The zenith angle (19 page)

“But the whole point of a satellite is to have a steady, fixed camera!”

“No,” said Van. “The whole point is steady, fixed
images.
You can compute the fixed images from a spinning satellite camera.”

“That’s impossible.”

“No. It can be done.” Astronomers could help a lot with orbiting camera images. Van hadn’t breathed a word to Dottie about it, but he knew it could be made to happen.

“It’s like Hollywood special effects, sir,” said Hickok proudly. “We’ll just fix it up in post-production. Like
Jurassic Park
!”

Wessler rose from his desk and put both his hands in his blue jumpsuit pockets. He had the look of a man who badly needed a drink.

“You will lose two, three percent of acuity if you spin the camera,” Van admitted. “But you’ve already lost that much acuity to that so-called CCD fogging. That is not a CCD problem at all, by the way. That is dirt being blasted off your spacecraft and settling on your lens.”

Wessler was still pacing. “We don’t have the fuel to spin that bird. We’re not made out of hydrazine up there.”

“That’s right. You’ll also lose fifteen months off the expected nine-year life. But at that rate of damage . .

. the satellite won’t live two years.”

“Our bird is under attack!” said Hickok, passionately jumping to his feet. “There is something up there, sir! I don’t know how it got up there, but it can’t be any accident that we have this problem during a War on Terror. Some evildoer is screwing with us, sir. I just know that.”

Wessler sat down again. “I don’t get a briefing like this every day.”

“No,” Van agreed.

“Where the hell did they dig you up, Dr. Vandeveer? You’re a hell of a guy, and I’ve never even heard of you.”

“MIT,” Van said. “Stanford. And Mondiale.”

Wessler stared as if a toad had jumped from Van’s tongue. “You’re from
Mondiale
?”

“I’m from Mondiale’s R&D lab,” Van said hastily. “I quit to work for the government.”

“I can’t believe this!” Wessler shouted, standing up again. “You crazy sons of bitches, my
mother
owned Mondiale stock! You’re a
phone company
! How did you lose ninety percent of your stock value? You people are completely crooked!”

A moan slipped out of Van. “The whole industry is hurting . . .”

“I can’t go to my best people and tell them to screw up our satellite on the say-so of some goofball from Mondiale!”

“I know that,” Van blurted, waving his hands in panic, “I know that the company hurt a lot of people. But you don’t have to take my word for this! That’s not a problem, not at all! I don’t want any credit for this, no, no! You just have to
look
at it. That’s all. Look at the bird. See how bad off it is. Shocked or burned. Like that!”

“How?”

“You can send up the Shuttle.”

“Do you know the price of a Shuttle flight? And the scheduling? Those old birds are falling to pieces!”

“Train the Hubble on it. Search it for burn marks.”

“Civilian telescopes are not our department.”

“Just look at it, that’s all,” Van begged. “Do it from the ground.”

“No! Observatories are
strictly forbidden
to image American spy-sats. I certainly wouldn’t want them getting started! Besides, they lack that technical capacity.”

Van had nothing left to say. His wife’s new adaptive-optic telescope would certainly have that capacity. But it was two years away from coming online. By then, it would be no use. Hickok stared down at Van, expecting some final wizard miracle from him, but Van realized that he was beaten. He couldn’t believe that Mondiale had brought his whole scheme crashing down. But that made a horrible sense, for in the last few months Mondiale had screwed up everything in Van’s life. The big shots who had hired him away from Stanford were about to do a perp-walk, in handcuffs, in front of cameras. Guilty of stock fraud. Failures. Disasters. Deceivers. From leaders of a revolution, they had turned into liars and cheats.

Van had done his best, but he had blown it.

“What the hell’s going on here?” said Hickok loudly. “I got your problem fixed, General! And you won’t even
look
?”

“This guy is from Mondiale!”

“Like Lockheed’s better? That bird could save the life of Special Forces spotters in Afghanistan! You’re telling me, what, that’s too much work for you? Use a KH-11!”

“That’s completely outside normal channels.”

“You’re gonna let our adversaries destroy our best surveillance asset while you sit here like some jackass?”

Wessler turned beet-red. “Mr. Hickok, you can’t push around a Space Force officer by yelling a bunch of saucer-nut crap. We are the
only
force on earth that has military space capacity. There
is
no one else. That’s not even remotely possible.”

“Who cares what your fat-cat industry vendors think is possible? That bird is dying up there! I busted my ass, I got you a genuine gold-plated computer genius here! He can fix the damn thing! If you don’t fix it, then you,
you,
are betraying our men out in the field.”

Wessler’s throat was moving. Van realized that Wessler was silently counting to ten. Van had never seen a grown man in uniform do that before. It was very frightening. Finally Wessler spoke. “I believe I’ve given you two dilettantes all the time that you need.”

“That does it,” Hickok announced. “I quit!” He took a key from his pocket and undid his wrist-cuff. Then he tossed the briefcase on a metal chair. “This turkey of yours is dead meat! I want no part of this!

You useless sumnabitches couldn’t run a model rocket show!”

Wessler looked at him, his reddened face flickering through rage, disgust, and pity. “Master Sergeant, I really don’t believe this is your game.”

Hickok leveled a throat-cutting stare at him. “Oh, so it’s a game to you, is it? You can’t get your big square head around an asymmetric threat, General! No wonder they hit the damn Pentagon out of a clear blue sky. I’d rather dig ditches in Lebanon than hang out with you pie-eating game-boys. Jesus Christ.”

“Mike,” Van said.

“What?”

“Let’s go now, Mike. All right? We’ll just go.”

NINE

COLORADO, FEBRUARY 2002

H
ickok wasn’t the kind of guy to silently nurse his grudges. His first stop outside the Cheyenne base was to pick up two fifths of Jack Daniel’s.

Van drove the Humvee as Hickok slurped his bourbon and griped. In going to visit Dottie, Van was borrowing Hickok’s courier truck.

The failure gnawed at Van. He was right, he knew he was right. Why hadn’t that worked? Why hadn’t he been more convincing?

Two reasons, really. The first was painful and personal. He, Dr. Derek Vandeveer, was a geek. He was a classic, bearded-weirdo, introspective nerd. Oh, yes, he could hold his own when people came to him with technical problems. But he didn’t have the grit that it took to really kick ass and take names. He should have had that kind of quality. He had nobody to blame for his weakness but himself. His grandfather would have broken that stupid Air Force general like a matchstick. Almost. He’d been so close. If not for that ugly Mondiale business . . . but that shouldn’t have mattered. Or, at least, Mondiale was only one aspect of a much deeper crisis. He should never have sold out to private industry in the first place. At Stanford, at MIT, people had high standards. People had intellectual rigor. At Mondiale, nobody cared at all about principles. The method at Mondiale was to build a prototype in R&D. Then throw it over the wall to marketing and product development. That was what Van had just tried to do with this military professional. And it just hadn’t worked. Van fiercely gripped the Humvee’s padded steering wheel. He was driving a vehicle the size of a living room, through dense Colorado commuter traffic, on snowy, hairpin mountain turns. White-line fever had him totally keyed-up.

Phantoms of shame and guilt danced on the snowy road ahead of him. Not only was he not a true leader, he was not truly a scientist, either. That was the tragic core of the whole ugly mess. Computer science was a fraud. It always had been. It was the only branch of science ever named after a gadget. He and his colleagues were basically no better than gizmo freaks. Now physics, now that was true science. Nobody ever called physics “lever science” or “billiard ball science.”

The fatal error in computer science was that it modeled complex systems without truly understanding them. Computers simulated complexity. You might know more or less what was likely to happen. But the causes remained unclear. When a hard-headed, practical man like General Wessler asked him “why,” all that Van could do was helplessly wave his hands.

He could have become a mathematician. He knew he had some skill there. Math would have been a much better choice for an ugly man who was shy and retiring. It was only personal weakness that had made him give in to the lure of computers. They called it “software engineering,” but that wasn’t engineering, either. If he’d been a true engineer like his grandfather, he would never have gone to the Space Force with such a cheap, lousy hack. He had brought them a half-baked notion. A hack was something rough-and-ready, tacked onto the end of a legacy system that was too huge, complicated, and overwhelming to fix. That was why he’d failed and been kicked out in disgrace. Jeb had given him the very same siren song. “This time, we’ll really straighten it all out.” No. No one could ever promise that about computers, because that was never the truth. It didn’t matter how good you were, how smart you were. Nobody ever “fixed” computers. You just threw the old computer out and got another one. Any genuine reform was impossible. The only thing you could do was layer some fresh mud on top of the cracks.

That, or just give up. Go into hiding, just hide from the burning shame. Yes, he, Derek Ronald Vandeveer, was a phony-baloney security expert for an agency that didn’t even exist. But it wasn’t like he could return to his previous life. What had happened to Mondiale and their competitors . . . that wasn’t a “bubble.” That was a train wreck on top of an avalanche. He, Derek Vandeveer, was part of the worst destruction of wealth in human history. Men he knew and trusted, corporate visionaries building a new and better electro-world, were out on bail. The very guys who used to drop by his lab in Merwinster in their pressed slacks and cashmere sweaters, to ooh and ahhh at the prototypes. Their second homes were auctioned off by bailiffs. Their trophy wives had vanished off the fashion pages into dry-out tanks.

Why had he ever, ever believed in that crap? As a last, fatal bottom line, what kind of terrible verdict was that on his own integrity and good judgment? He’d been in the lab blowing money entrusted to his company by widows and orphans. By the mothers of Space Force generals. What possible right did he have to thrust himself into public policy? What was he doing here now? A full nightmare awareness struck Van. An awful vision of the hordes of the cheated, the deceived, and the damaged. Millions of normal people across America, across the whole world, who had no awareness of what he had done to them, what he was trying to save them from . . .

Remember that hot stock that you bet on, Mr. and Mrs. America? All those nerds you trusted to bring you a New Economy? Well, they’re driving massive trucks in Colorado. Lost, alone. With drunken ex-soldiers. In a War on Terror. Cursing, bewildered, frustrated, violent. In his panicky haste to flee Cheyenne Mountain, Van had abandoned his cell phone and even his beloved Swiss Army knife. His pockets were truly empty now. Nobody would even talk to him. He was doomed. The CCIAB was doomed. The satellite was doomed. Maybe even America was doomed.

“You’re sure as hell not saying much,” said Hickok.

“I screwed up bad, Mike. I should have nailed that. That should have worked.”

“You’re the one bitching? I don’t even have a job now!” Hickok flung his empty whiskey bottle out the Humvee’s window, with an overhand Molotov lob. Then he cracked the seal on a second. “You’ve got a wife and a kid, fella! All I got in my life is this truck and some Dixie Chicks tapes.”

“You want a job, Mike?”

“That wouldn’t hurt me,” said Hickok. “What, a job with your outfit, you mean?” The idea amused him.

“You’re gonna turn me into a true-blue cyberwar freak, Dr. Professor?”

“Yeah, Mike. You’re hired. Come by my office when you get back to D.C.”

Hickok peered at the fine print on the whiskey label. “I think maybe I’ll drive back straight through Tennessee. Tennessee makes the best damn liquor in this whole wide world!”

Dottie’s telescope needed black skies. Black skies in America were few and far between. There were some strange and spooky places in the backwoods of Colorado. Mountain people always lived free. The nooks and crannies of the Rocky Mountains had Space Force generals, and ancient hippies, and silver miners, and jack Mormons.

“Out here in God’s country, we got ourselves some dropouts!” crowed Hickok, drunkenly pounding his leg with his rocklike fist. “The real off-the-grid people! Polygamists. Unabomber types. And there’s survivalists!”

During the Y2K panics of 1999, Van had come to know quite a lot about survivalists. And what he knew, Van didn’t like. Survivalists were people of bad faith. Their faith was that civilization would break down, and ought to break down, and deserved to break down. That no one in charge should ever be trusted. That all authorities were useless, deluded, or evil.

The survivalist faith was to abandon everyone and everything. Go into hiding. Buy lots and lots of gas masks. Cement. Water filters. Sacks of grain. Bars of gold.

“Mike, do you know any of those survivalist types?”

Hickok’s lids fluttered. He sat up in the Humvee’s backseat. “You bet I do! Us ‘snake-eaters’ can live right off the land! Escape and evasion under the stars! Cover your face up with dang mud! I used to train around these parts. If I recall myself correctly, there should be a roadside depot yonder. Sell you most anything you need to know!”

Van soon found Hickok’s depot. The place didn’t look like much. A big red barn. He wanted to press right on and get to Dottie’s place. Then he saw a glowing yellow roadside sign standing next to some rusty gas pumps. The sign was measled with shotgun pellets.KNIVES AMMO, it bragged.GUNS