Georges LeFarge felt like he was getting a fever. Or maybe the room was
just growing hot. All he knew was, he was miserable. He swabbed at his
face with a moist paper towel and tried to breathe normally, telling
himself he had to keep going, had to stick by Cally. This was no time
to give in to these creeps and get sick.
Ardent and intense, Georges looked every inch the computer hacker he
was; but he also was one of the finest aerospace engineers ever to come
out of Cal Tech. Although his long hair and so-so beard were intended
to deliver a fierce political statement, his benign blue eyes negated
the message. He was an idealist, but one filled with love, not hate.
His politics were as simplistic as his technical skills were state-of-
the-art: he never managed to understand why everyone in the world did
not act rationally.
He had grown up in New York's Soho district, living in a mammoth,
sparsely furnished loft with his mother, a widely praised painter of
massive, abstract oils--usually in black and ocher. Her depressing
paintings were huge, but her income only occasionally was, and
Georges's memory of his childhood was years of alternating caviar and
spaghetti. His French Canadian father had long since returned to a log-
and-clay cabin in northern Quebec, never to be heard from again.
He also remembered his mother's string of lovers, an emotional
intrusion he never quite came to accept. The day he went off to MIT, on
a National Merit Scholarship, was the happiest of his life. Or at least
he had thought so until he got a call from Cally Andros asking him to
come to work for SatCom.
He was now thirty-four, single, and he loved girls, or the idea of
girls. No, the truth was that he loved one girl, and had forever. She
was now his boss. After years of separation, they had finally dabbled
at an affair here on Andikythera, but he had to admit it hadn't worked.
At first it had seemed a good idea, his boyhood dream come true, but
now he had realized maybe they were better off just being friends. She
became a different person in bed, and one he found slightly terrifying.
But given what had just happened, all that seemed part of another,
forgotten place and time.
In addition to having a fever, he was bone-tired and his neck ached.
But he wanted desperately to stay alert. He stroked the wispy beard he
had been trying to grow for the last four months, gazed at the
terminal, and warned himself to stop thinking like an engineer and try
to think like a terrorist. These European criminals had shown up just
in time for the first space shot, which meant they had something
planned that needed a vehicle. They weren't going to hold the facility
for ransom: there was nothing here they could steal. Also, they had
been very careful not to damage any of the systems.
Which meant their real program, whatever it was, needed the Cyclops to
work and a vehicle to lift off. If that didn't happen, they were
screwed. So, he thought, you sabotage Thursday's shot and you nix their
plot, whatever it is.
But Cally would have a fit. Mr. Bates needed a success, and soon, or
the whole SatCom gamble would go down the tubes. It was a lose-lose
scenario. What to do?
Simple. Just keep working for now and hope. What else was there?
On the screen in front of him now was the output of a program in
progress, this one called HI-VOLT, which was a daily low-power warm-up
of the coils of the phased-array radar system on the mountain. The
computer methodically checked all the power systems for any hint of
malfunction, and the program had to be run, rain or shine. It was now
time to kick on the pumps and heat exchangers and get going. Something
to do. . . .
The cursor was flashing, ready for the "power on" command. He hit the
Enter key, activating the pumps for the heat exchangers, then turned to
see Cally approaching, winding her way through the workstations, led by
the head terrorist, the fucker who called himself Number One. LeFarge
could not get over the fact the bastard looked like an executive from
the Arlington office, only better dressed.
"Georges, you've got to kill HI-VOLT," Cally said. Although she looked
normal, there was extreme anxiety in her voice. The strain was coming
through. "We have to do a different run." She was passing her fingers
nervously through her hair. He loved her dark, Mediterranean tresses.
"A trajectory analysis using SORT."
The Fujitsu supercomputer they were using was programmed with a special
NASA program developed by McDonnell-Douglas Astronautics Co. Called
SORT, an abbreviation for Simulation and Optimization of Rocket
Trajectories, it minimized the laser energy required for an insertion
trajectory into low earth orbit. It also calculated the on-board nozzle
vectors to adjust altitude while the vehicle was in flight. Midcourse
corrections. All you had to do was program everything in.
"Now? But I just started--"
"Here's a list of what he wants." She glanced at Number One again, then
handed over a sheet of blue paper.
He took it and looked down. Maybe they were about to tip their hand.
But what could they know about computers?
He finally focused on the sheet. What? These weren't satellite
trajectories, these were longitude and latitude coordinates. Then he
studied it more carefully. They were abort targets.