Dan is ready to quit for the day, and he’s about to go with some of his crew to the El Torito just down the road. He wants McPherson to come along and join them for margaritas, and McPherson hides his irritation and agrees to it. On the short drive over he calls Lucy to let her know he’ll be home late, and then ascends the office complex’s maze of exterior staircases to the restaurant on the top floor. Fine view of the Muddy Canyon condos, and in the other direction, the sea.
Dan and Art Wong and Jerry Heimat are already there at a window table, and the pitcher of margaritas is on its way. McPherson sits and starts in on the chips and salsa with them. They’re talking shop. Executives at Grumman and Teledyne have been indicted for taking kickbacks from subcontractors. “That’s why they call the Grumman SAM the ‘Kicker,’ I guess,” says Dan. This gets them on the topic of missiles, and as the pitcher of margaritas arrives and is quickly disposed of, they discuss the latest performances in the war in Indonesia. It seems a General Dynamic antitank missile has gotten nicknamed “the Boomerang” for persistent problems with guidance software or vane hinges, no one is quite sure yet. But they just keep on flying in curved trajectories, a weird problem indeed. No one wants to use these devices, but they’re ordered to anyway because the Marines have huge quantities of them and won’t acknowledge that the problems have gotten above an acceptable percentage. So soldiers in the field have taken to firing their GDs ninety degrees off to the side of the target tanks… or so the gossip mill says. No doubt it’s a pack of lies, but no one likes GD so it makes for a good story.
“Did you hear about Johnson at Loral?” asks Art. “He’s in charge of the fourth-tier ICBM program, shooting down leakers. So, one day he gets a directive from SDC, and it says, Please assume that you will have to deal with twenty percent more than the total amount estimated to be launched in a full-scale attack!” They all laugh. “He almost has a heart attack, this is a couple of orders of magnitude more incoming than he thought the system was going to have to deal with, and all his software is shit out of luck. The whole system is overwhelmed. So he calls the Pentagon just before his ticker says good-bye, and finds out that whoever wrote ‘twenty percent more than’ should have written ‘twenty percent of. “…”
“He’s still got trouble,” Dan says when they stop laughing. “They can’t even knock down one incoming with more than fifty percent reliability, so they’re going to have to at least double the number of smart rocks, and the Pentagon is already threatening to dump him.” This reminds Dan of his own troubles, and with a grim smile he downs the rest of his margarita.
Art and Jerry, aware of their boss’s moods, sense this change of humor. And this is supposed to be a conference between the two managers. So they chat for a while longer, and finish their drinks, and then they’re up and off. Dan and Dennis are left there to talk things over.
“So,” Dan says, smiling the same unhumorous smile. “Lemon has stuck you into the Ball Lightning program, eh?”
“That’s right.”
“Worse luck for you.” Dan signals to a passing waitress for another pitcher. “He’s running scared, I’ll tell you that. Hereford is calling from New York and putting the pressure on, and right now he’s feeling it but good, because we are stuck.” He shakes his head miserably. “Stuck.”
“Tell me about it.”
Dan gets out a pen, draws a circle on the yellow paper tablecloth. “The real problem,” he complains, “is that the first tier has been given an impossible job. Strategic Defense Command has said that seventy percent of all Soviet ICBMs sent up in a full attack are to be destroyed in the boost phase. We won a development contract using that figure as the baseline goal. But it can’t be done.”
“You think not?” McPherson suspects that Dan may just be making excuses for his program’s problems. He sips his drink. “Why?”
Houston grimaces. “The necessary dwell time is just too long, Mac. Too long.” He sighs. “It’s always been the toughest requirement in the whole system’s architecture, if you ask me. The Soviets have got their fast-burn boosters down to sixty seconds, so most of their ICBMs will only be in boost phase for that minute, and half that time they’ll be in the atmosphere where the lasers won’t do much. So for our purposes we’re talking about a window of thirty seconds.”
He scribbles down the figures on the tablecloth as he talks, nervously, without looking at them, as if they are his signature or some other deeply, even obsessively memorized sign. tB = 30.
“Now, during that time we’ve got to locate the ICBMs, track them, and get the mirrors into the correct alignment to bounce the lasers. Art’s team has got that down to around ten seconds, which is an incredible technical feat, by the way.” He nods mulishly, writes tT = 10. “And then there’s the dwell time, the time the beam has to be fixed on the missile to destroy it.” He writes tD = , hesitates, leaves the other side of the equation blank.
“You told the Air Force we could pulse a large burst of energy, right?” McPherson asks. “So the damage is done by a shock wave breaking the skin of the missile?”
Dan nods. “That’s right.”
“So dwell time should be short.”
“That’s right! That’s right. Dwell time should be on the order of two seconds. That means that each laser station can destroy N missiles, where,” and he writes:
“However,” Dan continues carefully, looking down on the simple equation, one of the basic Field-Spergels that he has to juggle every day, “dwell time in fact depends on the hardness of the missile, the distance to the target, the brightness of the laser beam, and the angle of the incidence between the beam and the surface of the missile.” He writes down H, B, R, and 0, and then, obsessively, writes down this equation too, another Field-Spergeclass="underline"
“And we’ve been getting figures for hardness of about forty kilojoules per square centimeter.” He writes H = 40 KJcm2. “Our lasers have twenty-five megawatts of power hitting ten-meter-diameter mirrors at wavelength two point seven nanometers, so even with the best angle of incidence possible, dwell time is,” and he writes, very carefully:
tD = 53 seconds.
“What?” says McPherson. “What happened to this pulse shock wave?”
Dan shakes his head. “Won’t work. The missiles are too hard. We’ve got to burn them out, just like I used to say we’d have to, back before we got this development contract. The mirrors are up there and they won’t be getting any bigger, the power pulse is already incredible when you think that over a hundred and fifty laser stations will have to be supplied all at once, and we can’t change the wavelength of the lasers without replacing the entire systems. And that’s the whole ball game.”
“But that means that dwell time is longer than boost time!”
“That’s right. Each laser can bring down about eight-tenths of a missile. And there’s a hundred and fifty laser stations, and about ten thousand missiles.”
McPherson feels himself gaping. He takes the pen from Houston, starts writing on the tablecloth himself. He surveys the figures. Takes another drink.
“So,” he says, “how did we get this development contract, then?”
Dan shakes his head. Now he’s looking out the window at the sea.
Slowly he says, “We got the contract for Ball Lightning by proving we could destroy a stationary hardened target in ground tests, with the sudden pulse shock wave. They gave us the contract on that basis, and we were put in competition with Boeing who got the same contract, and after three years we have to show we can do it in boost phase, in real-time tests. It’s getting close to time for the head-to-head tests. The winner gets a twenty-billion-dollar project, just for starters, and the loser is out a few hundred million in proposal and development costs. Maybe it’ll get a follower’s subcontract with the winner, but that won’t amount to much.”