"Sir," Colonel Burns said, "the Phantom drifted off its flight plan forty minutes out of San Francisco and passed through Area WF."
Manchek felt himself slowing down. A kind of sleepiness came over him. "Area WF?"
"That is correct, Sir.
"When?"
"Twenty minutes before the crash."
"At what altitude?"
"Twenty-three thousand feet, Sir."
"When does the post team leave?"
"Half an hour, Sir, from the base."
"All right," Manchek said. "I'll be there."
He hung up and stared at the phone lazily. He felt tired; he wished he could go to bed. Area WF was the designation for the cordoned-off radius around Piedmont, Arizona.
They should have dropped the bomb, he thought. They should have dropped it two days ago.
At the time of the decision to delay Directive 7-12, Manchek had been uneasy. But officially he could not express an opinion, and he had waited in vain for the Wildfire team, now located in the underground laboratory, to complain to Washington. He knew Wildfire had been notified; he had seen the cable that went to all security units; it was quite explicit.
Yet for some reason Wildfire had not complained. Indeed, they had paid no attention to it whatever.
Very odd.
And now there was a crash. He lit his pipe and sucked on it, considering the possibilities. Overwhelming was the likelihood that some green trainee had daydreamed, gone off his flight plan, panicked, and lost control of the plane. It had happened before, hundreds of times. The post team, a group of specialists who went out to the site of the wreckage to investigate all crashes, usually returned a verdict of "Agnogenic Systems Failure." It was military doubletalk for crash of unknown cause; it did not distinguish between mechanical failure and pilot failure, but it was known that most systems failures were pilot failures. A man could not afford to daydream when he was running a complex machine at two thousand miles an hour. The proof lay in the statistics: though only 9 per cent of flights occurred after the pilot had taken a leave or weekend pass, these flights accounted for 27 per cent of casualties.
Manchek's pipe went out. He stood, dropping the newspaper, and went into the kitchen to tell his wife he was leaving.
***
"This is movie country," somebody said, looking at the sandstone cliffs, the brilliant reddish hues, against the deepening blue of the sky. And it was true, many movies had been filmed in this area of Utah. But Manchek could not think of movies now. As he sat in the back of the limousine moving away from the Utah airport, he considered what he had been told.
During the flight from Vandenberg to southern Utah, the post team had heard transcripts of the flight transmission between the Phantom and Topeka Central. For the most part it was dull, except for the final moments before the pilot crashed.
The pilot had said: "Something is wrong."
And then, a moment later, "My rubber air hose is dissolving. It must be the vibration. It's just disintegrating to dust."
Perhaps ten seconds after that, a weak, fading voice said, "Everything made of rubber in the cockpit is dissolving."
There were no further transmissions.
Manchek kept hearing that brief communication, in his mind, over and over. Each time, it sounded more bizarre and terrifying.
He looked out the window at the cliffs. The sun was setting now, and only the tops of the cliffs were lighted by fading reddish sunlight; the valleys lay in darkness. He looked ahead at the other limousine, raising a small dust cloud as it carried the rest of the team to the crash site.
"I used to love westerns," somebody said. "They were all shot out here. Beautiful country."
Manchek frowned. It was astonishing to him how people could spend so much time on irrelevancies. Or perhaps it was just denial, the unwillingness to face reality.
The reality was cold enough: the Phantom had strayed into Area WF, going quite deep for a matter of six minutes before the pilot realized the error and pulled north again. However, once in WF, the plane had begun to lose stability. And it had finally crashed.
He said, "Has Wildfire been informed?"
A member of the group, a psychiatrist with a crew cut-- all post teams had at least one psychiatrist-- said, "You mean the germ people?"
"Yes."
"They've been told," somebody else said. "It went out on the scrambler an hour ago."
Then, thought Manchek, there would certainly be a reaction from Wildfire. They could not afford to ignore this.
Unless they weren't reading their cables. It had never occurred to him before, but perhaps it was possible-- they weren't reading the cables. They were so absorbed in their work, they just weren't bothering.
"There's the wreck," somebody said. "Up ahead."
***
Each time Manchek saw a wreck, he was astonished. Somehow, one never got used to the idea of the sprawl, the mess, the destructive force of a large metal object striking the earth at thousands of miles an hour. He always expected a neat, tight little clump of metal, but it was never that way.
The wreckage of the Phantom was scattered over two square miles of desert. Standing next to the charred remnants of the left wing, he could barely see the others, on the horizon, near the right wing. Everywhere he looked, there were bits of twisted metal, blackened, paint peeling. He saw one with a small portion of a sign still intact, the stenciled letters clear: DO NOT. The rest was gone.
It was impossible to make anything of the remnants. The fuselage, the cockpit, the canopy were all shattered into a million fragments, and the fires had disfigured everything.