“This is Foxtrot Five to Bluebird Control. Altitude fifty thousand feet, on course, target range two-two miles, bearing one-six-zero degrees. All systems checking positive.”
Another voice replied:
“Bluebird Control. Dead on time Foxtrot Five. Maintain course and follow Plan Baker Two. Repeat—Baker Two. Redsox reports you’re on the air now. Reception good. Countdown on schedule. Acknowledge.”
“Foxtrot Five acknowledging. Wilco—Baker Two.”
“You are looking at an area reserved as a military testing ground on Somerset Island, in the far north of Canada,” Clifford’s voice informed them. “The view is being sent back from an Air Force RB6 flying clear of the target area. The target is the high peak located near the center of the group now in the center of the picture. You might just be able to see a small patch of red against the background just above and slightly to the right of the target peak. That’s a large marker balloon for visual identification.
“Back here, we have been starting up the reactor’s beam energizers. I am about to switch on the beam into the J-reactor. . . .” A pause of a few seconds followed. “Not far below where you are standing, the beam is now on—pouring energy out across the universe. I have already preset the space coordinates of the target into the programs that are running in the fire-control computers. All I have to do now is activate the focusing modulators to direct the return energy on to some specific point. As soon as I do that, the fire-control programs will take over, and direct the concentrated energy to the coordinates supplied.”
He waited for a moment, allowing time for the suspense to build up. “I am priming the focusing system to self-activate automatically and slave to the fire control programs ten seconds from . . . now.” A numerical display, superimposed upon the target picture, appeared and began reeling off the seconds.
Nine . . . Eight . . . seven . . .
“Note that from now on I play no further part. All operations are automatic.”
Three . . . two . . . one . . .
The whole room gasped in unison. The entire central portion of the mountain range vanished in a blaze of pure whiteness. The familiar, sinister shape of a slowly swelling and rising fireball rose up out of the maelstrom that erupted where the whiteness had been. A writhing column of fire and vapors climbed up through the clouds and began spreading outward to form a boiling canopy that blotted out the surrounding landscape.
“Holy Moses, what was that?” yelled the voice of Foxtrot Five.
“Search me,” came another voice on the circuit. “Musta been a ground burst. There was nothing coming in on radar.”
“Cut the cackle, Foxtrot Five. You’re still alive.”
“Wilco.”
In the next half-hour, Clifford repeated the performance on a series of other preprepared targets, including the burned-out shell of a shuttle booster that had been orbiting high above Earth for over ten years. In each case the results were as spectacular as the first. The shuttle booster demonstration showed that Jericho could be controlled right down to destructive levels that were far lower than the minimum unleashed by a thermonuclear explosion; it was vaporized in the equivalent of less than one hundred tons of TNT.
For his finale, Clifford brought up views of five different targets on separate screens, the locations being scattered across hundreds of miles of Arctic wilderness. Then he announced that, as already prearranged, ten dummy warheads would be launched toward various parts of the North American continent from orbiting space vehicles simulating ORBS satellites. As the mock attack was set in motion, the trajectories of the warheads were reported on an additional screen hooked into the regular tracking network.
“The fire-control computers have been fed the coordinates of the ground targets,” he announced. “They are also being updated continually with the instant-to-instant positions of the incoming missiles, which are now being tracked automatically by the surveillance system. What I am about to do is activate the focusing system and set the fire-control routine to direct the weapon on to each of the targets in turn. It will fire on each target for exactly one millionth of a second. Focus will activate ten seconds from . . . now.”