"So I'd try anything. You've got to slow him."
"Or return him to level flight."
"At this speed?"
We both looked at the controls now. The ship was accelerating again, and dropping so rapidly I couldn't follow the revolutions counter.
"Engage the ailerons," Bannister ordered. "Point seven degrees, negative."
Dennis came back on. "Harry, what are you doing? The ship is falling apart. The ailerons. It won't help. Listen, Harry, you've got to be careful. The flight configuration is so tenuous, anything can turn this thing into a falling stone. It had to happen, I knew, but I don't want to believe it now. This sitting here with that noise getting louder. It's spiraling out at me, getting bigger. Now it's smaller again. I'm afraid, Harry. The ailerons, Harry, they're gone. Very tenuous. They're gone. I can't see anything. The screens are black. No more shaking. No more noise. It's quiet and I hear myself breathing, Harry. Harry, the wrist straps on the suits are too tight. And the helmet, when you want to scratch your face, you can go mad. And Harry—"
That was the end of the communications. Something in the transmitter must have gone. They never found out. He didn't hit until almost a minute later, and nobody ever saw it. The tracking screen followed him down very precisely and very silently. There was no retrieving anything, of course. You don't conduct salvage operations in the middle of the south Atlantic.
I turned in my report after that. No one had asked for it, so it went through unorthodox channels. It took an awfully long time and my suspension did not become effective until after the second shot. I was the pilot on that one, you know. I got them to install the duplicate controls, over the insistence by Bannister that resorting to them, even in the event that it became necessary, would prove nothing. He even went as far as to talk about load redistribution electric control design. As a matter of fact, I thought he had me for a while, but I think in the end they decided to try to avoid the waste of another vehicle. At least, that might be the kind of argument that would carry weight. The vehicles were enormously expensive, you realize.