"Well, Gerry Flynn sings your praises about once a week."
"He's a good man to work for," Gregory replied, with a smile and a nod.
"He says you can do software better than anyone in Sunnyvale."
"For some things. I didn't do the code for 'Doom,' unfortunately, but I'm still your man for adaptive optics."
"How about SAMs?"
Gregory nodded. "I did some of that when I was new in the Army. Then later they had me in to play with Patriot Block-4, you know, intercepting Scuds. I helped out on the warhead software." It had been three days too late to be used in the Persian Gulf War, he didn't add, but his software was now standard on all Patriot missiles in the field.
"Excellent. I want you to look over something for me. It'll be a direct contract for the Office of the Secretary of Defense-me-and Gerry Flynn won't gripe about it."
"What's that, Tony?"
"Find out if the Navy's Aegis system can intercept a ballistic inbound."
"It can. It'll stop a Scud, but that's only Mach three or so. You mean a real ballistic inbound?"
The SecDef nodded. "Yeah, an ICBM."
"There's been talk about that for years…" Gregory sipped his coffee. "The radar system is up to it. May be a slight software issue there, but it would not be a hard one, because you'll be getting raid-warning from other assets, and the SPY radar can see a good five hundred miles, and you can do all sorts of things with it electronically, like blast out seven million watts of RF down half a degree of bearing. That'll fry electronic components out to, oh, seven or eight thousand meters. You'll end up having two-headed kids, and have to buy a new watch.
"Okay," he went on, a slightly spacey look in his eyes. "The way Aegis works, the big SPY radar gives you a rough location for your target-interception, so you can loft your SAMs into a box. That's why Aegis missiles get such great range. They go out on autopilot and only do actual maneuvering for the last few seconds. For that, you have the
SPG radars on the ships, and the seeker-head on the missile tracks in on the reflected RF energy off the target. It’s a killer system against airplanes, because you don't know you're being illuminated until the last couple of seconds, and it's hard to eyeball the missile and evade in so short a time.
"Okay, but for an ICBM, the terminal velocity is way the hell up there, like twenty-five thousand feet per second, like Mach eleven. That means your targeting window is very small… in all dimensions, but especially depth. Also you're talking a fairly hard, robust target. The RV off an ICBM is fairly sturdy, not tissue paper like the boosters are. I'll have to see if the warhead off a SAM will really hurt one of those." The eyes cleared and he looked directly into Bretano's eyes. "Okay, when do I start?"
"Commander Matthews," THUNDER said into his intercom phone. "Dr. Gregory is ready to talk to the Aegis people. Keep me posted, Al" was Bretano's final order.
"You bet."
The Reverend Doctor Hosiah Jackson donned his best robe of black silk, a gift handmade by the ladies of his congregation, the three stripes on the upper arms designating his academic rank. He was in Gerry Patterson's study, and a nice one it was. Outside the white wooden door was his congregation, all of them well-dressed and fairly prosperous white folks, some of whom would be slightly uncomfortable with having a black minister talk to them-Jesus was white, after all (or Jewish, which was almost the same thing). This was a little different, though, because this day they were remembering the life of someone only Gerry Patterson had ever met, a Chinese Baptist named Yu Fa An, whom their minister had called Skip, and whose congregation they had supported and supported generously for years. And so to commemorate the life of a yellow minister, they would sit through the sermon of a black one while their own pastor preached the gospel in a black church. It was a fine gesture on Gerry's part, Hosiah Jackson thought, hoping it wouldn't get him into any trouble with this congregation. There'd be a few out there, their bigoted thoughts invisible behind their self-righteous faces, but, the Reverend Jackson admitted to himself, they'd be tortured souls because of it. Those times had passed. He remembered them better than white Mississippians did because he'd been the one walking in the streets-he'd been arrested seven times during his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference-and getting his parishioners registered to vote. That had been the real problem with the rednecks. Riding in a municipal bus was no big deal, but voting meant power, real civic power, the ability to elect the people who made the laws which would be enforced on black and white citizens alike, and the rednecks hadn't liked that at all. But times had changed, and now they accepted the inevitable-after it had come to pass-and they'd learned to deal with it, and they'd also learned to vote Republican instead of Democrat, and the amusing part of that to Hosiah Jackson was that his own son Robert was more conservative than these well-dressed rednecks were, and he'd gone pretty far for the son of a colored preacherman in central Mississippi. But it was time. Patterson, like Jackson, had a large mirror on the back of the door so that he could check his appearance on the way out. Yes, he was ready. He looked solemn and authoritative, as the Voice of God was supposed to look.
The congregation was already singing. They had a fine organ here, a real hundred-horsepower one, not the electronic kind he had at his church, but the singing… they couldn't help it. They sang white, and there was no getting around it. The singing had all the proper devotion, but not the exuberant passion that he was accustomed to… but he'd love to have that organ, Hosiah decided. The pulpit was finely appointed, with a bottle of ice water, and a microphone provided by the CNN crew, who were discreetly in both back corners of the church and not making any trouble, which was unusual for news crews, Reverend Jackson thought. His last thought before beginning was that the only other black man to stand in this pulpit before this moment was the man who'd painted the woodwork.
"Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. I am Hosiah Jackson. You all probably know where my church is. I am here today at the invitation of my good friend and colleague, your pastor, Gerry Patterson.
"Gerry has the advantage over me today, because, unlike me, and I gather unlike any person in the church, he actually knew the man whom we are here to remember.
"To me, Yu Fa An was just a pen pal. Some years ago, Gerry and I had occasion to talk about the ministry. We met in the chapel at the local hospital. It'd been a bad day for both of us. We'd both lost good people that day, at about the same time, and to the same disease, cancer, and both of us needed to sit in the hospital chapel. I guess we both needed to ask God the same question. It's the question all of us have asked- why is there such cruelty in the world, why does a loving and merciful God permit it?
"Well, the answer to that question is found in Scripture, and in many places. Jesus Himself lamented the loss of innocent life, and one of his miracles was the raising of Lazarus from the dead, both to show that He was indeed the Son of God, and also to show His humanity, to show how much He cared about the loss of a good man.
"But Lazarus, like our two parishioners that day in the hospital, had died from disease, and when God made the world, He made it in such a way that there were, and there still are, things that need fixing. The Lord God told us to take dominion over the world, and part of that was God's desire for us to cure disease, to fix all the broken parts and so to bring perfection to the world, even as, by following God's Holy Word, we can bring perfection to ourselves.