by David Hewson
'Don't touch the panels themselves,' Lieberman added quickly.
'Hey, Professor. Why might that be?'
'They're fragile. If you hold too hard, the silicon could break, and that will surely do something to the power flow. Maybe it could notice.'
'Understood,' Ruffin confirmed, and rolled the floatcam in front of him. 'You see where we're headed?' Sundog was closing fast and soon he would have to make a decision about which piece of it was going to stop their movement, prevent them floating right through and over to the earth side of the system and, for sure, triggering a response. 'You guys see the support strut for the panel closest to me?'
'Got it,' Schulz and Lieberman said simultaneously.
'Unless you indicate otherwise, I intend to make a grab for that. Once I have it, Gallagher here can slow herself down by grabbing hold of me. Then we get on with erecting this sunshade.'
There was a pause on the line. 'Looks good,' Schulz said quietly.
'Here we go,' Ruffin announced to no one in particular. The floatcam was probably broadcasting this, he guessed. Somewhere down on the earth they were watching these two unwieldy figures in oversized white suits floundering around in space, trying to hook themselves onto a hunk of metal that held a black butterfly wing pointing back at the sun. The fingers of his big glove closed around the aluminium strut and Bill Ruffin was amazed to discover that, for one short moment afterwards, his eyes had closed of their own accord.
'Sir?' Schulz's voice said out of nowhere.
'We're here,' Ruffin announced, and knew they'd be hollering and clapping in those distant places just then. He fastened a temporary line to the structure of the satellite, then looked across at Mary Gallagher. She had grabbed hold of his sleeve, steadied herself, and was already working on the canisters.
'Point the floatcam at the base of the satellite,' Schulz ordered. 'The central section facing out towards you.'
Ruffin peered at the flat end of Sundog, like the bottom of some gigantic beer can, and moved the camera around so that it was in view. 'What am I looking for?'
'One big single LED. It should look green.'
Ruffin peered at the metallic plate. The light was there, all right. And it was green too. 'Got it.'
'We see it too,' Schulz said. 'Green means Sundog is primed and active. When the system goes to standby, that light should go to orange. Don't go anywhere near the damn thing then. Wait till it's red. That's total shutdown. It's dead bar a couple of backup circuits.'
'Understood,' Ruffin replied.
'Also,' Schulz added, 'if you trigger some kind of response mechanism, all the defensive weaponry is behind that plate. It has to retract before it can deploy. We built it like that so no one could see what was in there. If you see something moving, we got problems.'
'Right,' Ruffin said dryly. 'We'll know when to run and hide.'
It was a two-person job to erect each shade, and they'd been through this as much as they could down on the ground. The panels were made of fine, silver-coloured fabric, tightly packed into the container. On each side of the wing there was a ribbed, airtight tube with a small pressurized canister of oxygen built into the base. The idea was to point the device away from Sundog, back to the Shuttle, hit the activate button on each canister simultaneously, and watch the shade unravel slowly. When each was erected, it was attached to the aluminium centrepiece and drawn into position.
Ruffin checked on the position of the floatcam and watched Gallagher finish the final portion of the central strut. 'You people down below got a good view from there?'
'Yeah,' Lieberman's voice said.
'Here we go…' He and Gallagher nodded at each other, hit the button on their side of the canister, and watched the shade unfurl slowly in space, like the wing of a silver butterfly that had just emerged from the chrysalis. When it reached its full length, the two ribbed channels that fed the gas along the edge of the wing met on the semicircular end. The final result, Ruffin suddenly realized, was going to look like one of those old-fashioned ceiling fans that were now back in fashion in fancy hotels hunting for some period appeal. Slowly, not missing a single detail, they fastened the wing to one spoke of the circular centrepiece.
'Perfect,' Ruffin muttered, and looked at the Shuttle. It was getting farther away than he'd expected. The long lifeline linking them to the exterior was now a low ellipse. Sampson had done his best to make the drifting spacecraft match the progress of Sundog, but the limitations imposed on them made it hard. The two were just slightly out of kilter, drifting apart. Ruffin pushed the thought to the back of his head and got back to work on the other panels. Gallagher was ahead of him already and he could guess what was going on in her head. She'd seen the line paying out too.
It took thirty minutes to erect all four wings of the shade system and attach them to the centrepiece. By that stage the thing looked so much like a giant fan from some Mexican flophouse that Ruffin thought he could taste cold margarita at the back of his throat. The ground people had kept commendably
quiet throughout. There was, he guessed, nothing you could say.
He admired the big shape floating out between them and Arcadia now, and knew it would only take a few more minutes to manoeuvre into position, then wait patiently for Sundog to cool down and lapse into silence before starting the final part of the job. The line back to the ship was close to taut, had a slowly diminishing sag to its length.
'We're ready to put this thing in place,' Ruffin announced to everyone who cared to listen. 'But before we do, we need to break the link with the ship. This thing's drifting too strong for us.'
He nodded at Mary Gallagher and, in unison, they unhooked the clasps on the slim white nylon cord from their suits and let the line float away from them, out into the empty blackness of space, severing their one possible point of contact with a piece of the planet they called home.
Bill Ruffin took one last look at the blue emptiness of the Pacific beneath them and said, 'Let's get this done.'
CHAPTER 45
Strategy
Las Vegas, 0013 UTC
Three hours earlier Larry Wolfit had been playing with the imaging system in the makeshift headquarters of McCarran when there was a commotion at the door and a bunch of people walked in, Tim Clarke at their head.
Wolfit gulped audibly, stood up, and said, 'Mr President.'
'Yeah, yeah,' Clarke replied, waving his hand at the team of people in the room. This was both Bureau and Agency now, trying to work alongside each other, and if the breakthrough was going to come anywhere, he guessed this was where it would be. 'Let's cut straight to the quick, shall we? None of us can rely on the Shuttle alone, and even if that bet does come off we still need these people reined in. That job seems to have fallen to you. All I want is the short demo, a picture of where we are.'
Wolfit looked at Helen Wagner, who stood behind the President, with Dan Fogerty, Dave Barnside, and Ben Levine making up the rear. She nodded.
'This is a Bureau operation, Mr President,' he said cautiously. 'I don't want to tread on anyone's toes.'
'Larry,' Fogerty said, 'this is your toy, and it's your people back in Langley who are pushing the buttons. You kick off, okay?'
'Sure,' Wolfit replied, and sat down, swivelled the chair back to the screen. Clarke walked over, stood at his back, and stared at the digitized aerial photography on the monitor. 'Where's this?'
'Northeast Nevada, sir, close to the Utah state line. The town you can see there' — Wolfit reached forward and pointed to a cluster of light on the monochrome picture — 'is Wend-over, smack on the border. If I pull out a little we'll see Wells to the west. That's I-80 joining them. You see the continuous line?'
'Sure,' Clarke said. 'When I said demo I didn't exactly mean the real basic stuff.'
Helen intervened. 'What the President is trying to ask, Larry, is how are we doing?'
'Not so good. You understand anything about how this works, sir?'
'No.'
'Well, wh
at we have here is a whole set of digitized aerial photographs of the area. We got these from the Army, which has this kit too, but since we wrote the software it made sense for us to run the job. These are satellite pictures, good for a pretty sharp image of anything down to about six feet or so in size. The resolution is amazing, but that makes it all a little harder, of course, since there's so much data to process before you can find what you want.'
'That I do understand,' Clarke said.
'Right. So the way we try to shortcut things is we produce a digital profile of what we're looking for. You choose the item, then the computer goes off to see if it can find a match. Nothing's that precise, of course. So we have to have some control of the tolerance. I'll show you.'
He worked at the keyboard. The map changed in contrast, a little hourglass came up on the screen, and four newly painted circles appeared. 'This is what we get if we just run a straight match against the system. That' — he pointed at a circle outside the town of Wendover — 'is an electricity substation. As luck would not have it, Nevada Power and Light favours a substation design that kicks off our dome algorithm pretty neatly. The same goes of this hit beneath it. The other two we can rule out too. One is a rodeo ring at a dude ranch — we can see that just by drilling down into the image from a standard daylight view. The other is a water tower — been there for years. We can cross-reference this into the local planning database pretty easily and see if there's a listing for the object. So when we rule those out, we need to degrade the match. Then see what happens.'
Wolfit pressed a single key. A rash of new circles appeared on the screen. 'That's just a one per cent degradation. Gives us no fewer than nineteen new objects to investigate. And bear in mind we're looking at a mere hundred square miles or so of the target area here. We've been told to look at a square running five hundred miles on each side. That's a quarter of a million square miles, all told. So imagine replicating just this one per cent degradation there. Then look what happens when we go to two…'
He hit the keyboard again. The screen was covered in circles. 'Then three.' It was now virtually impossible to see the underlying geographical features of the image. Overlapping circles ran everywhere.
'If I move a couple of percents beyond that, we're going to lock up the system. We don't have the byte power to crunch those numbers. And even if we did, we don't possess the manpower to analyse the number of hits. I've got every last person I can find working on this back at Langley, plus we've co-opted the imaging departments of the Air Force and the Army too. But it's still a long process. Where we are now is that we've eliminated just about every one of the initial hits in around three-quarters of the target area — and most of them are those damn power substations or some pre-existing water installation that comes through on the planning records. If we hit lucky, we just haven't got there yet and she's sitting somewhere in the unsifted area. If we don't, then in thirty minutes or so I push that one per cent button and we start to pray.'
Clarke looked at Ben Levine. 'This is clever stuff, but it's not going to get us there.'
'No, Mr President. That was one reason why we put those papers in front of you, sir.'
'Forget the damn papers, Levine. You heard what I said on that subject and that's that. If you don't find these people using this nice billion-dollar toy of yours, how do you propose to do it?'
Fogerty stepped in. 'That's a Bureau issue, sir. I thought I'd make that point before Ben here did. We're running checks on everything we can think of. Existing databases, local police records, credit card companies, hotel bookings, anything where someone might have kept details of an address.'
'And?'
'This isn't rocket science,' Larry Wolfit said. 'I can show you just as easily as any of the other guys. See…'
A new image came up on his screen. 'This is a central database of all property records listed in the state of Nevada. We put in a keyword search for "Yasgur's Farm" — and we do have fuzzy logic built in here so it would come up if they'd changed the spelling slightly — and what do we get? Nothing. Same goes for Arizona and Utah. We got the power companies, the phone companies, the water companies, Internet service providers, rental car firms… there's scarcely anyone who doesn't sell or monitor something that we can't tap into. Nothing. Not a single close match. Maybe they do use this Yasgur's Farm term themselves, but my guess is it's some kind of code word, not a real name. Geeks love that sort of stuff. And it doesn't help us a bit.'
'What about the people?' Fogerty asked. 'Are we still getting a blank there?'
'Afraid so. These must be decent, clean-living folk. No parking tickets, no speeding fines. Nothing that's put their record into any database we can find since they left San Diego with not a forwarding address in sight.'
'Shit,' Clarke said quietly.
Levine's voice broke the silence. 'Sir?'
'Yes?'
'We can still go back on those orders. I don't like the idea any more than you, but if all we have is the Shuttle, we're cutting this fine.'
Clarke's eyes gleamed in the half-light of the room. 'If you push me once more on that subject, mister, I'll relieve you of your post here and now. Understood?'
Levine nodded and said nothing. Helen stared at Barnside, wondering if this was crazy, wondering if she really was the only one who could see this. Clarke turned to go.
'There is one other possibility,' she said.
The President looked at her, some sourness in his eyes. 'Well?'
'We know this has to be a remote location, right?'
'For sure,' Larry Wolfit said, watching the screen, playing with the imaging application again.
'Well, in that case it wouldn't have an official name, not in the sense that it was one that went down on credit cards or in the property records. More than likely it's a post office box number that's the official address.'
Barnside was watching her, smiling as if he enjoyed seeing her try to guess through something so out of her field. 'Even if you're right,' he asked, 'where does that get us? We still have nothing to go on.'
'Really?'
When she thought about it she could still feel the harsh, clean cut of the Atlantic air against her skin. And some pain behind it all as well. Childhood and pain went together.
'For a while, when I was a kid, we lived in Maine, somewhere really remote. That was a box number too — had to be, the mail people said. But no one lives in a number. We had a name for the place. Haven Cottage. And that's what we called it.'
'Nice memory,' Barnside said, unsmiling, 'but I still don't see where it gets us.'
'The point is that after a very short while we started getting mail, from people we knew. They would put the name we used for the place alongside the PO box number. Pretty soon, we'd get mail that dropped the number altogether, just read Haven Cottage, the area, and a zip code. And that still got through. Every time. When you're remote, that happens. You could just put someone's name on it if you felt like it, because — '
'- the mailman knew,' Clarke said, staring at her. 'Jesus, here are you guys punching away at computers and the answer we need is probably sitting inside the head of some mail depot manager right now, ready for the taking.'
Barnside was shaking his head, grinning all over his face. 'Can't be that many of them. These are remote, low-population-density areas. And these people must get mail. Just print out the contact names for the depot managers, Larry. The Agency guys can take it from there.'
In the corner of the room, a printer started to whir. Pretty soon names were spewing from it and Fogerty had his men dispatching them as they came, carving out the different territories. Helen watched them pawing through the sheets of paper, Barnside silent at her side, and waited until everyone had moved away from them, to stand behind Wolfit and watch the progress on the screen.
'Say it, Dave.'
'Say what?'
'That I am muscling in on something I don't understand.'
'Oh that.'
She wished he'd cu
t the stupid grin. 'Hey. You're right, of course. You're right a lot, Helen. It must be hard being you.'
'Thanks.'
He was struggling with something, wondering whether he really wanted to say it. 'You're trying to justify yourself, I guess.'
'Bull…' she groaned.
'No, it's true.'
She glowered at him. The man could be so infuriating. 'Why do I need to justify anything?'
'That cottage. It was where he killed himself, wasn't it?'
She didn't bother to reply.
'No problem,' Barnside said. 'I understand. And that drove you here, drove you into the Agency, kept you fighting to keep your head up all the way. As if that proved something.'
'I don't,' she spat, 'have to prove a damn thing.'
'No?'
He wasn't smiling any more. He was downright uncomfortable. 'You know what I'd think in your position, Helen? I'd think I'd get in there, I'd show these people who destroyed him, who ruined this innocent man. Except I wouldn't have the guts now, not me. Believe that.'
She watched them racing through the pages coming out of the printer, and she couldn't think of a thing to say.
'And something else too, Helen. Once you get there, once you know the kind of world we live in, suddenly everything doesn't look so black and white any more, does it?'
She tried to stop listening. She wished she could move away. 'Meaning?'
'Meaning that once you know what life's like in this place, you get to wondering whether everything is as nice and simple as that. Whether any of us is as innocent as we seem. And maybe whether your old man really was innocent.'
She wished she hadn't given up smoking. She wished she had a drink. 'You talk too much.'
He shook his head and put a big hand, like a bear's paw, gently on her shoulder. 'If it's worth anything, I read the files. Years ago. I know what your family was doing in Maine. That was where you ran? When they were closing in on him. In Boston. You just upped roots and got out of town for a while, thinking this would all blow over.'