'And you're the guy who made the breakthrough on the targeting system. You figured a way for the beam to provide its own targeting information.'
'Something like that,' the General answered for the kid. 'Dr. Ryan, that part of the system is classified highly enough that we will not discuss it further without written authorization.'
'General, the purpose in my being here is to evaluate this program relative to Soviet efforts along similar lines. If you want my people to tell you what the Russians are up to, I have to know what the hell we're supposed to look for!'
This did not elicit a reply. Jack shrugged and reached inside his coat. He handed the General an envelope. Major Gregory looked on in puzzlement. 'You still don't like it,' Ryan observed after the officer folded the letter away.
'No, sir, I don't.'
Ryan spoke with a voice colder than the New Mexico night. 'General, when I was in the Marine Corps, they never told me that I was supposed to like my orders, just that I was supposed to obey them.' That almost set the General off, and Jack added: 'I really am on your side, sir.'
'You may continue, Major Gregory,' General Parks said after a moment.
'I call the algorithm 'Fan Dance,'' Gregory began. The General almost smiled in spite of himself. Gregory could not have known anything about Sally Rand.
'That's all?' Ryan said again when the youngster finished, and he knew that every computer expert in Project Tea Clipper must have asked himself the same thing: Why didn't I think of that! No wonder they all say that Gregory is a genius. He'd made a crucial breakthrough in laser technology at Stony Brook, then one in software design. 'But that's simple!'
'Yes, sir, but it took over two years to make it work, and a Cray-2 computer to make it work fast enough to matter. We still need a little more work, but after we analyze what went wrong tonight, another four or five months, maybe, and we got it knocked.'
'Next step, then?'
'Building a five-megajoule laser. Another team is close to that already. Then we gang up twenty of them, and we can send out a hundred-megajoule pulse, twenty times per second, and hit any target we want. The impact energy then will be on the order of, say, twenty to thirty kilograms of explosives.'
'And that'll kill any missile anybody can make?'
'Yes, sir.' Major Gregory smiled.
'What you're telling me is, the thing-Tea Clipper works.
'We've validated the system architecture,' the General corrected Ryan. 'It's been a long haul since we started looking at this system. Five years ago there were eleven hurdles. There are three technical hurdles left. Five years from now there won't be any. Then we can start building it.'
'The strategic implications?' Ryan said, and stopped. 'Jesus.'
'It's going to change the world,' the General agreed.
'You know that they're playing with the same thing at Dushanbe.'
'Yes, sir,' Major Gregory answered. 'And they might know something that we don't.'
Ryan nodded. Gregory was even smart enough to know that someone else might be smarter. This was some kid.
'Gentlemen, out in my helicopter is a briefcase. Could you have somebody bring it in? There are some satellite photos that you might find interesting.'
'How old are these shots?' the General asked five minutes later as he leafed through the photos.
'A couple of days,' Jack replied.
Major Gregory peered at them for a minute or so. 'Okay, we have two slightly different installations here. It's called a 'sparse array.' The hexagonal array-the six-pillar one-is a transmitter. The building in the middle here is probably designed to house six lasers. These pillars are optically stable mounts for mirrors. The laser beams come out of the building, reflect off the mirrors, and the mirrors are computer-controlled to concentrate the beam on a target.'
'What do you mean by optically stable?'
'The mirrors have to be controlled with a high degree of accuracy, sir,' Gregory told Ryan. 'By isolating them from the surrounding ground you eliminate vibration that might come from having a man walk nearby, or driving a car around. If you jiggle the mirrors by a small multiple of the laser-light frequency, you mess up the effect you're trying to get. Here we use shock mountings to enhance the isolation factor. It's a technique originally developed for submarines. Okay? This here diamond-shaped array is? oh, of course. That's the receiver.'
''What?' Jack's brain had just met another stone wall.
'Let's say you want to make a really good picture of something. I mean, really good. You use a laser as your strobe.'
'But why four mirrors?'
'It's easier and cheaper to make four small mirrors than one big one,' Gregory explained. 'Hmph. I wonder if they're trying to do a holographic image. If they can really lock they illuminating beams in phase? theoretically it's possible. There are a couple of things that make it tricky, but the Russians like the brute-force approach? Damn!' His eyes lit up. 'That's one hell of an interesting idea! I'll have to think about that one.'
'You're telling me that they built this place just to take pictures of our satellites?' Ryan demanded.
'No, sir. They can use it for that, no sweat. It makes perfect cover. And a system that can image a satellite at geosynchronous altitude might be able to clobber one in any earth orbit. If you think of these four mirrors here as a telescope, remember that a telescope can be a lens for a camera, or part of a gunsight. It could also make a damned efficient aiming system. How much power runs into this lab?'
Ryan set down a photo. 'The current power output from this dam is something like five hundred megawatts. But-'
'They're stringing new power lines,' Gregory observed. 'How come?'
'The powerhouse is two stories-you can't tell from this angle. It looks like they're activating the top half. That'll boost their peak power output to something like eleven hundred megawatts.'
'How much comes into this place?'
'We call it 'Bach.' Maybe a hundred. The rest goes 'Mozart,' the town that grew up on the next hill over, they're doubling their available power.'
'More than that, sir,' Gregory noted. 'Unless they're to double the size of that town, why don't you assume the increased power is just going to the lasers?'
Jack nearly choked. Why the hell didn't you think of it, he growled at himself.
'I mean,' Gregory continued, 'I mean? that's like hundred megawatts of new power. Jesus, what if they made a breakthrough? How hard is it to find out what's happening there?'
'Take a look at the photos and tell me how easy you think it would be to infiltrate the place,' Ryan suggested.
'Oh.' Gregory looked up. 'It would be nice to know how much power they push out the front end of their instrument. How long has this place been there, sir?'
'About four years, and it's not finished yet. Mozart is new. Until recently the workers were housed in this barracks and support facility. We took notice when the apartment building went up, same time as the perimeter fence. When the Russians start pampering the workers, you know that the project has a really high priority. If it has a fence and guard towers, we know it's military.'
'How did you find it?' Gregory asked.
'By accident. The Agency was redrawing its meteorological data on the Soviet Union, and one of the technicians wanted to do a computer analysis of the best places over there for astronomical observation. This is one of them. The weather over the last few months has been unusually cloudy, but on average the skies are about as clear there as they are here. The same is true of Sary Shagan, Semipalatinsk, and another new one, Storozhevaya.' Ryan set out some more photographs. Gregory looked at them.
'They sure are busy.'
'Good morning, Misha,' Marshal of the Soviet Union Dmitri Timofeyevich Yazov said.
'And to you, Comrade Defense Minister,' Colonel Filitov replied.
A sergeant helped the Minister off with his coat while another brought in a tray with a tea setting. Both
