Georges LeFarge felt like he was getting a fever. Or maybe the room was just growing hot. All he knew was, he was miserable. He swabbed at his face with a moist paper towel and tried to breathe normally, telling himself he had to keep going, had to stick by Cally. This was no time to give in to these creeps and get sick.
Ardent and intense, Georges looked every inch the computer hacker he was; but he also was one of the finest aerospace engineers ever to come out of Cal Tech. Although his long hair and so-so beard were intended to deliver a fierce political statement, his benign blue eyes negated the message. He was an idealist, but one filled with love, not hate. His politics were as simplistic as his technical skills were state-of-the-art: he never managed to understand why everyone in the world did not act rationally.
He had grown up in New York's Soho district, living in a mammoth, sparsely furnished loft with his mother, a widely praised painter of massive, abstract oils-usually in black and ocher. Her depressing paintings were huge, but her income only occasionally was, and Georges's memory of his childhood was years of alternating caviar and spaghetti. His French Canadian father had long since returned to a log-and-clay cabin in northern Quebec, never to be heard from again.
He also remembered his mother's string of lovers, an emotional intrusion he never quite came to accept. The day he went off to MIT, on a National Merit Scholarship, was the happiest of his life. Or at least he had thought so until he got a call from Cally Andros asking him to come to work for SatCom.
He was now thirty-four, single, and he loved girls, or the idea of girls. No, the truth was that he loved one girl, and had forever. She was now his boss. After years of separation, they had finally dabbled at an affair here on Andikythera, but he had to admit it hadn't worked. At first it had seemed a good idea, his boyhood dream come true, but now he had realized maybe they were better off just being friends. She became a different person in bed, and one he found slightly terrifying.
But given what had just happened, all that seemed part of another, forgotten place and time.
In addition to having a fever, he was bone-tired and his neck ached. But he wanted desperately to stay alert. He stroked the wispy beard he had been trying to grow for the last four months, gazed at the terminal, and warned himself to stop thinking like an engineer and try to think like a terrorist. These European criminals had shown up just in time for the first space shot, which meant they had something planned that needed a vehicle. They weren't going to hold the facility for ransom: there was nothing here they could steal. Also, they had been very careful not to damage any of the systems.
Which meant their real program, whatever it was, needed the Cyclops to work and a vehicle to lift off. If that didn't happen, they were screwed. So, he thought, you sabotage Thursday's shot and you nix their plot, whatever it is.
But Cally would have a fit. Mr. Bates needed a success, and soon, or the whole SatCom gamble would go down the tubes. It was a lose-lose scenario. What to do?
Simple. Just keep working for now and hope. What else was there?
On the screen in front of him now was the output of a program in progress, this one called HI-VOLT, which was a daily low-power warm-up of the coils of the phased-array radar system on the mountain. The computer methodically checked all the power systems for any hint of malfunction, and the program had to be run, rain or shine. It was now time to kick on the pumps and heat exchangers and get going. Something to do…
The cursor was flashing, ready for the "power on" command. He hit the Enter key, activating the pumps for the heat exchangers, then turned to see Cally approaching, winding her way through the workstations, led by the head terrorist, the fucker who called himself Number One. LeFarge could not get over the fact the bastard looked like an executive from the Arlington office, only better dressed.
"Georges, you've got to kill HI-VOLT," Cally said. Although she looked normal, there was extreme anxiety in her voice. The strain was coming through. "We have to do a different run." She was passing her fingers nervously through her hair. He loved her dark, Mediterranean tresses. "A trajectory analysis using SORT."
The Fujitsu supercomputer they were using was programmed with a special NASA program developed by McDonnell-Douglas Astronautics Co. Called SORT, an abbreviation for Simulation and Optimization of Rocket Trajectories, it minimized the laser energy required for an insertion trajectory into low earth orbit. It also calculated the on-board nozzle vectors to adjust altitude while the vehicle was in flight. Midcourse corrections. All you had to do was program everything in.
"Now? But I just started-"
"Here's a list of what he wants." She glanced at Number One again, then handed over a sheet of blue paper.
He took it and looked down. Maybe they were about to tip their hand. But what could they know about computers?
He finally focused on the sheet. What? These weren't satellite trajectories, these were longitude and latitude coordinates. Then he studied it more carefully. They were abort targets.