“You doing okay dropping the bombs?”
“Yessir. It’s a little different, but—“
“How many more hops are you going to get?”
“Six, I think. Two each Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. We come home Wednesday.”
“Stay Wednesday and fly two more hops. Do eight. And Toad, leave the radar off. I want you to fly all eight without the radar. Use the IR and the laser and nothing else. You understand?”
“Yessir. Leave the radar off.”
“See you this Friday in the office. And give me a written recom- mendation Friday on what we can do to the system to make it easier to use without the radar. Night.” The connection broke. “‘
Toad cradled the dead instrument. He was wide awake. He got out of bed and went to the window. Raindrops were smearing the glass. What was that all about? Grafton didn’t seem to be getting much sleep these days. Shore duty sure wasn’t cracking up right.
He cranked the window open a couple inches. The wind whis- tled though the crack and chilled mm. It would be a miserable night to try to get aboard the ship. The meatball would be dancing like a crazed dervish while the fuel gauge told its sad tale. “Thank you. Lord, that I ain’t at sea flying tonight,” he muttered, and went back to bed.
The phone rang again. Toad picked it’up. “Tarkington, sir.”
“Grafton again. Toad. Leave the Doppler off too. It radiates.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Good night. Toad.”
“Good night. Captain.”
8
The plane carrying Jake and Helmut Fritsche landed at San Francisco International Airport, where the two men rented a car and ventured forth upon the free- ways. Fritsche drove since he had made this trip several dozen times.
“I guess a fair appraisal of Samuel Dodgers would include the word ‘crackpot,’” Fritsche said as they rolled south toward San Jose. “Also ‘religious fanatic,’ ’sports fanatic’ and a few more.”
Jake eyed Fritsche, with his graying beard and bushy eyebrows- “Crackpot?”
”Well, he’s a man of outrageous enthusiasms- Got a Ph.D. in physics from MIT in one of his prior incarnations, before he got religion or changed his name to that of his favorite baseball team. He grew up in Brooklyn, you know.”
“No,” said Jake Grafton through clenched teeth. “I didn’t.”
“Yeah. Anyway, he’s dabbled in computers and radar for years and patented this technology for suppressing reflected radiation. He came to me with some technical problems. I used my influence with the navy to get him a good radar to work with. Had it deliv- ered in a moving van.” He chuckled. “I’ll tell you that story some- time.”
“Henry says he’s a genius.”
Fritsche nodded Us agreement between drags on his cigar. Smoke filled the interior of the car. Jake cracked his window an inch to exhaust the thick fumes. “He’ll probably be in the running for a Nobel when his achievements get declassified.”
“Somebody said he’s greedy.”
“Samuel wants some bucks, all right. I can’t condemn him for that, not after a few years of reading about the pirates of Wall Street. Dodgers is the founder and only benefactor of his church and he wants to take it nationwide, with TV and radio and a hallelujah choir, the whole schmear. I think he realizes that since he’s so heavy into hellfire and damnation, contributions are going to be light. The feel-good, be-happy ministries are the ones rolling in the dough. Dodgers is going to have to keep his afloat out of his own pocket.”
Jake Orafton arranged the collar of his civilian jacket around his neck and lowered the window another inch. “What did George Ludlow say when he heard about Dr. Dodgers?”
“Amen,” Fritsche said lightly.
“I believe it,” Jake muttered. His companion tittered good-na- turedly.
The car rolled on into the farm district south of San Jose. Even- tually Fritsche turned up a dirt driveway and parked in front of a ramshackle wooden structure. A large sign amid the weeds pro- claimed: “Faith Apostolic Gospel Tabernacle.”
“I think we ought to get down on our knees inside and pray the GAO never gets wind of this,” Jake said as he surveyed the weeds and the fading whitewash on the old structure. The last coat of thin whitewash had been applied over a still legible Grange hall sign.
“You’ll see,” Fritsche assured him.
Samuel Dodgers was a stringy man in constant motion. He stood in the small, dusty chapel and tugged at this, gestured at that, reset the Dodgers baseball cap on his balding dome for the hundredth time, pulled at his trousers or ear or nose or lower lip, moving, always moving. “So you fellows wanta see it again, huh, and see what progress looks like in the late twentieth century? When do I get some money?”
“You got your last check two weeks ago.”
“I mean the next one.” He hitched up his pants and reset his cap and looked from face to face expectantly. The sunlight coming through a dirty windowpane fell on a long, lean face. His chin jutted outward from almost nonexistent lips. Above the grim mouth was a sharp nose and two restless black eyes. “The next check — when?”
“I think it’s a couple months away,” Fritsche replied gently.
“If I weren’t a Christian I’d cuss you government people. Your tax people squeeze the juice right out of a man — a man who’s sitting on the biggest advancement in military technology since the horseshoe — but the giving hand is so all-fired parsimonious, stingy, miserly. You people are just cheapl”
“You’re being paid according to the contract you agreed to. Dr. Dodgers.”
“Get a man over a barrel and squeeze him. It’s a sin to take advantage of a man trying to do the Lord’s work like I am. A sin.”
Jake glanced at Helmut Fritsche. He appeared unperturbed.
Dodgers led them between a dozen or so folding chairs toward the door near the altar. “Praise the Lord and pass the ammuni- tion,” Fritsche muttered just loud enough for Jake to hear above the tramping and scraping of heavy feet on the wooden floor.
The back half of the old Grange hall was a well-lit workshop. Several strings of naked hundred-watt bulbs were woven through the joists and cast their light on a crowded jumble of workbenches, tools and junk. The visitors picked their way through it behind Dodgers, who approached the only person in the place, a young roan of about twenty with carrot-red hair and acne to match.
“My boy Harold,” Dodgers said to Jake, who shook the offered hand and introduced himself- “Harold was at Stanford, but they weren’t teaching him anything, so he came back here to work with me. Learn more here with me than he would in that Sodom of little minds. Those fools with their calculators, always saying that some- thing won’t work…” He continued to fulminate as he opened the large doors at the back end of the building and began stringing electrical cords. “Well, Helmut, you seen this done before. Don’t just stand there like a tourist”
Dodgers drew Jake aside as Fritsche and Harold hooked up electrical cords and moved a workbench outside. “Okay.” He cleared his throat “Over there on that little bench below those trees” he pointed at the side of a hill about a half mile away—“is the radar. Harold will run that. That’s the radar the navy loaned me. Got it up there in an old two-holer that used to be here behind the tabernacle.” He stopped and showed Harold exactly how he wanted the power cables connected.
Jake joined him at a workbench. “Now this little radar suppres- sor — it picks up the incoming signal on these three antennas here and feeds it into this computer over there. Got four of the fastest chips made in this thing — Harold did most of the computer design. Computers are his bag. Little hobby of mine too. Anyway, the computer analyzes the incoming signal: strength, frequency, direc- tion, PRF — that’s Pulse Repetition Frequency — and so forth, and generates a signal that goes out through these companion antennas to muffle out future signals. That’s
