North Cape

Teleman's physiological and biochemical status was monitored constantly during the mission through a specially tailored system of instruments blended together to form the Physiological Control and Monitoring System. At the start of the mission, an intravenous catheter was inserted into the superior vena cava vein through a plug implanted surgically in his shoulder. A glass electrode was brought into intimate contact with his bloodstream at this nearest acceptable point to the heart. Through the electrode a series of minute pulses, set up by an electrochemical reaction with his blood, informed the computer continually of his body status. The computer was programed to receive inputs directly from various parts of the aircraft's controlling instrumentation that, coupled with The in vivo status reports, determined the time and dosage of the drugs he received. If the instrumentation, directed by the flight plan or by instructions from Teleman, called for a state of physiologically alert and expanded consciousness, proper drugs were fed into his bloodstream through the catheter and his body responded accordingly. Because of the duration of the flights, often lasting six to seven days, when Teleman was not needed to respond to specific tasks, the computer instructed the PCMS to feed in barbiturate derivatives and he slept. Teleman had once calculated that at least 65 percent of all of his missions were spent sleeping. Although great pains had been taken to develop a high tolerance in Teleman to the drugs he was constantly being infused with, he was thoroughly poisoned by the end of a mission.

In short, Teleman was carefully tailored to the aircraft and its missions. The reach the drugs allowed was marginal, yet enough to provide the control needed to handle his craft as no other airplane had ever been flown. Drugs kept him awake, or put him to sleep, instantly. Others kept him at the peak of alertness for as long as required and his mind focused on his Mission, his instruments, and his aircraft

CHAPTER 5

The great bend in the Oh River, one hundred miles east of the Siberian city of Tomsk, lay 180,000 feet below when the PCMS nudged Teleman out of sleep. Within three seconds he was awake and scanning the information displayed on the screen. The Electronics Countermeasures (ECM) bank had detected a series of searching radar beams within the past few minutes. Teleman got busy with the source detectors, concentrating closely on the sweep of the searching finger on the ECM screen. So far the radar beams were searching below eighty thousand feet, well below his present altitude. After a few minutes of concentrated work, he tracked the radar signals to their Iocation — about where he had suspected. Four hundred miles farther down the Ob was the ancient city of Novosibirsk, one of the oldest of the tsarist Siberian exile camps. Now it was a booming industrial and mining center, containing one of the largest Soviet air bases. Novosibirsk was located a800 miles north of the Soviet-Chinese border, and he suspected that the local commander of this tempting target was feeling just a bit jumpy this close to a hot war.

At the moment it appeared to be nothing more than routine searching by omni-radar. But the closer he approached to Novosibirsk, the more intense the weaving net of radar became and the greater the search altitude. For a minute his feeling of apprehension tightened, and Teleman wondered if they were on to him.

Fifteen minutes later he was approaching the northern rim of the Altai Mountain chain that ringed the western rim of the