“Ready.” Clifford’s voice came over the speaker system above the Command Floor. An auxiliary screen, set below and to one side of the main display, showed the two operators in the room above.
“I’ll hand the demonstration over to Bradley Clifford at this point, then,” Morelli informed the group. “Brad, over to you. I’ll leave you to do your own commentating. Okay?”
“Okay.” The main display came to life to show the hazy but unmistakable outline of a ship. It was positioned roughly halfway up the screen and was shown broadside; its bulk could be seen clearly floating in the ghostly haze produced by the water. “I’ve been tracking this ship for the past few minutes now, while Al was talking,” Clifford’s voice announced. “It’s in the eastern part of the North Atlantic, between the Azores and the Bay of Biscay. If you want the exact position it is fifteen degrees thirty-six minutes west, forty-two degrees ten minutes north, course two hundred sixty-one degrees, speed thirty-five knots. From the general outline it’s obviously a fairly large carrier, almost certainly one that’s involved in the exercises being held in that area this week. If you watch closely, you will see a small dot rise from the left-hand end from time to time. These are aircraft being launched at this instant . . . there goes one now.”
The audience had been well prepared with what to expect, but even so, gasps of astonishment and surprise rose around the floor.
“If I close in a little . . .” the shape enlarged, “you should just be able to make out details of the internal structure. In particular, note the brighter parts midships and toward the stern. These are the densest parts of the structure—the engines and propulsion machinery. You may be able to see also just the faintest hairlines of brightness inside the midships engine room. I’m pretty sure that the vessel is nuclear-powered and that those are fuel rods in its reactor. Note also the pinpoints in several compartments farther forward—probably fissile material contained in nuclear warheads that are parts of weapons included in the ship’s armory.”
The effect upon the watchers of actually being able to gaze inside a ship sailing on the high seas three thousand miles away was overwhelming. To a man they just stood and stared as coherent speech refused to come to their lips. Clifford’s lazy, matter-of-fact drawl seemed only to add somehow to the effect.
“Another aircraft is just taking off. This time we’ll follow it.” A finger of pale orange, larger than the dots seen previously because of the enlarged view, detached itself from the bow of the carrier. The view closed in on the aircraft, and the ship slid rapidly off the bottom edge of the screen. It seemed to gyrate around in space as the viewpoint altered to project it from all angles, finally zooming in to reveal the finely tapered nose and triangular wings.
“Again, the engines show up more distinctively than the rest of the structure,” Clifford commented. “Also, it doesn’t show up on the screen but I can see through the BIAC a slightly darker cone extending back from the tail. That is the result of the lower density of the exhaust gases. From the data contained in that pattern, we could compute the running temperature of the engines and make a fair guess as to what kind they are.” He allowed them a few more seconds to watch the still-climbing aircraft before speaking again.
“You will have noticed that we are managing to track steadily a target that is now moving quite fast. What may not be apparent is that this is all being done completely automatically, without requiring any kind of continuous participation by either of us in here. When I made the decision to follow this target aircraft, I issued a command to the BIAC to lock on and track, using procedural routines that it has already learned. At this moment neither I nor my colleague here, Aubrey Philipsz, is interacting or communicating with the system in any way whatsoever. But as you can see, the target is being tracked and displayed faithfully.”
Clifford began warming to his subject, and his voice took on a measure of excitement. “In fact, the system is capable of automatically following thousands of discrete, independent objects simultaneously, objects distributed anywhere within its range of operation. Moreover, I could instruct the machine to inform me when any of those objects reaches some predetermined point in its course—for example, the aircraft that you see is flying eastward now, toward the French coast; I could deposit an instruction to be informed if and when it gets inside one hundred miles of the shore; until that happens, the machine will do all the necessary work and I can forget about it. Similarly, I could command a general surveillance routine, whereby I would be informed of any aircraft or object entering French airspace . . . not just specific targets that I have previously identified, such as the one on the screen. In both those examples, I could, instead of being simply informed, program for the targets to be destroyed automatically. So too for all the other targets that the system is capable of tracking and detecting.