The Minotaur

23

You still here?” the doctor asked when he saw Toad leaning against the counter at the nurses’ sta- tion. The doctor was about forty and clad in a loose green hospital garment with tennis shoes on his feet

“How is she?”

“Unconscious.” The doctor swabbed the perspiration from his forehead with his sleeve. “I don’t know when she’ll come around. I don’t know if she ever will.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Toad demanded, grasping the doctor by the arm.

“Everything.” He patiently pried Toad’s hand loose. “Her spleen exploded. Fractured skull with severe concussion. Blood in her urine — kidney damage. Broken ribs, busted collarbone, two frac- tured vertebrae. That’s just the stuff we know about. We’re still looking.”

“She hit the ground before her parachute opened,” Toad ex- plained. “The drag chute was out and the main chute must have been partially deployed. She just needed another hundred feet or so.”

“Her status is extremely unstable.” The doctor took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. “I don’t know how she’s made it this long.” He flipped the ash on the floor, right in front of the No Smoking sign. “The average person wouldn’t have made it to the hospital. But she’s young and she’s in great shape, good strong heart. Perhaps, just perhaps …” He took a deep drag and ex- haled the smoke through his nose, savoring it

“Is she gonna be able to fly again?” Toad wanted to know.

The doctor took a small portable ashtray from his pocket and stubbed out the cigarette in it after a couple more deep drags. He looked Toad over carefully before he spoke. “I don’t think you heard what I said. She’ll be lucky if she lives. Walking out of this hospital will be a miracle. There’s nothing you can do for her. Now why don’t you go back to the Q and take one of those sleeping pills the nurse gave you. You need to get some rest.”

The doctor turned away from Toad and leaned his elbows on the counter of the nurses’ station. “When you get Lieutenant Moravia’s emergency data sheet from the navy, let me know. We’ll have to notiiy her next of kin. They may want to fly out here to be with her.”

Toad smacked the waist-high counter with his band. “I am her next of kin. She’s my wife.”

“Oh,” he said, looking Toad over again, then rubbing the back of his neck. “Sorry. I didn’t know that”

“I want to be in the room with her. I’ll sit in the chair.”

The doctor opened his mouth, closed it and glanced at the nurses, then shrugged. “Sure, Lieutenant Okay. Why not?”

Thirty minutes later Jake Grafton stuck his head into the room. He looked at Rita, the two nurses, the doctor, the IV drips and the heart monitor, then motioned to Toad, who followed him out into the hall.

“How is she?”

“She’s in a deep coma. She may die.” Tarkington repeated what the doctor had told him.

Jake Grafton listened carefully, his face expressionless. When Toad finally ran down, he said, “C’mon. Let’s go find a place to sit” They ended up in the staff lounge in plastic chairs at the only table, between a microwave oven and a pop machine. “What hap- pened out there today?”

Toad’s recapitulation of the flight took thirty minutes. After he had heard it all, from takeoff to loading Rita into the meat wagon, Jake had questions, lots of them.

They had been talking for over an hour when a young enlisted man opened the door and stuck his head in. “Captain Grafton? There’s an Admiral Dunedin on the phone for you.”

“Tell him I’ll be right there.”

On the way down the hall he told Toad, “You go check on Rita. I’ll see you in a bit.”

The phone was in the duty officer’s office. Jake held it to his ear as the air force officer, a woman, closed the door on her way out ‘This is Captain Grafton, sir.”

“Admiral Dunedin, Jake. We got your message about the crash. How’s Moravia?”

“In a coma. It’s an open question whether she’ll pull through. She ejected too low and her chute didn’t fully open before she hit the ground. She’s got a fractured skull, damaged spleen and a variety of other problems. Five or six bones broken.”

“And Tarkington?”

“Not a scratch.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, sir, the way it looks right now, the fly-by-wire system is suspect. We were having troubles with the control inputs — they were too much at low speeds — so we went with new E-PROMs. Now, all those parameters are supposed to be trouble-shot and double-checked on the bench test equipment and all that, but something went wrong somewhere. The plane got away from Rita in a high-G maneuver and went into an inverted spin. She recov- ered, then it departed again when she pulled G on the pullout. Coming out of the second spin, she just ran out of sky. It flipped on the pullout and Toad punched.

“Hindsight and all, they should have ejected on the second de- parture, but … They were trying to save the plane. Now it looks like Toad may have punched too late for Rita.”

“How’s Tarkington taking it?”

“Blaming himself. I might as well tell you, if you didn’t know, they’re married.”

There was a pregnant silence. “I didn’t know.”

“Yeah.”

“Did that have any bearing on this accident?”

“Not that I can see. They stayed with the plane because it was a prototype and they were trying to save it. Rita thought she could save it all the way down. The last departure at five thousand feet above the ground made it a lost cause, so Toad punched them both out while they still had a little room left in the seat performance envelope. Apparently they were closer to the edge of the envelope than he thought”

“TRX doesn’t have another prototype.”

“I know. We’re going to have to go with the data we have. I’ll get started on the report as soon as I get back to Washington. But I would appreciate it if you would get a team of experts from the company that made that fly-by-wire system out here, like tomor- row. Have them bring their test equipment We need some instant answers.”

“You have the box?”

“One of them, anyway. It’s a little mashed up, but all the cir- cuitry and boards appear intact. l’m hoping they can test it”

“Why not just put it on a plane to the factory?”

“I want to be there when they check it out. And just now I can’t leave here.”

“I understand.”

They talked for several more minutes, then hung up. Both men had a lot to do.

Toad wandered the corridors, looking in on Rita from time to time. A nurse was with her every minute. The evening nurse was a woman in her thirties, and she never gave him more than a glance. Rita was in good hands, he told himself. But she didn’t move. She just lay there in the ICU cubicle with her eyes closed, her chest slowly rising and falling in time with the mechanical hissing and clicking of the respirator. The IVs dripped and the heart monitor made its little green lines on the cathode-ray tube. What he could see of her face was swollen, mottled.

So after looking yet again at Rita and her bandages and all the equipment, he would wander off down the hall, lost in his own thoughts.

Hospitals in the evening are dismal places, especially when there aren’t many visitors. The staffers rush on unknown errands along the waxed linoleum of the corridors. In the rooms lay the sick people with their maladjusted televisions blaring out the networks’ mixture of violence and comedy and ads for the consumer trash of a too wealthy society. The canned laughter and incomprehensible dialogue float through open doors and down the dean, sterile cor- ridors, sounding exactly like die insane cackling of a band of whacked-out dopers. No one in the captive audience laughs or even chuckles at the drivel of the screens. It’s just noise to help survive a miserable experience. Or background noise while you die.

Toad hated hospitals. He hated all of it — the pathetic potted plants and cut flowers, the carts loaded with dirty dinner trays, the waiting bedpans and urine bottles, the gleaming aluminum IV frames, the distant buzzer of someone trying to summon a nurse, the moans of some poor devil out of his head, the smell of disinfec- tant, the whispering — he loathed it all.

He relived the final minutes of the flight yet again. It didn’t matter that he was in a hospital corridor with the TV noise and the nurses talking in the background: he was back in the plane with the negative Gs and the spuming and Rita’s voice in his ears. In his private world the events of seconds expanded into minutes, and every sensation and emotion racked him more powerfully than before.

He found himself in the staff lounge. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but he wasn’t hungry. He got a pop from the machine and sipped it while he inspected the bulletin board. Apparently management was having the usual trouble keeping the staff lounge clean. And the bowling league still needed more people. Come on, people! Sign up and roll a few lines on Thursday nights and forget all these bastards here in the hospital for a little while. They’ll still be here on Friday.

He thought about calling Rita’s parents, and finally decided to do it. He tried for three minutes to persuade the long-distance operator to bill the call to his number in Virginia, and when she refused, called collect. No one answered.

Back down the corridor to check on Rita. No change. Another glance from the nurse.

He walked and walked and flew again, spinning wildly, out of control, the altimeter winding down, down, down, out there on the very edge of life itself.

“So what are the possibilities?” Jake addressed the question to George Wilson, the aerodynamics expert. The group had watched the videotape made by the chase plane flown by Smoke Judy.

“It’s an inverted spin, no question,” Wilson said.

“Why?”

“The plane has negative stability. All these low-observable de- signs do. The fly-by-wire system is supposed to keep it from stall- ing and spinning, and obviously it didn’t.” Everyone there knew what the term “negative stability” meant. If the pilot released the controls, a plane with positive stability would tend to return to a wings-level, stable condition. Neutral stability meant that the air- plane would stay in the flight attitude it was in when the controls were released. Negative stability, on the other hand, meant that once the plane was displaced from wings-level, it would tend to increase the rate of displacement if the controls were released.

“So the fly-by-wire system is the first place to look,” Jake Graf- ton said, “Smoke, you saw this whole thing up close and personal. Do you have anything you want to add?”

“No, sir. I think the movie captured it, got even more of it than I remember seeing at the time. We could sit and niggle over her decision to recover from the second spin instead of ejecting, but I doubt that would be fair. It was a prototype and she’s a test pilot”

Jake nodded. He agreed with Smoke, as he usually did. He had tried keeping Smoke Judy at arm’s length after that night he saw him in West Virginia, yet except for that unexplained sighting, he had nothing else against the man. Judy was proving to be a fine officer and an excellent pilot, a man whose opinions and judgment could be trusted. Which was precisely why Jake had assigned him to fly the chase plane.

They discussed the test results they had and decided how to proceed. As Jake had told the admiral, his report was going to be written with the data the group had gathered. The reason for the crash would have to be included, if it could be established by the time he was ready to submit the document. So this evening he assigned the bulk of his staff to compiling test results and the rest to investigate, or monitor the contractor’s investigation of, the crash.

“Except for the people who are working with TRX, the rest of you need to get back to Washington and dig in. Admiral Dunedin and SECNAV will want the report ASAP.”

Jake Grafton came back to the hospital about tea that night to look in on Rita and talk to the doctor on duty. When he was finished, he dragged Toad off to the VOQ. “If you’re blaming your- self about this, you’d better stop,” he said when they were in the car.

Tarkington was glum. “She fought it all the way down. The controls were just too sensitive. The plane was out there on the edge of the envelope — high G, high angle of attack — and every time she thought she had it under control she lost it again. She kept saying, ‘I’ve got it this time.’”

“She’s not a quitter.”

“Not by a long shot” Toad looked out the passenger’s side win- dow. “A hundred and twenty pounds of pure guts.”

“So now you’re telling yourself you should have ejected on the second departure.”

“Only a thousand times today.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I should have.”

“Why didnt you? Because she is your wife?”

“Naw,” said Toad Tarkmgton, swallowing hard. “That wasn’t it. For just a few seconds there I was flying with you again, over the Med, and you were telling me to hang in there. Toad-man, hang tough. So I hung tough. I wanted to give Rita that chance. She was asking for it. So I sat there and watched the altimeter unwind and waited for her to perform her miracle, and look — I may have killed her, or crippled her for life.”

“It’s all your fault, is that it?”

“Aw. Christ, CAG.”

“Well, if you’d been in the front seat and she’d been in the back, what would you have done?”

“About what Rita did. If I were as good a pilot as Rita.”

“I’ve been around these planes for a few years. Toad, and let me tell you, there are no right answers. Some answers are better than others, but every option has unforeseen twists. If you had jumped when the plane departed the second time, with fifteen or sixteen thousand feet of altitude, you and Rita would have spent the rest of your lives thinking you jumped too soon, that you might have saved it if you had hung in there just a little longer. My father always called that being between a rock and a hard place.”

Toad shook his head.

“Years ago, in Vietnam, I learned that you can’t second-guess yourself. You have to do the best you can all the time, make the best decision you can in the time you have to make it — which is always precious little — and live with the consequences regardless. That’s the way flying is. And occasionally you’re going to make a mistake, nick it up. That’s inevitable. The trick is to not make a fatal mistake.”

Jake Grafton’s voice hardened. “Flying isn’t chess or football or checkers! Flying isn’t some game I Flying is life distilled down to the essence — it’s the straight, two hundred-proof stuff. And Rita knows; she’s a U.S. Naval Aviator. She chose this line of work and worked like a slave to earn that ride today. She knows.”

“Yes,” Toad admitted. “She knows.”

At 3 A.M. Rita’s mother answered her phone in Connecticut. She had obviously just awoke. “This is Toad Tarkington, Mrs. Mora- via.” You know, the guy who married your daughter? “Sorry to bother you this time of night I tried to call earlier—“

“We were at a party. Is everything okay?” She was wide awake now and becoming apprehensive.

“Well, not really. That’s sorta why I’m calling. I thought you should know.”

She went to battle stations while Toad tried to collect his thoughts.

He interrupted her torrent of words. “What it is — Rita and I jumped out of an airplane today, Mrs. Moravia- Rita’s over in the hospital now.”

He could hear her talking to Mr. Moravia. The pitch in her voice was rising.

“Anyway, Rita’s banged up pretty good and I thought you should know.”

“How bad is it?”

“She’s in a coma, Mrs. Moravia. She hit the ground before her parachute had time to open.” Silence. Dead silence. Toad contin- ued, “Anyway, I’m with her and she’s getting the best medical treatment there is and I’ll call and let you know when anything changes.”

Mr. Moravia spoke now. Perhaps his wife had handed him the phone. “What’s the prognosis, son?”

“She could die, Mr. Moravia. She’s in bad shape.”

“Should we come out there?” He didn’t even know where Toad was calling from.

“Not now. When she comes out of the coma, that might be a good idea. But not now. I’ll keep you advised.”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine, sir. No injuries.” Nice that he should ask. Toad thought.

“We’ll pray for her.”

“Yes, Do that. I’m doing some of that myself.”

Harry Franks, the program manager for TRX, stood in the middle of the hangar issuing orders. A small army of workmen were plac- ing wreckage in piles as he directed. They had been working since dawn.

He greeted Jake Grafton without enthusiasm. “Give me five more minutes and we’ll go upstairs,” he said, then pointed to a pile for a forklift operator with a piece of what looked like outboard wingtip.

Jake and the commanders wandered toward the door, trying to get out of the way. The plane had exploded and burned when it hit, so the pieces that were left were blackened and charred.

In an office on the second floor, the engineers from the company that had manufactured the fly-by-wire system, AeroTech, were completing the setup of their equipment. An AeroTech vice presi- dent sat on one of the few chairs, sipping coffee and watching the final installation of the network of wires that powered and con- nected the test boxes. He didn’t look very vice presidential. He and the engineers had flown in early this morning and had had only a few hours’ sleep. He stood up to shake hands with Jake.

After the introductions, they got right to it. The only surviving processor from the crashed prototype was carefully removed from its bent, damaged box and its innards exposed. It was physically examined by the assembled experts with all the curiosity of a group of med students examining a man with a new disease.

Jake backed off to let the experts have room. He found himself beside Harry Franks. ‘Tell me again how the fly-by-wire system works.”

“The aircraft had negative stability,” Franks said, hooking his thumbs behind his belt and warming to the subject. “Most high- tech tactical aircraft today have negative stability.” Jake nodded.

Franks continued. “A human cannot fly a negatively stable ma- chine. It would be like trying to keep a barn door balanced on top of a flagpole- So computers actually do the flying. In that way we could build a highly maneuverable aircraft and optimize its low- observable — stealth — features without worrying that we were com- promising or negating the ability of the pilot to control it. Now, the way it works is pretty neat.”

Jake allowed himself a small smile. All engineers think elegant solutions to technical problems are neat.

‘There are three computers,” Harry Franks continued. “They each sample the aircraft’s attitude and all the other raw data — like air density, temperature, airspeed and so on — forty times a second. Then they see what control input the pilot has made. The pilot’s control input merely tells the three computers what the pilot wants the plane to do. The computers then figure out what control throws are necessary to comply with the pilot’s order, and they compare their answers. They take a vote. Any two computers can overrule the third. After the vote, the agreed electrical signal is seat to the hydraulic actuators, which move the controls. This little sequence takes place forty times a second. You understand?”

“Yep-I think so. But how does the computer know how much to move the controls? That’s what the pilot does in a conventional airplane.”

“Well, obviously, the computer has to be told. So the data that it uses is placed in a Programmable Read-Only Memory, a PROM- Since it’s electrical, we call it an E-PROM. There are other types, like UV-PROMS and—“

Jake halted him with his hand. “So what you guys did when Rita complained of control sensitivity was to change the E-PROMs?”

“Yeah. Exactly. They come on chips. The data is just fried into the little beggars. We called AeroTech and they cooked us some more and flew ‘em down. That’s all there was to it.”

”But the plane crashed.”

“Yeah,” said Harry Franks defensively, “but we don’t know yet—“

“Something went very wrong. We know that much,” Jake Graf- ton said. “The plane went into three inverted spins. Rita was trying to get it out and succeeded twice.”

“Maybe she—“

“Uh-uh. Nope. She knew exactly what she was doing. She recov- ered from more inverted spins at Test Pilot School than you’ve even seen.”

The vice president of AeroTech had a cherubic, round face. The face looked like it had spent two days in the tropical sun when he faced Jake an hour later and said. “I don’t know how it happened, but the data is wrong on this chip.”

“How’s that?”

He gestured futilely. “I mean we’ve run the data three times, and I don’t know how the heck it happened, but the E-PROM data on this chip is just flat wrong. Look here.” He nipped open a thick computer printout “See this line here?” He read off the number, which was all it was, a number. “Now look here. This is the data on this chip.” His finger moved to another computer printout, one Jake had just watched running though the printer. Jake looked. It was a different number.

“How could this happen? I thought you people checked these things.”

“We do check the data. After the chip is cooked, we check every damn number. I don’t know what — I’m at a loss what to tell you.”

‘This is only one box,” Harry Franks said. “There were three of them. Maybe this is the only one that was defective.”

“Well never know,” Jake Grafton said slowly, surveying the faces around him and trying to catalogue their reactions. “The other boxes got smashed and burned. This is the only one left in one piece.”

“I don’t know what to say,” the AeroTech executive said.

Jake Grafton walked out of the room, looking for a phone.

Luis Camacho listened to Admiral Henry’s voice on the telephone and doodled on a legal pad. Today he was drawing houses, all with the proper perspective of course. He had the roofline and baseline right, he decided.

”Okay, so AeroTech sold you a defective E-PROM chip. Or two or three of them. Sue the bastards. What do you need the FBI for?”

“I had the aircraft’s control data base printed out from our computer. It’s wrong. Now, I don’t know if the AeroTech chip has this data on it or not, but the stuff in the Pentagon computer is wrong. So I got on the phone to that National Security Agency computer doctor who tends our stuff, Kleinberg, Fred Kleinberg. He played with his top secret programs that I’m not supposed to know jack about, and tells me the last guy who made a change on that data base was Harold Strong.”

Camacho extended the lines of the roof, eaves, and base of the house until they met at the perspective convergence point. Of course, Albright’s house had more shrubs around it, and with the fence and all you would never see it looking just like this.

“You still there, Luis?”

“Yeah. I’m still here.”

“I want you and your guys to look into it.”

“You called NIS?” NIS was the Naval Investigative Service.

“Nope- Since you are apparently the only guy inside the beltway who knows what the fuck is going on, I want you to investigate this.”

“Investigate what?”

“This computer screw-up, you spook asshole. A four-hundred- million-dollar prototype airplane that’s supposed to be black as the ace of spades just made a smoking hole in the ground and the pilot is at death’s door. The data on the computer chips that fly the plane is wrong. The last guy who messed with the data is dead, murdered. Somebody, someplace is bound to have committed a federal crime. Now get off your fat ass and figure out if the Mino- taur or some other bastard is screwing with my program! God- damn, what have I got to do? Call the Director? Go see the Presi- dent? Maybe I should put an ad in the Post?”

“I’ll be over in a little while.”

The admiral slammed the phone in Camacho’s ear. The agent cradled his instrument and went to the door. “Dreyfus? Come in here.”

At three o’clock Eastern Daylight Time that afternoon Lloyd Dreyfus and two other FBI agents boarded a plane at National Airport for a flight to Detroit, where a man from the local field office would meet them. They planned to drive straight to Aero- Tech’s headquarters in the suburbs.

The Minotaur

The agents were airborne somewhere over Pennsylvania when Toad Tarkington arrived at the hospital-at the air force’s Tonopah facility. He stopped at the nurses’ station. “How is she?”

The nurse on duty had been there yesterday when they brought Rita in. She was an air force captain. She looked at Toad with sympathy. “No change. Lieutenant. I’m sorry.”

“The doctor around?”

“He’s eating a late lunch. He’ll be back in a half hour or so.”

“Can I see her?”

“Sure.”

The ICU nurse nodded and Toad pulled a chair over near Rita’s bed- Her chest was still rising and falling rhythmically, the IVs were dripping, the green line on the heart monitor was spiking— she lay exactly as he had seen her yesterday and this morning when he looked in.

The IV needles were in her left arm, so he picked up her right hand and massaged it gently. In a moment he wrapped her fingers around two of his. “Rita, this is Toad. If you can hear me, squeeze my hand a little.”

The hand stayed limp.

‘Try real hard, Rita.”

Nothing.

“Harder.”

He gave up finally and continued to lightly knead her fingers.

There was a window there by her bed. When he pulled the cur- tains back he could see the distant blue mountains. Clouds were building over the peaks. ‘

Life is not fair. Good things happen to bad people and vice versa, almost as if the goodness or badness of those who bear the load was not factored into the equations for that great computer in the sky. Toad stood facing out the window and ruminated upon it Somehow he had survived this last ejection all in one piece and Rita hadn’t. It wasn’t because he was a good person, or because of his pious rectitude or exemplary morals or conspicuous faith. He was physically okay because he had been lucky, sort of. And Rita was smashed up because her luck deserted her. Yet perhaps the ejection had cost him something more valuable than his life.

Your luck won’t last forever, Tarkington. The day will come, Toad-man, the day will come. Regardless of how you live or the promises you keep, on that day to come your luck will desert you. You won’t recognize the morning, you won’t recognize the noon, but that will be the day. And on that day you’ll lose her forever.

He slumped into the chair. Looking at Rita in her bandages was hard, looking at the IV racks, respirator, and heart monitor was harder. He twisted, trying to get comfortable.

Somehow, someway, the E-PROMs in the fly-by-wire computers were screwed up. He had heard them talking this afternoon. How could it happen? How could TRX and AeroTech’s checks and double checks and Quality Assurance programs all go south at precisely the same time?

Someday hell! She might die today, or tomorrow. Or the day after. You could lose her any day.

He picked up her hand again and massaged it slowly and gently. Finally he placed it carefully back on the covers. He leaned over Rita and kissed the two square inches on her forehead not covered with a bandage. “Hang tough, Rita. Hang tough.”