The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [72]
“That December event,” Van said. “Some very similar power surges happened to the Hubble, before the Shuttle crew fixed its Kapton sleeves. The power surges mean that the solar panels were vibrating on their bistems.” Van bucked his hands back and forth. “It means that something almost tore the wings off your spacecraft.”
Van put his Pepsi down. He felt drained. But Wessler had a face like a cross-examining attorney. “We used to have those ‘episodes,’ as you say. But now we have ongoing operational anomalies. What do you make of that?”
Van could handle that question. “That’s BUMPER, your space-junk debris collision program. I looked at BUMPER, too. BUMPER has an unexamined assumption in its design specs. BUMPER assumes that debris cannot intercept a spacecraft from more than ten degrees above or below a plane tangent to the Earth normal.”
Wessler scratched the back of his neck. “Of course. Otherwise that debris would fall right into the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up immediately.”
“No,” said Van. “Not if the debris were coming off of the spacecraft itself. Not big chunks of space junk, not yet. But a fine haze of debris. Ionized. Ablated. Particles and ejecta from violent surface shocks. You would get a dielectric constant on the spacecraft that would reattract those contaminants and precipitate them onto specific areas of the hull.”
“You see, it’s just like a microwave oven, sir,” Hickok broke in helpfully. “You can’t ever get smoke in outer space because there’s no air up there, but if it got blasted by an elf or sprite or like that, then there would be gas and dust. Kinda like a hot cloud of grease.”
“I know what the man’s talking about,” Wessler said tautly.
Hickok shrugged. “Well then, you sure got me beat.”
“I understand it, but there’s no reason for me to believe it,” Wessler said. “Why do I have to believe in elves, all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know,” Van said. “There wasn’t time to fully examine that question. But I do have a working fix for your satellite’s problem.”
“This is where Dr. Vandeveer and I part company, sir,” Hickok said eagerly. “Because I do know! And it’s no damn little elves, either. We are under attack, sir! This is spacewar!”
“What?” said Wessler. “How? Who? The Russians?”
“Well, why not the Russians?” said Hickok. “I’ve met some Russians, sir. I know they’re up for anything.”
“The Russians can’t launch anything at us! I have personally seen their space centers. The Russian space centers are totally broke! They can’t pay their own power bills.”
Hickok bored in. “The Red Chinese are building rockets, sir! They can lift big payloads! I reckon they’re sandbagging us.”
Wessler raised his brows. “What do you make of that concept, Dr. Vandeveer?”
“I don’t believe in sandbagging attacks,” Van said. “Sand is not an effective space weapon. Fine debris like sand would ionize quickly, then it would fall out of orbit. Besides, a cloud of sand from a Chinese rocket would injure other spacecraft, and we haven’t seen any signs of that.” Van pulled at his beard. “Have we seen other signs of that, General?”
Wessler closed his lips tightly. He had nothing to offer on that topic.
Van tried to smile at him. “Let’s all be reasonable here. We don’t have to bring any elves, UFOs, or Communists into this.” He cleared his throat. “Let’s just say . . . cause or causes unknown. Then we can focus on patching this problem you have.”
Wessler’s face set like stone. Van knew that it was time to move right along in a hurry. “Can you help me with my case here, Mike?”
Hickok opened the cork-lined instrument box. Van removed the extra foam-rubber padding. He was very relieved to see that his breadboarding had survived the rough trip from Washington. Van had had to leave his grandfather’s big solder gun back inside Hickok’s Humvee. Van had