"To understand the operation of this facility," Isaac Mannheim was
saying, "you need to appreciate the technology we've installed here."
He was resting against the trunk of a tree, gazing wearily down the
mountain at the sun-baked asphalt of the facility stretching below.
"I've already got a rough idea how it works," Vance replied. He was
pondering the quiet down below. "It's the people I want to know more
about."
"Well, of course, that's my primary concern as well." The old man
shrugged. "But we are on the verge of an experiment that will change
the world for all time. That's just as important."
"Not in my book."
"Perhaps. But all the same, I think I should tell you a few technical
details about the facility. Since you say you're familiar with its
general workings, you probably know that its heart is a twenty-gigawatt
laser we call the Cyclops. Using it, we can send a high-energy beam
hundreds of miles into space without losing appreciable energy. Our
plan is to use that beam of energy, which we can direct very
accurately, to power a satellite launch vehicle."
"I understand that."
"Excellent," he said, as though encouraging a student. Then he pushed
on. "In any case, the Cyclops itself is a repetitive-pulsed, free-
electron laser, which means the computer can tune it continuously to
the most energy-efficient wavelength, a crucial feature. It starts with
an intense beam of electrons which it accelerates to high velocity,
then passes through an array of magnets we call the 'wiggler.' Those
magnets are arranged in a line but they alternate in polarity, which
causes the electrons passing through to experience rapid variations in
magnetic-field strength and direction. What happens is, the alternating
magnetic field 'wiggles' the beam of electrons into a wave, causing
them to emit a microwave pulse--which is itself then passed back and
forth, gaining strength at every pass. Eventually it saturates at a
level nearly equal to the power of Grand Coulee Dam, and then--"
"Maybe you ought to get to the point," Vance said, feeling he was
receiving a college lecture. He used to give college lectures, for
chrissake, in archaeology. Were they just as tedious? he suddenly
wondered.
"Of course." He pushed on, oblivious. 'The whole operation is
controlled by our Fujitsu supercomputer. The hardest part is getting
the microwave pulses and the electron pulses to overlap perfectly in
the wiggler. That part of the Cyclops, called the coaxial phase
shifter, requires delicate fine-tuning. The alignment has to be
critically adjusted, the focusing perfect, the cavity length--"
"Get back to the vehicle. I think I've heard all I need to know about
the wonders of the Cyclops."
"Very well. The energy is focused, in bursts, from up there." He turned
and pointed up the mountain. "That installation is a phased-array
microwave transmission system, which delivers it to the spacecraft. To
a port located on the sides of the vehicles down there. The port is a
special heat-resistant crystal of synthetic diamond. Once inside, the
beam is directed downward into the nozzle, where it strikes dry ice and
creates plasma, producing thrust. The vehicle is single-stage-to-
orbit."
"Nothing is burned." Vance had to admit it was a nifty idea. If you
could do it.
"That's correct. The laser beam creates a shock wave, a burst of
superheated gas moving at supersonic velocity out of the nozzle. By
pulsing the beam, we form a detonation wave that hits the nozzle
chamber and--"
"So it's really Star Wars in reverse," Vance interjected. "Bates is
using all that fancy research in high-powered lasers to put up a
satellite instead of shooting one down."
"The power is comparable. The superconducting coil we use to store
power can pulse as high as twenty-five billion watts. The dry ice that
is the 'propellant' is only about three hundred kilograms, a tiny
percentage of the vehicle's weight, and since the vehicle is virtually
all payload, we should be able to put it into a hundred-nautical-mile
orbit in a matter of minutes. The beam energy will be roughly five
hundred gigawatts per second and--"
"I get the picture," Vance interjected, tired of numbers. "But what
you're really saying is that this transmission system up here on the
mountain is the key to everything. If it goes down, end of show."
He was thinking. The terrorists had not destroyed anything, at least
not up here. Which probably meant they intended to use it. The prospect
chilled him.
"Okay, let's work backward to where the people are," he continued.
"What's down below us here? The power has to get up here somehow.
"We're at one end of the island, down a bit from Command, which is
underground. That's where the computer is, which handles the output
frequencies of the Cyclops and also the trajectory analysis. It gets
data from a radar up here on the mountain and uses that to provide
guidance for the laser beam as the vehicle gains altitude. There are
giant servo-mechanisms that keep the parabolic antennas trained on the
vehicle as it lifts off the pad and heads into orbit. They also
retrieve all the telemetry from the spacecraft, and--"
"What's belowground down there?" He was pointing toward the vehicles.
"That area has an excavated space below it for the multi- cavity
amplifier bay. It's--"
"The what?"
"That's where the free-electron laser, the Cyclops, begins pumping up.
Then the energy is sent up here"--he pointed back up the mountain--"to
the phased-array transmission system."
"Right. So underground it's shaped something like a dumbbell, with the
technical management staff at this end and then the operating people
down there. What's in between? Just a big connecting tunnel?'
"Correct. And, of course, the communications conduits. For all the
wiring."
Okay, Vance thought. Now we're getting somewhere. The terrorists will
be split up. That's going to make things easier, and harder. They could
be taken out one group at a time, but there also could be hostages at
peril all over the place. These situations are always a lot cleaner
when all the hostages are in one location.
"Any other connections?"
"Well, there's really only one." He shrugged, and ran his hand through
his mane of white hair. Vance thought it made him look like an aging
lion. "As you can imagine, these levels of power mean there are
enormous quantities of waste heat. So Bates tunneled water conduits
between a submerged pumping station on the other side of the island and
a number of locations."