Frowning, he shrugged and passed on through the door, greeted the milling technicians, and tossed his crumpled flight suit toward two medics from the foreign team who caught it in midair, bowed, and hurried it into the medical lab for . . . the devil take it, he didn't know and he didn't care.
The fluorescent-lit hall was crowded with white-shirted technicians returning from the morning's test in Number One, the big hypersonic wind tunnel. Everybody was smiling, which told him the final run-up of the model must have gone without a hitch.
That was the last segment of the revised schedule. The hypersonic test flight was on, in eighteen days.
What in hell was the sudden rush? What was everybody's real agenda? Nobody was talking.
That was what really bothered him, had bothered him from the start. This top-secret vehicle wasn't destined to be some kind of civilian space-research platform, regardless of what anybody claimed. Who were they fooling? The ultimate weapons delivery system had just been built here, a high-tech behemoth that married advanced Soviet thruster and guidance technology with a hypersonic airframe and scramjets created by the world's leading manufacturer of high-temperature alloys and supercomputers. And it was all being done here, the one place on earth with the technology.
Here. The trouble was, this wasn't Russia.
So Daedalus devised his winding maze;
And as one entered it, only a wary mind
Could find an exit to the world again. . . .