Tim Glister: Red Corona

So, Knox didn’t know anything about the two dead men beyond the most basic information. He didn’t know how they’d been killed, or why. It was hard for him not to feel like Manning was setting him up.

In her cramped, windowless lab, Valera thought about the lie she’d told Zukolev.

She didn’t need the argon. He was right – it was inert. It didn’t do anything. It wasn’t a catalyst and it had nothing to do with her research. She’d just requested the gas because she wanted to know how much attention Zukolev was paying to her work.

She was telling the truth about something else, though. She really did feel close to a breakthrough. After years of struggle, toil, and setbacks, she was convinced she was on the edge of glory – because she had to be.

Valera’s father had had two passions in life: early Asian languages, and British detective stories. Every evening when Valera was a child, he would read the Russian translations of novels by Arthur Conan Doyle to her. She was too young to understand the complicated plots, but one line from The Sign of the Four – the novel they had been reading the night her father was seized by the NKVD and never seen again – had been seared into her mind. The Russian translation was ‘when you have removed every other possibility, the truth is all that’s left’.

After three years of wrestling with the same problem every day, she’d eliminated so many possibilities that, by Conan Doyle’s logic, she must be near the answer.

‘What shall we try today?’ she asked the portrait of Stalin hanging on the wall opposite her.

Zukolev insisted that a portrait of the great man hung in every office and workroom in Povenets B, so the city’s workers could always feel him looking down on them. It was always the same portrait, and always shrouded in black velvet.

But to Valera the face hanging in her office didn’t belong to Stalin. It was her lab assistant, her collaborator, her confessor. His identity changed day by day, depending on what Valera needed to keep herself sane – another little rebellion.

She had wasted her first year in Povenets B chasing theoretical dead ends. Eventually, she had realised she needed help and, with none on offer, she’d created her own. She started talking to the painting. It helped her externalise her thoughts, consider fresh perspectives, vent her frustrations. The painting never talked back. It didn’t need to. It just needed to listen. Until one day, when Valera felt like she was lost and trapped at the same time. She had looked into Stalin’s eyes and heard in her mind, in a voice that wasn’t quite her father’s but wasn’t quite anyone else’s either, the line from The Sign of the Four .

Protecting standard radio communications from interception was relatively straightforward. By encrypting signals across a broad spectrum of channels, constantly hopping between a preset range of bandwidths, messages could be sent between two locations without being jammed or listened in to. This was how all major militaries, intelligence agencies, and the more private of the world’s global corporations kept their conversations secure and their secrets safe.

Unfortunately, this technique didn’t work when it came to getting anything but the most basic messages from the Earth’s surface to orbit and back again. This was because of the scattering effect of the planet’s atmosphere. No matter how many bandwidths were jumped, messages never pierced the atmospheric barrier. Only the most simple signals that were barely a step up from Morse code could pass through.

Valera had convinced herself that the secret to breaking the barrier lay in unlocking some new, undiscovered realm of physics. It was an arrogant idea, and after months of questioning proofs, exploring half-cooked theories, and drafting calculations that didn’t add up, she’d conceded defeat.

That was the day the portrait on her lab wall started talking to her, and she realised that if the answer wasn’t to be found in creating something new, then it must be in doing something different with what she already had.

She broke down the problem into its simplest form. There was a wall in her way, and she needed something to punch through it. She needed a bigger signal.

Zukolev may have been a skinflint when it came to supplies and equipment, but he had furnished Valera with an impressive library. He fed her a regular supply of papers by other Russian scientists, along with some of the latest research by physicists working in America, Britain, Germany, and Sweden, all clandestinely acquired by the GRU. He always handed them over with great ceremony, as if he himself had risked his life to bring them to her. The first few sets of papers had even been translated for Valera, but the efforts were so poor that she’d ended up just asking for the originals. She still struggled with German, but her Swedish was now passable and her English was almost fluent.

She reread every paper and report she had. Then she went to Zukolev and asked for two things. The first was a travelling wave tube amplifier, a technology developed by the British and Americans during World War Two to boost radio signals. The second was a set of plans for something called a rake receiver. Valera thought that combining a stronger signal with a more sensitive receiving system might be the key to opening up a hole in the atmospheric barrier and getting a message into space. She made her case to Zukolev and, after his usual complaining about time and expense, both pieces of equipment were delivered to her lab the next month.

Combining the travelling wave tube amplifier with the rake receiver did exactly what she’d hoped, but it wasn’t a solution. For every broadcast that worked, another didn’t. A fifty per cent success rate in lab conditions wasn’t good enough. But she was convinced she was on the right track. So she repeated test after test, each time getting different results, and each time pretending that she wasn’t getting closer and closer to the definition of madness.

After two more months, Valera had gone back to reading through her library for fresh inspiration. She was now halfway through.

She poured herself a weak cup of coffee from her samovar – another hard-fought-for gift from Zukolev – and carried the next stack of papers over to her desk.

Valera could read for hours, and she did, stopping only for occasional refills of coffee. She was happy losing herself in the theoretical world and forgetting the reality of Povenets B. But by late afternoon she’d found nothing to help her solve her problem. It was frustrating. She knew she couldn’t rush the science, but she also knew after her meeting with Zukolev that she needed to deliver something resembling progress soon.

She emptied the last of the samovar and started on the next pile of papers. Halfway down was a slim report from 1957 by a military engineer called Leonid Kupriyanovich about his development of an experimental portable telephone. She paced up and down the small amount of free floor space, clutching her coffee in one hand and Kupriyanovich’s report in the other. By the third page she knew she was on to something.

Because of its diminutive size, Kupriyanovich’s phone could only broadcast a very weak signal. He’d overcome this limitation not by trying to make his signals stronger, but by making them larger, wider. He used asynchronous code division to spread his transmissions across a much broader bandwidth than they needed, effectively increasing the odds of them reaching their destination. Instead of trying to turn the signal into a rocket, he turned it into the wind.

Before she had finished Kupriyanovich’s report, Valera was already trying to work out if she could apply the same principle to her work. If one big signal couldn’t break through the atmospheric barrier, could a hundred smaller ones? She asked Stalin what he thought. He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no either.