Word: everests
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Dawn was breaking over Edwards Air Force Base at California's Muroc Dry Lake when the husky, dark-browed test pilot chugged up to the flight line in a battered model A Ford coupe. Lieut. Colonel Frank K. Everest Jr., 35, wiggled into his girdle-tight high-altitude suit, picked up his crash helmet and headed for the runway where a four-engined B50 waited. Clamped tight to the B-50's fat belly was "Pete" Everest's aircraft-a sleek, needle-nosed little job with "Bell X2" painted on its sides...
...Pilot Everest climbed aboard the B-50, waved to the waiting crew, sat down behind the pilots. Engines rumbling, then roaring, the B50 gathered speed, rose into the brightening sky. Everest waited until the B50 had labored to 30,000 ft., snugged down helmet and oxygen mask for the last time, then walked aft and let himself down into the cockpit of the silent...
...position, and Pete Everest had swiftly checked instruments, controls, oxygen. Into the mike in his mask he began to count the seconds before the drop: "Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one. Drop me, dad!" The bomber pilot pulled a lever, and the X-2 plummeted away...
Within seconds, the plane's Curtiss-Wright rocket engine-powerful enough to drive a Navy cruiser-cut in with a roar. Violently the X-2 shot forward. Everest brought up her nose and began an accelerating climb to 70,000 ft. There, under the deep-purple sky, he leveled off, fired up all the rocket power he had and set out for his goal: 2,500 m.p.h.. 850 m.p.h. faster than man had ever flown. The machmeter danced upwards-2.1. 2.2, 2.3. But something was wrong. Trouble in the X-2's engine was holding her down...
Published this week are the first three volumes (boxed and priced at $12.50). Breathlessly the publisher confides that "no one, absolutely no one but Tiffany Thayer, could have written it." No one is apt to quarrel with him, for Author Thayer has reached an Everest of vulgarity that may well stand as a mark until standards of literary decency are chucked entirely. His fancy is that Mona Lisa is written by French Poet Francois Villon; it turns out to be a between-the-sheets foray into the political brawls and sexual excesses of Renaissance Italy. It begins with the hero...