Operation Damocles (17 page)

“Deal,” said Townsend, shaking hands. “Thanks, Dr. Ortiz.”

They stood up.

“Having someone like Eddie and you to talk to, makes me feel a little less alone,” said Townsend. “Your help means a lot.”

“Just call me Hector. I’ll see what I can do. We’ll meet somewhere else in the future, just to reduce the numbers of curious people watching us come and go, and to avoid the possibility of someone listening in, okay?”

“My thoughts exactly. Call you tomorrow.”

XXII

Gene Stickle sat with three other physicists in a conference room at the U.S. Army Strategic Defense Command’s headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama. Present were Able Johnson, a rangy, middle-aged Southerner from Georgia Tech University; Ted Wallace, a younger professor from Cal-Tech who, like Johnson, was a contract consultant to SDC; and Joe Mercer, a middle-aged government employee like Stickle, and past director of the SDC’s now defunct Directed-Energy Weapons Program.

Johnson and Wallace had worked independently of one another to perform a contracted study for SDL. Their task had been to assimilate and correlate all the detailed data gathered about the effects of the weapons beam and develop a theory regarding its operation and tactical weaknesses. Wallace had come up empty. Johnson was giving his report. Wallace doodled on a legal pad, listening, interjecting occasionally. Mercer and Stickle were attentive to Johnson, who was describing, in a rich, baritone drawl, his speculations on the technology of the weapon.

“I think it’s safe to assume,” he began, “that given the small size of the thing, that the energy beam is not just brute power. The weapon system’s not big enough. The power plant required to deliver a forty-terawatt beam to the earth’s surface would be big enough to blot out a big part of the moon. The mirror itself would have to be twelve meters in diameter to deliver a focused beam with a three-meter aperture at the earth’s surface. It would stand out in orbit like a spotlight. Since we know the weapon platform is not much over a meter in diameter, they must have used a small superconducting magnet array to focus and modulate the beam. It simply can’t handle that much power. Based on that assumption, I’ve tried a bit of computer modeling that leads me to believe that it must operate on the principle of resonance.

“The energy of the beam sets up a sympathetic vibration in materials, kind of like a microwave oven, at the molecular or atomic level. Maybe even the nuclear level. What was mystifying about the damn thing at first was that it seems to couple efficiently with a wide variety of materials. At any rate, resonant coupling could explain energy transfer ratios at sufficient amplitude to do what it does. The specific mechanism is not readily evident. I do have a hypothesis, though.”

“You hinted earlier that you’ve eliminated infrared wavelengths,” said Wallace. “The bandwidth at IR frequencies is certainly sufficient for high frequency modulation. There are only ten elements in the periodic table with nuclear magnetic resonance frequencies over one hundred megahertz. Hydrogen is the highest at three hundred megahertz. Seems to me a carbon dioxide laser could do it.”

“Ionization potential is too low at IR frequencies,” interjected Stickle. “It’s not simply a thermal effect.”

“I agree,” said Johnson. “It’s in the UV or X-ray spectrum. It doesn’t just heat things up until they melt or vaporize. You would be back to the objection of too big an energy requirement. No, this thing literally blasts things apart, and the thermal bloom we’ve seen in the satellite images is more of a side effect than a direct cause.”

“You mean, the breakup of the target material creates an exothermic chemical reaction, right?” said Mercer.

“Exactly,” responded Johnson. “I think it’s a form of induced fission.”

“Let’s come back to that in a minute,” said Stickle.

“What about the simple beam mechanics—control signals, feedback, and so on? Can we detect control signals, or targeting signals, and interfere with them? What kind of time do you think we have, from command initiation until it positions and fires?”

“Well, in my opinion, the uplink is as simple as shit, and there’s not a hell of a lot that you can do to interfere with it. They have probably located a few simple, low-powered, modulated lasers at various sites around the country. These are set up as dumb terminals, or slaves. They can be controlled by modem, by telephone, by radio—a dozen different ways. I’d bet they’re slaved to an active computer, somewhere.

“Multiple sites would insure that the weather can’t block a signal, and more importantly, that a stratospheric rocket can’t ionize the atmosphere with a seed chemical to disrupt ground-to-orbit communications. Any one of these lasers could send a hundred-nanosecond burst of digital data with target coordinates and a GO code. If you are them, and you’ve really been clever—and it seems to me that they have been, at every turn—you have several major firing events preprogrammed into the weapon’s fire control system. You add a well-known little device called a dead-man’s switch. The active computer I mentioned sends a signal pulse every so often to the weapon system’s fire control, telling it to dump its current countdown, and start over again. The computer has to be manually reset at regular intervals.

“That way, if you are captured, all you have to do is threaten not to reset the computer that controls the switch. After a certain amount of elapsed time, the damn thing begins to acquire targets and fire automatically.

“A word of advice in that regard, gentlemen. If you do catch them, you had better not let anything happen to them until that weapon system is disabled. If you kill them, or if they refuse to tell you the control codes, that thing could kill every plant, animal and human being in the northern hemisphere. It could sterilize half the earth, and maybe as a side effect, kill the entire planet.”

Johnson paused for effect. “Make no mistake about what you’re up against, gentlemen. It may be literally the annihilation—utter and complete—of all surface life on this planet.”

“Sweet Jesus,” uttered Mercer, “it just gets worse and worse.”

“No defense at all?” asked Stickle.

“The only survival possibility that holds any hope at all is deep undersea habitats with nuclear power systems,” said Johnson. “Deep mine shafts and such might work for a while, but you’ve got to understand that the atmosphere is not going to be breathable for years—maybe decades. You would have to come up with some way to produce food, water and oxygen, and to handle wastes.”

Johnson paused again, staring out the window into the distance. “God only knows what kind of weather patterns would eventually emerge. Look at what happened when it traced a thin line—a mere two miles wide—up the east coast. Think about that land of energy and destruction crossing the breadth of the North American continent. It would probably sweep from east to west, like the shadow of a cloud passing over the earth. Everything the shadow touched would explode and burn. Even the bacteria in the soil would be destroyed. Dust and smoke in the stratosphere for ages, blocking sunlight. Nothing could grow. Onset of an ice age. The planet climatology might never recover.”

“Maybe the Doomsdayers are right,” said Mercer, despondently. “Maybe that damned thing really is the Sword of God.”

“Maybe,” said Johnson reflectively. “At any rate, living in the sea has the advantage that the water volume of the oceans provides an enormous buffer system. The food chain will suffer, and plankton and other life will be affected, but the polar caps are likely to suffer somewhat less. Fish, shellfish and various sea flora should be available for years, and breathing oxygen can be liberated from sea water by electrolysis or chemical reaction. Hydrogen too, for combustion processes, and for power production and light. The sea bottom can be farmed if you have light, and wastes are easily handled—they’re even useful as fertilizer.”

“I confess, I hadn’t followed it out as far as you have, Dr. Johnson,” said Stickle. “I guess we really are looking at a potential doomsday scenario. The people we work for certainly haven’t thought that far ahead. They see this simply as a power struggle, a king-of-the-mountain game. I’m wondering what they will say when I present your findings.”

“I doubt it will slow them up very much,” said Wallace. “Most people don’t know that many of the reputable scientists that built the first atomic bomb—the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, during the Second World War—were afraid that it would set the atmosphere on fire and destroy the world. They wanted to stop the project. Maybe that’s why they called it the Trinity Site, where it was tested. At any rate, they did it anyway. They took the chance, and risked all of humanity. That ought to tell you something about power-mad politicians.”

“What else have you got, Dr. Johnson?” asked Stickle.

“Well, you asked about elapsed time for target acquisition and firing. From geostationary orbit, it takes light two hundred and forty milliseconds to go from a satellite to earth and back, round-trip. The destructive energy beam traverses across the surface of the target in microseconds, far too fast to acquire target analysis data and reflect it back to the satellite’s fire control system, so that it can decide what the composition of the immediate object in its path is, and adjust the frequency of the beam accordingly. During the two-hundred-and-forty-millisecond delay, the beam will have traversed more than one and a quarter million meters.

“I’ve concluded that there are two possibilities. The possibility I believe the least is one in which the weapon sweeps the target with a mapping signal that analyzes the target footprint prior to firing the main laser. It analyzes all the components that make up the target—rocks, trees, highways, dirt—and their size, composition, etc. It maps them into its fire-control system’s memory as Cartesian coordinates, then adjusts the resonance of the energy beam as it traverses each mapped grid reference during the firing sequence. It all takes place in a few hundred milliseconds of course, but the mapping sequence does require a finite amount of time, depending on the area of the target. Figure a quarter-second for the mapping signals round-trip transit, an eighth of a second one-way for the main energy beam, fifty-three milliseconds per square mile mapped—it works out to about twelve square miles analyzed, mapped and obliterated per second.”

“My God!” said Mercer.

“Jesus,” said Stickle.

“I’m still interested in your resonance theory, Dr. Johnson,” said Wallace. “Could you elaborate on that a bit?”

“Well, as you are no doubt aware, one of the significant properties of a resonant signal is that it permits maximum energy transfer between the signal—in this case an energy beam—and the object or objects that it is resonant with. This is the property engineers think about most often, with regard to resonance. It’s called coupling efficiency, and is normally of primary importance to radio and television engineers. How far a receiver will pick up a signal, its sensitivity in other words, depends on its coupling efficiency. We couldn’t have radio or TV communications without resonant circuitry.

“Another way to look at resonance though, is that it allows a relatively small signal energy to pump up a very large energy storage reservoir, until it self-destructs. Like pumping up a balloon with a tire pump until it explodes. To something the size of an atom, or even a molecule, a few watts is a lot of power, and an energy pulse of only a fraction of a watt becomes a lot of power when the pulses come at a rate of three times ten to the fifteenth power—three quadrillion pulses per second. To deliver forty terawatts to the surface of the Earth at that frequency, with an energy conversion efficiency of say, twenty percent, a sine wave coefficient of RMS power of 0.707, and an attenuation or loss factor of ninety-five percent of the beam energy in passing through the atmosphere, the power supply would still only have to generate a fraction of a watt. A few watts, at most. That’s why your IR detectors couldn’t find it, gentlemen; a coffeepot radiates more heat.

“Some of you may recall reading of instances where buildings, or bridges, were set in harmonic motion by the wind, or by traffic passing over them. They began oscillating, each oscillation stronger than the one before, increasing in amplitude as the resonant signal continued pumping the system, until they whipped themselves to pieces. That’s why soldiers march in route step when crossing a bridge, to break up any repeating impulse. Even dogs, with their peculiar trotting gait, have been known to set a suspension bridge into violent motion. Those are classical, elementary examples. Neither the soldiers or the dog could knock down a bridge by kicking or stomping on it, but by simply walking across it in a synchronous step that matches the bridge’s periodic chord, they can. Simple harmonic coupling.”

Johnson continued, “Closer to our time and technology, laser cavities are commonly pumped with an extraneous energy source, at the resonant frequency of the cavity. The valence electrons in the lasing medium, usually a gas or dye, are pumped up with energy until they simply can’t hold it any longer. When the electrons pass the threshold of their ability to absorb energy, they cascade to ground potential, giving up the trapped energy as a monochromatic burst of electromagnetic radiation, or simply put, an intense beam of colored light.

“All this happens in a few microseconds, of course. Not a lot of energy involved, overall, but look what it can do—burn through metal, or carry a TV picture to Mars.

“In the case of this weapon, though, that’s where the similarity ends. The electrons in the target material aren’t allowed to drop back to a neutral state. If the timing was uneven, and some electrons reached saturation before others, the result would be a mild electric current flow, as the free electrons traveled through the material and bumped other electrons off their parent atoms. Each atom that lost an electron would become a positively charged ion for a few microseconds, until another stray electron came along and filled the void created by the missing one. The thermal effect of the electric heating might warm a metal object, but that’s about all. The charge on the atoms would then be in balance again. The net effect would be a lot of random heat generated by sporadic electric currents, but nothing truly destructive.

“The factors that make the difference are time and uniformity of energy distribution in the target material. Electrons travel through matter at a finite speed. In a copper wire, it’s about a hundred and forty thousand meters per second, much less than one percent of the speed of light. Now, for the sake of argument, let’s say that an energy beam moving at the speed of light ionized almost all the atoms in a chunk of material—gave them a positive charge—all at once. Like charges repel one another. Each resonant pump of the beam would force the atoms to a higher energy state. The energy beam would do this so fast that the electrons would not have time to flow between atoms; they would all be simultaneously repelled, and blown away completely. They would be forced away from the nucleus, out into the space normally occupied by the covalent electronic bonds—the shared electron orbits between associated atoms that hold matter together. It would make every atom in the matrix of the substance repel every other atom, and the substance would fly apart with tremendous energy.”