The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [8]
DeFanti’s laptop broke the silence with a pinging sound. “Well, here we go then,” DeFanti said.
“The Iridium flash already? That’s great.”
DeFanti glanced into his laptop and rattled off coordinates.
“How do I input those over here?” said the Dot-Commie, at his scope.
“Do it manually.”
“Do I look like I do things manually?”
DeFanti stepped across and aligned the bigger telescope as well as his own. The two of them pressed their heads to their cold rubber eyepieces.
“Been to Sri Lanka lately?” DeFanti said.
“Nope. Should I go there? The jet’s all warmed up.”
“I sent e-mail to Dr. Clarke there. The ‘Father of the Communications Satellite.’”
The Dot-Commie jerked erect from his eyescope. He was stunned. “Arthur C. Clarke? The Arthur C. Clarke?”
“Yes, and Dr. Clarke answered me. He was very polite.”
“Tom, that is fantastic. What an honor! I saw 2001 when I was three years old.”
They shut their glowing laptops to help their eyes adjust to night vision. “Are you seeing that haze up there?” DeFanti asked.
“It’s pretty clear tonight, Tom. It is truly tremendous out here. What a treat.”
“That’s wildfire smog. Two years of drought in Colorado. Fires and fire alerts everywhere. The sons of bitches lit up that public park like Coney Island. There are state and county dark-sky ordinances, but they’re feds, so they just ignore us. ‘Sue us,’ that’s their attitude. A bunch of arrogant, wise-ass, brass-bottomed jacks-in-office . . .”
“I saw a flash!” the Dot-Commie yelped.
DeFanti switched eyes at his rubber eyepiece. No use. You had to be there just at the instant.
“It was like the flash off a rearview mirror,” the Dot-Commie reported. “Metallic. Brief, yet intense.”
“Back in the good old Wild West days, the U.S. Cavalry used heliographs,” DeFanti said as he fruitlessly searched his patch of sky. There could be three, or even four flashes if the bird’s attitude-control was going. But he was seeing nothing but stars.
“The Cavalry once sent a flash of sunlight off a mirror that was visible for ninety miles. The British Army used signal mirrors in Afghanistan. Can you imagine that? An army fighting with mirrors in Afghanistan.”
“Afghanistan’s not a consumer market,” said the Dot-Commie. “Will there be more glints?”
“Maybe,” said DeFanti. They waited. “No,” he said finally. He straightened his aching back.
The Dot-Commie opened his laptop, woke the screen, and punched at keys. “So what do you make of our problem, Tom? I know it’s a lot of money. But we can do that. We’ve got loads of market money now. Buckets.”
“Okay, straight from the gut, kid. Here’s the deal. You can’t turn an enterprise around on the word of one guy from R&D. It doesn’t matter if he’s brilliant or even if he’s technically correct. The middle-level people just won’t go for that politically.”
“Truth and technology will win over bull and bureaucracy, Tom. That’s the story of the New Economy.”
“No, kid, the truth does not win. For a couple of quarters the truth gets somewhere maybe. If everybody’s real excited. But never in the long run, never.” DeFanti shrugged. “The common wisdom always wins. Consensus, perception management, and the word on The Street. The markets, kid, the machine. The markets will go ape if we get all sweaty about some obscure security problem and start firing our established personnel. That move is panicky. It’s just not professional.”
“You’re not Getting It here, Tom.”
“Kid, I knew you would tell me that. I’m not so old that I’m blind and deaf yet. I know that it’s a dangerous situation. It’s dangerous like mixing Deep Black intelligence and also owning the media. But I do that anyway, because dangerous is what pays.