The Gold Coast

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  McPherson can still remember perfectly the mistake that got him stuck with this. He was down in LSR’s executive restaurant, walking in with Art Wong, and in response to something Art said, without pausing to think (or look around), he said, “I’m damned glad I don’t have the job you guys do. The whole ballistic defense program is nothing but a black hole for money and effort if you ask me.” And then he turned around and there was Stewart Lemon, standing right there and glaring at him.

  And so now he’s assigned to Ball Lightning. Lemon never forgets.

  Dan is ready to quit for the day, and he’s about to go with some of his crew to the El Torito just down the road. He wants McPherson to come along and join them for margaritas, and McPherson hides his irritation and agrees to it. On the short drive over he calls Lucy to let her know he’ll be home late, and then ascends the office complex’s maze of exterior staircases to the restaurant on the top floor. Fine view of the Muddy Canyon condos, and in the other direction, the sea.

  Dan and Art Wong and Jerry Heimat are already there at a window table, and the pitcher of margaritas is on its way. McPherson sits and starts in on the chips and salsa with them. They’re talking shop. Executives at Grumman and Teledyne have been indicted for taking kickbacks from subcontractors. “That’s why they call the Grumman SAM the ‘Kicker,’ I guess,” says Dan. This gets them on the topic of missiles, and as the pitcher of margaritas arrives and is quickly disposed of, they discuss the latest performances in the war in Indonesia. It seems a General Dynamic antitank missile has gotten nicknamed “the Boomerang” for persistent problems with guidance software or vane hinges, no one is quite sure yet. But they just keep on flying in curved trajectories, a weird problem indeed. No one wants to use these devices, but they’re ordered to anyway because the Marines have huge quantities of them and won’t acknowledge that the problems have gotten above an acceptable percentage. So soldiers in the field have taken to firing their GDs ninety degrees off to the side of the target tanks … or so the gossip mill says. No doubt it’s a pack of lies, but no one likes GD so it makes for a good story.

  “Did you hear about Johnson at Loral?” asks Art. “He’s in charge of the fourth-tier ICBM program, shooting down leakers. So, one day he gets a directive from SDC, and it says, Please assume that you will have to deal with twenty percent more than the total amount estimated to be launched in a full-scale attack!” They all laugh. “He almost has a heart attack, this is a couple of orders of magnitude more incoming than he thought the system was going to have to deal with, and all his software is shit out of luck. The whole system is overwhelmed. So he calls the Pentagon just before his ticker says good-bye, and finds out that whoever wrote ‘twenty percent more than’ should have written ‘twenty percent of. “…”

  “He’s still got trouble,” Dan says when they stop laughing. “They can’t even knock down one incoming with more than fifty percent reliability, so they’re going to have to at least double the number of smart rocks, and the Pentagon is already threatening to dump him.” This reminds Dan of his own troubles, and with a grim smile he downs the rest of his margarita.

  Art and Jerry, aware of their boss’s moods, sense this change of humor. And this is supposed to be a conference between the two managers. So they chat for a while longer, and finish their drinks, and then they’re up and off. Dan and Dennis are left there to talk things over.

  “So,” Dan says, smiling the same unhumorous smile. “Lemon has stuck you into the Ball Lightning program, eh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Worse luck for you.” Dan signals to a passing waitress for another pitcher. “He’s running scared, I’ll tell you that. Hereford is calling from New York and putting the pressure on, and right now he’s feeling it but good, because we are stuck.” He shakes his head miserably. “Stuck.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Dan gets out a pen, draws a circle on the yellow paper tablecloth. “The real problem,” he complains, “is that the first tier has been given an impossible job. Strategic Defense Command has said that seventy percent of all Soviet ICBMs sent up in a full attack are to be destroyed in the boost phase. We won a development contract using that figure as the baseline goal. But it can’t be done.”

  “You think not?” McPherson suspects that Dan may just be making excuses for his program’s problems. He sips his drink. “Why?”

  Houston grimaces. “The necessary dwell time is just too long, Mac. Too long.” He sighs. “It’s always been the toughest requirement in the whole system’s architecture, if you ask me. The Soviets have got their fast-burn boosters down to sixty seconds, so most of their ICBMs will only be in boost phase for that minute, and half that time they’ll be in the atmosphere where the lasers won’t do much. So for our purposes we’re talking about a window of thirty seconds.”

  He scribbles down the figures on the tablecloth as he talks, nervously, without looking at them, as if they are his signature or some other deeply, even obsessively memorized sign. tB = 30.

  “Now, during that time we’ve got to locate the ICBMs, track them, and get the mirrors into the correct alignment to bounce the lasers. Art’s team has got that down to around ten seconds, which is an incredible technical feat, by the way.” He nods mulishly, writes tT = 10. “And then there’s the dwell time, the time the beam has to be fixed on the missile to destroy it.” He writes tD = , hesitates, leaves the other side of the equation blank.

  “You told the Air Force we could pulse a large burst of energy, right?” McPherson asks. “So the damage is done by a shock wave breaking the skin of the missile?”

  Dan nods. “That’s right.”

  “So dwell time should be short.”

  “That’s right! That’s right. Dwell time should be on the order of two seconds. That means that each laser station can destroy N missiles, where,” and he writes:

  “However,” Dan continues carefully, looking down on the simple equation, one of the basic Field-Spergels that he has to juggle every day, “dwell time in fact depends on the hardness of the missile, the distance to the target, the brightness of the laser beam, and the angle of the incidence between the beam and the surface of the missile.” He writes down H, B, R, and 0, and then, obsessively, writes down this equation too, another Field-Spergel:

  “And we’ve been getting figures for hardness of about forty kilojoules per square centimeter.” He writes H = 40 KJcm2. “Our lasers have twenty-five megawatts of power hitting ten-meter-diameter mirrors at wavelength two point seven nanometers, so even with the best angle of incidence possible, dwell time is,” and he writes, very carefully:

  tD = 53 seconds.

  “What?” says McPherson. “What happened to this pulse shock wave?”

  Dan shakes his head. “Won’t work. The missiles are too hard. We’ve got to burn them out, just like I used to say we’d have to, back before we got this development contract. The mirrors are up there and they won’t be getting any bigger, the power pulse is already incredible when you think that over a hundred and fifty laser stations will have to be supplied all at once, and we can’t change the wavelength of the lasers without replacing the entire systems. And that’s the whole ball game.”

  “But that means that dwell time is longer than boost time!”

  “That’s right. Each laser can bring down about eight-tenths of a missile. And there’s a hundred and fifty laser stations, and about ten thousand missiles.”

  McPherson feels himself gaping. He takes the pen from Houston, starts writing on the tablecloth himself. He surveys the figures. Takes another drink.

  “So,” he says, “how did we get this development contract, then?”

  Dan shakes his head. Now he’s looking out the window at the sea.

  Slowly he says, “We got the contract for Ball Lightning by proving we could destroy a stationary hardened target in ground tests, with the sudden pulse shock wave. They gave us the contract on that basis, and we were put in competition with Boeing who got
the same contract, and after three years we have to show we can do it in boost phase, in real-time tests. It’s getting close to time for the head-to-head tests. The winner gets a twenty-billion-dollar project, just for starters, and the loser is out a few hundred million in proposal and development costs. Maybe it’ll get a follower’s subcontract with the winner, but that won’t amount to much.”

  McPherson nods impatiently. “But if we could do it on the ground?”

  Dan polishes off another glass in one swallow. “You want another pitcher?”

  “No.”

  He pours foam and ice into his glass. “The problem,” he says carefully, “is that the test wasn’t real. It was a strapped chicken.”

  “What?” McPherson sits up so fast his knee knocks the table and almost tips his glass over. “What’s this?”

  But it’s clear what Dan means. The test results didn’t mean what LSR said they did.

  “Why?”

  Dan shrugs. “We were out of time. And we thought we had the problem licked. We thought we could send a beam so bright that it would create a shock wave in even the hardened skins, the calculations made it look like all we needed was a little more power and the brightness would be there. So we simulated what would happen when we did solve the problems, and figured we could validate the tests retroactively, after we had the contract. But we’ve never been able to.” He stares at the table, unable to meet McPherson’s gaze.

  “For God’s sake,” Dennis says. He can’t get over it.

  “It’s not like no one has ever done it before,” Dan says defensively.

  “Uhn.”

  In fact, as they both know, the strategic defense program has a long history of such meaningless tests, beginning under its first R&D PM. They blew up Sidewinder missiles with lasers, when Sidewinders were designed to seek out energy sources and therefore were targets that would latch on to the beams destroying them. They sent electron beams through rarefied gases, and claimed that the beams would work in the very different environments of vacuum or atmosphere. They bounced lasers off space targets and claimed progress, when astronomy rangers had done the same for decades. And they set target missiles on the ground, and strained them with guy wires so that they would burst apart when heated by lasers, in the famous “strapped chicken” tests. Yes, there’s a history of PR tests that goes right back to the beginning of the whole concept. You could say the ballistic missile defense system was founded on them.

  But now—now the system is being produced and deployed. It’s the real thing now, sold to the nation and in the sky, and with a strapped chicken in their part of the system, they’re in serious trouble. The Pentagon is not as lenient with private contractors as they were with their own research program, needless to say. The company could even be liable to prosecution, though it seldom comes to that. It doesn’t have to to ruin the company, though.

  And here Lemon has put him into this program! McPherson already knew that Lemon gave him the task out of malice; it complicated his primary work quite a bit; but this! This! It goes beyond malice.

  “Does Lemon know?”

  “… No.”

  But McPherson can see in Dan’s face that he’s lying, trying to cover for his boss, his friend. Amazing. And there’s no way Dennis can call Dan on it, not now. “My God.” He stops a waitress and orders another pitcher of margaritas.

  They sit in silence until the new pitcher arrives. They fill up. “So what do you think we should do?” Dan says hesitantly. There’s a certain desperation in his voice; and he’s drinking the margaritas as fast as he can.

  “How the hell should I know?” Dennis snaps. The question makes him suddenly furious. “You’ve got Art and Jerry’s people working on the pulse problem?”

  “Yeah. No go so far, though.”

  McPherson takes a deep breath. “Would more power help?”

  “Sure, but where will we get it?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose…” He is thinking to himself now. “I suppose the best thing to do is try jamming all the power we do have into as short a burst as we can manage. And focus it to as small a space.” He sighs, picks up the pen and starts scribbling formulas. The two of them bend their heads over the table.

  24

  —RRKK!—“Slightly radioactive still. On the foreign front the score is still in our favor in Burma—as for Belgium, I don’t want to talk about it, all right? Now let’s put an ear to the new hit by our favorite group The Pudknockers, ‘Why My Java Is Red White and Green’—”

  Sandy Chapman turns off the radio. Groan, moan. Stiffness in the joints, he feels like an old man. Sunlight streams into the plant-filled, glass-walled bedroom; it’s warm, humid, smells like a greenhouse. Sandy manages to lever himself into a seated position. Angela is long gone, off to work in the physical therapy rooms at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

  All the glossy green leaves blur. Bit of fuzz vision, too much eyedropping yesterday as usual, leads to a sort of eyeball hangover, as if he’d been teargassed or had his corneas sandblasted or something. He’s used to it. He gets up, pads off to the bathroom. The face in the mirror looks wasted. Dark circles under bright red eyes, stubble, mouth caked white, long red hair broken out of ponytail, looking electrocuted. Yes, it’s morning time. Ick.

  In the kitchen he starts the coffee machine, sits staring out at the San Diego Freeway until it’s ready. Back to the bedroom, where he sits on the floor among the plants. Eyedrop a little Apprehension of Beauty … ah. That’s better. Just the lubrication feels good. He sips coffee, relaxes, thinking nothing: no worries, no plans. Odors of coffee, hot plants, wet soil. “Hey this is why my Java is red white and green,” he sings, “the blood in the jungle, the smoke white machine.…” This is the sole moment of peace in his day, waxy leaves around him glowing translucent green in the mote-filled sunny air, everything visible, a world of light and color.…

  Need another cup of coffee. Fifteen minutes later the thought occurs to him again, and he stands. Oops got up too fast. Through warm patches to the kitchen. Ah, feeling much better now. Sensuousness of feet on warm tile, taste of coffee cutting through fuzz in mouth, video of Angela getting undressed last night, running on the kitchen screens. Ready to get a start on the day’s business. A day in the life, sure enough.

  But first he stops to call his father, down at the experimental clinic in Miami Beach. They talk on the video link for twenty minutes or so: George seems good today, hearty and cheerful despite the pallor and the IV lines. Sandy finds it reassuring, sort of.

  Then he’s dressed, alert, out the door to work like any other businessman.

  Sandy begins his day on time. And while he’s only depending on himself, he stays on schedule. He tracks to a rundown area of the underlevel of Santa Ana, a mile or so north of South Coast Plaza, and unlocks the door to the warehouse he rents, after turning off all the alarms. Inside is his laboratory.

  Today he starts with cytotoxicity assays, one of the most crucial parts of his work. Anyone can make drugs, after all; the trick is finding out if they’ll kill you or not without testing them personally. Or giving them to rats. Sandy doesn’t like killing rats. So he likes these assays.

  Since the cornea’s epithelium will be the first place the drugs hit, epithelial cells get the first tests. A couple of days ago Sandy joined the crowd of biochem techs at the slaughterhouse and bought a package of cow eyeballs; now he takes them from the fridge and uses a device called a rubber policeman to scrape the epithelial cells off the basement membrane. Tapped into a petri dish with some growth medium, and a carefully measured dose of the drug in question—a new one, a variant of 3,4,5 trimethoxyamphetamine that he’s calling the Visionary—these cells will either proliferate or die or struggle somewhere in between, and staining them at the end of a week will tell the tale.

  That assay set up, Sandy moves on to trickier stuff. The new drug’s effect on lymphocytes has to be checked as well, because blood will be carrying it a lot of the time. So Sandy begins a chromium rele
ase assay, injecting chromium 51 into lymphocytes, then centrifuging them so only the cells remain. At that point all the chromium in the mix is within the cells. Then the Visionary is added—in doses ranging from femptomolars up through picomolars, nanomolars, micromolars—and it all goes into a growth medium that should keep lymphocytes happy. But with the drug in there who knows. In any case dying or dead cells will release the chromium, and after another centrifuging, the free chromium found will be a good measure of the drug’s toxicity.

  Later more tests of stationary cells and organ cells, particularly bone marrow cells, will be necessary. And eventually, after a lot of hours in the lab, Sandy will have a good idea of the Visionary’s toxicity. Neat. As for long-term negative effects of the new drug, well, that’s not so clear. That’s not in the guarantee. That’s not something he likes to think about, and neither does anybody else. None of these new drugs are well understood on the long-term level. But if there are problems down the road, they will no doubt come up with something, like they did for the various viral killers. Make the body into a micro-battlefield and win it all: the brain can finally prove it is smarter than viruses. Who knows what demon will fall next?

  So, not to worry about long-term physical effects. As for the new drugs’ effects on the mind, well, it isn’t so cut and dried, but he does have a collection of cross spiders, building their webs under the influence of the new products. The particular nature of the altered state induced by the drug can be partially predicted by the computer’s Witt analysis of the webs. Amazing but true. More precise knowledge in this area will come after some extensive field testing; he has a lot of volunteers.