The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [74]
Wessler sat down again. “I don’t get a briefing like this every day.”
“No,” Van agreed.
“Where the hell did they dig you up, Dr. Vandeveer? You’re a hell of a guy, and I’ve never even heard of you.”
“MIT,” Van said. “Stanford. And Mondiale.”
Wessler stared as if a toad had jumped from Van’s tongue. “You’re from Mondiale?”
“I’m from Mondiale’s R&D lab,” Van said hastily. “I quit to work for the government.”
“I can’t believe this!” Wessler shouted, standing up again. “You crazy sons of bitches, my mother owned Mondiale stock! You’re a phone company! How did you lose ninety percent of your stock value? You people are completely crooked!”
A moan slipped out of Van. “The whole industry is hurting . . .”
“I can’t go to my best people and tell them to screw up our satellite on the say-so of some goofball from Mondiale!”
“I know that,” Van blurted, waving his hands in panic, “I know that the company hurt a lot of people. But you don’t have to take my word for this! That’s not a problem, not at all! I don’t want any credit for this, no, no! You just have to look at it. That’s all. Look at the bird. See how bad off it is. Shocked or burned. Like that!”
“How?”
“You can send up the Shuttle.”
“Do you know the price of a Shuttle flight? And the scheduling? Those old birds are falling to pieces!”
“Train the Hubble on it. Search it for burn marks.”
“Civilian telescopes are not our department.”
“Just look at it, that’s all,” Van begged. “Do it from the ground.”
“No! Observatories are strictly forbidden to image American spy-sats. I certainly wouldn’t want them getting started! Besides, they lack that technical capacity.”
Van had nothing left to say. His wife’s new adaptive-optic telescope would certainly have that capacity. But it was two years away from coming online. By then, it would be no use.
Hickok stared down at Van, expecting some final wizard miracle from him, but Van realized that he was beaten. He couldn’t believe that Mondiale had brought his whole scheme crashing down. But that made a horrible sense, for in the last few months Mondiale had screwed up everything in Van’s life. The big shots who had hired him away from Stanford were about to do a perp-walk, in handcuffs, in front of cameras. Guilty of stock fraud. Failures. Disasters. Deceivers. From leaders of a revolution, they had turned into liars and cheats.
Van had done his best, but he had blown it.
“What the hell’s going on here?” said Hickok loudly. “I got your problem fixed, General! And you won’t even look?”
“This guy is from Mondiale!”
“Like Lockheed’s better? That bird could save the life of Special Forces spotters in Afghanistan! You’re telling me, what, that’s too much work for you? Use a KH-11!”
“That’s completely outside normal channels.”
“You’re gonna let our adversaries destroy our best surveillance asset while you sit here like some jackass?”
Wessler turned beet-red. “Mr. Hickok, you can’t push around a Space Force officer by yelling a bunch of saucer-nut crap. We are the only force on earth that has military space capacity. There is no one else. That’s not even remotely possible.”
“Who cares what your fat-cat industry vendors think is possible? That bird is dying up there! I busted my ass, I got you a genuine gold-plated computer genius here! He can fix the damn thing! If you don’t fix it, then you, you, are betraying our men out in the field.”
Wessler’s throat was moving. Van realized that Wessler was silently counting to ten. Van had never seen a grown man in uniform do that before. It was very frightening. Finally Wessler spoke. “I believe I’ve given you two dilettantes all the time that you need.”
“That does it,” Hickok announced. “I quit!” He took a key from his pocket and undid his wrist-cuff. Then he tossed the briefcase on a metal chair. “This turkey of yours is dead meat! I want no part of this! You useless sumnabitches couldn’t run a model rocket