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crackled and the B-29's pilot said, "What the hell is the holdup down there?"
    "Major Carrera, this is Troy McNaughton. Is our pilot on this frequency?"
    Marshall's voice came on. "Roger, that. I'm reading you five by five."
    "I'm going to give you some instructions, Mr. Marshall, and I want you to obey them. Do not, I repeat, do not take the aircraft beyond Mach .95. Do you understand?"
    "Roger, I read you. But why? Everything is—"
    "Marshall, my instructions are that you don't go beyond Mach .95. I'll explain everything at the debriefing. Now that's final! You can drop whenever you're ready."
    High above them, the test pilot scowled in anger. The whole process was so risky that it wasn't worthwhile to make the flight just to go to Mach .95 again. He was sitting on a bomb—1,400 gallons of liquid oxygen and 1,300 gallons of diluted ethyl alcohol. If the two were mixed properly in the huge RLX-15 engine, he'd light a fire generating eight thousand pounds of thrust that could take him supersonic. If they didn't mix properly, if there was some leakage, some pooling of fuel or vapor, he, the MS-447, and the B-29 would disappear in a single gigantic fireball.
    His teeth chattered uncontrollably as the freezing-cold metal seat sucked away his body heat through his thin flying suit—there was no room for leather coveralls. Marshall rubbed his gloved hand across the inside of the canopy, slick with Drene shampoo to keep it from frosting up. For the last forty minutes he'd been cramped into the tiny cockpit like an olive in a pimento, preoccupied with the long checklist, and alternating between savoring the prospect of being the first man to break the sound barrier and worrying about what might happen when he did. All of his own analysis indicated that things would go smoothly—but there were still those who predicted a catastrophic breakup of the aircraft.
    Suddenly it hit him. It was Tuskegee all over again. McNaughton must have selected a white pilot for the honor, probably one of the guys who had done some of the early glide tests.
    It was worse than unfair—it was stupid. He was the only one who was fully qualified, the only one who had made powered flights.
    His anger built as he went on with the checklist litany, his gloved finger pointing to the propellant pressures, flicking the telemetry switches on, checking the trim. The airplane had only a few flights on it, but the instrument panel was already nicked and worn, the green priming showing through the matte-black finish.
    The hell with McNaughton. There was nothing to keep him from following the original flight profile—just let the little rockets run and they'd push him right through the speed of sound. It wouldn't matter if they fired him. Even a colored pilot could get a job anywhere if he was the first man to break the sound barrier. Then he smiled through his anger, knowing that his father would disapprove, would tell him simply, "Do what's right, son!"
    He tucked the checklist inside its metal jacket as the pre-drop countdown began. Carrera nosed the B-29 over into a slight dive, full power on all four engines, airframe quivering as it slanted through the crisp air toward the whitish-green desert below. When the countdown reached zero, the bomber would be passing twenty thousand feet at precisely 250 miles per hour, only two knots over the MS-447's fully loaded stall speed. It wasn't nearly as fast as Marshall would have liked, but it would be all Carrera could get.
    "Three . . . two . . . one . . . zero!"
    The bomb-bay's scissor clamps released and the rocket plane jolted down the retaining rails to burst like a bomb into the slip-stream's blast. The explosion of sunlight slashing into the cockpit momentarily blinded him as he fell away, yawing slightly in the silent glide beneath the bomber's belly. He eased the control wheel forward to accelerate. Now gliding faster than the B-29 could fly, Marshall felt speed cloak his gleaming white plane with stability,