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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: Operator B
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“Hey, paint’s cheap,” Wentz said.
“Maybe, sir, but since you’ve burned it all off in a hyper-velotic cruise, that means we can’t return to the atmosphere until after sundown—six hours. Otherwise the satellites might see us.”
Wentz chuckled. “Six hours? In
this
rig? I could do sixty before I started to get tired. We’re
cruisin’,
Colonel. And
I’m
 the driver. So just sit back and enjoy it.”
An endless scape of stars stretched before them.
You gotta be shitting me,
 Wentz thought, staring outward.
For the last twenty-five years, he was limited to the sky. Now he had the entire universe.
««—»»
In only a week, Wentz learned to operate the OEV to a degree that he thought there was nothing he—or it—could not do. It was all a mind-set, not that different from a high-tech fighter, the only difference being that the detents reduced reaction time to zero. His brain no longer needed to command his hands on the controls.
Instead—now—his brain was plugged into the aircraft.
Not only could Wentz command the OEV with his mind, he could
tease
it,
jink
it, execute maneuvers that would not have been possible by stick-control or fly-by-wire. The physical human body was simply not capable…but with Wentz’s
mind
 functioning as an integral component of the OEV’s flight systems—
Wentz couldn’t imagine the full-scale possibilities.
Barrel-rolls in space, true-toe vertical thrusts, FLOTs and FEBAs and flat-spins and “skidder-turns.” Wentz performed aerial moves, within the atmosphere and without, that were unprecedented.
At least by a human.
He wondered how he’d fare compared to the
true
 pilots of this vehicle.
“What were they like?” he asked on his seventh test flight. He was encircling the earth at a 23,000-mile geostatic orbit-track. He wasn’t sure—because the OEV had no true-speed indicators, altimeters, or azimuth gauges—but it seemed that each revolution took but seconds. The harder he thought, the faster he went.
“The native operators?” Ashton asked.
“Yeah. Little green men? Silver skin? Big black almond-shaped eyes?”
“I don’t know,” Ashton confessed, “because I never had a need to. I only know they were air-breathers, bipedal, and warm-blooded. One of the bodies was cryolized, and the other was autopsied, at Wright-Patterson.”
“Why do you think they came to earth?”
“Who knows? A field survey, probably. Probably monitoring our technological progress with regards to weapons of mass destruction. The Edgewood Arsenal? You don’t
even
 want to know what kind of stuff we’ve got stored there.”
“You’re right,” Wentz said. “I don’t want to know.” Wentz took his three-fingered hands out of the detents, leaving his last guidance thoughts in the system: continue following the orbit-line. “How far advanced do you think they are?”
“Probably a thousand years, something like that.”
Christ…
“The seal of the egression hatch is so minute, we couldn’t even get molecular wire to run a patch to the outer-hull,” Ashton remarked. “And even if we could, the hull is impenetrable, no way to mount anything on it.” She pointed to the meager bank of readout gauges and VDU’s above the detent panel. “A brace-frame holds that stuff in place, same for the storage racks and lockers in back.”
“If the hull’s impenetrable…how do we have radio contact with S-4?” Wentz asked.
“Luck. Radio waves pass through without any detectable distortion. It’s just a standard SINGARS radio we’ve got installed… You hungry?”
“Sure.”
Ashton unhooked her safety belt, walking normally to the rear of the craft, in spite of its tremendous speed and gyrations.
When Wentz wasn’t looking, she popped a small pill into her mouth.
Moments later, she returned to her seat, bearing two packs of MRE’s.
“Ah, Meals, Ready to Eat,” Wentz recognized the o.d.-green wrappers. “You got a hot dogs and beans there?”
“Live it up, sir,” she said, and passed him the pack. “And you can have my chocolate disk—”
“The hockey puck?” Wentz exclaimed. “Shit, in the field, guys would sell those things for fifty bucks! You don’t want yours?”
Ashton passed him the green cellophane packet, which read CHOCOLATE, ONE (1) DISK, 104 GRAMS. “I don’t eat chocolate,” Ashton said in a vehicle that was probably surpassing 250,000 miles per hour. “It makes my face break out.”
««—»»
Later test flights would prove equally flawless. Wentz flew to the moon, the Alpha-Centauri double-star system, to Venus.
On the moon, he EVA’d, performing several familiarization sessions in the most technologically advanced “space suit” known to man.
This is a trip,
 he thought, skipping through dust and an age-old volcanic ejecta in the Aristarchus plains. He picked up an oblong rock close to the shape of a football; he threw it and watched it disappear.
Eat my shorts, Eli Manning,
he thought.
You ain’t shit.
««—»»
The next day, Wentz was cleared for the mission.
CHAPTER 11
“I love you,” Wentz whispered.
“I love you too,” Joyce hotly whispered back.
His hands molded against her soft flesh; her perfect breasts swayed above his face. Her beautiful dark visage lowered, to kiss him, and Wentz was swept away. His life, for the first time, was perfect.
As he penetrated her, moving with her pleasure, he raised his hands to caress her face—
And when she saw them—his hands, his mutilated, three-fingered hands shiny with scar tissue—
She screamed.
She screamed and pulled away, crawling backward. She began to vomit as she fell off the bed. Wentz lurched up, crawling toward her, and at that same moment, the bedroom door clicked open, and Pete peered in.
“Dad, what—”
“Close the door!” Wentz shouted, pointing at his son.
Pete screamed when he glimpsed his father’s hands.
The door slammed shut.
When Wentz looked over the edge of the bed, he saw that his wife had turned into a swollen, vermiculated corpse. Eyes popped and running with fluid. Her skin blue-green. Lumpen bile slipping from her once-pert, now-rotten lips.
“I hate you,” the corpse gargled. “I hate you, and so does your son…”
When Wentz came awake, he was gagging at the remnant dream-stench of death.
Fuck,
he thought
. This ain’t making it…
The wall clock ticked. Just past 4 a.m.
Four hours,
 he thought.
He showered, shaved, donned his service whites. He zipped up his leather mitts. When he left his quarters, silence seemed to stalk his footfalls. Level Thirteen was a white labyrinth with no vanishing point. Eventually, he found himself in the OEV vault. The sentries in the shadows didn’t move; Wentz felt alone, which was what he wanted. He paced around the OEV, not looking at it as much as looking at his life. He thought about Joyce, he thought about Pete, he thought about all the things he would miss now, but then remembered there was no alternative. There never had been.
The training blocks and the test blocks all seemed unreal now. They were distant dreams; they were like stories someone had told him. When he tried to see the last six weeks in his mind…it wasn’t him in the operator’s seat of the OEV. It was someone else. A dream man.
But today was no dream. His hands had three fingers each. That was real. And in a few hours he would be using those hands—and the instincts they were connected to—to pilot an extraterrestrial vehicle to Mars.
This was real.
Wentz stared at the OEV. They’d had to repaint it each and every time he’d taken it out. It looked surreal with its desert-sand paint on the top, and the heather-blue on the bottom.
All at once, Wentz couldn’t believe what he was looking at, nor what he was about to do in just a few hours.
He looked at his watch…
Oh, man…
What felt like twenty minutes had stretched to four hours.
It was 0758.
The vault door clanked, then began to rise. Bright white light spilled into the hangar and a figure stood in stark-black silhouette.
Major “Jones” stepped out of the light.
“General, it’s time for you to get to the ready room. Time to suit up.”
Wentz could hear his watch ticking. “Yeah. I guess it is.”
««—»»
A pressure-suit wasn’t necessary; the OEV maintained flawless cabin pressure of 14.7 psi or exactly 100 kilopascals, close to identical to earth conditions at sea level. In the past, Wentz had worn a simple simulator helmet, since Ashton had monitored the SINGARS radio channels.
“I need a CVC helmet,” Wentz informed Jones, “for commo.”
“No, you don’t, sir,” Jones replied.
Another silhouette emerged from the bulkhead light. It was Ashton, dressed in the same flight suit series as Wentz.
“You’re coming?” Wentz asked.
“No offense, sir,” she said. “You may be the best pilot in the world, but considering you’ve got a 65-million-mile trip ahead of you, you might need a communications officer.”
“Cool with me.” Wentz extended his mitted hand toward the OEV. “Hop in.”
Wentz climbed up the trolley ladder. He slapped the exterior press-panel.
The top hatch hissed open.
“Let’s get this spam can rolling,” Wentz said.
««—»»
“Charlie-Oscar, this is Jonah One. Request permission to take off.”
The topside door stood yawning open. Bright sky glared beyond.
“Roger, Jonah One. You are cleared.”
Fuck this fucking around,
 Wentz thought. Hands to detents, he jerked the OEV from the hangar entrance…and disappeared.
“Time to cook,” he said.
Clouds sailed by, then so did the rest of the atmosphere. Moments later, they were plunged into star-flecked space.
“Is it me, or does this thing fly faster each time we go out?”
“Yes, sir,” Ashton responded, “though we haven’t come up with a technically sound hypothesis as to why.”
“The first time I went up, it seemed to take a lot longer to get out of the atmosphere,” Wentz observed.
“And maybe you weren’t paying attention, but your second trip to the moon took half as long as your first.”
“I can’t figure it. There’s no throttle, no fuel-flow, no type of velocity controls—”
“It’s all in your mind,” Ashton asserted. “That’s our guess, sir. General Farrington experienced the same thing. Each excursion to the Alpha Cent cluster consumed fewer flying hours. Increased confidence of the operator probably has something to do with it, and familiarization, too. The more flight-hours racked up on the OEV, the greater the feel you have with its total function. The more you get to know it, the faster it flies.”

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