and Georges had launched it from the Morton Street Pier in Greenwich
Village--she felt she was on her way. She had blossomed--in every way,
much to her frustration--a lot quicker than Georges did. At age
seventeen his idea of sex was still to swap chemical formulas. So she
finally gave up on him as a lover and decided to wait till college.
She chose Cal Tech, selected after turning down acceptances from half a
dozen prestigious universities in the East. By then, Calypso
Andropolous had decided she wanted to get as far away from West Forty-
ninth Street as possible. And she never wanted to see another eggplant
moussaka as long as she lived.
She also wanted a shorter name, and thus it was that her long Greek
surname became merely Andros. That simple change had a liberating
effect on her far beyond what she had expected. At last she felt truly
American . . . and able to admit to loving nothing better than living
off Whoppers and fries. Junk food was, in fact, the thing she missed
most here. No, what she missed most was Alan. Still.
Georges had picked MIT, and she did not see him again until he came to
Cal Tech for grad school. By that time she was deeply in love with Alan
Harris, who was twenty years her senior. She was discovering things
about herself she didn't want to know. Harris was a biochemistry
professor, tall and darkly handsome, and she wanted desperately to live
with him. She knew he was a notorious womanizer, but that didn't
matter. She was looking for a missing father and she didn't care. It
was what she wanted.
When he broke it off, she thought she wanted to die. The only one she
had left to turn to was Georges. And they restarted a friendship as
platonic as it had been back at Bronx Science, though it was deeper
this time. Georges told her to forget about Harris and just concentrate
on a first-rate dissertation.
It was not easy, but she did. Her project involved compressing a big
computer program that calculated spacecraft trajectories into a small
one that could be operated on a Hewlett-Packard hand calculator. She
then devised a way to create voice commands that could free up an
astronaut's hands
while he--soon, she told herself, it would be she--handled other
controls.
After reading every NASA report that NTIS had released on microfiche,
she knew no one there had created anything like it. She also figured
out that NASA was a hotbed of careerists, all protecting their own
turf. The only obstacle to their accepting her new computer program
would be the NIH syndrome--Not Invented Here. It turned out she was
right, and wrong.
By happy chance, her dissertation came to the attention of Dr. Edward
Olberg, a deputy director of trajectory control at the Kennedy Space
Center, who hired her a week later, with a GS rating a full two grades
higher than customary. He knew a good thing when he saw it. And now Dr.
Cally Andros' computer work was the creation of a NASA employee. End of
problem. She still wanted to be in the astronaut program, but she
figured she had made a good start.
She was wrong. It turned out that she was far too valuable in the
guidance section to let go. She published a lot of papers, grew very
disillusioned, and was on the verge of telling them to stuff it, when .
. .
An executive unknown to her, named William Bates, called one May
morning three years ago, said he had read all her papers, and then
offered her a job that caused her to postpone her dreams of space
flight. He wanted her to head up a private space program. She was, he
told her, too good to work for the government. She should be out in the
real world, where things happened.
When she recovered from the shock, she felt an emotion she had not
known since her first day at Bronx Science--she was scared. In the
business world, the responsibilities were clear-cut and fatal. You were
not blowing some anonymous taxpayer's money: it was real cash.
Furthermore, your responsibilities doubled. Not only did you have to
make it work, you had to make a profit. She loved the challenge, but
she quaked at the enormous risk.
Finally she made a deal. Yes, she would give up a sure career for a
risky long shot, but on two conditions. First, she
got to pick her staff, and second, someday she would get to go into
space herself.
Although he clearly thought the second demand rather farfetched for
SatCom, he assented to both. . . .
"How's it looking, Cally?" Bates was striding into Command, having just
emerged from his office at the far end of the cavernous room. Fifties,
gray-templed but trim, he wore a trademark open-necked white shirt and
blue trousers--a touch of the yachtsman, even ashore. A former Vietnam
fighter pilot, he had flown over from the company's head office in
Arlington, Virginia two days ago--setting down the company's Gulfstream
IV at Athens--to be on hand when the first vehicle, VX-1, went up. As he
stalked up, he was his usual crabby self, seemingly never satisfied
with anything that was going on.
She looked him over and stifled the horrible impulse she had sometimes
to call him Alan. He was short-tempered, the way Alan Harris was, and
he had the same curt voice. Otherwise, though, they were nothing alike.
The mind works in strange ways.
"Cyclops countdown is right on the money, Bill. to the second. Big
Benny is humming, and coil temps are nominal. Georges says it's a go
for sure this time. We're going to achieve the power levels needed to
lase." (They had tried two preliminary power-ups previously, but the
supercomputer had shut them down in the last hour of the countdown both
times.) "Looks like tonight is the night we get lucky."
Georges LeFarge had served as her personal assistant throughout the
project, even though he formally headed up the computer section. These
days he was still slim, almost emaciated, with a scraggly beard he
seemed to leave deliberately unkempt, just as he had at Cal Tech. Bates
had bestowed on him the title of Director of Computer Systems, which
did not sit well with his leftist politics. His conscience wanted him
to be a slave to the exploiting capitalists, not one of them. However,
he always managed to cash his bonus checks. He had carried on a
flirtation with Cally, sending messages back and forth on the Fujitsu's
workstations, for the last two years. She had finally taken him up on
it; and it was a bust all around. _C'est la vie_.
At this moment he was blended into a sea of shirt-sleeved technicians
glued to the computer screens in Command Central, the nerve center of
the entire operation. The young Americans all worked in a room slightly
smaller than three tennis courts, with rows of light-beige workstations
for the staff and three giant master screens that faced out from the
far wall. The soft fluorescents, cheerful pale-blue walls spotted with
posters and the large SatCom laser-eye logo, muted strains of Pink
Floyd emanating from speakers somewhere in the corner, and circulated
air carrying a hint of the sea--all made the perfect environment for the
nineteen young workers spaced comfortably apart at the lines of desks
this evening shift.
As they watched, the superconducting coil ratcheted increasingly larger
bursts of energy into the accelerator, pumping it up. At twelve
gigawatts the Cyclops should--if all went well--begin to lase.
The coil, a revolutionary new concept for storing electrical energy,
was situated deep in the island's core. It was a near-perfect storage
system, permitting a huge current of electricity to circulate
indefinitely without resistance, ready to produce the massive,
microsecond pulses of power. The heart of the system was an
electromagnetic induction coil 350 feet in diameter and 50 feet high
embedded in a natural cave in the island's bedrock. The coil itself was
a new niobium-titanium alloy that became superconducting, storing
electricity without resistance losses, at the temperature of liquid
nitrogen. A vacuum vessel almost like a giant Thermos bottle surrounded
the coil and its cryogenic bath.
The coil fed power into a particle accelerator that drove the complex's
centerpiece, the Cyclops--a free-electron laser designed to convert the
energy stored in the coil into powerful pulses of coherent microwaves.
The supercomputer would then focus these with the phased-array antennas
into the propulsion unit of the space vehicle. That unit contained
simple dry ice--the only thing simple about the entire system--which
would be converted to plasma by the energy and expand, providing thrust
for the vehicle.
"Cally, we have ten point three gigs," LeFarge announced confidently.
He was absently stroking his wisp of beard. "Power is still stable."
"Good." She watched the readout on the computer screen in front of her
as the numbers continued to scroll. If the Cyclops performed the way
the engineers were all predicting, the world's most powerful laser was
about to go critical. A thrill coursed through her.
The idea was brilliant. By directing the energy to a space vehicle, you
kept the power plant for its rockets on the ground. Unlike conventional
rockets, the vehicle's weight would be virtually all payload, instead
of almost all fuel. It would cut the cost of launching anything by a
factor of at least a hundred. . . .
Now a green oscilloscope next to the computer screens was reading out
the buildup, a sine curve slowly increasing in frequency.
"Eleven point one," Georges announced, barely containing a boyish grin.
"We're still nominal."
Cally glanced at the screen. "Let's keep our fingers crossed. Almost
there."
"By the way," Bates interjected, "assuming everything goes well here
tonight and the storm lets up, I've scheduled myself on the Agusta over
to Kythera in the morning. A friend of mine was sailing near there, and
I'm a little worried. I just tried to reach him on the radio and got no
answer. Maybe his radio got swamped, but I want to find out." He was
turning to head back to his office. "Now, though, I've got some calls
in to Tokyo. So keep me informed on the countdown, and your feelings on
the weather."
More investors, she caught herself thinking. Begging. Which must mean
the money's getting tight again. But hang in there just a couple more
days, Bill, and we're gonna show the world a thing or two. They'll be
begging _you _to let them invest.
"I just came in to give you some moral support," Bates continued,
pausing, "and to tell you I think you're doing a terrific job."
"Bullshitting the help again?" She laughed, not quite sure she believed
his tone.
"Why not? It's free." A scowl. "But just keep up the good work." He had
extracted a leather tobacco pouch from his blue blazer and begun to
fiddle with his heavy briar pipe. She started to ask him to please not
smoke here with all the sensitive Fujitsu workstations, but then
decided they were his workstations. "If this thing flies, literally,
I'm going to give you a vulgar stock option. Another one. For putting
up with me."
"How about a bottle of aspirin?" She made a mock face. "I don't have
any time to spend the money."
"I'm going to take care of that, too. After this is over, I'm going to
have you kidnapped by a Greek beachboy and taken to some deserted
island where there's only one way to pass the time." He frowned back, a
wry crinkle passing through the tan at the corner of his eyes. "Twenty
years ago I might have tried to do it myself."
"Still hoping to get me laid?" She gave him her best look of shock, and
they both had to laugh. The sexual electricity was there, whether
either of them wanted to admit it or not.
"There's a time and place for everything," he went on, showing he could
hint and not hint at the same time. "You're definitely working too
hard."
"I can't take all the credit." She knew when to be self-effacing and
when to change the subject, fast. "We owe all this to the Bed Sox's
oldest living fan."
By which she meant Isaac Mannheim, the retired MIT professor whose
revolutionary propulsion idea had made the whole project possible. In
1969 he had demonstrated his ground-based laser concept to NASA, but
they had backed away, claiming they had too much invested in
conventional chemical rockets. But he knew it would work, knew it would
change the way space was used, so he had taken the idea to entrepreneur
William Bates and offered to sign over the patents for a piece of the
profits. Bates was impressed. He took him up on the offer, raised the
money, and then hired the best aerospace engineer he could find to head
up the project. Together they were a perfect team.
Mannheim, with flowing white hair and tweedy suits, was now in his
seventies and lived in retirement in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was
due in tomorrow, just in time to watch the first lift-off of a full-
scale vehicle. When he arrived in Athens, Cally always dispatched the
company Agusta to pick him up. A first-class corporation, she figured,
ought to behave like one.
"If the Cyclops power-up goes off without a hitch tonight, then we
should have plenty of good news for him this trip," Bates said. "I'll
let you be the one to brief him."
"Oh, he'll know it all before he gets here. He calls me every day at
1700 hours, our time, to check things out. I could use him to set my
watch."
"Isaac's like the voice of our conscience, always telling us to work
harder and better. Well, good for him." He smiled and flicked a gold
lighter. The young technicians around the room gave him a disapproving
glance, but kept their silence. The boss was the boss.
Besides, everybody in Command, poised in front of their screens, had
other things to worry about.