Mikk froze at the controls, waiting for the moment. Now fully opened, the wing over him tugged at the fuselage, striving to rise. In this gusting wind from the sea, he had to catch the lift at the right point to take him up and away from the rock.
Now! He slapped the release knob and the catapult hurled him forward. He was off the rail, he was airborne, soaring in the updraught, moving the stick right and left as the wing tried to roll to port, a nasty little trick which all pilots of the Lucifer plane knew to allow for. His timing had been almost perfect; the wind whistled in the creaking struts behind him, the buzz of the stall-warning tab on the trailing edge reassured him that he had plenty of flying speed. Safely clear of the slope, he turned and let the wind bring him round in a long swoop, waving a gloved hand to the launch crew before he brought back the stick and began the diagonal ascent of the cone. Four traverses of the upwind face, and then he was over the summit, searching across it for the thermal from the lava lake. The volcano was quiet today, morning mist clinging to the inner slopes of the crater, reddened where it reflected the fires below.
The solid-state radar altimeter resumed the comforting beeps, rising in pitch, which told him he was gaining height. Round and around he went, the summit crags dropping away, the outer slopes again in view, then the surrounding badlands so laboriously crossed yesterday. Now he could see the fields of the settlement, and beyond them the sea, but incoming clouds were beginning to spoil the view. The beeping flattened out and he tacked to rediscover the wavering column of warm air. In the distance, now, on the horizon, was the dark mass and plume of Aetna, the next staging point in his journey.
Lucifer was a planet dotted with volcanoes, larger and younger than Earth, its core and crust impregnated with the radioactive elements which stoked its fires. On an early photograph from orbit, with the volcanoes tagged in red at the end of each smoke plume, some pilot had written ‘like an oil-field in the Gulf’—a reference to an old war, and not one of the great ones, but visually apt: Earth hadn’t shown a landscape as geologically active since long before there were geologists to study it.
In one respect Lucifer was ideal for colonisation: the land masses were barren, though the seas teemed with life and the atmosphere was breathable. Integrating terrestrial life into the biosphere of an earthlike, life-supporting world was a task no biologist would normally attempt—not when there were sterile but otherwise earthlike worlds which could be terraformed so much more easily. Lucifer was a borderline case because the continents were lifeless: the plants and the bottom-crawlers had no way to leave the tidal pools when it was certain, on evolutionary timescales, that any adaptations would vanish under a fresh blanket of lava.
So life had made no inroads from the coast until humans arrived—dispossessed, homeless or impoverished humans who would risk staking out a planet which might not be significant in the galactic trade wars for centuries, if ever. Out there among the stars, where huge corporations traded in whole solar systems, someone had thought this world might be strategically useful. It could be colonised with a small investment of resources—much less than for a terraforming project—by people sufficiently desperate to grab the few patches of stable terrain, able to house a hundred to a thousand at most, and willing to terraform those patches or die in the attempt. Willing to learn to fly and to land, not in big safe capsules, but in one and two-person winged planes which would be the robust basis of inter-settlement links for generations—even if those generations had no other technology, and even if they lost tens of planes per year. With 5000 landers, mass-produced by a von Neumann machine on some carbonaceous asteroid, the Lucifer fleet would take a long time to run out.
Thus the Lucifer plane: a one or at most a two-person carrier, built entirely of carbon fibre; the fuselage solid, the wing a woven mesh braced by spars which radiated fanwise from the nose and by two massive, hinged struts from the mid-fuselage to the leading edge. For atmosphere entry, with the fuselage uppermost, it was a double-cavity Waverider: hit lower air, vary the geometry of the leading edge, half-roll, rotate the cockpit 180 degrees, and you had a hang-glider. All you had to do after that was get down, on an unfamiliar planet bigger than Earth, at one of the few sites where life was possible, where the kamikaze scouts were waiting.
Not all had made it. Some pulled excessive g’s on entry, disintegrated the fibre structure and died high in the atmosphere. Some made the roll too violent, lost one or both wings, and fell like broken birds or like bullets. And some, inevitably, went astray and landed on the jagged lava, far from hope of rescue.
Most of them made it, nevertheless. Of necessity, more than half of them were pilots, and there were planes for all who were. But in the next generation, not all had the aptitude, and in any case most were wholly occupied in trying to farm, to maintain basic skills and the background knowledge which would allow the colony to build up, once it became obvious that no more help was coming from outside. Whatever the trading gambit had been, apparently it didn’t come off, and for the foreseeable future, Lucifer was on its own. With the focus on survival, nobody dragged gliders across the lava and up the sides of the mountains to launch unless it was necessary. After two generations, already pilots were a select and privileged few—a few whom Mikk had always wanted to join and whose privileges he had always wanted to share. In his dreams he had saved many a settlement, single-handed.
If he had been in the first generation, of course, his approach would have been perfect. Nobody had flown an atmosphere entry for five generations, since the colonists were dropped here and left to fend for themselves; but in his dreams and daydreams Mikk had done it often, riding the fire down towards where the sky was familiar, the plumes of the volcanic peaks rising out of the landscape to become level with his wings, and it all rolling over him, then back, as the conversion was made. He had lived through that one, vicariously, as often as he had flown Camels or Spitfires, Phantoms or F-16’s. In his mind he always flew the best, and he was the hottest pilot of them all.
Yesterday, in the control tower on the rain-swept settlement landing field, the Briefing Officer had seen his abilities rather differently. “This flight’s an ascending staircase—you shouldn’t be flying it. Nobody should, with less than a thousand solo hours. You’re supposed to be on a milk run round the coast, picking up and dropping mail just to get some experience.”
This man was out of the air before his time, smashed up on a lava outcrop just short of some landing field, and he had no time for would-be bold young pilots. But he had no-one else to send. The New Andes were erupting, inland, and had breached one of the natural nuclear reactors of Lucifer’s crust—what geologists called ‘the Oklo effect’. Radioactive ash was falling on New Quito, and iodine from the coast was needed urgently. “Stick to your training, stick to the flight plan. No short cuts, no heroics, no fancy flying. People are depending on us, children especially—it’s not a job for you but you’re all there is.”
And after that, the first fishing crew back into harbour were detailed to get him and his plane across the lava field, up the side of Vesuvius, and safely into the air. He had often imagined himself flying a mercy mission like this, succeeding by daring and skill against impossible odds. Unfortunately, the weather was perfect for cross-country flying and although the route was demanding, the odds were entirely in his favour. This wouldn’t get him into the inner circle of fire-riders, not unless something went badly wrong and yet he survived it; but it would show them something he knew, with all the confidence of nineteen Earth years—that he was good enough to be one of the best of them.
Unexpectedly, on the long glide towards Aetna, Mikk heard the muted tone of the beeper change. At once he turned up the volume and circled, seeking out the unmapped thermal with the infrared sight embedded in his windscreen. It wasn’t a strong one and lifted him only a few hundred feet, but it was important. It might mark a new volcanic hot-spot, and if so the geologists would be interested: every change on the dynamic crust of this plant told them something new. Geological monitoring was constant, in a situation where one peak could block the way to a dozen settlements when it was active. No-one was crazy enough to fly into that kind of violence. The air within an erupting plume was no hotter than re-entry, and in theory the aircraft could stand it, but it was filled with turbulence, lightning and red-hot flying rocks.
More immediately important was that the rising air might save a life some day—perhaps his own. If you ran out of lift and had to set down on those waterless badlands, virtually impassible on foot, there was nowhere for rescuers to land by you or to take off again. There had been a few epics—pilots sustained by air-drops of food and water while they walked out—but to get the supplies within reach on a lava field, by a technique first used in the jungles of Earth, you needed a long, long rope, plenty of height and plenty of lift. Until the colony re-attained powered flight, retrieving downed aircraft and pilots was generally impossible.
Across the land-mass of Lucifer, the glider paths were now well-known. In the early, learning days, enough pilots had been carried off course by unexpected winds to find the ways back if there were any. Each had its surprises, its bonuses and its hidden traps. Most talked about were the staircases: the milk-runs where each volcano in sequence was lower than the last, and the much harder paths where you had to gain more height each time. Mikk was flying one of those, and that was why he had taken off in early morning, so that the ground below would grow hotter as the day wore on.
Aetna was before him now, and with the extra lift he had gained, the approach was no problem. The pilots had all had the experience of running out of lift over the plains: diving suicidally towards the slopes of the next volcano, catching the updraught that took you up over the rim, nosing in over the smoking ramparts, and that desperate wing-tip turn that put you either in the rising column, or corkscrewing down into the lava lake. There was no need to remind yourself not to breathe, the survivors said: you had to remind yourself to start breathing again when you were out of it, circling up and clear.
Of those who had failed to find the updraught on the outside, there were a very few who had made the plunging turn off the slope, survived the turbulence at the volcano’s base, and landed within walking distance of some settlement. There were very few volcanoes near settlements, though out of necessity all the settlements were near volcanoes. For any other location, it was better to go straight in and end it quickly.
His next staging point was Arsia—higher than Aetna, but named for the great volcano on Mars because it had a similar huge rift in its side, where the cone had crumpled between parallel faults and provided an escape route for the lava lake to pour out and solidify on the plains below. Sailing in along it was like being an insect inside one of Earth’s ancient burial chambers—and there was always the risk of more rockfalls from the overhanging crags. But the true risk was inside the cone, dangerously low over the lava lake, where the air was unbreathable and the turbulence could be extreme. The payoff was the virtual certainty of finding strong lift as soon as you entered the crater—enough to take you swiftly back to breathable air and high enough to fly safely on. Pilots who had flown so low called it ‘sharing the dragon’s breath’.
Of those who had literally shared the volcano’s breath, taking an involuntary searing gasp low within the caldera, there were no survivors at all. Nevertheless, the impulse to ride the fire was built into all of them. Mikk’s instructor, Johan, had done it on a training flight when he could as easily have turned away. Mikk had survived it, taking no breath inside the fiery zone—indeed, he had thought he would never breathe again. He was a probationary member of the fire-riders, in them but not of them, not until he flew the manoeuvre with control in his hands. When that moment came, there would be no witnesses; but he would know it had happened, and the change it would work in him would be obvious to the rest.
Mid-afternoon found him still climbing the staircase, but with only one range still to cross. Ahead lay Kilimanjaro, named for its African counterpart because it was high enough to catch and freeze moisture from its own outgassing and from the upper airstreams crossing the continent. In the centuries since the last major eruption, the cone had become encased in gleaming ice and the build-up stayed ahead of the rock-dust and sulphur coming out of the crater. The run-off from its glaciers was beginning to form fans of soil on the plains, potential sites for future settlements.
Though the incoming weather from the sea had seemed threatening when he took off, he had stayed far before it and the sun had baked the badlands all day, with the steady increase in general lift he had hoped for. In the last hundred kilometres he had lost virtually no height, the following wind helping to keep up his groundspeed, and he had little soaring to do to breast the summit of the volcano. As he crossed the snow-fields of the wide rim, light strained through the mesh of his wings made his enlarged shadow look like the wide-cast net of some giant fisher.
The image was all too appropriate, because Kilimanjaro had set a trap for him. Though it hadn’t been obvious from the outside, and there had been no warning from the geologists, the great caldera was active, its lava higher than ever seen before and boiling, glimpsed through roiling clouds of flame. The central updraught was correspondingly more powerful and the surrounding downdraught correspondingly fierce—in a crater of this size, he had no chance to get across in these conditions. The descending airstream caught him and pulled him down, forcing him to turn away from where safety lay as the stall-warning tab went ominously quiet. He had to turn towards the rocks, angle his wings parallel to the inner slope of the cone, and go whirling down—gaining speed all the way, till the rocks were only a blur, but without gathering enough momentum to be able to beat centrifugal force and get to the centre of the deadly funnel.
The rate-of-descent beeps had merged into a scream, and he might have joined it if breathing wasn’t bound to be fatal. He was down in the fire-mist and immersion in the lava could only be seconds away. The worst of it might be that the carbon-fibre hull would withstand the heat—for a time. Preferable, perhaps, if he could find the nerve, to crack the canopy before the impact and let the molten rock engulf him. But to let go the stick now would be to admit there was no chance, however small, that an eddy would whirl him into the rising thermal. And now it was too late...
Much too late! The lava lake had vanished and he was in thick smoke, shot through with sparks, penetrating his cockpit and driving out the sulphurous fumes of the volcano. There was still fire below but it was true fire, buildings wrapped in flames. Even as the updraught from them expanded his wings, an explosion from below thrust him upwards, fighting again for control. Below, as far as he could see, there were buildings on fire.
The idea that he might be dead flashed through his mind, and was as instantly dismissed. He was still at the controls of the Lucifer plane, with all its familiar sensations—still alive, gasping for breath, sweat blurring his vision as the turbulence from below buffeted his wings. What mattered was to gain height, remain in control...the rising beeps of the altimeter and the buzz of the warning tab were more comforting than ever before.
Other sounds were more disturbing, but as his confusion and panic began to subside, he began to make sense of them—incredible though they seemed. He had gone somewhere, in that moment of discontinuity before his reflexes kicked in to keep the plane in the air. Yet there was no settlement of this size on Lucifer, not anywhere. What was below him had to be a city—and furthermore, a city under attack, from the air. The whistles and the painful explosions had to be falling bombs; the very different hammering had to be the guns of the defenders. Beams of light stabbed up through the smoke, sweeping the sky and sometimes catching the silver shape of an aircraft before it jinked away. All around him the conflict raged, conflict which was clearly one-sided. As he gained time to think, the outrage of what was happening began to sink in, mixing with a nausea which wasn’t all due to the sickly reek of the smoke.
Turning around to stay in the thermals, Mikk tacked over the city like a bird of ill-omen. The Lucifer plane’s black, nonreflecting mesh was unlikely to be seen from the ground, and wouldn’t show on radar if they had it. Even if he was briefly caught by a searchlight crew they’d be unlikely to differentiate him from the blackness of the sky: they were looking for birds of prey, much higher up. A greater hazard, revealed dully by the fires and in brief stroboscopic flashes by the bombs, was that there were some tall buildings in the smoke—some at least only burned-out shells, without even the reflections of the flames in their windows to warn him on approach.
Eventually the whole city must be reduced to that state, and with nothing left to burn down there, he must run out of lift and have to come down. His chances as an airman among survivors might be little better than on the barren plains at home. It was amazing that he could even think of that, while the bombardment continued without mercy. What had happened to him? Where was home, and where was this? Surely it could only be Earth, but if so, when was this? There had been no war like this for many centuries before humans reached out to the stars.
Overhead, the lights and the guns had found a victim. The twists of the bomber as it tried to escape seemed to be in slow-motion: diverging cones of light and converging ones of tracers held it fast. The tracers became an upward blizzard as more batteries shifted target. Flames blossomed from an engine and abruptly the aircraft flipped over, twisting in the remorseless light beams as it spiralled earthwards. A parachute streamed away and opened, startlingly white against the blackness of the sky, and at last the gunners were convinced and turned to seek another attacker.
Though out of the lights, the plunging bomber was still marked by the fire behind it. Mikk side-slipped towards it, hoping to glimpse a marking or recognise a shape that would tell him where he was. As it passed him, sure enough, he recognised the silhouette—and the Iron Crosses on the wings...It was too much, it pushed him finally into disbelief. This had to be illusion, had to be, even if it wasn’t consistent and he was still in the Lucifer plane, not up there in a Beaufighter making more kills than Cunningham...
Trying to see, he had got too close to the Heinkel. Its slipstream caught him and down he went, fighting again for control. The glider was on its back and in a moment of inspiration he hit the switches that hadn’t been used for a century, converting the wing to its rigid Waverider mode. It was just in time: a moment later the bomber crashed directly below him, bomb-load and fuel going up in one huge flash. The blast caught him and threw him upwards, up, up and still up. Darkness, fire and noise vanished together and he was back over Kilimanjaro—high over it, safely in the thermal, the last lungful of smoke-filled air expelled violently to prevent an embolism even as he rolled the plane back over to normal flight.
Though he had been in the battle for little more than an hour it was now early evening, the clouds over the volcanoes becoming red in the dusk, a corner of moon gleaming on a dark edge higher up. The New Andes lay ahead, several of the peaks thrusting out plumes of dust which towered far past his height and glowed fiercely in their lower regions, while the rivers of lava on their flanks stood out brightly in the gathering dark. Somehow he kept flying, though he lost all count of time, still battling in his mind with the extraordinary vividness of the hallucination. He must have found the updraught at the last moment, when he had already shared the dragon’s breath, and all the time that his mind was possessed, he must have been climbing slowly within it. This must be the secret of the fire-riders, something you had to experience before you could credit it: something so powerful that it brought your knowledge to life, took you back into the early history of aviation.
Before he knew it he was at his destination, still with enough height over the cooling landscape to get down safely on the settlement plateau, between the luminescent markers of the runway. It wasn’t a good landing, the nose slamming down hard as soon as the tail-skid made contact, but the ground crew were quickly round him to raise the canopy and help him clear. Now the reaction hit him, a belated fit of coughing to rid his lungs of soot and a fit of the shakes which made him unable to help in the folding of the carbon-mesh wings. Unable even to speak, he disengaged himself from the operation and walked towards the Dispersal, fighting his trembling all the way.
New Quito must have called for a wide range of supplies, because there were an unusual number of aircraft ahead; parked, wings folded, like prehistoric winged reptiles or the first toothed birds. Normally, if a pilot came in so late, there would be a line of pilots waiting to greet him, to brush the Debriefing Officer aside with good humour and force him to get his report on a beer-soaked table in the bar. But there was only one figure waiting for him, half-illuminated by the bright windows of the pilots’ Mess.
As Mikk approached, he saw that it was Johan. It seemed appropriate—if he could tell anyone, it would be this man—but he could think of nothing to say.
“It’s happened to you, then,” said Johan. “You’ve been to the city.”
“What? How could you know?”
“We get a feeling,” said Johan. “A lot of the fellows are here, you’ll notice...But the smell tells us for sure. The aircraft comes back with the stink of burning homes—if ever you’ve experienced it, the smell of a burned-out house is never forgotten. It’ll take you days to get rid of it; the ground crew radioed in about it before they even got you out.”
“But—but—with all the smells we come back with, how could they know to watch for that one?”
“Because there’s an ex-pilot in every ground crew, and it’s happened to all of us. It keeps happening.”
“All of it? The city, the bombs, the flames? The lights, the guns? Are you saying it really happened?”
“There’s plenty of evidence that it’s real. Planes have come back with bullet-holes, sometimes with shrapnel in them...and with thorough debriefing, we can usually identify the city. If there were bombs falling continuously, it probably was London, Tokyo or Dresden. If it’s just a sea of fire, it’s Hiroshima. One spire is Coventry, two spires and a river is Cologne, and so on.”
“But...” It had been hard to believe at the time, impossible to believe afterwards, but this produced another split reaction. It was reassuring to know that he wasn’t insane, but staggering to find his experience was commonplace. “It’s happened to you—to all of you? Why don’t you tell us?”
“Well, would you? Especially if you were the first? Even if you thought you were the first—it happened a lot of times before anyone recognised the smell on someone else’s aircraft. Then it turned out many of the pilots had been through it. Since it already was a secret, it seemed best to keep it that way.”
“Why?” He would have believed almost anything his heroes told him, but it was hard to believe that they’d keep something like this quiet—even if it did explain why sharing the dragon’s breath changed people so much. “What is the secret? Why does it happen? How does it happen?”
“As to why: obviously, it’s directed; purposive, not just a force of nature. To keep us in the air, there has to be lift, and whatever sends us back makes sure there’s plenty of it. At first, pilots thought that was all there was to it—something knew they were in trouble and got them out. But it’s always a city in flames—never a forest fire, for instance. It’s almost always under attack from the air, so it’s almost always the Second World War. And of course, because people who want to be pilots are usually crazy about old battles, we realise where we are. It’s not just to save our lives, there’s much more point to it than that.”
“If we could choose how to go back, we’d be rocket pilots, or fighter aces...”
“Even when it was happening, there were a few pilots who saw war in the air from both sides, and wrote about it. When one was on the ground, recovering after being shot down, he was caught in an air-raid and a woman who recognised his uniform cried to him, “Why aren’t you up there too?” At first he was angry, protesting that he was on her side, and then he realised that there was a sense in which the war was between airmen and civilians, whatever their nationality.
“Now, we have the start of a civilisation on Lucifer which depends on airmen for its links, and someone, something, is telling us that the behaviour of the past won’t be permitted. Is it significant, do you think, that the planet and the planes are both called Lucifer? The corresponding Greek name was Phosphorus, which is also a chemical used in incendiary bombs. In medieval times Lucifer came to be a name for the Devil, but originally it was the Roman name for Venus as the morning star, the bringer of light and hope—as we’re supposed to be for the settlers. The bombers are our antithesis, but we have to see it to know it.”
“But who’s making it happen?”
“Well, the time-gates are volcanoes. We go back to real cities, identifiable in debrief, but there’s not always war. If you go back a second time it’s Pompeii, or Santorini, or Mont Pelée, as if to show us what volcanoes themselves can do. We’ve wondered if they’re warning us to leave the planet, or saying they approve of burning cities, but that’s not it.”
“You don’t mean—!” Running out of belief, Mikk ran out of words. Was he being told that his heroes were part of a cult, worshipping gods under the volcanoes—like something out of the cultural sections of his training, the ones he had skipped whenever the teaching machines allowed?
“It’s possible.” Johan waved an arm at the row of parked Lucifers, to which Mikk’s had now been added. “The earliest aircraft were wood and fabric, ready to burn at the smallest spark. Could their makers have imagined a cloth which could withstand atmosphere entry and the heat of a volcano? We can’t imagine life which could exist under the crust of a planet, and it’ll be a long time before we have the scientific resources to investigate. Certainly it couldn’t be life as we know it, but there’s sentience here somewhere. With the power to send us back down the time-line of our own history, make us face the things we’ve done that we’d rather forget. We’re being told they won’t stand for that here. So any time you find yourself getting too cocky, too full of your worth as a pilot, especially thinking how good you’d be at war in the air—just stop and ask: who does this planet really belong to?”
Involuntarily, they both looked at the glowing summits surrounding them in the night, before turning away to the Mess and the welcome of their fellow pilots.
Notes
This story, which added ‘fire’ to ‘land, sea and air’ to complete ‘The Elements of Time’, was provisionally accepted by Amazing Stories, subject to some minor changes which weren’t made in time before the magazine ceased publication. Much of the inspiration came from Terence Nonweiler, formerly Professor of Aeronautics at Glasgow University and an Honorary Member of ASTRA, the Association in Scotland to Research into Astronautics. In 1967 he took part in discussions which led to my book “Man and the Stars”.1 For landing on an Earthlike world, he strongly advocated winged space vehicles, and for landing in unknown terrain, he insisted on ‘time to enquire’ over the landing site. In this and in later meetings which led to “New Worlds for Old”2 and “Man and the Planets”3, he dismissed arguments that more sophisticated systems than wings would in time become available: wherever you have a planet with an atmosphere, a wing, which makes use of the properties of that atmosphere, is more elegant than something which wastes energy staying aloft by other means.
Nonweiler was the inventor of the Waverider re-entry vehicle, intended to be the manned spacecraft in a British space programme based on the Blue Streak missile. The programme was cancelled by the Macmillan government, but work on Waverider continued for a time at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, to assess Waverider’s potential as a Mach 6 airliner. Thereafter Waverider was largely forgotten, except by enthusiasts such as ASTRA, but after years of campaigning it’s back on the international scientific map. In October 1990 the University of Maryland hosted the First International Hypersonic Waverider Conference, co-sponsored by NASA, and the delegates present numbered nearly a hundred.
The Waverider wing is folded downwards. Travelling at several times the speed of sound, it generates a plane shockwave below it, attached to the leading edges; consequently the shape of the under-wing cavity has to be related to the planform (the shape of the vehicle, seen from above). A delta planform gives the shape which is known as the ‘caret wing’, because from the rear it looks like an inverted ‘V’ or a printer’s caret. A Concorde-type planform gives a cavity shaped like a Gothic arch; this was the one which the Royal Aircraft Establishment evolved as best for their Mach 6 airliner design. Its low wing-loading gives it a landing ‘footprint’, descending from space, which literally envelops the Earth, and a touchdown speed of less than 160 kph. When it comes to developing the Solar System’s resources a delivery vehicle which can land anywhere on Earth, on ordinary runways, will be of great political importance.
The US Air Force and the University of Maryland developed an alternative version of Waverider, which has removed most of its original characteristics except for the high-speed manoeuvrability. It was flown as the nosecone of the X-51, an experimental prototype of a Mach 6 cruise missile, intended to hit targets up to 60 miles away without risk to aircrew in the B-52 carrier. In November 2010 Time Magazine hailed Waverider as no. 4 in the fifty best inventions of 2010.4 Terence Nonweiler would have hated what’s happened to his invention, and as a pacifist he would have hated what the X-51 concept stands for. In his 1970 lecture to ASTRA he had attributed the lack of interest in Waverider to its lack of military applications, and considered it a small price to pay. If we can, we shall reclaim the territory for Nonweiler’s version of the Waverider and its peaceful applications.
In 1992 Gordon Dick (who has since changed his name to Gordon Ross) and I drafted an article, ‘Flight in Non-Terrestrial Atmospheres’, including a Waverider carrier for a Venus surface explorer, a flexible aircraft for Mars exploration, and a Waverider factory for the atmosphere of Jupiter.5 Analog editor Stanley Schmidt asked us also to consider worlds which would be like Earth, yet sufficiently different to need different designs. Following an earlier suggestion by L.H. Townend,6 Gordon came up with two flexible Waverider shapes, the Lucifer Plane and the Altair, allying his previous experience in sails and hang-glider design to Nonweiler’s theory.
The conditions allowing human occupation of planets were examined by Stephen H. Dole in the fascinating book “Habitable Planets for Man”7 the allowable range was from 0.04 of Earth’s mass to 2.35, to retain a breathable atmosphere at one end and to keep surface gravity below 1.5g at the other. The lower limit of atmospheric pressure is set by mountaineering experience, the upper by deep-sea diving, with partial pressures of oxygen and other gases adjusted accordingly. The temperature range has to permit water to exist as solid, liquid and gas... When we look at the effect this has on aircraft design, the answer is that if something will fly on Earth, it’ll fly on any other Earthlike world, with more or less payload depending on the exact set of conditions.
Considering the extremes, we came up independently with a world younger than Earth, perhaps larger (though not too large), with more radioactive material in its crust, and lots of volcanic activity. With all that thermal lift around, the occupants could use hang-gliders for transport—and they’d probably need them, because settlements would be separated by impassable badlands. An atmosphere entry vehicle should also be able to withstand temperatures inside the crater of a volcano; but could it be lightweight and robust enough to do both?
Gordon Dick’s Lucifer plane is built almost entirely of carbon fibre, and its wings are a carbon-fibre mesh which will let enough plasma through to survive the heat of entry. Mesh parachutes for braking during atmosphere entry have been under study since the early 1950’s. For a ballistic vehicle they increase the landing ‘footprint’; you might think that for a Waverider they contract it, since the lift of the wing is reduced, but as drag is also reduced the crucial lift/drag ratio is little altered. The wing is braced by struts radiating fanwise from the nose and by two hinged spars from the fuselage to the leading edges. On the way into atmosphere, the fuselage is uppermost and the wing is a double-cavity Waverider. Liquid hydrogen bled through the struts carries away heat at the trailing edges, possibly for ignition on an external burning surface to provide thrust. Once down into the troposphere, in a manoeuvre which will require careful timing and judgement, the pilot rolls it on to its back, adjusts the geometry of the leading edge by varying the spread of the fan, and rotates the cockpit 180 degrees so that he or she is no longer upside-down. With that, the plane is in hang-glider mode—probably for the rest of its operational life, unless the colony has the capability to put it back into space as a mini-shuttle.
The tail assembly also rotates, out of the way for landing; and of course the wing can be folded, for compact parking. For unless we assume that this imaginary colony has the capability from the outset to keep powered aircraft flying, then the Lucifer planes will continue to be gliders as they maintain transport links between settlements. So they’ll need to be small and light enough to be dragged up the volcanoes for re-launch; so thousands of them will be needed to take down the population of a viable terrestrial colony; so they’ll be mass-produced, probably by a von Neumann machine on some carbonaceous asteroid... and the Lucifer settlements will have enough of them to maintain contact, even if it takes centuries to build up local industries and conditions are so bad that tens of planes are lost every year meantime.
Versions of this design could live in almost any imaginable atmosphere, Earthlike or not; But one world will be off-limits to Lucifer planes: Venus, whose sulphuric acid smog would turn their carbon-fibre structure into candyfloss with terrifying speed—not to mention the low surface winds, and the need for armour. And Venus is described in most textbooks as a terrestrial planet, on size and mass. So to make an all-Terran as well as all-terrain version, which the article went on to discuss, we must either produce a material which will let the plane go to Venus, yet still fly in all those other atmospheres; or we can just make Venus and any sister worlds habitable, so making their atmospheres ‘terrestrial’ in the sense which our article began with.
References
1. Duncan Lunan, “Man and the Stars”, Souvenir Press, 1974; US edition “Interstellar Contact”, Henry Regnery Co., 1975.
2. Duncan Lunan, “New Worlds for Old”, David & Charles, 1979; US edition William Morrow Inc..
3. Duncan Lunan, “Man and the Planets”, Ashgrove Press, 1983.
4. Richard Corliss et al, ‘The 50 Best Inventions of 2010’, Time, 176, 21, 48 (November 22nd, 2010).
5. Duncan Lunan and Gordon Dick, ‘Flight in Non-Terrestrial Atmospheres, or the Hang-glider’s Guide to the Galaxy', Asgard 2, 4, ASTRA, April 1992; shorter version Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, January 1993.
6. L.H. Townend, “The Waverider”, APECS Limited, 1983.
7. Stephen H. Dole, “Habitable Planets for Man”, Blaisdell Publishing Company, 1964.