Sled Driver

formation. This kind of meeting was unplanned and rarely occurred. I knew they
couldn't stay long, as our course was taking them further away from their base.
Soon they would have their own low fuel status to contend with. Nevertheless, like
teenagers in hot rods, these young Allied pilots seemed interested in a bit of a drag
race. As I came off the tanker and cleared to the right, the fighters positioned
themselves abeam me, waved, and lit their afterburners. I gave them a head start.
The F-16 is a nice little jet and we enjoyed their visit. We left them in the dust.
We proceeded further north and crossed the Arctic Circle. The barren cold land
below made me appreciate the warmth of my space suit, and wonder about the
poor devils manning the facilities we had come to see. Comments from the back
seat assured me that someone was down there. Walt had warnings on his scope. I
checked the periscope and noticed we were leaving large contrails across the sky,
formed from our exhaust hitting the cold air. Vapor in the exhaust instantly froze
into ice crystals making dual white lines across the sky. When we had a hostile threat
below, we preferred not to pull contrails because they pinpointed our location. The
SR-71 didn't leave contrails often, so we rarely concerned ourselves about
inadvertently leaving this advertisement. When we did leave contrails though, we
continued our flight, making no deviations.
I noticed the large plumes emanating from the engines, and saw the sun setting on
the horizon far to the South. The sunset seemed out of place, since we had left in the
morning and had only been airborne for a couple of hours. I saw firsthand, how the tilt
of the earth in winter months caused early sunsets at northern latitudes. I didn't think
much more about this until we started a large right turn back toward the land masses
to the South. As the nose of the jet tracked through the turn and we started heading
eastward, I saw the most unusual sight. Out the right window I saw the light remaining
from a setting sun. A pale blue sky was painted with red ribbons of light pointing to
where the sun had just been. As I looked out the left window to the North, I saw a
night sky, complete with stars. I had seen the sky at dusk many times while mountain
climbing, and was familiar with the contrast of a departing sun and approaching
darkness from higher altitudes. I had never seen a sunset this far North, and this high
up. I had to look left and right several times to confirm what I was seeing. From our
altitude, it was truly dayti me on my right and nighttime on my left. As we continued
through the right turn to the West, I was surprised to see our old contrails still painted
across the sky. The two track pattern from our dual exhaust sketched our