Smitty nodded. "Any cross-country we plan to do had best be plotted due east, across the desert."
"There's the atomic project area, that way," Foster protested. "They certainly must have increased their air defenses around that."
"At low altitude, we can get around it," Smitty said.
Foster's features went slack. "Look here! You're not seriously thinking of—"
"If we had a wind-tunnel, no!" Smitty retorted wryly. "We could stick the little ship in it, let it run for a few days, watch the hull polarize itself to the gravitors' field, and note how the air-flow around the ship was affected. Then we could rip out the jet chamber and design a new one that'd work in the affected air-flow."
"If we had a wind-tunnel," Morrow emphasized.
"Right!" Smitty turned back toward the ships. "So," he concluded, "we take the big ship! We head out over the desert and keep going, watching how the ship performs and what the air-flow does to her. We'll have to install a few barometric pressure-point indicators around her hull—"
"But we'd have to fly several days steady to get that hull completely polarized," Morrow said. "We can't just restrict ourselves to night flying."
Smitty winced. Then he rubbed his chin, scowling. "If we have to, Bill, we can go east to Utah, then south through Arizona to Mexico, then east again—flying across the Border at night, without lights, won't be too much trouble; and once in Mexico we won't have to worry about radar. We can go out over the Gulf of Mexico, if we want to, and then turn north and fly up the Mississippi and Ohio valleys as far as Pennsylvania. There's a lot of brush country in the neighboring mountain areas—there'd be little danger of getting seen through there. So long as we don't have to land anywhere, we're safe!"
"In other words, it'd be a cross-country endurance flight," Morrow surmised.