?”

“The same types of components rode the KX-238 that were in the Griffon I,” Bill O’Brien, the controls man, remarked.

“But the Griffon was a box-kite compared to this one,” Ed Alcott told him. “We flew a lot of new stuff this time.”

“True, true,” O’Brien mused. “But it was the same type of gear… basically. It should have worked fine—”

“But it didn’t,” Karlter pointed out. He drummed the desk top with his fingernails. “Boys, here at White Sands our toughest problem has always been reliability. It’s difficult to get something to work the same way every time. Some engineering sciences have licked the reliability problem, but it looks like we’re still stuck with it.”

“Reilly’s Law,” Guy Barclay said cryptically.

“Huh?”

“Reilly’s Law,” Guy repeated. “It states that in any scientific or engineering endeavour, anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

“Very true in rocketry,” Karlter admitted. “So we’ve got to put in components we know to be reliable to the nth degree.”

“But it was a basic design flaw as well,” Dwight Jacobs objected.

“That it was.” Karlter was the project engineer, a man with long experience in rocketry. He knew what such a thing meant. “So we do something about it. Guy, freeze construction on Number Two. We go back to the drawing boards and labs for complete redesign.”

“A major modification,” O’Brien said with disgust. “We always think we have the problems licked… until the first one flies. Then we’ve got to go back and do it all over again! One of these days I’m going to quit engineering and start teaching.”

 

Captain Quinn laid his stripe-laden cuffs on the desk, folded his big, competent hands, and spoke for the first time. “Justin, we’ve all studied your flight report, but I’d like to ask you a few questions—”

“I tried to put down everything,” Cal said.

“I know,” the Navy aero-medical man said quietly. “I don’t question the fact that your report seems rather sketchy when the ship went out of control; we can’t expect keen observation under stress conditions like that. But it just seems rather strange to me that everything went fine during the re-entry phase and then went haywire later on. Re-entry was the touch-and-go proposition both ship-wise and pilot-wise—or so we thought. What were your express feelings during the supersonic glide phase? How did the ship handle? What was your general attitude? Was there any question of failure in your mind?”

“No, after I got out of re-entry, I knew the rest would be fine. I don’t recall too clearly just what I was thinking, but I wasn’t worried,” Cal told him. “The ship was a little touchy on the controls, but I expected it. The Triple-X was the same way at high Mach-numbers.“

“Did control get touchier in the transsonic just before failure occurred?” O’Brien asked, rubbing his forehead with the eraser on his pencil.

“I… I don’t know exactly,” Cal replied carefully. “The last part of the flight is still a little confused—”

“I can understand that,” Karlter put in. Don Karlter knew that if no one else in the room did. He had been the first man to ride the Griffon I, the original long-range manned rocket that was the prototype of the KX-238. “Cal, you won’t be in shape to ride the next one, but I want you to monitor the re-design. You’re Johnnie-on-the-spot; you’ve actually ridden in the beast. Do you have any recommendations right now before we get into the re-design work?”

“Nothing right now. I don’t know exactly what you plan to do. So you guys talk,” he suggested, shifting in his chair to let cigarette ashes drop off onto the floor. “I’ll put in my two-bits’ worth where I can.”

The conference dragged on for hours as the engineers tried to understand the failure and design it out of the next ship. It seemed illogical to some of them that the failure had happened the way it did. But they knew from the wreckage that it had happened, and they therefore attempted to find the logical reason for it.

They never questioned Cal Justin’s report. He was an experienced test pilot. He knew his report was accurate, but he also realized it was incomplete. He felt very uncomfortable during the entire meeting.

Faced with having to do something, the engineers worked out an approach to the problem. They went back to their offices, and the modification and re-design of the KX-238 transcontinental rocket began.

In the ensuing months as the form of the KX-238A took shape in the hangar at White Sands, Cal kept busy doing what he could. As with any project, there were a hundred small “fires” to put out each day—endless trifling jobs and decisions which had to be made. Since his left arm had set improperly and had been reset, he found himself on ice as far as riding the A-model went and therefore spent many long hours checking-out the relief pilot, Ralph Simmons, on the operations involved in flying the KX-238A.

But he was not the same Cal Justin who had stepped through the hatch of the KX-238 that morning several months ago. His wife noticed the change before anybody else did, and she brought it up one evening at supper.

“You’ve been working terribly hard, haven’t you, dear?” Diane asked as she noticed him toying with his food. This was unusual, for he normally had an appetite which would do credit to a wolf.

He looked up and managed a smile. “Work hard with a busted wing? Don’t kid me, hon.”

“Is it your arm that’s bothering you then?”

“Some. I don’t like being crippled-up, even though I know I was lucky to get off as easy as I did.”

Diane knew by this time not to make any fuss about her husband’s dangerous work and usually kept silent. Like many a test pilot’s wife, she worried herself sick about him when he was aloft, but she didn’t mention the fact once he was on the ground again. The two of them had learned early in their married life that such discussions definitely didn’t strengthen their marital relations, particularly when Cal’s job meant their bread and butter. However, this time she plunged boldly ahead and remarked, “You didn’t look very rested the morning you left to fly that ship, Cal. If it was due to that little argument we had the night before about going to dinner with the Ogilvys—”

“No, but—”

“You looked tired when you left. I hope you weren’t mad; I said I was sorry—”

“I know you did, hon… but I was a little bushed that morning. I wonder if—Well, never mind.”

She got up and put her arms around his shoulders. “Cal, dear, what’s been bothering you lately? You’ve been moody and quiet—not at all like yourself. Is it because you crashed the ship? Is that it?”

“Yes—” He put his napkin on the table.

“Because you didn’t get enough sleep the night before?”

He got up suddenly, pulling away from her. “I don’t know, Diane. I just don’t know. The engineers say it was a mechanical failure… and that I’m not to blame.”

She faced him and asked, “Then why are you worrying?”

“Because it was my fault! But I can’t explain it—”

“What happened, dear?”

“I… I went to sleep at the controls.”

“You… went… to sleep?” his wife asked incredulously. “But how?”

“Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? I don’t understand it myself.”

“Have you told Don Karlter?”

“No—”

“But, why not?”

“Do you believe I really fell asleep?”

“I… I don’t know,” she said, taken aback. “How could you have gone to sleep flying a dangerous ship?”

“Well, you’ve just answered your question. I haven’t told anybody but you, because who’s going to believe me? I was all teed-up to a fare-thee-well flying that ship; I had to be! I was on edge, nervous, touchy, and under some rugged physical strain. So how could I have fallen asleep?” He sat down again and let her perch on his lap with her arms around him.“Now do you see? How can I tell them that without knowing why I fell asleep? I know what the boys would say: ‘Old Cal took a pretty rough shaking-up in that crash, you know— and maybe he’s not flying straight yet’. Well, maybe I’m not, but that’s what happened.”

“But it might be something important, sweetheart,” Diane suggested. “Maybe something they didn’t know about before… something due to the high altitude or the speed—”

“Three previous flights were made without incident of this kind in the Griffon rockets,” he said, shaking his head. “They’ve been making high-altitude mammal flights all the time for the past couple decades. Nothing like this has ever shown up. There was no logical reason for it to happen at all.” He paused while he got out cigarettes for both of them, then went on, “I guess I shouldn’t worry. They’ve found a mechanical flaw in the design that may have been the real cause. So I’m not to blame for it. But I keep wondering about Ralph—” He shrugged. “I don’t know; if Ralph does fine, we’ll forget it. About the only thing I can do right now is to keep quiet or get tossed in the booby hatch for the head doctors to play with. Keep it under your lid, too, hon… if you believe it.”

Somehow, he sensed that she didn’t. After all, he had been through a serious crash, hadn’t he? And couldn’t this be part of the mind’s protective mechanism blanking out memories of pain by conveniently forgetting the moments leading to the crash—and making him believe he’d fallen asleep?

He’d thought about that—but he still knew that he had gone to sleep.

“Now after you horse it out of the dive, Ralph, don’t forget to make sure Red Dog is tracking you from Florida. We don’t want to search the Atlantic Ocean for you,” he explained for the hundredth time as he knelt by the pilot’s chair helping Simmons into his straps and telemetry gear.

The KX-238A was fueled and ready to go. Karlter and his boys weren’t taking chances this time; they’d planned for a short hop from White Sands to Florida.

“Red Dog will lock on you, and from then on it’s just like riding an ILS instrument landing,” he went on. “Just watch the panel, and you can’t miss the field. They’ll have three F-200’s to chase you in, but you’ll be guided by the landing radar. It checks and rechecks its solution about thirteen times a second to keep you on the right course. The dope it gives you is the real stuff; trust it instead of the seat of your pants, and don’t try to navigate by contact—”

“Nothing superstitious about this bunch, is there?” Ralph remarkde with a grin as he checked the blood-oxygen pickup on his ear lobe.

“Huh?”

“Thirteen reports per second.”

“Oh! That’s just what the computer happens to be set up for. The landing system’s still pretty much in the development stage, making old equipment do new things, you know. It has something to do with the rate of their radar antenna sweep and track frequency, or something.” He felt at the straps, then slapped Simmons on the shoulder. “Good luck, chum. We’ll be waiting for that post card from Miami Beach!”

Simmons gave him the thumbs-up.

The take-off went smoothly. Cal watched from the roof of the White Sands “C” Control Center as the KX-238A drove for the sky, her boosters separating clean and on schedule. When the call for cut-off came over the speakers, and the tiny star in the sky winked out, he went downstairs to the radar plot room.

There was an air of quiet, orderly confusion around the plotting boards as men leaned over them, marking the thin pen traces with timing notations. He went over to the Z-plot—the vertical trajectory presentation—where Don Karlter was watching the trace with a nervous expression on his long face.

Simmons got it through the re-entry pull-out without trouble. His voice came over a loud-speaker on the wall, “Hello, Chloroform Base, this is Fragrant Annie! Re-entry normal! Standing by to ride Red Dog. Approach! Over!”

Cal watched the radar plot anxiously as Red Dog radar picked up the ship. The pen on the plot board was racing along now. On the horizontal chart, it was whizzing across the outlined map with amazing speed.

“This is Fragrant Annie! Riding Red Dog now! Some heating around vital spots, but not bad. She’s flying smooth.”

Thirty seconds dragged by, then it happened. The pen wiggled. Don Karlter grabbed for the microphone and shouted, “Fragrant Annie, this is Chloroform! You’re all over the sky! What’s going on? Over!”

The silence that came back fell like a thunderclap among the men. Karlter pushed the mike button again. “Fragrant Annie, acknowledge Chloroform! Acknowledge! What’s the matter? Over!”

“Don!” Bill O’Brien called out from his position by the telemetry recorder. “Something’s happened to him!”

Captain Quinn’s voice boomed out, “His body telemetry indicates he’s unconscious!”

“What? why?”

“I don’t know! Respiration down, pulse retarded—He’s out like a light!”

The teletype against the wall linking them with the Florida radar stations began to rattle insistently. Dwight Jacobs stepped over and read it aloud as it was being printed.

“RDX TO CHLO BASE. URGENT. URGENT. FRAGRANT ANNIE NO COMMUNICATION. CHASE PLANES REPORT FRAGRANT ANNIE LOSES CONTROL IN DIVE. ADVISE. ADVISE. DE RDX BY 3320 0957.”

“Ralph! Ralph! Answer me!” Karlter yelled over the mike. The radar plotting pen described a series of erratic maneuvers and came to rest suddenly. The teletype started up again.

“RDX TO CHLO BASE. FRAGRANT ANNIE IMPACT REPORTED BY CHASE PLANES TWO HUNDRED MILES NNW. WASHOUT. REPEAT TOTAL WASHOUT. RECOVERY PARTY UNDER WAY. DE RDX 3320 0959.”

Don Karlter put down the mike and turned slowly from the plotting board. “Number Two down,” he said ii a hoarse whisper. “Why? What caused it? What knocked him out? Why? WHY?”

O’Brien was removing the film canister from the telemetry recorder. “We’ll have the film this afternoon,” he said as he started for the door.

“I want to see that film in one hour flat!” Don suddenly snapped. “Captain, get the Air Force aero-med boys in on this one as well. I want to find out what happened—”

Cal Justin knew what had happened. Simmons had fallen asleep.

But he didn’t say anything. He was too sick to say anything. Instead, he stood stonily by the plotting board, frozen with his thoughts.

Because he hadn’t spoken up, Ralph Simmons had died. The report confirming that was being quietly read aloud by Dwight at the teletype.

Because he hadn’t spoken up! But also because he could not speak up!

He went home. He couldn’t bear to stay around for the post-mortem over the telemetry films showing how a man died.

 

“Pilot error?” Karlter snorted, pacing back and forth behind his desk. He tripped over the telephone cord, swore, then glared at each man gathered in the room. It was the same group as before. “I’d call it pilot failure! Quinn, what’s your opinion?”

The Navy flight surgeon shook his head as though he were in a daze. “I don’t understand it. I just don’t understand it at all. He wasn’t under excessive acceleration. The cabin temperature was tolerable with the suit he was wearing. There was absolutely no indication of anoxia or explosive decompression at all. The records look like he fainted! His pulse and respiration took a jump as though he were suddenly frightened, and then he went unconscious! It doesn’t make sense, Karlter. He lived through more than 10g on re-entry pull-out, then passed out cold in level flight heading in for a landing. In all my experience with naval aviation—”

“How’s his wife, Cal?” Bill O’Brien suddenly asked.

“Pretty bad,” the test pilot said sadly. “The final jolt is always rough, although both she and Diane know something like this may happen and are forced to live with it.”

“Does she want his body shipped back here—what’s left of it, I mean?”

Cal shook his head slowly. “She believes that shipping dead bodies around and having funerals is barbaric. She merely asks us to throw his ashes into the jet stream from an F-200.”

Karlter was still pacing, ignoring the conversation. He suddenly burst forth in exasperation. “Two ships! Two ships—and one pilot!” He took a deep breath and set his long jaw. “But we’re not giving up. We’ll take one more flier at it. O’Brien, how soon can you make arrangements for us to get access to the NBS flight simulator?”

“I’ll call Washington right now,” Bill replied, reaching for the phone.

“Never mind; after this meeting,” Karlter waved him off. “Dwight… Tex… Sam… Irv… all of you! Sit down over the plans and specs for the 238A and study them like they’ve never been studied before.”

“What should we look for?“ Dwight asked.

“You decide! You’re the engineers on this project! You saw the flight records! Try to find out what happened! Cal, does this strike a bell with you? How does your interpretation of the records jibe with what you recall from your flight?”

“It looked normal… until the last. I can’t tell you what happened before I crashed; it’s confused. Things happened so fast that—” Cal tried to explain.

“O.K., O.K.! Captain, I’d like to have a palaver with the boys at Patuxent… day after tomorrow. Can you leave tonight and arrange for it?”

“What’s the purpose?” Quinn asked quietly.

“Cal’s going with me. He’s riding the next ship. We should put him through his paces in the aero-med flight simulators and centrifuges to find his tolerances, limits, reactions, and other pertinent data so we can have something to go on in case he doesn’t make the grade.”

“Can do. I’ll be out of here this evening.”

Karlter turned to the test pilot. “Cal, better get ready to leave tomorrow. You’re the only man who’s ridden a 238 and lived. You’ve suddenly become very important to this project!”

Cal’s face remained impassive.

The flight to Maryland was rough. One jet engine had a flame-out at thirty-five thousand feet while they were trying to clear some frontal weather over Tennessee, and the remainder of the flight was made under conditions of anxiety. Cal didn’t get much sleep. He kept thinking about his crash—and Simmons. And he wondered whether or not the jetliner would have another flame-out. It would be rather ironic for him, a test pilot of hot aircraft and rockets, to expire in the crash of a scheduled commercial airliner.

At Patuxent, Cal was immediately thrown into an intensive series of medical checks. He failed most of them miserably. In the centrifuges where he was whirled at high-g with little instruments strapped to his body, he passed out cold at 2.15 g, far below normal tolerance. During the several seconds of free-fall in a supersonic jet flying a ballistic trajectory, he completely lost his orientation and became violently sick. He didn’t get a chance to endure explosive decompression, extreme heat, and the rest of the hair-raising experiments he was scheduled for. The aero-medical men gave him a flat thumbs-down as far as riding anything hotter than a private plane.

Alone in his temporary quarters the night following his down-check, he chain-smoked cigarettes and paced the floor. But by eight o’clock, he was so dead-tired that he fell asleep on the bed with his wrinkled clothing still on.

Don woke him later to tell him that they were going back to New Mexico in the morning, but Cal was too tired to remark.

At three o’clock in the cold hours of the morning, however, he woke up sweating. Sleep was suddenly useless. Without turning on the light, he went to the small window and started to chain-smoke again. The sky was beginning to gray in the east, but a clammy fog was rolling in from the Atlantic Ocean, shrouding the buildings in a hazy cloak. The winking red lights of the control tower and radio antennas jabbed upward into the murk, and from the direction of the flight line came the unmistakable muted thunder and whine of a high-thrust turbojet getting under way. Below the window, lonely street lights shone back from the glossy-wet pavement.

What could he say? How could he go to Don Karlter and tell him what had to be told? He stood there berating himself.

“I’m a coward,” he told himself in a hoarse whisper. “A weakling. I can’t tell them the 238 put me to sleep. They’d think I was weak—like the tests just showed. But I’ve got to tell them… and make them believe it. Otherwise they’re going to go on killing pilots. Ralph was killed because I didn’t have the guts to tell them. Ralph died because of something I didn’t let them know.”

He had to break silence; he couldn’t go on living this way. But how?

The time was coming when another pilot—not he any more—would have to face that looming, unknown specter, that ghost of Morpheus which had already claimed two ships and the life of a man.

“I’m not going to let them kill another one!” he said to himself. “I’ve got to find out what happened! I’ve got to find out why I went to sleep!”

 

The next morning, after a very restless night, Cal discovered himself at loose ends. Don was suddenly called into a high-level conference with some brass that had come from Washington. Possessed of a visitor’s badge which gave him clearance to the technical areas, Cal decided to lose a few hours in the technical library. He was feeling absolutely miserable, and needed the several hours’ relaxation of the common spare-time duty of a specialist: keeping up with progress in allied fields.

He spent a good half-hour rummaging through the unclassified commercial magazines and finally signed into the classified area. Digging out a few of the late flight reports on the Quad-X and X-17 research planes, he settled himself at one of the long tables.

The young lieutenant commander across from him was evidently one of the aero-medical men from the Patuxent center, for he wore the insigne of a naval flight surgeon. A stack of reports and journals covering various phases of aviation medicine was piled in front of him.

Cal went over the first report on the Quad-X, becoming engrossed in it to the exclusion of all else. His troubled mind found relaxation in the precise language and the tightly logical equations. He was about to go on to the second report when he noticed the title on the cover of a journal lying in front of the boyish commander.

“Pardon me, commander, may I have a look at that journal when you’ve finished with it?” he asked in a whisper.

The naval surgeon looked up and glanced at Cal’s civilian suit. “Of course,” he remarked, handing it across the table. “It’s unclassified—one of the new journals on physio-psychological research. A bunch of promising work, even if some of their theories are a bit wild.”

Cal studied the index printed sternly on the brown cover and opened it to the article he was interested in.

The title was, as is sometimes common, quite long :

“A Report of Some Theoretical Investigations Into Neurological Feedback by Aural and Visual Senses, Including Preliminary Reports of Studies of InfraSonics, Flicker, Narcolepsy, and Fatigue, by Elmer T. Worthington, Ph.D., et al, University of Colorado.”

He opened and started to read the introduction. An hour later, he was plowing his way through paragraphs of unfamiliar terminology, but the article held him. He was still studying it when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

It was Don Karlter. “Plane leaves in thirty minutes. Let’s go.”

He returned the journal and left the library in a daze.

Cal had just found out why he had gone to sleep at the controls of the KX-238.

 

As usual, he was very uncomfortable riding in the airliner. He was used to flying a plane, not riding it. He missed the instrument dials in front of him, the song of the radio range in his ears, and the indications of the radar and omnirange. He kept trying to guess their altitude and airspeed until it got dark. They were somewhere over southern Missouri, he guessed.

Quinn drowsed off in his seat across the aisle. But Don Karlter kept right on studying the reports in front of him. The lights in the jetliner were low now, the only illumination in the cabin being a halo of light around the stewardesses’ area and the slender beam of light on the table in front of Don and Cal. The heavy breathing of people was all around them. Through the cabin wall, they could barely hear the muffled swish and thunder of the jets pushing them through the stratosphere.

“I feel whipped,” Don said disgustedly, sliding the papers back into his brief case.

Cal shook his head sadly. Don Karlter’s life was and always had been the dream of space flight. He had believed so strongly in it that he had taken the Rocket Division of the Karlter Ship & Drydock Corporation and built it into the biggest rocket concern in the world. He had risked his life to ride the first of the old Griffon rockets, and his heart and soul were tied up in the KX-238. The transcontinental rocket was a step nearer to space flight, and he was pushing it for all it was worth. Of course, Washington knew that such a long-range manned rocket would be invaluable both as a bomber and a reconnaissance ship. But commercial firms were interested in it, too, because the rocket was becoming fast transportation.

Before the Griffon rockets, guided missiles had had only military uses; the Pact of Berlin had almost sounded the death knell of rocketry until Karlter succeeded in putting a man in a rocket and giving it commercial possibilities. A budding new industry was rising from the heap of old swords that had been military rocketry, and another failure at this point could set it back for decades.

Therefore, the puzzling problem of the pilot failure of the second 238 rocket had hit Don Karlter hard. Cal knew it; he could sense it in the man’s actions. He had known Don for a long time, and shared with him most of his beliefs and dreams of the future of rocketry.

“Cal,” Karlter went on, lighting a cigarette for himself and the test pilot, “the two failures were not connected in the slightest. Those two in a row were probably just circumstance. The third one will probably go O.K. But it’s got to go! A third failure in a row, regardless of reason, will send us all back to selling apples on street corners and replacing burned out bulbs in the engineering offices of Great Western Aircraft. But we’ve got to take the risk. We licked the mechanical failure of the first ship. Now we’ve got to lick the pilot failure! Cal, that’s going to be up to you. You can’t ride it, but you can train the next pilot

And I want you to train him. It all rests with the pilot now. The ship is good; as usual, the engineering product is about a hundred times better than nature’s. It’s the man now, Cal. I wish we could improve him, but we’re stuck with only one model; no new ones are going to come along for a while! So we’ve got to put up with a lousy, unpredictable, weak, and fallible hunk of human being. Only this time we’ve got to get a pilot that won’t conk out on us. We can always figure out some reason why a machine fails on us, Cal. Human beings… no. As the old saying goes: some people got it, some people ain’t. We’ve got to get somebody who’s got it.“

You won’t find him, Cal thought. But I’ve got to prove it to you—and myself

Don lapsed into silence thereafter. Cal thought surely he would have something to say about the medical checks, but he didn’t. Karlter knew what a bad crash could do to a pilot; Don had flown once.

 

One evening about a week after they’d returned, Cal came home, ate dinner, and told Diane, “Sweetheart, I’m going into the study for a little bit. I don’t want to be disturbed. O.K.?”

She nodded and reminded him, “Please try to get to bed at a decent hour tonight, dear. I don’t even remember you coming to bed last night.”

“I’m a night owl by trade,” he kidded her. “I never get going good until my second cup of coffee in the morning. You’re the bright and early one around here, you know. I sometimes wonder why I didn’t marry someone with the same metabolic cycle.”

“Beast!” she chided him. “What are you up to now? Don’t read until two a.m. It’s bad for your eyes to read when you’re tired.”

“I’m just going to do a little experimenting,” he told her, getting up from the table. “It’s not dangerous, but I want you to follow my instructions.”

Her face suddenly got serious at the mention of danger. “What are you going to do, Cal?”

“I’m going to prove that the ship put me to sleep.”

“The ship put you—Cal, are you all right?”

“I am. I think I have the problem solved, but I’ve got to try it. If it works, it’ll prove that the KX-238 forced me to go to sleep.” His wife looked at him strangely. “But—”

“I’ve got to solve it once and for all, dear. It’s a hanging problem. I went to sleep; Ralph went to sleep; the next pilot will go to sleep. They’ll keep on killing pilots and losing ships unless I can step in and show them just how the ship caused a human failure as surely as if it clubbed him, or tossed him against the canopy, or blacked him out in a turn. I’ve got to show that the pilot failure is beyond the control of the pilot. Now, if I don’t come out of the study in one hour—say, by eight o’clock—I want you to call Don Karlter. Have him come right over and bring Captain Quinn with him. That’s all. Understand?”

Diane didn’t like it, but she didn’t try to stop him. She knew she couldn’t. Instead of arguing further, she made up her mind what she would do as soon as Cal retired to the study. Don and Captain Quinn would know how to handle him. After all, hadn’t he been acting strangely since the crash, and hadn’t he persisted in this silly notion of the ship putting him to sleep?

Secluding himself in the study, Cal shut the door tightly behind him and placed an easy-chair in front of the high-fidelity record player. From a carton on the desk he took a small black box containing a large point-source of light. He dug in his pocket, hands shaking, and took out a small device he’d had made up in the White Sands’ optical shop: a small glass prism with a hole along its axis and ten equal, silvered faces. This he placed over the center pin of the record turntable and fixed the light source so that it was pointing toward the prism. Setting the turntable speed at 78 r.p.m., he stepped back and put his hand on the light switch.

He knew what he was getting into. Subconsciously, his mind rebelled. With streams of sweat running down his face, he forced himself to turn off the light and sit down in the chair.

The turntable in front of him was spinning the prismatic cylinder set on its center pin. As it turned, its ten silvered sides reflected the spot of light into his eyes.

It took will power to focus his attention on it. He watched it intently for nearly thirty seconds. Then it hit him.

A terrific wave of pure, cold fear came over him, making him want to scream aloud and run. But he grabbed the chair and stayed put; after all, he kept yelling at himself, what is there to fear? Then there was pain in his arms and chest and a screaming, roaring noise in his ears. He was suddenly no longer in his den, but sitting in the cockpit of the KX-238.

Flicker, flicker, flicker—Each of the ten sides of the prism reflected light in turn to his eyes, but at a carefully predetermined frequency.

Then it began to blur, to become a glow instead of a flicker. The flashing spot of light grew in his vision until he could see nothing else. Wave after wave of drowsiness was washing over him. I’m right! I’ve got it! I’ve found it! he thought as he hovered on the edge of consciousness.

But even as he thought this, he was already so far gone that he didn’t hear the door open, nor his wife scream. And he didn’t feel Don Karlter and Quinn trying to bring him to.

 

The demonstration for Karlter and Quinn later that night was also a success.

“Holy Smoke! Turn on the lights! Turn on the lights!” Don yelled. Cal flashed the overhead light on again and stopped the turntable. Karlter wiped his hand over his face. “ Wow! It does, doesn’t it?”

“Believe me now?” Cal asked.

“Hell, yes! Give me a cigarette.”

Quinn was still sitting there, looking very unmilitary in an old pair of paint-smeared dungarees. He still had sawdust in his hair from his home workshop.Violently he shook his head and rubbed his mustache, nodding slowly. “Narcolepsy. It fits,” he mumbled. “Quite an effective demonstration, Cal.”

“But why didn’t you say something about it before?” Karlter wondered, indictment in his voice. “ Why? A man rode to his death because of your silence! Why didn’t you speak up?”

“Look, Don, don’t act like both judge and jury. What would you have done if I had told you? Don’t answer; I know. I would have been called all sorts of nasty names, and the problem would not have been solved. You’d have assigned the cause of failure to that lousy, no-good pilot and wept like mad over the loss of that perfect ship, destroyed by that lousy pilot.

“As it was, there happened to be some kind of a mechanical failure as well. Might have happened before or after the crash. But you had the trouble pinned on that mechanical flaw and would have thought I was just punchy from the crackup, so you would have ignored it. I couldn’t give you a good reason because I had no data to back me up. I could have yelled to the head doctors, or charged at windmills. It might have been noble of me, but certainly not effective. I’d have already lost your respect. So I kept my mouth shut.”

Karlter nodded. “Go on. You’re making sense.”

“You were happy about it then until Simmons cracked up… as I knew he would. But by that time I almost had myself talked into believing that falling asleep was nonsense. But then we were all stuck; the telemetry information— which was lacking on my crack-up—said Ralph fell asleep, which he did. Except that it was natural to assume that he’d been knocked out.“ He drew deeply on his cigarette and expelled smoke in a long cloud. ”Boy, if you think you had a tough problem then, how about me? I knew I had to tell you, but I couldn’t. Man, I was a coward, a weakling, a general no-good-nick! It was only after I got hold of that report,“ he went on, indicating the copy of the paper he’d sent for and which Captain Quinn was now reading with rapt attention, ”that I knew what caused the failures. But, to be absolutely sure I was on the right track, I had to rig a gimmick and demonstrate it—which I just did and which has just given me a corker of a headache. Then I had to prove to both of you that a man can undergo human failure for reasons that are beyond his control and tie it down to something that could be measured so that I wouldn’t be accused of merely a character failure. Me and every pilot that flew that ship. The math was perfect; the ship was perfect; the trouble was that the pilot was no good. Ergo, the pilot is the trouble. That’s the reasoning; I remember you saying that. That wasn’t the trouble, Don.“

He walked over and sat down on the couch; his hands were still shaking, and his words were tumbling out. “I did a lot of thinking about this whole mess after we got back from Patuxent, Don. You see, we have trouble admitting that a person can be compelled. If a human being falls short, it’s because of any reason except compulsion—cowardice, weakness, anything. We don’t like to admit that forces external to ourselves can compel us to want to do something. But the psychiatrists are doing it! And remember the Communist brain-washing techniques? Man, I was up against it! Really up against it!”

Quinn lowered the book and picked up the prism from the turntable. Rolling it over in his hand, he looked at it. “Low frequencies play funny tricks with the human brain. We’ve known this for quite some time, Don. A fourteen-cycle audio note, for example, if presented at a level above eighty decibels, will drive a subject almost insane with fear. Physical vibration has the same effect. We just completely overlooked another aspect of it on the KX-238: light!”

“We sure did!” Cal cut in. “Don, this little prism on the turntable was reflecting that light source into our eyes at a thirteen-cycle-per-second rate. What is the rep-rate of the approach and landing radar guidance on the 238’s panel?”

Don looked up suddenly. “Thirteen cycles-per-second!”

“Right! There’s the culprit! The thirteen-per-second flicker of the screens on that panel does the same thing as that little prism. Maybe Quinn can tell you exactly what it does physiologically, but I went to sleep concentrating on that panel—and so did Ralph Simmons!”

“Actually,” Quinn came in as though he were almost on cue, “the psycho-physiology men are coming up with a lot of stuff that’s been guesswork and rule-of-thumb until recently. According to this article—which I am going to read most thoroughly, by the way—that particular flicker frequency constitutes some sort of feedback within the brain. E.E.G. records from the occipital and parietal lobes show the alpha rhythm to be about thirteen cycles-per-second on the average. With my meager knowledge of electronics, I would say that the experts would call it positive feedback or perhaps even phase distortion. However, it’s now evident that it knocks the viewer into narcolepsy. There’s a lot of work to be done on it yet.”

“But we can modify the landing system for the 238!” Don said with a grin.

“Sure, now that we know about it and accept the fact that it has some nasty effects on the pilot,” Cal put in. “I have a hunch, Don, that it’s just one of the nasty little things lying around that have been overlooked and that we’ll design into the ships in pure innocence. And we’ll go on killing pilots because of this design flaw. I’ll probably be one of them, but it’s stupid to think that we can do what we intend to do without killing a few people with mistakes. Look at aviation, for example.”

“You’re right,” Don reflected quietly. “It’ll be expensive—and not only in terms of cash. But everything we’ve done that’s been worth while has carried a payment. What really hurts is not the design flaws in our ships; they can be fixed. It’s the design flaws in our culture—”

“Yeah, like the one which kept me from coming to you and saying, ‘Don, Ralph died because I didn’t tell you this before, but the KX-238 transcontinental rockets have a sleep-compeller built into them!’ ”

“Or like the one that would have made me tell you that you were nuts!” Don got to his feet and pointed at Cal. “But forget flying them, chum. You’re on the design staff from now on, especially after those tests at Patuxent.”

Cal looked up at him. “We’ll see how I react now, and if Quinn thinks it might have been psychosomatic. I went through holy physical hell right here under the flicker, and I’d almost be willing to bet I get through with flying colors now. At any rate, I don’t intend to stay on the ground and let some other guys beat me out now. Want to place a bet on that, Don?”

Don did. He lost.

 

 

THE END