The Gold Coast

10

Dennis McPherson walks into his office one morning, just a mail visit before he runs over to White Sands, New Mexico, to oversee a test of the RPV system, now called Stormbee. He finds a note commanding him to go up and see Lemon.

His pulse goes up as the elevator rises. It’s only been a week since Lemon flared into one of his tantrums, pounding his desk and going scarlet in the face and shouting right at McPherson. “You’re too slow to do your job! You’re a goddamned nitpicking perfectionist, and I won’t abide it! I don’t allow dawdlers on my team! This is a war like any other! You seize the offensive when the chance comes, and go all the way with it! I want to see that proposal for Stormbee yesterday!” And so on. Lemon likes to burst all constraints occasionally, everyone working for him agrees about that. This doesn’t make McPherson like it any better. Lemon’s been out of engineering so long that little matters like weight or voltage or performance reliability don’t mean anything to him anymore. Those are things for others to worry about. For him it’s cost-effectiveness, schedules, the team’s momentum, its look. He’s the team’s fearless leader, the little führer of his little tin reich. If the project were perpetual motion he’d still be screaming about schedules, costs, PR…

This morning he’s Mr. Charm again, ushering McPherson in, calling him “Mac,” sitting casually on the edge of his desk. Doesn’t he realize that the charmer routine means nothing when combined with the tantrums? Worse than that—the two-facedness turns him into a slimy hypocrite, a manic-depressive, an actor. It would be easier to take if he just did the screaming tyrant thing all the time, really it would.

“So, how’s Stormbee coming along, Mac?”

“We’ve manufactured a prototype pod that is within the specs set by Feldkirk. The lab tests went okay and we’re scheduled to test it on one of Northrop’s RPVs out at White Sands this afternoon. If those go well we can either run it through some envelope testing or give to the Air Force and let them go at it.”

“We’ll give it to the Air Force. The sooner the better.” Of course. “They’ll be testing it anyway.”

That’s true, but it would be a lot safer for LSR if they found out about any performance problems before they let the Air Force see it. McPherson doesn’t say this, although he should. This abrogation of his responsibility to the program irritates him, but he’s sick of the tantrums.

Lemon is going on as if the matter is settled. That’s the trouble with superblack programs; the contractor tends to do less testing than any competition for a white program could possibly get away with. And yet there’s no good reason for it; they don’t have a deadline. Feldkirk just said they should get back to him as soon as they could. So the haste is just Lemon’s obsession; he’s weakening the strength of their proposal by a completely irrational sense that they have to hurry.…

“We’re going as fast as we can,” McPherson allows himself to say. It’s risking another outburst, but to hell with it.

“Oh I know you are, I know.” A dangerous gleam appears in Lemon’s eye, he’s about to press home the point of how he knows—because he’s the boss here, he’s in charge, he knows all. But McPherson deadpans his way through the moment, passes through unscathed. Lemon trots out some more of his führer encouragements, then says, “Okay, get yourself out to White Sands,” with a very good imitation of a smile. McPherson doesn’t attempt to reciprocate.

He tracks to San Clemente and takes the superconductor to El Paso. Fired like a bullet in an electromagnetic gun.

It’s been a tough couple of months, getting this test prepared. Every weekday he’s gone into the office at six A.M., made a list of the day’s activities that is sometimes forty items long, and gone at it until early evening, or even later than that. At first he had to deal with all of the tasks concerned with designing the Stormbee system: talking with the engineers and programmers, making suggestions, giving commands, coordinating their efforts, making decisions… It’s good work at that point, responding to the technical challenge and dealing with the problems presented by them. And his design crew is a good group, resourceful, hardworking, quirky; he has to ride herd on the efforts of this disparate bunch, and it’s interesting.

Then they got into the production and components testing phase, and the debugging of the programming. That was frustrating as always; it’s beyond his technical competence to contribute much in the way of specifics at that point, and all he could do was orchestrate the tests and keep everyone working at them. It’s a bit too much like Lemon’s role at that point, not that he’d ever go about it in the same style.

Then it was time for the big components’ tests. And now, time for the first test of the entire system.

The train arrives inside the hour, and from the tube station at El Paso the LSR helicopter lofts him over to White Sands Missile Range, the testing grounds that a consortium of defense companies leases from the government.

As he gets out of the helicopter McPherson reaches in his coat pocket for the sunglasses he brought with him. It really is uncanny how white the sand in this area is: a strange geological feature, for sure. Not that anyone actually visits the little national park on the edge of the testing grounds.

McPherson is carted to the LSR building on the range, and several of the engineers there greet him. “It’s ready to go,” says Will Hamilton, LSR’s on-site testing chief. “We’ve got Runway Able for noon and one, and the RPV is fueled and prepped.”

“Great,” says McPherson, checking his watch. “That’s half an hour?”

“Right.”

They have coffee and some croissants in the cafe, then take the elevator up six floors to the observation deck on the roof. Cameras and computers will be monitoring all aspects of the test, but everyone still wants to see the thing actually happen. Now they stand on a broad concrete deck, looking out over the waves of pure white dunes, extending to the horizons like an ocean that has been frozen and then had everything but pure salt bleached away. Such a weird landscape! McPherson enjoys the sight of it immensely.

Over to the north are the runways that the companies all share, crossing each other like an X over an H, their smudged concrete looking messy in the surrounding pureness. Compounds for Aerodyne, Hughes, SDR, Lockheed, Williams, Ford Aerospace, Raytheon, Parnell, and RWD lie scattered around in the dunes, like blocks dropped by a giant child. There’s a great plume of smoke out to the east, lofting some thirty thousand feet into the sky; someone’s test has succeeded, or failed, it’s hard to tell, although there’s an oiliness to the plume that suggests failure. “RWD was trying out the new treetop stealth bomber’s guidance system,” Hamilton informs McPherson. “They say it didn’t see a little hill over that way.”

“Too bad.”

“The pilot was automatically ejected no more than a second before impact, and he survived. Only broken legs and ribs.”

“That’s good.”

“RPVs are the coming thing, there’s no doubt about it. Everything moves too fast for pilots to be useful! They’re just up there at risk, and it costs ten times as much to make a plane that will accommodate them, even though they can’t do anything anymore.”

McPherson squints. “As long as all the automatic systems work.”

Hamilton laughs. “Like ours, you mean. Well, we’ll find out real soon now.” He gestures to the west. “The target tanks are out there on the horizon. We’ve followed your instructions, so they’re equipped with the Soviets’ Badger antiaircraft systems, and surrounded by Armadillo SAM installations. Those should give the plane a run for its money.”

McPherson nods. The six tanks on the western horizon, also under remote control, are little black frogs trundling south in a diagonal pattern, churning up sugary clouds of sand. “It’s a fair test.”

They wait, and to pass the time they talk some more about the test, saying things they both already know. But that’s all right. Everyone gets a little nervous when the time comes to see if all their efforts will actually amount to anything. Will the numbers translate into reality successfully? The talk is reassuring.

The deck intercom crackles as they’re patched into air control for the runways. A hangar north of the runway has opened, and out of it rolls a long black jet with a narrow fuselage.

Below the fuselage are two pods.

They’re as big as the fuselage itself: one black, one white.

Sensors. You can close your eyes, it won’t matter.

Under each delta wing, flanking the turbines: arrays of little fletched missiles.

The front of the fuselage comes to a long point, like a narwhale’s.

The rear flares out into stabilizers almost as big as the wings.

Under the fuselage, a small cylindrical rocket booster.

Understand: it doesn’t look like a plane anymore.

And those brake lights, winking in the axons…

Altogether it’s a weird contraption, appearing mole blind and not at all aerodynamic. There’s something eerie about the way it rolls to the end of the runway, turns, fires up the jets and shoots down the runway and up into the dark blue sky. Who’s minding the store? Hamilton is grinning at the sight, and McPherson can feel that he is too. There’s something awfully… ingenious about the thing. It really is quite a machine.

The intercom has been giving takeoff specs and such; now, as the RPV’s rocket booster cuts in and it recedes to nothing but a flame dot in the sky, they listen. “Test vehicle three three five now approaching seventy thousand feet. Test program three three five beginning T minus ten seconds. Test program beginning now.”

Ten of the dozen men on the deck start the stopwatch functions of their wristwatches. Some of them have binoculars around their necks, but there won’t be a chance to use them until after the test strike is made; there’s nothing to be seen in the sky, it’s a clean, dark blue, darker than any sky ever seen in OC. Nothing in it. McPherson finds that he’s not breathing regularly, and he concentrates on hitting a steady rhythm. Scanning the sky, in the area where the RPV was last seen, probably not where it will reappear, look around more… his eyesight is remarkably sharp, and un-focusing his attention so that he sees all the expanse of blue above him, he notices a tiny flaw, there far to the north.

“Up there,” he says quickly, and points. The chip of light moves overhead and then quicker than any of them can really follow it the black thing darts down zips over the boom white dunes and the tanks become orange blooms of fire as the thing turns up and fires back into the stratosphere like a rocket. Mach 7, really too fast for the eye to see: the whole pass has taken less than three seconds. The tanks are black clouds of smoke, BoomBoom B-B-B-B-BOOOOM! The sound finally reaches them. Empty blue sky, white dunes marred by six pillars of oily flame, off there on the horizon. Every tank gone.

They were shouting when the booms hit. Now they’re shaking hands and laughing, all talking at once. No matter how many tests they’ve witnessed, the extreme speed of this craft, and the tremendous volume and power of the explosions, inevitably impresses them. It’s a physical, sensory shock, for one thing, and then conceptually it’s exhilarating to think that their calculations, their work, can result in such an awesome display. Hamilton is grinning broadly. “Those Badgers and Armadillos didn’t even have time to register incoming, I’ll bet! The data will show how far they got.”

“And the pods all worked,” McPherson says. That was the crucial test, the one of the target designation and tracking. With all those things functioning, they’ve fulfilled the specs. The fact that the Soviets’ best field SAM system isn’t fast enough to stop the Stormbee is just gravy, confirmation that the Air Force has asked for the right things. The main fact is, they have a system that works.

They spend the next few hours going over the data that the test generated. It all looks very good indeed. They pop the cork on a bottle of champagne and click plastic cups together before McPherson gets on the helicopter with the data, to return to El Paso and OC.

Flying over the magnets in the soundless, vibrationless calm of the tube train, McPherson can’t help but feel a little glow of accomplishment. He ignores the printouts in his lap and looks around the plush car of the train. Businessmen in the big seats are hidden behind opened copies of The Wall Street Journal. With no windows and no vibration and no noise, it’s difficult to believe that they are moving at Mach 2. The world has become an incredible place.…

When he returns it’ll be time for the painful task of writing up the description of the system, in proposal form. Several hundred pages it will run to, not as much as a bid proposal, it’s true, but still, it will be his job to oversee and edit the ungodly number of descriptions, charts, diagrams and such. Not fun.

Still. Being at that stage means a lot; it means they have a working system, within the size and power specs given. It’s more than a lot of LSR’s programs can say, at the moment. McPherson thinks of Ball Lightning briefly, shoves the thought away. This is one of the rare times that a program director can say, The work is done, and it’s a success. He hasn’t been given all that many commands like this one, and it means a lot.

The image of the test comes back to him. That inhumanly swift stoop, attack, disappearance; the quick, precise, and total destruction of the six lumbering tanks; it really was quite extraordinary, both physically and intellectually.

And remembering it, McPherson suddenly sees the larger picture, the meaning of the event. It’s as if he just stood back from a video screen, after months of examining each dot. Now the image is revealed. This system, this RPV with its Stormbee eyes, its armament of smart missiles, its speed, its radar invisibility, its cheapness and lack of a human pilot put at risk—this system is the kind of pinpoint weapon that can really and truly change the nature of warfare. If the Soviets roll out of Eastern Europe with their giant Warsaw Pact army—for that matter, if any army starts an invasion anywhere—then these pilotless drones can drop out of space and fire their missiles before any defensive system can find them or respond, and for each run a half dozen tanks or vehicles are gone. And quick as you can say wow the invading force is gone with it.

The net result of that, given that this technology is pretty much out there for anyone to develop—LSR is not a superinventor after all, nobody is—the net result is that when every country has systems like this one, then no one will be able to invade another country. It just won’t be possible.

Oh, of course there will still be wars—he is not so idealistic as to think that pinpoint weapons systems will end war as an institution—but any major invasion force is doomed to a swift surgical destruction. So really, large-scale invasions become out of the question, which severely curtails how big a war can get.

And all this without having to use the threat of nuclear weapons. For a hundred years now, almost, NATO has used nuclear weapons as the ultimate stopper to any Warsaw Pact invasion. Battlefield nukes in artillery shells, nuclear submarines in the Baltic and Med, the illegal intermediate-range “messenger missiles” hidden in West Germany, ready to make a demonstration pop if the tanks roll.… It’s one of the most dangerous situations in the world, because if one nuke goes off, there’s no telling where it will stop. Most likely it won’t stop until everyone’s dead. And even if it does stop, Europe’s cities will be wiped out. And all to resist tanks!

But now, now, with Stormbee… They can take the nuclear weapons out of there, and still have a completely secure defense against a conventional invasion. The cities and their populations won’t have to go up with the invaders; nothing will be needed but a precise, limited, one could even say humane, response. If you invade us, your invading force will be picked off, by unstoppable robot snipers. Swift, surgical destruction for any invading force; and the war wiped out with it. War—major wars of invasion, anyway—made impossible! My God! It’s quite a thought! A weapon that will make antagonists talk—without the horrific threat of mutual assured destruction. In fact, with weapons like these, it really makes perfect sense to dismantle all the megatonnage, to get rid of the nuclear horror.… Can it really be true? Have we reached that point in history where technology finally will make war obsolete, and nuclear weapons unnecessary?

Yes, it seems it can be true: he has seen the leading edge of that truth, just barely seen it as it swooped down over the white sands of the desert like a Mach 7 mirage, a peripheral vision, that very day. It actually looks as if his work, the sweat of his brow, might help to lift from the world the hundred-year-long nightmare threat of nuclear annihilation. Might even help to lift the thousand-year-long threat of major, catastrophic war. It’s… well, it’s work you can take pride in.

And hurtling back over the surface of the desert, McPherson suddenly feels that pride more strongly than he ever has in his entire life, something like a radiant glow, a sun in his chest. It really is something.