"For me?" Leland asked groggily.
"Yes, sir. I need you to sign for it, but I'm afraid I'm all out of pens. If I may, could I borrow one of yours?"
"Yeah, sure. Just a second." Leland turned and walked toward a pencil holder by his telephone. As he bent over to retrieve the pencil, Leland heard the door slam. He spun around to see the postman pointing a pistol at his chest. "Hey, what the hell is this?" he demanded.
The "postman" kept the gun rock steady. "I must know, Mr. Leland, are we alone?"
"Huh?" Leland's mouth was wide open.
"Please do not make me repeat myself, Mr. Leland. Now tell me. Are we alone?"
"What? Uh, well, yeah, we're alone, but I don't—"
A muffled thunt! spat from the barrel of the P7. The 9mm hollow-point slug caught Leland square in the sternum, lifting him off his feet and pinning him against the wall. He stayed there for a moment, looking back at the postman with an empty gaze. Then his eyes rolled up and he fell over in a clump, leaving a red stain on the wall.
The postman locked the door and quickly inspected the one-bedroom apartment. Leland had told the truth. They were indeed alone. He felt for his victim's pulse, and there was none. Then he went into the bedroom, where he searched through the cluttered dresser top and found what appeared to be a work schedule. The postman looked at it carefiilly, and ascertained that Leland — a power systems technician — had just returned from a night shift of working on the Constellation. He went to the closet and extracted Leland's hard hat and a pair of the white coveralls that all technicians wore in the gantry area. The postman pulled on the coveralls, put the hard hat under his arm, and replaced the P7 in the box. He grabbed Leland's keys from the dresser and locked the door on his way out. After scanning the parking lot, he quickly made his way to the dead man's Toyota and drove off toward the Beeline Expressway and Cape Canaveral.
Orbiting above the Earth's polluted atmospheric veil was one of the most precise scientific instruments ever assembled by man. Over a decade of design, engineering, fabrication, grinding, and polishing had gone into its construction, at a cost of over $1.2 billion. But the payoff for the money, and the four million plus man-hours that went into it, was nothing less than cosmic.
The Hubble Space Telescope looked like a 43-foot-long "tall boy" beer can with blinders attached. With this goofy-looking instrument, astronomers were able to see celestial objects fifty times fainter, obtain images ten times sharper, and peer seven times deeper into the universe than with conventional earth-bound telescopes.
At one end of the beer can was the heart of the Hubble — its 94-inch reflective mirror. Although smaller than Mount Palo-mar's 200-inch reflector, it was a great deal more precise. To illustrate its precision: if the Hubble's 94-inch mirror were enlarged to a disk three thousand miles in diameter, its largest imperfection would be four inches high.
The revolutionary mirror was made of an extraordinary material called ultra low expansion (ULE) glass, manufactured by Corning Glass Company. The ULE glass could endure the large temperature swings of outer space without expanding and contracting like conventional glass.
The Perkin-Elmer Corporation fabricated the ULE glass into a concave structure with a honeycomb base, then ground and polished the surface with a computer-controlled robotic arm for twenty-five weeks. In a heat-and-vacuum process, the mirror was then coated with a film of aluminum 2.5 millionths of an inch thick to provide it with a reflective surface.
When the telescope was pointed at a target, the image came in the open end of the beer can, struck die 94-inch primary mirror, bounced to the 12.5-inch secondary mirror, then was reflected into the telescope's instrument array, which dissected the image for analysis. The on-board electronic instruments, powered by the solar panel "blinders," transmitted the data to Goddard. It was then passed to the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for subsequent analysis and dissemination.
How sensitive was the Hubble? From its low earth orbit it could detect a candle burning on the moon. It expanded the observable universe by 350 times, allowing scientists to observe celestial objects fourteen billion light-years away — almost to the beginnings of time as man comprehended it.
The incredible instrument was named for famed American astronomer Edwin Hubble. When Hubble began his career, conventional astronomical theory postulated that the known universe terminated at the end of our Milky Way galaxy. Hubble demonstrated that the universe went beyond our own tiny Milky Way. Indeed, the universe contained billions of galaxies, all hurtling and expanding through space at cosmic speeds. His contribution to astronomy was perhaps greater than Galileo's.
But now, the telescope bearing Hubble's name was repositioning itself for a different purpose. The unknown Russian satellite launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome was traveling in a polar orbit, while the Hubble was circling the globe in a quasi-equatorial path. The orbital trajectories of the two spacecraft would roughly intersect on opposite sides of the globe once very forty-five minutes. The Soviet satellite was in the lower orbit, while the telescope was traveling above it. The technician at Goddard issued instructions for the Hubble to track the Soviet satellite as it passed underneath the telescope on the sunny side of the earth. This was like driving your car over an overpass while keeping your eyes on a car traveling underneath you from left to right.
On command from the ground controller, the telescope's maneuvering thrusters were engaged and the entire mechanism pivoted into position. When the Russian satellite passed from darkness to sunlight the scope's protective aperture door flipped open, allowing the primary mirror to capture the tiny image.
"Mr. Tompkins," who had first become the "postman," was now Leland the power technician driving his Toyota sedan across the Indian River on NASA Causeway West, approaching the Kennedy Space Center (KSC).
The reason why the genuine Leland had had to be "taken out" — KGB jargon for "murdered" — was the security system at KSC, and in particular, Pads 39A and 39B, which handled shutde traffic. First, to obtain access to the employee parking area, an intruder would have to have the proper sticker on his bumper. If he did, then he would be waved past the security guard's hut at the main entry gate. Obtaining a forged bumper sticker from Moscow Centre was not a problem — Mr. Tompkins had done that often enough. Taking Leland's Toyota had been more of a convenience than a necessity.
But beyond the parking lot, access to the pad area became a bit more sticky. Technicians working on Pad 39A had to pass through an access/locker room building, which was the only passage through the ten-foot-high, sensor-laden cyclone fence that ringed the entire pad complex. It was in this building that technicians could change clothes and shower if they wished, and that access through the security fence was controlled. An employee had to pass through a "cattie chute" where a guard checked the worker's photo ID, matched his name against an access list, and signed him in or out. Work schedules on the pad were erratic prior to launches — a technician might work ten hours, leave for six, then return to the pad for another twelve hours. That was why Leland had to be taken out. It simply wouldn't do for Mr. Tompkins to show up posing as Leland when Leland was already signed in, or have Leland show up after Mr. Tompkins had entered the complex. That would be a screaming red flag to the guard.
For two years, Mr. Tompkins had studied photographs of KSC, followed individual employees home and tracked their work patterns, and used scuba gear to take pictures from offshore. Additionally, he'd pasted a forged bumper sticker on a Chevy van and parked it in the employee parking lot to study movements, procedures, and guard changes at the access building. He'd chosen Leland only after a careful appraisal indicated the technician was unmarried and apparently had little social life. The body probably wouldn't be discovered for days.