“Exactly, exactly,” Desmond agreed, chopping his head. “Just a time factor, says Chui-lin, but there’s no sign of overheating until we switch modes, and I don’t think dropping the grain size as we’ve done will be – ”
“Fifteen seconds,” boomed a voice from the control center on the ground, and this time Kelly and the scientist did slide the goggles down over their eyes. The cameraman hunched behind the long shroud of his viewing screen. A guidance mechanism as sophisticated as anything in the latest generation of air-to-air missiles should center the lens on the test vehicle, despite any maneuvers the target or the helicopter itself carried out. Machinery could fail, however, and the backup cameraman was determined that he would not fail – because he was good, not because he was worried about his next efficiency report.
The monocle ferry was a disk only eighteen feet in diameter, and at its present slant distance of almost half a mile from the helicopters it would have been easy to ignore were it not so nearly alone on a barren yellow landscape. With Vandenburg and Cape Canaveral irrevocably surrendered to the US Space Command when it was formed in 1971, the Army and Air Force had chosen Fort Bliss as the site for their joint attempt to circumvent their new rival’s control of space weaponry.
Not only was the huge military reservation empty enough to make a catastrophic failure harmless, but its historical background as the center of Army Air Defense Training lent a slight color to the services’ claim that they were not trying to develop a ‘space weapon’ of their own in competition with the Space Command.
Not that that would help them if Carlo Bianci decided the program should be axed. The congressman from the Sixth District of Georgia had made a career – a religion, some critics claimed – of space defense, and it wasn’t the sort of thing he permitted interservice squabbling to screw up.
“Now, there may be a critical limit to grain size,” Dr. Desmond was saying, “below which none of the aluminum will form hot-spots on the mirror surface, but at these energy levels it won’t take more than a few molecules to – ”
“Go,” said the control center, and the landscape changed in intensity.
The beams from the six chemical laser lift stations in orbit above the launch site ‘were in the near infrared at a wavelength of 1.8 microns. Not only was light of that frequency invisible to the human eye, it was absorbed by the cornea instead of being focused by the lens to the potential injury of the retina. The wavelength was a relalively inefficient one for transmitting power, especially through an atmosphere which would have passed a much higher percentage of the ultraviolet. The five megajoules of energy involved in the test, however, meant that even the least amount of reflection raised an unacceptable risk of blindness and worse if the operation were in the visible spectrum or shorter.
“Go-o-o …” whispered Desmond, probably unaware that he had spoken aloud. Tom Kelly leaned outward, bringing his shoulder and helmet into the dry, twenty-knot airstream.
The six-ton saucer quivered as it drank laser energy through the dozen windows of segmented corundum which ringed its upper surface like the eyes of a monstrous insect. The central hub of the ferry contained the one-man cockpit, empty now except for instrumentation, which did not rotate as the blast chambers around the saucer’s rim began to expel air flash-heated within them by laser pulses.
Dust, as much a part of West Texas as it was of the hills above Beirut, rippled in a huge, expanding doughnut from the concrete pad. It formed a translucent bed for the ferry, a mirage landscape on which the saucer seemed to rest instead of lifting as planned. Then the dust was gone, a yellow-gray curtain across distant clumps of Spanish bayonet, and the ferry itself was a lens rather than a disk as it shot past the helicopters circling at five hundred meters.
“All right!” blurted Kelly, jerking his eyes upward to track the monocle through the frame members and shimmering helicopter rotors against a sky made amber by his goggles.