The Minotaur (39 page)

“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.”