Slingshot | Page 3

go, after today. He wondered if he'd quit at
seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old pride and excitement were still
strong. He still got a kick out of the way the girls looked at the silver
rocket on his chest. But he didn't feel as lucky 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