ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 117
Stealth had the power to end the Cold War, but it also had the power in
the meantime—should the Russians realize what the Americans were up
to—to trigger World War Three.
Have Blue was a strange-looking aircraft. It didn't look mean and
hungry. It didn't look like the kind of plane that could start and end wars.
It had the appearance of a bunch of bolted-on geometric shapes that had
somehow been hammered into the vague outline of a jet. It turned out
there was more than a good reason for that.
Have Blue hadn't been the creative inspiration of an aerodynamicist,
but of a mathematician.
Begin with what you can see, then search for what you can't.
As I wrestled with the stealth feature, Marckus' words from our
meeting battered around my head, forming as a dark thought with a black
body and soft wings.
I had trawled the white world and found five possible pathways to
antigravity: manipulating an object's mass and/or inertia; exploitation of
the zero-point energy field; perturbations of the space-time continuum;
faster-than-light travel; and gravity shielding. None of them was visible
in the developmental activities of the U.S. aerospace industry, but just
because you couldn't see them, it didn't mean they weren't there.
Just as it had, or hadn't been with stealth a decade and a half earlier.
Ben Rich and I had sparred on a number of occasions on the stealth
question—most recently at an air show where he'd turned up, desperately
ill with cancer, to promote his book. I'd respected him utterly
and liked him hugely, sensing in his presence the grit and wisdom of a
generation of postwar aviation pioneers that wouldn't be around us for
much longer.
It was Rich who'd once told me of a place—a virtual warehouse—
where ideas that were too dangerous to transpose into hardware were
locked away forever, like the Ark of the Covenant in the final scene of
Raiders of the Lost Ark. It had almost happened to stealth.
By starting with stealth, something that I knew about, something I
could see, maybe I could pick up traces of that energy, the friction that
astronomers looked for when hunting down black holes.
In the year ahead, the calendar of aerospace and defense events showed
that I had multiple excuses for visiting the States—to look for the selfgenerated
heat of a buried antigravity effort's interaction with the real
world.
As I sat behind my desk, calling contacts and sources in an effort to
plug holes in the incomplete, still highly secret history of stealth, I could
hear the faint echo of a signal. It was almost impossible to decipher, but