West, but so far they don't have that. Until they do, they can't use the ground-based laser as we have, that is, relaying the beam by orbiting mirror to a distant target. But what they have now can probably do great damage to a satellite in low-earth orbit. There are ways to protect satellites against that, of course, but it's the old battle between heavier armor and heavier warheads. The warhead usually wins in the end.'
'Which is why we should negotiate the weapons out of existence.' Ernie Alien spoke for the first time. General Parks looked over to him with unconcealed irritation. 'Mr. President, we are now getting a taste-just a taste-of how dangerous and destabilizing these weapons might be. If we merely consider this Dushanbe place to be an antisatellite weapon, look at the implications it has for verification of arms-treaty compliance, and for intelligence- gathering in general. If we don't try to stop these things now, all we'll get is chaos.'
'You can't stop progress,' Parks observed.
Alien snorted. 'Progress? Hell, we have a draft treaty on the table now to reduce weapons by half. That's progress, General. In the test you just ran over the South Atlantic, you missed with half your shots-I can take out as many missiles as you can.'
Ryan thought the General might come off his chair at that one, but instead he adopted his intellectual guise. 'Mr. Alien, that was the first test of an experimental system, and half of its shots did hit. In fact, all of the targets were eliminated in under a second. Major Gregory here will have that targeting problem beaten by summer-won't you, son?'
'Yes, sir!' Gregory piped up. 'All we have to do is rework the code some.'
'Okay. If Judge Moore's people can tell us what the Russians have done to increase their laser power, we have most of the rest of the system architecture already tested and validated. In two or three years, we'll have it all-and then we can start thinking seriously about deployment.'
'And if the Soviets start shooting your mirrors out of space?' Alien asked dryly. 'You could have the best laser system ever made on the ground, but it won't do much more than defend New Mexico.'
'They'll have to find 'em first, and that's a much harder problem than you think. We can put 'em pretty high up, between three hundred and a thousand miles. We can use stealth technology to make them hard to locate on radar-you can't do that with most satellites, but we can do it with these. The mirrors will be relatively small, and light. That means we can deploy a lot of them. Do you know how big space is, and how many thousands of pieces of junk are orbiting up there? They'd never get them all,' Parks concluded with confidence.
'Jack, you've been looking at the Russians. What do you think?' the President asked Ryan.
'Mr. President, the main force we're going against here is the Soviet fixation on defending their country-and I mean actually defending it against attack. They've invested thirty years of work and quite a pile of money in this field because they think it's something worth doing. Back in the Johnson administration, Kosygin said, 'Defense is moral, offense is immoral.' That's a Russian talking, sir, not just a communist. To be honest, I find that a hard argument to disagree with. If we do enter a new phase of competition, at least it would be defensive instead of offensive. Kind of hard to kill a million civilians with a laser,' Jack noted.
'But it will change the whole balance of power,' Ernest Alien objected.
'The current balance of power may be fairly stable, but it's still fundamentally crazy,' Ryan said.
'It works. It keeps the peace.'
'Mr. Alien, the peace we have is one continuous crisis. You say we can reduce inventories by half-again, so what? You could cut Soviet inventories by two thirds and still leave them with enough warheads to turn America into a crematorium. The same thing is true of our inventory. As I said coming back from Moscow, the reduction agreement now on the table is cosmetic only. It does not provide any degree of additional safety. It is a symbol- maybe an important one, but only a symbol with very little substance.'
'Oh, I don't know,' General Parks observed. 'If you reduce my target load by half, I wouldn't mind all that much.' That earned him a nasty look from Alien.
'If we can find out what the Russians are doing different, where does that leave us?' the President asked.
'If the CIA gives us data that we can use? Major?' Parks turned his head.
'Then we'll have a weapons system that we can demonstrate in three years, and deploy over the five to ten years after that,' Gregory said.
'You're sure,' the President said.
'As sure as I can be, sir. Like with the Apollo Program, sir, it's not so much a question of inventing a new science as learning how to engineer technology we already have. It's just working out the nuts and bolts.'
'You're a very confident young man, Major,' Alien said professorially.
'Yes, sir, I am. I think we can do it. Mr. Alien, our objective isn't all that different from yours. You want to get rid of the nukes, and so do we. Maybe we can help you, sir.'
Zing! Ryan thought with a hastily concealed smile. A discreet knock came at the door. The President checked his watch.
'I have to cut this one short. I have to go over some antidrug programs over lunch with the Attorney General. Thank you for your time.' He took one last look at the Dushanbe photo and stood. Everyone else did the same. They filed out by the side door, the one concealed in the white plaster walls.
'Nice going, kid,' Ryan observed quietly to Gregory.
Candi Long caught the car outside her house. It was driven by a friend from Columbia, Dr. Beatrice Taussig, another optical physicist. Their friendship went back to undergraduate days. She was flashier than Candi. Taussig drove a Nissan 300Z sports car, and had the traffic citations to prove it. The car fitted well with her clothes, however, and the Clairoled hairstyle, and the brash personality that turned men off like a light switch.
' 'Morning, Bea.' Candi Long slipped into the car and buckled the seat belt before she closed the door. Driving with Bea, you always buckled up-though she never seemed to bother.
'Tough night, Candi?' This morning it was a severe, not quite mannish wool suit, topped by a silk scarf at the neck. Long could never see the point. When you spent your day covered in a cheap white lab coat, who gave a damn what was under it-except Al, of course, but he was interested in what was under what was under, she thought to herself, smiling.
'I sleep better when he's here.'
'Where'd he go?' Taussig asked.
'Washington.' She yawned. The rising sun cast shadows on the road ahead.
'How come?' Bea downshifted as she accelerated the car up the freeway on-ramp. Candi felt herself pressed sideways against the seat belt. Why did her friend have to drive this way? This wasn't the Grand Prix of Monaco.
'He said that somebody ran a test, and he has to explain it to somebody or other.'
'Hmph.' Beatrice looked at her mirror and left the car in third as she selected a slot in the rush-hour traffic. She matched velocities expertly and slid into a space only ten feet longer than her Z-car. That earned her an angry beep from the car behind. She just smiled. The nondriving part of her psyche took note of the fact that whatever test Al was explaining hadn't been American. And there weren't too many people doing tests that this particular little geek had to explain. Bea didn't understand what Candi saw in Al Gregory. Love, she told herself, is blind, not to mention deaf and dumb-especially dumb. Poor, plain Candi Long, she could have done so much better. If only she'd been able to room with Candi at school? if only there were a way to let her know? 'When's Al going to be back?'
'Maybe tonight. He's going to call. I'll take his car. He left it at the lab.'
'Put a towel over the seat before you sit in it.' She chuckled. Gregory drove a Chevy Citation. The perfect car for a geek, Bea Taussig thought. It was filled with the cellophane wrappers from Hostess Twinkies, and he washed it once a year whether the car needed it or not. She wondered what he was like in bed, but stifled the thought. Not in the morning, not after you just woke up. The thought of her friend? involved with that made her skin crawl. Candi was just so naive, so innocent-so dumb! about some things. Well, maybe she'd come around. There was still hope. 'How's the work on your diamond mirror coming?'
'ADAMANT? Give us another year and we'll know. I wish you were still working with my team,' Dr. Long said.
'I can see more on the administrative side,' Bea answered with remarkable honesty. 'Besides, I know I'm not as smart as you.'
'Just prettier,' Candi noted wistfully.
Bea turned to look at her friend. Yes, there was still hope.
