Read Online One Thousand Years by Randolph Beck - Free Book Online

up?”
    “They
start in phases. We could bring out this display and start each
phase ourselves, but the rechner does that better than a man ever
could. The rechner usually knows the mission we are assigned. It
will start the engines when we give the command and set up the
navigation. It could take us all the way there and back if we want
it to. The stick is for making quick flight adjustments, and for
manual combat maneuvers.”
    “It
seems to me that the machine does a lot of the work for you,”
McHenry surmised. “I guess there is a lot for it to do.”
    “Well,
it is not like it was in your day. A pilot has a different role than
just flying the craft. You probably need to become more acquainted
with the rechners.”
    “I
guess so,” said McHenry, realizing that was going to be his
next task.
    A
sense of inadequacy overwhelmed him. He had thought this could have
been his best chance to escape. He was alone with only one other man
on a spacecraft that could very likely be capable of taking him down
to his base in Italy. Perhaps even straight to the United States.
Or maybe directly to Berlin, he thought, where he could drop a
powerful space weapon on Hitler's Nazi bunker ... If only he could fly this thing now.
    Besides,
he realized, Vinson was too kind a soul to bash his brains in, even
if he hadn't been so much larger — and almost certainly much
stronger.
    “Have
you ever flown one of these in combat?” he asked.
    “Never,”
replied Vinson. “Grauen sightings are rare. The Reich has had
no other enemies for over five hundred years. There might be one
reported every three or four months, but I haven't been so lucky.”
    “Really?
Don't Barr and Bamberg have Iron Crosses? How did they get those?”
    “My
friend, you have no experience of our times,” said Vinson.
“They have been flying for a couple hundred years. That is
long enough to have seen combat. Perhaps not as much as you have,
but they have seen more than enough.”
    McHenry
allowed that to stand. It was clearly true. The Tiger may have had
a stick and something like a window, but it was not an airplane. He
had a thousand years to catch up on.
    “See
this,” said Vinson, fiddling with the panel. The background
image disappeared completely, replaced by a field of stars with the
Earth below.
    McHenry
held back expressing his astonishment, but he did look behind to see
if the Göring was anywhere nearby.
    “We
are now in game or simulator mode,” Vinson explained. “We
use this for training. I will be able to show you how we do things.”
    “You
mean, we hadn't really moved, and we're still in the hangar,”
said McHenry, unsteadily. The only comparison he could think of was
Hollywood.
    They
practiced flying through space while Vinson explained the simple
basics. They spent ten minutes working this way, and McHenry slowly
got a feel for the controls.
    “When
you first learned to fly, did you make passes over the airfield?”
    “Yes,
they're called touch-and-goes.”
    Vinson
reconfigured the simulator again. This time McHenry could understand
what Vinson was doing even if he couldn't quite follow along. They
were now positioned at low orbit just at the edge of space, at a
steep descent.
    “We
will do a touch-and-go over Berlin,” Vinson said. “You
couldn't practice like this in real life, but in simulation, we can.”
    McHenry's
breath caught. He understood that Vinson was being friendly, but his
own sense of duty picked up again. He needed to learn this so that,
perhaps one day soon, he might take a Tiger for real. It wouldn't be a touch-and-go, he hoped. It would be a bombing
run.
    “And
as you can see,” Vinson continued, “we can start the
flight anywhere. It could take hours to get to this point in the
landing sequence were this a real flight. Now, watch the angle.”
    They
progressed steeply. McHenry would later learn the different types of
approaches, but this one was standard. Vinson would explain the
procedure while McHenry