there to eyeball the Russian satellites. Look at the shot I gave you.'
' 'Before' and 'After,' right?' Gregory's eyes flicked from one image to another. 'Solar panels are gone? wow. What's the body of the satellite made of?'
'Aluminum, for the most part,' Graham said. 'The Russians go in for ruggeder construction than we do. The internal frames may be made of steel, but more likely titanium or magnesium.'
'That gives us a top-end figure for the energy transfer,' Gregory said. 'They killed the bird. They got it hot enough to fry the solar cells right off, and probably enough to disrupt the electrical circuitry inside. What height was it at?'
'One hundred eighty kilometers.'
'Sary Shagan or that new place Mr. Ryan showed me?'
'Dushanbe,' Jack said. 'The new one.'
'But the new power lines aren't finished yet.'
'Yeah,' Graham observed. 'They can at least double the power we just saw demonstrated. Or at least they think they can.' His voice was that of a man who had just discovered a fatal disease at work on a family member.
'Can I see the first sequence again?' Gregory said. It was almost an order. Jack noted that General Parks carried it out at once.
This continued for another fifteen minutes, with Gregory standing a bare three feet from the television monitor, drinking his Coke and staring at the screen. The last three times, the picture was advanced frame by frame while the young Major took notes at every one. Finally he'd had enough.
'I can have you a power figure in half an hour, but for the moment, I think they've got some problems.'
'Blooming,' General Parks said.
'And aiming difficulty, sir. At least, it looks like that, too. I need some time to work, and a good calculator. I left mine at work,' he admitted sheepishly. There was an empty pouch on his belt, next to his beeper. Graham tossed one over, an expensive Hewlett-Packard programmable.
'What about the power?' Ryan asked.
'I need some time to give you a good number,' Gregory said as though to a backward child. 'Right now, at least eight times anything we can do. I need a quiet place to work. Can I use the snack room?' he asked Parks. The General nodded, and he left.
'Eight times?' Art Graham observed. 'Christ, they might be able to smoke the DSPS birds. It's for damned sure they can wreck any communications satellite they want. Well, there are ways to protect them?'
Ryan felt a little left out. His education was in history and economics, and he hadn't quite learned the language of the physical sciences yet.
'Three years,' General Parks breathed as he poured some coffee. 'At least three years ahead of us.'
'Only in power throughput,' Graham said.
Jack looked from one to another, knowing the significance of what they were worried about, but not its substance. Gregory came back in twenty minutes.
'I make their peak power output something between twenty-five and thirty million watts,' he announced. 'If we assume six lasers in the transmission assembly, that's-well, that's enough, isn't it? It's just a matter of racking enough of them together and directing them at a single target.
'That's the bad news. The good news is, they definitely had blooming problems. They only delivered peak power on target for the first few thousandths of a second. Then it started blooming out on them. Their average power delivery was between seven and nine megawatts. And it looks like they had an aiming problem on top of the blooming. Either the mounts aren't shock-mounted properly or they can't correct for the earth's rotational jitter. Or maybe both. Whatever the actual reason, they have trouble aiming more accurately than three seconds of arc. That means they're only going to accurate plus or minus two hundred forty meters for a geostationary satellite-of course, those targets are pretty stationary, and the movement factor could count either way.'
'How's that?' Ryan asked.
'Well, on one hand, if you're hitting a moving target-and low-earth-orbit birds move across the sky pretty fast; something like eight thousand meters per second-there are fourteen hundred meters per degree of arc; so we're tracking a target that's moving about five degrees per second. Okay so far? Thermal blooming means that the laser is giving up a lot of its energy to the atmosphere. If you're tracking across the sky rapidly, you keep having to drill a new hole in the air. But it takes time for the bloom to get real bad-and that helps you. On the other hand, if you've got vibration problems, every time you change your aiming point, you add a new variable into your targeting geometry, and that makes things a lot worse. Shooting at a fairly stationary target, like a communications satellite, you simplify your aiming problem, but you keep shooting up the same thermal bloom until you lose almost all your energy into the air. See what I mean?' Ryan grunted agreement, though his mind had again reached beyond its limit. He barely understood the language the kid was speaking, and the information Gregory was trying to communicate was in a field that he simply didn't understand. Graham jumped in.
'Are you telling me we don't have to worry about this?'
'No, sir! If you got the power, you can always figure out how to deliver it. Hell, we've already done that. That's the easy part.'
'As I told you,' the engineer told Morozov, 'the problem isn't getting the lasers to put the power out-that's the easy part. The hard part is delivering the energy to the target.'
'Your computer cannot correct for-what?'
'It must be a combination of things. We'll be going over that data today. The main thing? Probably the atmospheric-compensation programming. We'd thought that we could adjust the aiming process to eliminate blooming-well, we didn't. Three years of theoretical work went into yesterday's test. My project. And it didn't work.' He stared off at the horizon and frowned. The operation on his sick child hadn't quite been successful but, the doctors said, there was still hope.
'So the increase in laser output came from this?' Bondarenko asked.
'Yes. Two of our younger people-he's only thirty-two and she's twenty-eight-came up with a way to increase the diameter of the lasing cavity. What we still need to do, however, is come up with better control of the wiggler magnets,' Pokryshkin said.
The Colonel nodded. The whole point of the free-electron laser that both sides were working on was that one could 'tune' it much like a radio, choosing the light frequency that one wished to transmit-or that was the theory. As a practical matter, the highest power output was always in about the same frequency range-and it was the wrong one. If they'd been able to put out a slightly different frequency the day before-one that penetrated the atmosphere more efficiently-the thermal blooming might have been reduced by fifty percent or so. But that meant controlling the superconducting magnets better. They were called wigglers because they induced an oscillating magnetic field through the charged electrons in the lasing cavity. Unfortunately, the breakthrough that made the lasing cavity larger had also had an unexpected effect on their ability to control magnetic-field flux. There was no theoretical explanation for this as yet, and the thinking of the senior scientists was that there was a minor, though undiscovered, engineering problem in the magnet design. The senior engineers, of course, said that there was something wrong in the theorists' explanation for what was happening, because they knew the magnets worked properly. The arguments that had already rocked the conference rooms were spirited but cordial. A number of very bright people were struggling together to find Truth-the scientific kind that did not depend on human opinion.
Bondarenko's mind reeled at the details even as he scribbled down his notes. He'd thought himself knowledgeable on lasers-he had, after all, helped to design a wholly new application for them-but looking at the work that had been done here, he thought himself a toddling child wandering through a university laboratory and wondering at the pretty lights. The principal breakthrough, he wrote, was in the lasing-cavity design. It allowed the enormous increase in power output, and had been made over a table in the canteen when an engineer and a physicist had jointly stumbled across a piece of Truth. The Colonel smiled to himself. Pravda was actually the word they used. 'Truth' was the exact translation, and the two young academicians had spoken it so artlessly. Indeed, that was a word that had gained currency at Bright Star, and Bondarenko wondered how much of that was an inside joke of some sort or another. 'But is it pravilno,' they would ask of a fact. 'Is it truthful?'
Well, he told himself, one thing was truthful enough. Those two people who'd met to discuss their love life- Bondarenko had already heard the story in greater detail-over a canteen table had combined to make a colossal leap forward in laser power. The rest would come in good time, Bondarenko told himself. It always did.
