The first half of April slipped away as
Isaacs spent two hard weeks probing the meteor theory. He called in
projectile experts from around the country, and his top people
visited various test sites. The harder they worked, the less likely
the idea seemed. Boswank had traced the Novorossiisk report to one
of the most respected members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences,
Academician Viktor Korolev. That seemed a positive note: his
reputation as a profound and unprejudiced thinker was
well-established. Then at the end of the first week came the curt
Soviet reply to Isaacs’s report. A meteor had been previously
considered and rejected. With Korolev”s reputation behind that
statement, and the increasingly negative results of his own team’s
study, Isaacs knew he was losing any power to influence events. To
make matters worse, the Soviet reply was defensive and belligerent.
It yielded no hint that they conceded the innocence of the
Americans in the Novorossiisk affair, certainly no confession that
they might have mistakenly overreacted in the destruction of the
FireEye. The only good news was that with the act of retribution
the Yellow Alert had been cancelled. The Backfire aircraft were
returned to normal routine; the missiles recapped snugly; the
troops redeployed.
Isaacs walked slowly down the hall from
Drefke’s office and punched the elevator button. The Director had
just returned from the meeting of the National Security Council.
Isaacs had read the result on his face. The shuttle was going up
tomorrow. The crew was to disable the Cosmos 2112 and bring it back
in the cargo bay. Or fry trying.
He got off at his floor and continued his
thoughtful pace. He opened the outer door to Kathleen’s office and
was surprised to see Pat Danielson sitting there with an expectant
smile and a pile of computer output and charts on her lap. The
smile faded when she saw the-heavy cloud on Isaacs’s face.
“Is this a bad time?”
She detected Isaacs’s quick visible effort to
compose himself. His voice had a forced heartiness.
“Not at all.” He smiled ruefully. “No worse
than any other time. You have something important?”
She glanced down at the bundle of paper
clutched possessively on her lap, and her voice carried an overtone
of excitement.
“I think you’re going to find your curiosity
about this seismic signal justified.”
Isaacs had to think for a second to recall
what she was talking about. He was too preoccupied with the
historical clash scheduled to take place over their heads tomorrow
to give much attention to the task he had assigned her, but the
little wheels had to be greased, just like the big ones. A little
investment of his time would keep Danielson performing
efficiently.
He crossed to the door to his office and held
it open in welcome as she rose and hustled through. She deposited
the material on his desk and took the chair across from him.
“It wasn’t just a transient then?” he
asked.
“On the contrary, the more we learn about it,
the longer we can trace it back through the earlier data — several
months’ worth now.” She pointed to the stack of paper. “Here’s the
latest output, hot off the printer.”
He gestured outward with both hands, palms
up, encompassing the output and the young woman.
“Shoot,” he said, striving to concentrate on
what she had to say.
“With a longer time base, more information
becomes available. At first all one could tell was that the signal
repeated itself. We had only a crude idea of the period and no
notion of the location. We’ve worked very hard to obtain a better
estimate of the period. The figure of an hour was an alias. The
true period is somewhat less than ninety minutes. This update shows
that we’re beginning to get a handle on the location. Would you
care to guess?”
Danielson did not usually play such little
games, but came straight out with the facts. She thinks there’s
something special here, thought Isaacs. Aloud he said,
“Undoubtedly, it’s coming directly from the situation room in the
Kremlin.”
“Wrong, of course,” smiled the young woman.
She turned serious. “But you’ve hit on an important point. The
first algorithms used in the signal analysis were based on the
assumption of a static source, that the signal was coming from a
single location. That assumption proved to be self-inconsistent and
we abandoned it. When we allowed for the possibility that the
source moved, things began to fall in place.
“I won’t show you all the data, but look at
these two clear stretches when the background noise was low.”
Danielson unrolled a strip chart on Isaacs’s desk. “See here, the
signal comes from the vicinity of Egypt. Here, this is a week
later, it comes from the mid-Pacific basin. That proves it moves. A
more careful analysis hints, but doesn’t yet prove, that the period
is not due to a change in power at the source, but is due to a
source of roughly constant power moving from one side of the Earth
to the other.”
“A reflected wave of some kind,” put in
Isaacs.
“Perhaps,” replied Danielson, “but not like
any the seismologists have ever seen before. Any strong Earthquake
will set up reverberations that travel diagonally through the
Earth, but those die out quickly. Something continues to drive this
wave — that’s the mystery.”
“So the actual energizing source might still
be located in one place and the apparent movement is just due to
the random bouncing of the subsequent wave.”
“Possible,” allowed Danielson, “and more
comfortable, but the data still seem to suggest that the source is
moving.”
“How much energy is involved?” queried
Isaacs.
“Well, of course, the power we detect depends
on both the power at the source and the distance to our detectors.
If we assume the source is, on the average, at the distance of one
Earth radius, about four thousand miles, then the seismic energy
flux at the detector corresponds to a source power of about one
thousand megawatts — big for a power station, but pretty small
potatoes compared with all the seismic energy in the Earth at a
given time. Which is why the signal is hard to detect and
analyze.
“Since we don’t really know the nature of the
source, it’s difficult to associate an energy with it; that is, it
could sit in one place and emit bursts of energy that reverberate,
or it could represent a continuous supply of energy, as we believe.
A ballpark estimate is the total energy liberated in one
characteristic period, ninety minutes. In one period that would be
about one per cent of the energy of a one kiloton nuclear
event.”
“That’s a maximum estimate, isn’t it?” asked
Isaacs.
“Yes, sir,” replied Danielson, “within a
factor of a few, given that the source is confined to the
Earth.”
“One hundredth of a kiloton,” mused Isaacs.
“That’s too small to be a nuclear device, and if the source is
closer, the energy estimate only goes down. Still, if that amount
of energy is being liberated artificially on the surface, we should
be able to see other signs of it in the optical or infrared —
somewhere.
“The most reasonable assumption,” Isaacs
continued, “is that this is some natural seismic event that happens
to have a period of about an hour and a half, regular fault
slippage of some kind.”
Danielson raised a finger and opened her
mouth to interject, but Isaacs interrupted her, “Unless, of course,
you can prove the source is actually moving about.
“Obviously, I’m unconvinced this signal is
anything but some sort of natural phenomenon,” Isaacs said, “but I
am convinced we need to nail it down. Suppose you’re right and it’s
not related to natural fault slippage somewhere, do you have any
guess as to what it might be?”
“No. If the source is moving around in the
Earth as I think the data suggest, it’s a total paradox. Fault
slippage at different points on the Earth shouldn’t be
correlated.”
Isaacs leaned back in his chair, toying with
a pencil. “A period of ninety minutes still sounds suspiciously
like some artificial phenomenon — keyed to somebody’s time clock.
If your positions are right, Egypt and whatnot, it’s not a local
man-made thing, but I’d like to make sure that is ironclad.”
Isaacs sat up at the desk and gestured to
Danielson with the pencil. “You had better make this a matter of
some priority until it’s resolved. We need to know the period, if
it really is one, more accurately. If the period is not precisely
defined, that’s good evidence of a natural phenomenon. If the
period turns out to be exactly ninety minutes, it will be a
man-made event despite present evidence to the contrary.
“We need to know the location, whether or not
it is moving around. When you have a location, we can look for some
other evidence of its existence and nature. If it’s seismic in
nature, there should be some correlation with fault location and
activity. Any other suggestions?”
Danielson paused a moment in concentration
before she spoke. “No sense speculating without more data. It will
probably be useful to get records from civilian seismic stations,
universities here and abroad. We can look for correlations among
events that would pass unnoticed in any single record. That should
help with both the period and the location.”
“That’s fine,” said Isaacs with a note of
finality. “Let me know how this develops.”
“Right,” said Danielson, rising to leave,
collecting the bundle from his desk. “We’ll continue to monitor our
own AFTAC data, and that may begin to pin things down. But it will
take a month or so to acquire and analyze the civilian
records.”
“Okay, keep in touch.”
“Yes, sir.”
Isaacs watched the door close behind her. He
stared at it, unseeing, as her problem diffused from his mind and
his consciousness flowed out along tangled diplomatic channels.
From his office to Drefke’s to the White House. To Moscow.
Academician Korolev. Why did he rule out the meteorite? What had
happened to the Novorossiisk? What would happen to the shuttle?
*****
Major Edward Jupp went through the countdown
procedure the way he had a hundred times in simulation and twice
for real. His gloved hands played over the switches, and he
responded to the voice of the mission control agent at the
Consolidated Space Operations Center in Colorado Springs. His mind
was on the gaunt, taciturn passenger in the rear seat. This was his
first mission as commander, and he ached for a perfect flight. So
what did they do but pull the mission scientists, and substitute
this bozo, Colonel Newman, putting him in charge of a half-baked
kamikaze mission to snatch a live Russian laser satellite. On the
other hand, thought Jupp, they’re giving me a chance to fly this
sweet baby, new engines, high orbit capability; we’ll see what she
can really do.
He watched from the corner of his helmet
visor as the boom swung away from the top of the liquid fuel tank.
He could sense the billion cracklings as the liquid oxygen sucked
heat from the mighty vessel, and he lightly fantasized again that
he could smell its cool freshness. The hum of a thousand organs,
electrical, mechanical, fluid, and solid sang their readiness to
him. He listened to the countdown and felt the Pavlovian rush of
adrenalin as the count reached “one.” With “zero” the beast
screamed its energy, first with the roar of the gigantic liquid
fueled engines and immediately the answering call of the solid
boosters, a triumphant Tarzan cry, hailing the defeat of gravity.
And then, just as before, the miracle was repeated and they were on
their way, lifting, twisting away from the gantry, the thrill of
unbridled acceleration coursing through his body.
They kept to established routine for the
first several orbits. The idea was not to tip their hand too early.
Jupp knew, though, that the Russians would be watching them
microscopically, anticipating precisely the move they now planned.
The quiet passenger remained in his seat, not so much withdrawn as
apparently oblivious to the activity necessary to establish a
shuttle orbit. If he noticed that he was suspended head down two
hundred miles above Earth, he did not show it.
They switched to the briefing books for their
revised mission, a mission they had studied and rehearsed for only
a fleeting week. Only a week before that, the Russians had blown
away a fancy new American reconnaissance satellite. Jupp was aware
that the American military and intelligence communities had been in
a retributive fury, little disposed to look past the surface act
and examine the motive. The Russians, correctly or not, suspected a
space-based attack on one of their carriers, and the recon
satellite had shown an undue interest in the damaged ship. The
Americans still did not have an operating laser in space. Now they
knew the Russians did have one. The Americans wanted it. The
shuttle would get it. Jupp had had only a few chances to discuss
this change in plans with his copilot, Larry Wahlquist, but he knew
Larry liked the whole thing even less than he did.
Jupp and Wahlquist stood facing the U-shaped
console at the rear of the flight deck, their backs to the pilot’s
and copilot’s seats and the nose of the shuttle, their feet
anchored by velcro pads against the capricious lack of gravity.
Each opened independent safety switches on opposite sides of the
console, and then Jupp lifted a cover and thumbed a heavy toggle
switch. They watched on the TV monitor as the twin doors on the
large cargo bay swung open. Wahlquist fitted his hands into the
manipulator controls. His gaze switched rapidly back and forth from
the monitor screen to the rear window above the console, which
provided a direct view into the cargo bay. In the bay, the long,
skinny, elbow-jointed manipulating boom came alive, an extension of
Wahlquist’s own muscles and nerves. He moved the boom to the only
item in the large storage area. It was a cylinder twenty feet long
and four feet in diameter. From the end of the cylinder extended a
shaft that ended in a special fitting designed to be gripped by the
manipulator boom. Wahlquist moved the boom to the shaft, then made
the fine adjustments to align the clamp on the boom with the
fitting. Slowly he closed the jaws on the clamp. Satisfied that the
mating was exact, he threw a switch that locked the boom onto the
shaft with an unbreakable vise grip. He threw another switch on the
console and watched on the TV monitor as the tubular casing
separated along its length and peeled back like a long skinny clam.
He then used the boom to heft the shaft and hold it aloft, pointed
straight out from the bay toward the Earth below. Nestled along the
shaft, cleverly and compactly aligned, were the segments of a
mirror. At a signal, the many pieces would carefully unfold and
arrange themselves like a gigantic polished umbrella, half again as
big in diameter as the shuttle craft itself.