He took one last look at the high-definition video screens—one for each eye—inside the helmet that would be the vehicle's "windscreen," then flipped the snap and began shoving it up. He hated the damned thing, thought it made him look like a giant high-tech moth.
"Shall we power-down the centrifuge now?" the voice continued, unfazed.
"Take it down. I'm ready for lunch. And a bottle of juice. 'Peit budu ya!'"
"I read you," the radio voice chuckled once more, knowing there wasn't any vodka to be had for a hundred miles around the facility. Reports were the project director had heard too many stories about Russian drunkenness and somehow always forgot to include liquor in the supply requisition. "I hear there's borscht again in the mess today. Petyr just came in from the North Quadrant. Said it tastes like piss. Bastards still haven't learned—"
"Pomnyu, pomnyu." He found himself longing for real food, seemingly impossible to produce here. Just like a drink.
He waited a few seconds longer, till the huge white centrifuge had come to a complete stop, then shoved down the metal hatch release and stepped out. He looked up at the high-impact glass partition of the instrument room, waved to the medical team, and began unzipping his flight suit. It was only half open by the time the technicians marched in, anxious to remove quickly the rubber
suction cups and wires he was wearing on his head and chest, the instrumentation probes for their body monitor system. They wanted to reclaim them before he ripped them off, something he frequently had been known to do. Androv always said he was there to fly whatever plane nobody else had the balls to, not take a physical, so he wanted the goddam things off, and fast.
Air Force Major Yuri Andreevich Androv was thirty- seven, tall, with the studied swagger all Soviet test pilots seemed to acquire after a few years. His dark eyes and hair were set off by a high forehead and long, lean cheeks, and behind those cynical eyes lurked a penetrating intelligence. There was something else too, the most vital attribute a test pilot can have: a perfect, natural integration of the two sides of his brain.
Soviet medical studies had shown that the best pilots were artists, because handling a plane at three times the speed of sound was primarily a function of the intuitive right side of the brain, the side that provides the instincts, the seat-of-the-pants judgment. The left brain, in contrast, handled a pilot's rational functions—it was his data management system, his computer.
Flight instructors for tactical aircraft at the Ramenskoye Flight Test Center south of Moscow knew that a pilot lost his edge when his brain started getting its signals mixed, when it was no longer sure which side was in control. They called it the biology barrier. The result of information overload in a stress situation, it could lead to a total breakdown. The brain went haywire.