"I know how you feel, sir," Butler said in his deep, gravelly 52 .

voice, running a hand across his shaved head. "I get a shiver every time I see her."

She was a child of the first X-29 advanced technology dem- onstrator aircraft built in the early and mid-1980s. Long, low, sleek and deadly, DreamStar was the only fighter aircraft any- where with forward-swept wings, which spread gracefully from nearly abeam the cockpit back all the way to the tail. The forward-swept wings allowed air to stick to the aircrafts control surfaces better, making it possible for the aircraft to make faster and wilder maneuvers than ever thought possible. She was so agile and so fast that it took three independent high-speed com- puters to control her.

"Chief," Patrick said as they began a walkaround inspection of the fighter, "there's no question she's one sexy piece of hard- ware. Very sexy."

Butler nodded. "Couldn't put it better myself."

The cockpit seemed suspended in mid-air on the long, pointed forward fuselage high above the polished concrete floor of the satellite-bluff hangar. Beside the cockpit on each side of the fu- selage were two auxiliary fins, canards, integral parts of the DreamStar's advanced flight controls. When horizontal, the ca- nards provided extra lift and allowed the fighter to fly at previ- ously unbelievable flight attitudes; when moved nearly to the vertical, the canards let the fighter move in any direction without changing its flight path. DreamStar could climb or descend with- out moving its nose up or down, turn without banking, dart sideways in, literally, the blink of an eye.

The one large engine inlet for the single afterburning jet en- gine was beneath the fuselage, mounted so that a smooth flow of air could still be assured even at radical flight attitudes and fast changes in direction. DreamStar had two sets of rudders, one pair on top and one on the bottom, which extended and retracted into the fuselage as needed; the lower stabilizers were to assure directional control at very high angles-of-attack (when the nose would be pointed high above the flight path of the aircraft) and low speed when the upper stabilizers would be in- effective.

Even at rest she seemed energetic, ready to leap effortlessly into the sky at any moment. "She looks like a great big cat ready to pounce, " Patrick said half-aloud.

They continued their walkaround aft. DreamStar's engine ex- 53.

haust was not the typical round nozzle on other fighters. She used an oblong vectored-thrust nozzle that could divert the en- gine exhaust in many different directions. Louvers on the top and bottoms of the nozzle could change the direction of thrust instantaneously, giving DreamStar even greater maneuverability.

The vectored thrust from the engine could also act as added boost to shorten takeoff rolls, or as a thrust-reverser during dog- fights or on landing to bleed off energy.

She was one hell of a bird, all right, and Patrick McLanahan figured he had the best job in the world-turning her into the world's newest and deadliest combat-ready weapon. Patrick "Mac" McLanahan, an ex-Strategic Air.Command B-52 radar navigator-bombardier-especially remembered for his role on the Flight of the Old Dog that knocked out a Soviet laser installa- tion-was the project officer in charge of development of the DreamStar advanced technology fighter. Once perfected, the XF- 34A DrearnStar fighter would be the nation's new air-superiority fighter.

Walking around the engine exhaust they noticed a crew chief running over to activate an external-power cart. "Looks like they're ready for power," Butler said. "I'd better go see how they're doing. Have a good flight, Colonel.

Patrick returned his salute and headed toward the plane he would be flying that morning. If the two aircraft were humans, the second jet fighter, Cheetah, would be DreamStar's older, less intelligent cousin. A by-product of the revolutionary SMTD, Short Takeoff and Landing and Maneuverability Demonstrator projects of the last decade, Cheetah was a line F- 15E two-set jet fighter-bomber, heavily modified and enhanced after years of research and development in the fields of high performance flight and advanced avionics. It had come to Dreamland, this top- secret aircraft and weapons research center northwest of Las Vegas, seven years earlier. It had been at Dreamland for less than a day before then Lieutenant General Bradley Elliott, the director of HAWC, had had her taken apart for the first time.

The changes to the airframe had been so extensive that it had been given a code-name Cheetah instead of keeping its original nickname, Eagle.

Hard to believe, McLanahan thought, that such a machine like Cheetah could be outdated in so short a time.

The remarkable enhancements built into DreamStar had been 54 .

tested years earlier on Cheetah, so Cheetah shared DreamStar's huge movable forward canards, vectored-thrust engines and computer-commanded flight controls. But even Cheetah was starting to show its twenty years of age. Modifications to every component of the fifty-seven-thousand-pound aircraft meant lots of riveted access panels scarred across its fuselage, performance- robbing patches that layers of paint could barely hide. With an eleven-hundred-pound remote-control camera mounted just be- hind her aft cockpit, her once impressive top speed of Mach two was now a forgotten statistic-she'd have a tough time, Patrick thought, of reaching Mach one without afterburners. DreamStar could easily cruise at one point five Mach without 'burners.

Where all of the high-tech components had made DreamStar the fighter of the future, those same enhancements had taken a severe performance penalty on Cheetah. But there was still one man who could make Cheetah dance in the sky like a brand-new bird. Patrick found that extraordinary young pilot asleep under Cheetah's nose, using the nosewheel as a headrest.

,. C. I I.

"Yo," came a sleepy reply.

Patrick went up the crew-boarding ladder, retrieved a set of ear noise protectors from the cockpit. "On your feet. Time to go aviating.

For C. Powell that bit of Air Force jargon was raw meat to a starving wolf-he was up, on his feet and skipping up the crew entry ladder like a kid.

"Say the word, Colonel."

"I'm stopping by to see how our boy is doing in DreamStar, McLanahan said, putting on the ear protectors to block out the noise of the external power cart. "Should be fifteen minutes to engine start. Get Cheetah ready to fly."

"You got it, boss."

In another life, Captain Roland Q. Powell, the only son of a very wealthy Virginia family, all five feet five and one hundred twenty pounds of him, must have been a barnstormer; before that he might have ridden barrels over Niagara Falls. "Plain reckless" would have been the wrong term to describe his fly- ing, but "reckless abandon" was close. He was totally at home in airplanes, always pushing his machine to the limit but staying in control at all times. He never flew slow if he could fly fast, never made a turn at thirty degrees' bank when he could 55.

do sixty or ninety, never flew up high when he could fly down in the trees. He earned the nickname " " from his Under- graduate Pilot Training instructors who would mutter "Jesus Christ" (usually followed by "help me" or "save me") when they found out they had been scheduled to fly with Roland Pow- ell.

He became an FAIP, first assignment instructor pilot, out of Undergraduate Pilot Training, but the Air Force didn't want an entire Air Force filled with JC. Powells, so he was assigned to Edwards Air Force Base. Flight test was the perfect place to stick Roland Powell. He knevall there was to know about aero- dynamics but would still agree to do anything the engineers asked of him, no matter how dangerous or impossible it seemed. As a result Powell got the hot planes. Every jet builder wanted to see what magic JC. Powell could conjure up with his airframe. He was soon enticed to Dreamland by General Elliott with the promise of flying the hottest fighter of them all-Cheetah. Pow- ell's expertise both as a pilot and as an engineer helped speed up the development of DreamStar, but he chose to stay with Cheetah. From then on, he had been her only pilot.

But JC. Powell had had his time in the spotlight. Now, it was Kenneth Francis James' turn.

When he got to DreamStar again, Patrick climbed up the lad- der on the hydraulic lift and watched as James was lowered into the cockpit. His special flight suit was preformed into a sitting position, making James look like a plastic doll. Once James was lowered into place, Patrick moved toward him as close as pos- sible without interfering with the small army of experts attending to the pilot's seat configuration.

"Feeling okay, Ken?"

James nodded. "Snug, but okay."

Patrick watched as James was set into his specially molded ejection seat, strapped into place, and had his oxygen, environ- mental and electronic leads connected. The image of a medieval knight being readied for combat flashed in Patrick's head, topped off when they placed James' helmet on his head and clipped it into a clavicle ring on his shoulders. The helmet was essentially a holder for a variety of superconducting sensors and terminals that covered the inner surface. Once the helmet was locked into place, the flight suit became one gigantic electronic circuit, one big superconducting transistor. It became the data-transmission 56 .

circuit between James and the amazing aircraft he was strapped into.

"Self-test in progress," Carmichael said. The computer, a diagnostic self-test device as well as an electroencephalograph to monitor the human side of the system, checked each of the thousands of sensors, circuits and transmitters within the suit and their connections through the interface to DrearnStar. But Carmichael chose not to let the computer do his work, even though he was the one who had designed the interface; the sci- entist manually ran through the complex maze of readouts, checking for any sign of malfunction or abnormal readings.

He found none; neither did the computer. A few minutes later, Carmichael turned to Patrick, nodded. "He's ready."

Patrick walked around the lifts narrow catwalk and knelt down in front of James. He could barely see a movement of James'

eyes through the helmet's thick electro-optical lenses.

"Ready to do some flying, buddy?"

They looked at each other. There was no movement at all from James. Patrick waited, watched. James appeared to be trying to decide on something. He didn't seem fearful or appre- hensive or at all nervous. He was just . . . what?

Patrick glanced at Carmichael. "Alan? How's he doing?"

"His beta is pinging off the scale," Carmichael said, recheck- ing the electroencephalograph readouts. "No alpha or theta activity at all."

Patrick turned again to James, bent down close to him. "We can reschedule this, buddy. Don't push it. It's not worth the grief .

"No. I'll be okay. I'm just . . . trying to get ready .

"Then relax, let it come to you, don't chase it. If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen.- ,@'

"Hell of a way to fight a war," James said-the tension in his voice was obvious. "I can see a fighter pilot telling his squadron commander, 'I know the enemy is rolling across the base but I can't fly today-my damn theta isn.'t responding . . I I've got to prove that I can go in and out of theta-alpha in a moment's notice."

"Making the system operational is still a few years off, Ken,"

Patrick told him. "Don't worry about all that. Relax, don't force yourself or the system. Let's just go up and have some fun Finish up and buy me a beer at the Club afterward. That's all.

57.

Patrick raised a hand in front of the test pilot, and James slapped a metallic-lined glove into it. "Punch a hole in the sky, buddy. That's an order, too." He gave James one last thumbs- up and stepped off the lift.

By the time Patrick had stepped back onto the tarmac Dr.

Carmichael was shaking his head in disbelief.

"He's already under alpha-JC. parameters. I think he's getting to the point where he can do it anytime. If we had him hooked up outside the plane, he could probably go into theta-sine A before we strap him in."

"He gets nervous every now and then," Patrick added, "es- pecially before a big test like this one. Back me up on monitor- ing him, Alan."

An external power cart was running on Cheetah by the time Patrick returned, climbed into the aft cockpit and strapped in.

Aircraft power was already on, and his crew chief and test-range officers had already done a fast preflight of the telemetry and data collection instruments packed into the cockpit. Because Cheetah was the only jet around that could even try to keep up with the DreamStar, it was now used to fly photo-chase on train- ing and test flights. The special high-speed camera Cheetah car- ried tracked DreamStar as it went through its paces. Patrick could monitor all of DreamStar's important electronic indica- tions and if necessary take control of the plane by remote con- trol.

With all of DreamStar's power off, however, there was only one readout to monitor-the EEG of Ken James himself. Like Carmichael, Patrick was amazed as he watched the electronic traces of James' different brainwave patterns. He clicked open his interphone.

"He's almost into theta-sine alpha already."

"Does that mean I can go to sleep too?" JC. Powell said.

"How fast could ou go into theta-alpha?" Patrick said, watching the readouts change. "I know you've flown the DrearnStar simulator. Could you do any better?"

"Patrick, I'm a pilot, not a robot." 's voice had lost its sardonic tone. "Seems to me ANTARES turns pilots into near- robots. But to answer your question: sure, I could go into theta- sine-alpha quickly. Couple of minutes. Staying in theta-alpha was another trick. I could never quite get the hang of it. But I 58 .

didn't lose DrearnStar, I gained Cheetah. I figure I got the better deal.

Which was a long speech for JC. Powell; it underscored his dislike for ANTARES. ANTARES might be th@'great addition to DreamStar's already amazing array of avionics, it might be the future of air combat-but JC. Powell didn't see it in his future.

"It doesn't turn anyone into a robot," Patrick said. "You still have full control. I don't see what your problem is about AN- TARES. ".

"Full control? Of what? A computer tells him what to do, and he does it. "

"It's still the pilot calling the shots, "Sure, he can pick up his own options out of a list the com- puter presents to him, or he can override everything and go his own way. I know that. But if a smart computer offers up a list of a hundred options, well, most guys will pick something out of that list." Powell spread his hands out across his lap. "Say you're at a fancy restaurant." He motioned an imaginary waiter to his table. "You've been to this restaurant before because they have the best steak in town, but Pierre hands you the menu.

What do you do?" Powell opened his imaginary menu and pre- tended to read it. "You look at the menu. Why? Because it's there. So maybe you order the steak because that's what you always order, but you still look at the menu.

"See, even with ANTARES it takes time to scan the menu.

A real pilot will use that time to use his head and instincts to execute a real maneuver. In ANTARES there's no thought, anal- ysis, decision making . . . it's been done for you. And I call that programming.

"But if it results in a better system?"

"ANTARES hasn't been proved to be better than a human pilot .

"We still use a human pilot, "

"More or less, I guess," Powell said sarcastically, returning switches to their proper positions. "But in a significant way we don't-I say ANTARES can be beat."

"Well," Patrick said, rubbing his eyes wearily, trying to mas- sage away the headache that usually happened when arguing with JC. Powell, "it's a moot point, at least for now. Like I said, we're not concerned with how well DreamStar fights, deploying 59.

her is still a ways off. We're here to test the aircraft and test the concept. "

, slumping so far down in his seat Patrick 'ouldn't see him, said, "But all those generals and congressmen don't care about testing the concept. They all want to know the same thing-can she win dogfights?"

"And you're saying she can't."

"I'm saying that she can be beat. A pilot with the right combo of skill and balls can beat ANTARES. And if ANTARES is forced out of the combat loop, the pilot in DreamStar has to be able to take charge and fight on his own. DreamStar's not really set up for pilot-directed dogfighting. For me that's her weak- ness . . . And look what we're doing to our combat pilots"- motioned toward DreamStar-"Ken James is one of the best pilots in the Air Force. He's been a star ever since he grad- uated from the Zoo. So what have we done with him? We've trussed him up in a steel flight suit, a twenty-pound helmet and more damn electrodes than Frankenstein's monster. We're using his brain but not his mind. There's a big difference, I figure.

Are all our best military pilots going to be used as protoplasmic circuit boards for ANTARES?"

For a guy that was only thirty years old, Powell could be a real stick-in-the-mud sometimes. Patrick scanned the EEG read- outs. "Everything looks normal. It should be awhile before he radios in that he's ready. I'll let you know when he's coming around so we can crank engines."

"Roger that. I'm gonna do another flight-control check."

"Didn't you just do a computer self-test?

"Having a computer check a computer to see if a computer is working is just looking for trouble. One of these days all those computers will get together and drive us into the ground. I wanna catch them before they do it. I'm doing the check manually. Let me know when you're ready to go."

"Rog." Patrick was tired of arguing. Besides, had a point. He turned again to the EEG monitors.

Theta-sine-alpha indicated that James was relaxed, but it was a much deeper level of relaxation, more neurological, much more than ordinary muscle relaxation. The ability to get to theta-sine- alpha had taken months of training. They called it biofeedback when psychologists would hook a patient up to a mini-EEG or polygraph that would beep whenever a beta wave would be de- 60 .

tected, indicating stress or irregular muscular or nervous activ- ity. The idea was to relax the body or control nerve Activity until the beeping stopped. James had to go far beyond such muscle relaxation-he had to relax his mind, open it, create a window into the subconscious.

For Kenneth Francis James, the window to his mind did not open like a door or a window-it opened like a hot, rusty knife ripping through pink flesh. But that was the nature of the Ad- vanced Neural Transfer and Response System that linked the brain with a digital computer. James had gone far beyond Car- michael's lectures. This was the real thing, the link-up between the computer on the plane and his suit.

The first mind-numbing phase of transition was activation of the system itself, which occurred automatically once ANTARES detected that James had entered theta-sine-alpha. In order to pick up the tiny changes in electrical activity in James' body, the metallic ANTARES flight suit itself had to be electrified. Even though the charge was very small it was applied to almost every part of the body, from the skull to the feet; it was like touching one's tongue to the terminals of a nine-volt battery and feeling the tiny current jolt the taste buds, except that James felt that sweet, tingling sensation in every part of his body. And through it all, he had to maintain theta-alpha . . .

Enduring activation of the ANTARES system was only the first step; the now familiar slight physical pain was easy to block out. The next assault, however, was on the mind itself.

Once ANTARES was open it would transmit a complex series of preprogrammed questions to various conscious and subcon- scious areas of James' mind. The questions, programmed months earlier by countless hours in a simulator-recording unit, would match the existing brainwave patterns of each level encountered.

After scanning, recognizing and matching the patterns, AN- TARES would then overpower that particular neural function, force the original pattern to a compatible subconscious level and allow the ANTARES computer to control that level. It was like submitting a series of passwords to several levels of guards ex- cept each time ANTARES would reach a level it would hammer, not knock, on the door, demanding entry. Once admitted, it would first befriend, then overpower, the resident inside. The takeovers accomplished by ANTARES were sometimes painful, DAY OF THE_CHEETAH 61.

sometimes soothing. At times images would force their way out of James' subconscious, long-stored memories of childhood that Maraklov had long forgotten.

His conscious mind was now like a big living room that had just had all its furniture moved to different parts of the house.

ANTARES had taken over control of most conscious activity, keeping only a few essential activities in the conscious fore- ground while relegating the rest to higher parts of the brain. Now ANTARES was ready to start remodeling.

With the doors and windows to James' subconscious mind wide open, his mind was ready to receive and process vast amounts of information. Normally that information would come from the five senses, and even with ANTARES some still did, but now altogether new sources of information were open. AN- TARES could collect and transmit digital data signals to James'