ZOOM. The camera closes on the bull’s-eye. A gust of wind blows the smoke away, and a lone Abrams tank hugs the ground at the center of the fury, its turret shifting smoothly, its cannon periodically spitting fire. Shells pound upon it. Hardie speaks of the extraordinary toughness of the Chobham armor plate. The turret continues to spin, blithely ignoring the hellfires unleashed.
PAN. The bridge is now quiet: te Americans have completed their retreat, save the one vehicle left behind to cover their movement. That one Abrams backs slowly toward the bridge, enemy machines pressing ever closer.
FOCUS. The periodic flames from the Abrams cannon cease. One shell too many has struck it in a weakened plate. Recognizing the failure, the enemy rushes forward, firing constantly. A larger, darker cloud rises from the Abrams. It moves no longer. The dark cloud clears to reveal an empty hulk, spotlighted by a series of explosions that destroy the bridge.
FADE. “Unfortunately, individual acts of heroism may have no significance. More significant than the successful retreat across the Neckar is the French announcement of a separate peace treaty wth the Soviet Union. The French armies now in Germany will return home under banners of neutrality during the next 48 hours.” Bill gives a comprehensive list of the cities in Germany and Denmark that have surrendered since his last report.
Kelvin turned red while viewing the newscast. As he turned to Nathan, the pulse in his left temple throbbed visibly.
Nathan watched him with concern. “We can’t deploy them yet,” he said again, as if repetition would make his point fasten itself in Kelvin’s mind. “Just because the Hunters passed the basic test doesn’t mean they work. If you deploy now, and we find another hardware problem, we’re sunk.”
“And if we deploy after all our troops are dead, we’re also sunk,” Kelvin retorted, doggedly reiterating his position.
Seeing that it had become a confrontation of egos, Nathan sat back in his chair and consciously relaxed his mind and body. He concentrated on the amusing aspects of the past 48 hours; though difficult to recall, amusement was a salient feature of his situation. After all, two days ago, Kelvin had been against deploying the Sling Hunters, while Nathan had been in favor.
The pinball game on the testing range had not brought about this transformation by itself. Even discounting the problems with desert sand, the hopper had failed: it had fired at shadows rather than targets, for one thing. And every member of the team had grown silent as they had examined the detailed readouts of the battle: from the sensing, through the decision-making, through the hovering, there had been odd quirks in the hoppers behavior that left the programmers puzzled and worried. The problems seemed more numerous than the successes.
Fortunately, they would not have to wait until all the problems were fixed before they could deploy Hunters. As Nathan had explained to Kelvin the day before, once they were sure the hardware worked, they could build and ship Hunters while they continued to work on the software. As they made software improvements, they would download the new versions by satellite link: it would be no different from the way they loaded the test Hunters with new software in Yakima.
Kelvin had not merely accepted the idea of deploying the hardware before completing the software; he had ordered Leslie to start a ramp-up of all the factories involved in Sling manufacture, to prepare the production lines for peak output. They would immediately start manufacturing and stockpiling Hunter subassemblies. That way, they could run the first thousands of Hunters through production almost instantly, and they would face bottlenecks only with new parts demanded by the results of the testing.
Kelvin had gone on to ask about the software for all three Hunters. “How long do you think it will take before all the software bugs are out?”
Nathan had laughed. “It’ll be years before all the bugs are out. Well deploy before that, too.”
“What about the SkyHunter and the HighHunter? Are they ready, or are you testing them yet?”
“We’ve been alternately testing the SkyHunter and the HopperHunter on the range,” Nathan had explained. “Basically, they both work, except for the kinds of problems you saw yesterday, where the Hopper started shooting at shadows. Most of the problems with target recognition are shared by both systems—fixing it in one will fix it in the other.”
“What about the HighHunter?”
“The HighHunter has nastier problems. We can’t run a full-up test of the HighHunter without shooting one into orbit. Then we’d have to make it dispense its Crowbars somewhere over Seattle, to make them drop here on the Range. I don’t know what our chances are of surprising the Russians with the Hunters, but if we drop a HighHunter out of orbit, they’ll take a serious interest in everything we’re doing in Yakima.”
Kelvin had growled—the sound of a mountain climber who has just found frayed rope in his hands. “Damn. This project is completely unclassified. I’m sure the Russians know about it.”
“Actually, we’re counting on it.” A Zetetic observation on institutions leaped to Nathan’s mind: Organizations never know anything . Rather, certain select individuals in organizations knew certain things. By grouping selected individuals together while dispersing others, the manipulator could dominate the organization. “Certainly, individual Soviet officers know about different aspects of the Sling. However, the Sling has never been important enough to classify. So the Russians who know about it wouldn’t consider it to be important either. Our complete lack of classification may have protected us more than a Secret or even a Top Secret clearance would have. We’re lost in the noise.”
Kelvin had looked doubtful. “I hope you’re right.”
“Yeah. So do I,” Nathan had responded drily. “Anyway, that chance of surprise prevents us from doing a full test of the HighHunter. We’ve dropped some Crowbars over the range, but I’m not comfortable with the extent of our testing. It’s been far too incomplete. We’ll have to be alert when the first HighHunters go into action.” Kelvin had seemed satisfied at that point; they had dropped the subject.
Now, sitting in Pioneer Pies with Kelvin on one side and a terrifying newscast on the other, Nathan understood the driving force behind Kelvin’s eagerness to get the Hunters to Europe. He ate slowly; a cold lump grew in his stomach.
Kelvin pressed his attack. “The Hopper flew across the twilight and hit everything it was supposed to hit. It didn’t hit anything it wasn’t supposed to hit. It dodged around enemy fire like a mosquito dodging a fist. Damn! And then die SkyHunter did the same thing.” His eyes held a tortured combination of pleading and commanding. “The hardware’s fine.” He clenched his fist, his tendons vibrating, and pressed it against the wooden table as if afraid he might lose control otherwise. “We need those Hunters in Europe now.”
Nathan temporized. “Let’s talk with the team before we do anything hasty.”
After an unhappy pause, Kelvin said, “All right.”
They drove back to the Thunderbird.
They asked Lila first, “Is the hardware ready to ship? Can we fix the rest of the problems in software?”
Lila pulled on her lip, twisting it in her fingers. “I don’t know. I guess so. I … guess so. But we really ought to test it more.”
They asked Kurt. “Why not?” Kurt replied. “What we’ve got works well enough to zap some of the bastards.” He paused. “It wouldn’t hurt to test a bit more, though.”
They asked Flo. “I believe all the equipment in the control and communications parts of the Hunters—the parts for which Ronnie and I are responsible—work adequately correctly.” A pair of creases marred the soft smoothness of her forehead. “But I am sure Amos would advise against sending them yet. Even if all the separate pieces work correctly, we may be surprised when they work together at cross-purposes.” She shook her head. “This is not a good idea.”
They asked Ronnie. “Great. Get era over there. Anything that goes wrong, we’ll get around it with a software kludge of one kind or another.”
Finally, they asked Juan. They sat in N
athan’s room, Juan stretching his long legs across the bed, toying with a microfloppy. As he spoke, he flipped the flat plastic square back and forth with ever greater agitation. As he flipped it one way, he seemed anxious; as he flipped it the other way, he seemed amused. “So here we are again, Nathan, on the verge of a beta test.” Beta testing was a stage commercial vendors usually went through with software. During beta test, the vendor released the new product to a carefully selected handful of customers who understood the risks—and who knew enough to help the vendor fix the last problems. The beta customer also knew how to create his own, temporary work-arounds for outlandish problems.
But no one in the middle of a war had the time or the clarity of mind to produce novel solutions to outlandish problems. Nathan smiled back at Juan. “Yes, Juan, its beta test time. Whom do we victimize this time?”
“No doubt the whole damn army.” His head lolled, then swept sideways in a slow shake. “But not yet,” he whispered desperately. “We aren’t ready yet.” He clenched the floppy, then tossed it aside. “Listen. I know the Hunters better than anybody else here. Kurt, Ronnie, Flo, and Lila may have developed the software, but when they test their stuff, they test it against me. There is not a single nuance of those machines that I don’t understand as well as they do. Nathan, it doesn’t work yet. There are too many things that nobody understands, even when it works right, the way it did yesterday.”
The general spoke. “What’s wrong with it?”
Juan shrugged helplessly. “If I knew what was wrong, we’d fix it. But we don’t know. Christ, there’s so much we don’t know.”
“When will you know?” Kelvin asked, his words forming bullets that made Nathan wince.
But Juan just smiled sadly. His shirt was open at the collar; to Nathan it seemed to leave his throat exposed. “I don’t know when I’ll know.” The sinews in his throat rippled, and he suddenly sat erect, a judge proclaiming a verdict “But I know I’ll know when they’re ready.”
The general reacted, squaring his own shoulders. “We can’t wait forever.”
“And you won’t have to.” As suddenly as he had straightened, Juan coiled around the bed again. He reached into his back pocket, pulling out his credit-card-size note computer. “We may be close. Actually, I think we really are close. Maybe, if we push all the way today, we can learn everything we need to know.” His right hand worked silently over the palm-size touchpad as he studied the testing schedule. “If things go well, we can pack about three days of tests in by midnight.”
“And then it’ll be ready?” Kelvin demanded.
“And then we’ll decide whether it’s ready,” Juan corrected him.
They broke into two teams: Kurt, Lila, and Ronnie ran one test while Flo, Juan, and Nathan prepared the next. The tests became ever more rigorous, ever more complex, ever more ruthless—a series of gauntlets that no machine could run successfully. Indeed, that was the point: “Test to destruction,” Juan explained cheerfully, “is the truest form of analysis.”
They tested Hyacinth to destruction before lunch. Once too often, Hyacinth raced close to the ravine wall. A stone outcropping appeared and the hopper smashed into it, crumpling its ground-effect skirt, spinning out of control. Hyacinth bounced along until the rocks turned it to rubble.
“Hardware or software?” Kelvin demanded.
The new van, permanently emplaced at the Point, reverberated with the rumble of air conditioning—a level of cooling that kept the van so chill they had named it the Refrigerator. Now everyone twisted to hear the verdict from Ronnie and Florence. The van seemed stuffy, despite the bracing air. “Well, I guess it’s software,” Ronnie muttered.
Florence quietly tapped at the keyboard, pointed out a routine on the screen to Ronnie, who nodded. “That is correct,” Florence agreed. Her voice matched the coolness of the van.
Juan frowned. “Why didn’t we catch this software problem in the simulations?” He, too, turned to reexamine his code.
While they reworked the sims and the hopper control systems, they sent Oriole into the air.
The SkyHunter performed magnificently on one test. They set up the second test series, and it dropped all its bombs on shadows.
“Hardware or software?” Kelvin asked in a near-scream.
Lila shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” She slumped into the chair. Nathan and Kelvin left her alone with her Oriole and Kurt’s Caesar.
The wreckage of Hyacinth remained in the shallow grave of the ravine and the next hopper in the test group took its place in the gauntlet. Marigold now scurried across the plains and into combat with enemy bunkers—low, sloping bulwarks of earth and concrete. Juan, Lila, and Flo watched the patterns of fire and crossfire quietly—too quietly. So quietly that Nathan sensed a problem. He looked around the room and asked, “What’s wrong?”
A sick look of exhaustion crossed Juan’s features. “We fixed it, we think. But we’re still not sure why our fix worked.”
Kelvin started to turn purple. “You don’t know?’9 He looked from side to side, then back. “What about your sim? What was wrong with it?”
Juan drew his long, elegant fingers down across his face, to pause at his throat. His hand settled there to rest, emphasizing the slow, calming rhythm of his breathing. “Nothing.”
The general’s eyes bugged out. “How can that be?”
No one answered. Nathan broke the deadlock. “General, let me assure you that the answers will not become any clearer if you and I stand here pressuring everybody. The worst enemy of anyone trying to find a subtle problem is anxiety. Make them anxious enough by hounding them, and they’ll never find it.” Nathan tapped Kelvin on the shoulder. “Besides, we haven’t breathed enough dust yet today. Let’s go outside and watch this run with binoculars.”
With a stiff turn, Kelvin followed him out of the Refrigerator, onto the wind-swept ridge overlooking the silica mines. Nathan peered down over the valley and muttered, “Where is everything?”
At this Kelvin laughed, a short release of tension. “You’d be a terrible failure as a HopperHunter, Nathan Pilstrom. Or as a forward observer.” His index finger plucked points out of the desert, commenting, “Bunker, arty, copter field, bunker …” His sure, precise pointing reminded Nathan of the movements of programmers, pointing and clicking on the software objects they controlled. With a touch of revelation, Nathan saw General Kelvin in a new light: he was a programmer of battlefields.
Kelvin stopped listing out objects, squinted, and held his binoculars up to look at a far corner of the valley. “And there’s the hopper,” he said with a lingering smile.
Nathan held up his binoculars and watched the hopper’s crazy war dance across the field, leaving chaos wherever it went. It seemed somehow more ridiculous when viewed from this vantage point; before, they had always watched the action through the hoppers own cameras. But their new perspective also gave Nathan a striking view of the hoppers effectiveness. When watching through the hopper’s cameras, he never saw the reactions of the men to the hopper’s attacks. With the binoculars, Nathan could linger to watch the consequences. The opposing troops always stopped in confusion, melting from a tight team to a loose rabble.
Kelvin echoed his thoughts. “Ridiculous,” he muttered about the Hunter, “but deadly.”
Marigold completed the gauntlet with swift precision, a surgeon carefully slicing tumors from dusty flesh. But when Nathan returned to stick his head inside the Refrigerator, no one looked flush with success. “We’ll see what the next round shows,” Juan said with a grim, remote expression.
So Nathan and the general took one of the helicopters to the new site for SkyHunter tests. Lila had preceded them. Squinting through the tornado of sand thrown up by their landing, they could see her elation as she screwed a sensor clump back into place.
Breaking from the copter cabin, Nathan ran through the miniature sandstorm holding his breath, while tears formed in his gritty eyes.
“I’ve got it,” sh
e yelled in triumph over the din of the helicopter’s blades and engine. “I can beat the shadows by adding some extra interpolations on near-infrared bands. All we need to do is switch a couple of our sensing fibers, to get our sensitivity up.”
No applause met her explanation. “Hardware problem?” Kelvin asked with fear-filled violence.
Lila stepped back in confusion, not understanding Kelvin’s harsh response. She’d expected people to be pleased that they’d found the solution.
“Well, it’s partly software for the interpretation, but we’ll need hardware mods as well.”
Kelvin seemed frozen. Nathan took a deep breath and smiled brightly. “I’m delighted that youve found a fix. Will your fix work with the Hoppers as well?”
Lila nodded. “Yeah, and it’ll fix the problem in the Crowbars, too. Even though we haven’t seen it there yet, we would have.”
“Great. How long before we can get Oriole modified for the new sensors?”
“Oriole’s going to fly home now. We’ll be ready for more testing by evening.”
So Nathan and the general shuttled back to the Refrigerator. But when their helicopter arrived, the van was empty. The Eagle Scout was gone. Kelvin spotted the Eagle down in the valley. “They’re all down there looking at the Hopper that crashed—Hyacinth.”
Nathan gazed through the binoculars and sagged. “That isn’t Hyacinth,” he said. “That’s Marigold.” He swallowed with disappointment. They had lost another Hopper in a ravine wreck.
Eventually, the Eagle trundled back up the mountainside. Juan sat at the wheel, the shadows under his eyes deeper than Nathan had ever seen them before.
He spoke with the exhaustion of a hospital attendant who has watched a favorite patient enter the operating room for the last time. “We know what the problem is. It’s not the software at all, and there wasn’t a problem with the sims. The problem is that the Hopper’s hardware doesn’t meet spec. Its direction control gets sloppy at high speeds.”
“How long will it take to fix?” Kelvin asked.
David's Sling Page 26