Project Daedalus
By Thomas Hoover
He told himself you’ve done this a hundred times before at the Ramenskoye Flight Test Center. You’re Russia’s best test pilot. Now, please do it.
He leaned back in the seat to lower his head another few millimetres, then grasped for the pressure control on his G-suit, the inflatable corset that squeezed critical blood paths. He ignored the pain as its internal pressure surged, gripping his torso and lower legs like a vice and forcing blood upward to counter the accumulation at his feet.
Two seconds…
With his right hand, he rotated a black knob on the heavy sidestick grip and turned up the oxygen feed to his mask, an old trick from fighter training school that sometimes postponed the “event” for a few milliseconds.
Most importantly, though, he strained as if constipated in the snow, literally pushing his blood into the best manoeuvre of all. He liked to brag that he had upped his tolerance by three G’s through years of attempting to crap in his blue cotton undersuit.
It was working. The tunnel had begun to widen out again. He’d gained a brief reprieve.
“Acknowledged.” He spoke to Petra, then reached down with his left hand and flicked forward the second blue switch behind the throttle quadrant, initiating the simulated hydrogen feed to the outboard scramjet tridents, portside, and starboard. Acceleration was still increasing as the flashing green number on the video screens in front of his eyes scrolled past Mach 4.6, over four and a half times the speed of sound, already faster than any air-breathing vehicle had ever flown.
Only a few seconds more.
He had to stay conscious long enough to push his speed past Mach 4.8, raising the fuel-injector strut temperature of the scramjets to the 3,000-degree Fahrenheit regime and establishing full ignition. If the scramjets failed to stabilize and initiated auto shutdown, he would flame out at almost twenty-five hundred miles per hour.
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Thomas Hoover
Thomas Hoover began his writing career with two classic non-fiction books on Far Eastern art (Zen Culture, Random House, 1977) and religion (The Zen Experience, Penguin, 1980).
Biography.
He then moved into fiction writing with two critically acclaimed novels about English sailors in the early Seventeenth century, one set in India, The Moghul, and one in the Caribbean, Caribbee. Critics have compared his historical novels to those of James Clavell and James A. Mitchner, and his books have twice been optioned for TV mini-series production.
His most recent novels, including The Touchdown Gene, a novel about DNA manipulation, examine topics at the cutting edge of medicine and genetics.
Hoover also acquired a doctorate in oceanography and later served as senior vice president of an architect-engineering firm in New York, where he has lived for several decades. His vices include being an avid sailor and a recognized collector of Indian classical music.
Thomas Hoover
