The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [108]
“I guess not.”
“Had my own consulting company for a while, that didn’t work out. Just lately it’s missile defense.”
Van tried not to stare. Missile defense? Star Wars? The ultimate in pseudoscience phony baloney? The great Jim Cobb reduced to working on Star Wars?
Van glumly supposed that there was money in it. A huge amount of money had been thrown away on Star Wars.
“It’s not like you think,” Cobb lied. He tipped his martini rim below his white mustache. “It’s the Airborne Laser project. Air Force.”
“Oh,” Van said with a nod, “the photonic emissions.”
“To tell the truth, that’s not the part they have me working on.”
Van lifted his brows. The Cyber-Security crowd was getting a bit liquored up and noisy. Ted squirmed vigorously in his arms.
Cobb stared emptily over Van’s right shoulder. “You have to imagine,” Cobb told him, “trying to stuff one hundred and eighty thousand pounds of laser equipment into one 747 cargo jet. That’s the Airborne Laser. They need fourteen laser modules to shoot down missiles, and six of them already outweigh any jet’s lifting capacity. Chemical laser. Huge, flying tanks of chlorine, iodine, and hydrogen peroxide. The devil’s brew, that stuff. It sloshes. Oh, boy, it sloshes.” Cobb leaned way back, lifting his free arm. “You are trying to aim that giant, flying chemical laser at a rising missile that is clearing a silo . . .”
“It’s a death ray?”
“Lasers never work well,” said Cobb, wobbling back upright. “Lasers are always underpowered. Lethality is in the kilojoule per centimeter range. You just can’t do efficient optical coupling in chlorine-iodine wavelengths. There are ways to slide those pulses around, but when it comes to combining them . . .” Cobb started to hand-wave. He looked for a place to set his empty martini glass. He failed to find one. He absently tucked the narrow stem of the glass into Ted’s sweaty little fist.
Suddenly Cobb was searching in his jacket. He found a business card and handed it over. Cobb’s card had an old-school ARPANET address, nothing but dots and numerals.
“Mama,” said Ted agreeably. Dottie had arrived. To Van’s astonishment, she was wearing a short black cocktail dress. Dottie had hose and heels. She had earrings that matched her necklace.
Dottie gently relieved Ted of his empty martini glass. “I think I’d better get you a fresh one, Ted.”
“This is Jim Cobb,” said Van. “From Bell Labs. My wife Dottie, Dr. Cobb.”
“Oh, yes, Bell Labs,” said Dottie brightly. “The three-degree cosmic background radiation!”
“They thought that was pigeon crap,” Cobb told her, blinking.
“I beg your pardon?”
“That microwave hiss from the birth of the universe. They thought it was pigeon droppings inside the Bell equipment. So they cleaned out the horn. Then they found out that it was the universe radiating right at us.”
“That’s quite a story,” said Dottie.
“They were looking for crap and they found cosmic significance. The very opposite of most scientific endeavors!”
Dottie stared at Cobb. It was a rare privilege to hear Bell Labs humor, straight from the source. “My husband often speaks of you, Dr. Cobb. He’s a big admirer of your work.”
“Love to have you out to the BMDO,” said Cobb to Van, slurring a little. “I’d show you that COEA.”
Tony reappeared. Tony was escorting a woman who was almost certainly the most attractive woman at the event. She turned out to be the wife of a colonel at the Center for Strategy and Technology at the Air War College. She quickly took Cobb in hand, chatting at him amiably.
“Your AFOXAR people are still inside my damn plane,” Tony told Van. “Meet me there before the demo, all right? We’ve got to cross some i’s and dot some t’s.”
“Tony, I can’t do anything they can’t do. They’re fully trained Air Force technicians.”
“You and I need to talk, Van.”
Van scowled. “You’re not getting cold feet about this, are you?”
Dottie broke in. “He’ll be there, Tony.”
Tony nodded and moved on. Van looked at her, upset. “What was that about? Ted and I were just about to bring you the fruit plate.”
“Honey, that was over