Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of “the rat race” is not yet final. Look at Joe Namath, they say; he broke all the rules and still beat the system like a gong. Or Hugh Hefner, the Horatio Alger of our time. And Cassius Clay -- Muhammad Ali -- who flew so high, like the U-2, that he couldn't quite believe it when the drone bees shot him down.

Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over Russia, is now a test pilot for Lockheed Aircraft, testing newer, more “invincible” planes in the cool, bright skies above the Mojave Desert, in the Antelope Valley just north of Los Angeles. The valley is alive with aviation projects, particularly at Edwards Air Force Base, near Lancaster, where the Air Force tests its new planes and breeds a new, computerized version of the legendary, hell-for-leather test pilot. Air Force brass at Edwards is appalled at the persistence of the old “kick the tire, light the fire, and away we go” image. The key word in today's Air Force, they insist, is “professionalism.”

This made my visit to the base a bit tricky. It was painfully obvious, even after an hour or so of casual talk, that the hard-nosed pros on the flight line resented the drift of my conversation -- particularly when I asked about things like “dueling societies.” The Air Force has never valued a sense of humor in its career men, and in high-risk fields like flight testing, a sense of the absurd will cripple a man's future just as surely as an LSD habit.

Test pilots are very straight people. They are totally dedicated to their work and not accustomed to dealing with slip-shod civilians who seem even faintly disorganized -- especially writers. My image was further queered by a painfully cracked bone in my right hand, which forced me to use my left in all formal introductions.

At one point, while talking to two colonels, I lamely explained that I break my hand about once a year. “Last time,” I said, “it was a motorcycle wreck on a rainy night; I missed a shift between second and third, doing about seventy on a bad curve.”

Zang! That did it. They were horrified. “Why would anybody do a thing like that?” asked Lieutenant Colonel Ted Sturmthal, who had just come back from flying the huge XB-70 acoss the country at the speed of sound. Lieutenant Colonel Dean Godwin, who is rated, along with Sturmthal, as one of the top test pilots in the Air Force, stared at me as if I'd just produced a Vietcong watch fob.