Joseph Delaney: Business as Usual, During Altercations

The man on the street agreed. So, apparently, did the bombers. The situation languished in stalemate. Nobody blinked, but nobody moved either.

The trouble with stalemates was that none ever had or ever could last forever.

Within Sumpter’s cabinet the voice of caution struggled with the voice of action. “In the long run this posture is :dangerous in itself, Mr. President,” Sam admonished. “Uncertainty is debilitating to business. As long as that thing is up there nobody will invest in anything that loss of spatial capability might affect. The enemy can win a long war, and we can’t.”

He turned his gaze to the other cabinet members at the meeting, noted the nodding heads and added, “we’ve got to eliminate the threat once and for all, otherwise depression is inevitable and imminent. As Augie is here to tell you, Mr. President, there are plans underway to upstage us.” He turned to the secretary of state.

The secretary made his grim announcement. “Our military attache in Paris forwarded a note, delivered to him this morning. Officially, the purpose is to warn us of pending military action so that we can take steps to protect our interests. It refers to us as a friendly power, but I get the impression that they mean ‘friendly’ in the same sense that de Gaulle regarded us as friendly.”

He gestured toward the admiral, who had been invited to sit in even though he wasn’t a member of the cabinet. “I’ve already furnished a copy to the joint chiefs, who reached the same conclusion I did, namely, that the French are planning to try it alone, perhaps to save face. After all, they did put that thing up there. Admiral?”

“They’ll botch it, Mr. President.” Vogel’s tone was grave. “They’ve got the right idea but the job’s too big for them. They haven’t got a system good enough to close in on that thing and destroy it before somebody on the ground can press the button. It may be that nobody has. Certainly we haven’t been able to come up with anything foolproof.

“That’s without considering what its automatic defenses might do. We don’t know anything about these systems. We don’t know what they do, how sensitive they are, what ranges they’ve been set for or anything else about them. We can’t even be sure they exist. They might not. The terrorists could be bluffing.

“We can’t determine that without approaching it and risking setting it off. On the other hand my experts tell me that even if neither we nor the terrorists do anything, sooner or later some stray piece of space junk or a meteor will wander into range. There’s just no way to get near it without setting it off.”

Sumpter had been listening with only half an ear, groping through his memories for a way to do exactly that. He felt something, but so far it had managed to stay just beyond the edge of his perception. It was a rare moment these days when anything from his scientific past was able to dislodge the vicious realities of geopolitics.

Then, in a flash, he had it, snared in a net of logic. He reeled it in, then beamed, “There is a way, Admiral. It’s a way we already know will work because we did it once before, by accident.” He gazed out at all the puzzled faces. “I guess I’d better explain. You see, all of us were kids then, and some of us hadn’t even been bom yet, but there was this experiment, a nuclear weapons test, and it all went wrong. This is what happened…”

Donald Grimm, pilot of the shuttle Endeavor, and mission commander, was not an easy man to rattle, but he was realist enough to acknowledge that looking up through the hole in the donut could not be very healthy.

Just hours before Endeavor had launched, a French missile had come up from Chad. It waited in a parking orbit until they reached their position, then ground control began maneuvering it to catch up to the target, the so-called bucket of buckshot Francospatiale had unwittingly launched for the terrorists. It carried a nuclear warhead, to be exploded in the proximity of this target. Theoretically, the electromagnetic pulse would fry any unprotected electronic equipment.

What worried Grimm was what else it might fry. He knew that even with the Earth between the ship and the device at the time of detonation the residual radiation level would be very high and their next orbit would take them through the debris of the blast. He wasn’t very comfortable with the prospect.

True, the explosion would assume a different configuration and appearance up here, since the mushroom cloud was typical only of surface detonations, and the particles would disperse faster without an atmosphere to affect them, but the mission was dangerous nonetheless. Endeavor would be pretty hot when she landed.

As soon as he had reported in, the countdown on the ground had begun. Zero was the last word he expected to hear from the ground. When the device went off it would black out all electronic communication, both in orbit and on the surface.

That meant Grimm would have to fly the mission manually from then on, and that contact with Earth would be tenuous, slow and cumbersome through their single, shielded laser.

“Zero!”

In response, Grimm burned the main engine for what seemed an eternity, and Endeavor climbed steadily toward the bucket. Inside the shuttle four American crewmen and three French astronauts waited pensively for the target to appear over the horizon. They made the first pass through the debris cloud. It was not visible, of course. Their only indication that a thermonuclear explosion had occurred was a prickling sensation on the skin as they passed over the south pole. It felt weird.

“There’s the target,” Thomas Westwater announced. With radar unusable, Endeavor’s co-pilot/astrogator had been searching for the target with a binocular telescope. “I have it in the cross hairs. Our approach looks good but it’s a little slow. Why don’t you give it a couple of squirts?”

Grimm responded with a two second burn of the main engine and waited. This was when he first started to feel really scared. No matter how much confidence the people on the ground had in the theory, this was still the acid test and nobody knew for sure the theory could pass it.

Just about everything the US had put up here was designed to deal with EMP, and had automatically resetting circuit breaking devices. Russian equipment also had them, which meant that as the pulse weakened, what was dormant in the target now might revive and zap them.

Their safety depended on getting the job done before that happened, always presuming, of course, that the terrorists had bought the deluxe package. If they hadn’t, their circuitry would have been ruined by the immense current the pulse induced and put out of commission for good.

As Endeavor approached nearer and nearer without incident Grimm opened the cargo door. The EVA crew gathered at the airlock, ready to go out and attach the booster she carried in her cargo bay. Grimm didn’t know whether the shuttle could survive long enough to get away if the satellite exploded but he was sure suited men wouldn’t.

Westwater dismounted the big glasses and stood down. The target was now near enough to be tracked with the naked eye.

Grimm fired short bursts from the forward thrusters, settling onto station in a manner not much different from routine docking. When relative motion reached zero the Frenchmen went out the lock, while the arm was deployed by the other two Americans inside. From the arm a rocket dangled, its nozzle pointing at the ship, its four spiderlike arms now extended and protruding from its flat nose.

The target floated menacingly near, no more than 50 meters away. Grimm could see there was already a booster mounted behind the payload. They hadn’t known about that, since there had been no close reconnaissance. He wondered how the EVA team would handle that. Watching the activity out the port made Grimm very nervous. He knew the pulse had done its job. What scared him was that the effect could vanish any time and the target’s breakers, if it had any, might reset.