Slingshot | Page 3

as he used to. Twenty-nine years old, and he was starting to feel like an old man. He pictured himself lecturing to a group of eager kids.
Had a couple of close calls, those last two missions. That Red had looked easy, the way he was wandering around. He hadn't spotted them until they were well into their run, but when he got started he'd made them look like slow motion, just the same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained sudden deceleration.... Coulter shook his head at the memory. And on the last mission they'd been lucky to get a draw. Those boys were good shots.
* * * * *
"We're crossing his track, Paul. Turn to nine point five o'clock and hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds, starting on the count ... five--four--three--two--one--go!" He completed the operation in silence, remarking to himself how lucky he was to have Johnson. The boy loved a chase. He navigated like a hungry hawk, though you had to admit his techniques were a bit irregular.
Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way they operated, remembering the courses, the tests, the procedures practiced until they could do them backwards blindfolded. When they tangled with a Red, the Solter co-ordinates went out the hatch. They navigated by the enemy. There were times during a fight when he had no more idea of his position than what the old ladies told him, and what he could see of the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon.
And using "right side up" as a basis for navigation. He chuckled again. Still, the service had had to concede on "right side up," in designing the ships, so there was something to be said for it. They hadn't been able to simulate gravity without fouling up the ships so they had to call the pilot's head "up." There was something comforting about it. He'd driven a couple of the experimental jobs, one with the cockpit set on gimbals, and one where the whole ship rotated, and he hadn't cared for them at all. Felt disoriented, with something nagging at his mind all the time, as though the ships had been sabotaged. A couple of pilots had gone nuts in the "spindizzy," and remembering his own feelings as he watched the sky go by, it was easy to understand.
Anyway, "right side up" tied in perfectly with the old "clock" system Garrity had dug out of those magazines he was always reading. Once they got used to it, it had turned out really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, his astrogation prof, would have turned purple if he'd ever dreamed they'd use such a conglomeration. But it worked. And when you were in a hurry, it worked in a hurry, and that was good enough for Coulter. He'd submitted a report on it to Colonel Silton.
"You've got him, Paul. We're dead on his tail, five hundred miles back, and matching velocity. Turn forty-two degrees right, and you're lined up right on him." Johnson was pleased with the job he'd done.
Coulter watched the pip move into his sightscreen. It settled less than a degree off dead center. He made the final corrections in course, set the air pressure control to eight pounds, and locked his helmet.
"Nice job, Johnny. Let's button up. You with us, Guns?"
Garrity sounded lazy as a well-fed tiger. "Ah'm with yew, cap'n."
Coulter advanced the throttle to 5 G's. And with the hiss of power, SF 308 began the deadly, intricate, precarious maneuver called a combat pass--a maneuver inherited from the aerial dogfight--though it often turned into something more like the broadside duels of the old sailing ships--as the best and least suicidal method of killing a spaceship. To start on the enemy's tail, just out of his radar range. To come up his track at 2 mps relative velocity, firing six .30 caliber machine guns from fifty miles out. In the last three or four seconds, to break out just enough to clear him, praying that he won't break in the same direction. And to keep on going.
Four minutes and thirty-four seconds to the break. Sixty seconds at 5 G's; one hundred ninety-two seconds of free wheeling; and then, if they were lucky, the twenty-two frantic seconds they were out here for--throwing a few pounds of steel slugs out before them in one unbroken burst, groping out fifty miles into the darkness with steel and radar fingers to kill a duplicate of themselves.
This is the worst. These three minutes are the worst. One hundred ninety-two eternal seconds of waiting, of deathly silence and deathly calm, feeling and hearing nothing but the slow pounding of their own heartbeats. Each time he got back, it faded away, and all he remembered was the excitement. But each time he went through it, it was worse. Just standing and waiting