GROUNDED

By William Sambrot

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Startling Stories Fall 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Lieutenant Colonel Martin sat back in his hard desk chair and looked out through the tinted window to where the slim, dartlike jets waited, poised on the sun-washed runways. A red and blue jet swooped down out of the brilliant, cloudless sky and shot along the runway, wheeled and rolled back toward the parking strip. It was the courier ship from Washington.

The colonel frowned, his sunburned face breaking into sharp, diagonal lines. The courier plane was used only in cases requiring utmost secrecy. And always, it brought trouble. Today, it brought trouble for Martin.

He waited, tapping a lean finger on the desk, his eyes distant but not seeing the harsh ridge of up-flung barren mountains, looming clear and incredibly near despite the fact they were sixty miles away—sixty miles of alkali wasteland where only gila monsters moved, scuttling from rock to rock to escape the brazen sun.

Beyond those mountains was Project Breakaway, the Air Force's top secret attempt to fling a dart up high enough and fast enough to break free of earth's clutching gravity. It was Colonel Martin's job to command one group of jets that guarded the approaches to Project Breakaway. It had been a dull job—routine, boring—up until yesterday morning.

It was twenty-eight hours ago, to be exact, that Colonel Martin, Captains Morelli, Sayers and Ryan had sighted and chased the fantastic platelike object that zoomed, wobbled and ducked in circles about them even though, with all coal poured on, they were hitting close to eight-hundred miles an hour.

Morelli, Sayers and Ryan had never come back from that chase. At eight-hundred miles an hour, with visibility limited only by the farthermost rim of the horizon, under a glaring desert sun, all three had plowed simultaneously into a sun-drenched ridge, a mere nine thousand feet above sea-level—a ridge, it appeared, they'd deliberately headed for and smashed into. How? Why had all three made the same error of judgment? Why had they dropped from thirty-thousand feet to nine thousand in a steep, zooming dive, flying formation, and not once mentioned it over their radio?

Why indeed? These were all questions asked Colonel Martin by suspicious 

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