His head still inside the plane’s greenhouse, McDonough listened transfixed. Like most CAP officers, he was too old to be a jet pilot, his reflexes too slow, his eyesight too far over the line, his belly muscles too soft to take the five-gravity turns; but now and then he thought about what it might be like to ride one of those flying blowtorches, cruising at six hundred miles an hour before a thin black wake of kerosene fumes, or being followed along the ground at top speed by the double wave-front of the “supersonic bang.” It was a noble notion, almost as fine as that of piloting the one-man Niagara of power that was a rocket fighter.
The noise grew until it seemed certain that the invisible Jets were going to bullet directly through the hangar, and then dimmed gradually.
“The usual orders?” Persons shouted up from under the declining roar. “Find the plane, pump the live survivors, pick the corpses’ brains? Who else is up?”
“Nobody,” Martinson said, coming down from the ladder and hauling it clear of the plane. “Middletown squadron’s deactivated; Montgomery hasn’t got a plane; Newburgh hasn’t got a field.”
“Warwick has Group’s L-16”
“They snapped the undercarriage off it last week,” Martinson said with gloomy satisfaction. “It’s our baby, as usual.
Mac, you got your ghoul-tools all set in there?”
“In a minute,” McDonough said. He was already wearing the Walter goggles, pushed back up on his helmet, and the detector, amplifier, and power pack of the EEG were secure in their frames on the platform behind the Cub’s rear seat.