David's Sling (26 page)

While Kelvin idly stirred sugar into the steaming liquid, Nathan asked, "Do you believe the only way to defeat tanks is with more tanks?"

Kelvin paused. "It's the only method that has worked so far. We've tried handheld TOW missile launchers. But if somebody kills the man guiding the missile, the missile crashes." He shuddered. "The Russians have gotten very good at killing the man." Anger entered his eyes, and he seemed suddenly to be much larger. "We lost thousands of good men trying to make that tactic work. We can't make that kind of mistake again."

Nathan nodded. "Never again. In some sense, the Russians are fighting the TOW missile with Information Age techniques. They're killing the information-processing part of the missile—the man who aims it. "

Kelvin considered that for a moment. "I suppose so."

"Listen." Nathan pushed for a revelation in General Kelvin's perspective. "We both know how easy it is to prove that a project is a failure—it's as easy as proving that a project is a success. To prove failure, list the weaknesses, without mentioning any strengths. To prove success, list the strengths without mentioning any weaknesses." He brought his hand down in a chopping motion. "General, we can't afford either of those two distortions to influence our decisions here. In addition to showing you the strengths of the Sling, I am committed to exposing for you every flaw we can think of. It's a scary list. But we would be leading you, and the country, across a bridge made of tissue paper if we didn't give you that list. "

Nathan pointed his hand at the general. "But we need something from you, too, for our honesty to work. You can't just look at the list of problems and shut us down. You must help us find ways to make the system work despite the problems."

A mischievous smile crossed Kelvin's lips. He shoved the coffee aside. "Very well. Show me that it
might
work. If you show me it might work, I'll believe you."

Excellent." Nathan felt some tension relax in his neck muscles. Kelvins attitude was very Zetetic. At least he understood his own prejudices.

Kelvin interrogated him at length about matters that Nathan rarely had to discuss—not the flashy technology of the Hunters, but questions whose answers could make the difference between success and failure: What do the troops have to know to operate a Hopper? What will they have to feed it after a battle? How do they repair it when it breaks?

They don't repair it, General. They throw it away when it breaks. It's disposable, like a razor blade or a paper cup."

They argued the wisdom of this philosophy—it had great strengths and great weaknesses.

When a break opened in the discussion, Nathan said, "You haven't seen any of our Hunters in action, have you? Let me show you our simulation runs." He rose.

Kelvin followed with a shake of his head. "Skip the sims. Simulations always look convincing—they're the ultimate tool for showing strengths while hiding weaknesses. I don't believe them at all."

Nathan laughed. "In earlier times, people talked about how good projects looked on paper. Now, they talk about how good they look on simulation. And a simulation can distort reality even more than paper, if abused with sufficient skill." His tone hardened. "I assure you that Juan does not build delusionary scenarios. He maintains a harshness in his sims that gets as close to reality as you can get. If he isn't sure how brutal reality is, he makes the simulation more brutal than reality could possibly be." He looked over at the general. "Still, we can do better. I'll show you live videotapes of Hunters in action. You'll see the real machines at their finest—and at their worst."

"Much better."

"We'll stop for Juan on the way up; he probably has the best overview of the strengths and idiosyncrasies of the system. In some sense, Juan
is
each one of the Hunters: he creates the simulations."

Nathan stepped back into the Tieton Room, to see Juan at a work station again, his mouth hanging wide, his eyes locked open. Nathan inhaled sharply, afraid of the trancelike, epileptic quality of his stare.

But Juan blinked and started typing again.

In a whisper to avoid disturbing the others, Nathan asked him, "Are you all right?"

"Sure," Juan muttered without looking up.

"Can I disturb you to come talk with General Kelvin for a few minutes?"

He shrugged, a weary gesture. His eyes drooped. "Why not? I'm not doing much good here." Smoothly flicking a sequence of power buttons, he rose to follow Nathan.

"I'm planning to show him the tapes of the live tests in the firing range, to give him a feel of how the Hunters
really
work."

Juan screwed up his face with doubt. He looked at Kelvin. "Are you sure you want that much truth, all at once?"

Nathan watched Kelvin's jaw work in annoyance.

Juan continued. "Well, if you want even more reality, we're going to go play pinball," he glanced at his watch, "in about twenty minutes."

The general stared at Juan. "You're going to play
what?
"

"We're going to play pinball." He smiled with assumed innocence. His weariness had disappeared in the renewed twinkling of his eyes.

Nathan ended the impasse. "That's the local name for running a live test. If you're not too tired from your journey, come and watch a HopperHunter go nose to nose with a Soviet battalion. The Soviets are fakes, of course, but the Hunter is real." He couldn't resist a smile that mirrored Juan's. "As for why we call it pinball, you'll understand after you've seen the battle. "

When Kelvin accepted the offer, Nathan turned back to Juan. "We'll meet you out on the Point."

He led the general out of the room, out of the Thunderbird, and into the parking lot, to an Eagle Scout four-wheel jeep.

Looking at the sad state of the jeep, Kelvin gasped, then laughed. "You
have
been at war out here. "

"Yes." Nathan knew what Kelvin meant: whenever Nathan looked at the Eagle, he wondered what archaeologists would think thousands of years from now, if they found such a vehicle buried beneath the sands of Yakima.

With just a little more caked-on dirt, the Eagle would have been buried right there in the parking lot. Sand packed itself around the mirrors and the grill; the gold-brown powder smeared across the window in a frosting that would not melt or scrape away. "We've only been out here two days, and our jeeps already look like sand dunes. I suppose we could get someone to wash them, but it wouldn't make any difference." Nathan sighed. Then, laughing, he said, "We signed a statement with Avis promising that we wouldn't drive off-road. Of course, we didn't discuss
our
idea of a road, as opposed to
their
idea of a road. " He slapped the roof with joy. "Any old rut qualifies as a road in the Yakima Firing Range."

"Why didn't you just buy the jeeps?" Kelvin demanded. "Money isn't a problem."

"We may have to buy them in the end." Nathan shrugged. "This seemed easier at the time. They rent jeeps at the airport; they don't sell them."

They climbed into the Eagle and closed the doors, unleashing spumes of dust. General Kelvin waved his hand to clear the air, which only served to stir the dust more thoroughly.

More of the fine powder adhered to Nathan's lungs with every breath. He could smell it—the distinctive, gritty smell of the desert. "You can't beat it," Nathan explained with the fatalism of a priest giving last rites. "The best strategy is to pretend that you like it." Keying the ignition, he brought the engine coughing to life.

Kelvin snorted.

Nathan turned right onto North First Street, heading toward I-82. They drove in silence for a time. When Kelvin spoke again, his voice seemed almost dreamy. "I'd forgotten what Yakima was like."

"So you've been here before," Nathan led him forward in the discussion.

"I think everybody in the Army comes here sooner or later." The general gazed around at the austere, rolling beauty of the desert, with the look of a man coming home.

Nathan took advantage of the general's relaxed mood to ask him about himself. Kelvin had a son in the Air Force in Germany. He knew that his son had probably died in the first hammering clashes of the war. If he was not dead, he was a prisoner. The American aircraft, superior though they were to their Soviet counterparts, had been hopelessly outnumbered. The Soviet swarm shot them down over terrain that Soviet divisions quickly overran.

They passed Range Benchmark 1944, then started up the hill that the Sling team used for observing the tests at close hand; they had dubbed it the Point. Before Nathan and Kelvin reached the top, Nathan knew about General Kelvin's frustrations with the modem Army, his occasional disagreements with his daughter, and his resigned acceptance that he would never get a third star. "Of course, if this war were to continue for a couple of years, I would surely get promoted." He shook his head. "At that price, I'd rather not."

Nathan pointed out, "If the Sling saves the day, you might yet get your three stars, and without an endless bloodbath."

They reached the Point. A van lumbered over the same ruts their jeep had used. "Here come the troops," he said, pointing at the brittle dinosaur struggling against the harsh landscape. "We bring a lot of equipment with us on these trips. Perhaps more than we can really afford."

"Leave the van here, and get duplicates of the equipment," Kelvin ordered. "In fact, put two completely outfitted vans up here, for backup. We can't waste time moving stuff around like that. " He looked around. It's not like anyone was likely to steal it out here."

"You're right. Everyone will be delighted to leave everything here."

The van bounced onto the hilltop and stalled next to the jeep. The door opened, and both Nathan and Kelvin squeezed in with the rest of the Sling team. Nathan introduced Kelvin to Lila and Ronnie; they had left Flo behind at the Thunderbird to sleep.

Juan clapped his hands. "Well, gang, lets do it," he said, squeezing himself into the controller chair. Twin monitors lit up and stereo speakers hissed. Nathan watched Kelvin watch the screen.

The new HopperHunter, Hyacinth, came to life with the whine of turbine engines. Dust clouds boiled across the screen. Juan started a team monologue. "We're watching through Hyacinth's stereoscopic cameras. Of course, the hopper's view is better than ours: its sensors run through radar and infrared, not just optical wavelengths." Juan's voice echoed oddly in the confined metal space.

On the speakers, the turbine's whine coughed; the dust cloud parted before them as the hopper surged forward. The dust cloud had been induced by Hyacinth's hovering.

Gaining speed, Hyacinth hurtled over the sagebrush, dropped with sickening suddenness into a ravine, and popped out again, all the while swiveling its camera from side to side.

It came to the base of a mountain and started straight up, with no noticeable loss of speed. Leslie spoke. "This maneuver's really hard on the engines. The power team performed a miracle, pumping her acceleration like that without blowing the compressors. "

Hyacinth crested the mountain. The view opened on a valley. Vast though it was, in comparison with the limitless plains stretching beyond the next series of hills, it seemed quite tiny. Kurt commented, "From here we get a quick image of the enemy positions before going in."

The word "quick" got an odd punctuation mark from the hopper itself, for it did not slow down as it reached the lip of a precipice and plunged over. Nathan heard Kelvin gasp. Nathan felt it, too; this part of the trip always left him feeling queasy.

He wondered why no one else on this team shared his motion sickness, as Ronnie explained eagerly, "We spent almost a month fixing that leap so we wouldn't crash on the way down." Indeed, Hyacinth had landed gently on a ledge, one edge of its ground-effect skirt hanging over the side, then it plunged again, and again, in a fantastic series of hops.

Kurt spoke in the brisk but respectful voice peculiar to a soldier addressing a superior. "Sir, by coming up over the cliff in this maneuver, our view of the battlefield doesn't expose us to artillery fire." A slightly gloating expression entered his eyes. "Of course, we're pretty hard to kill even when they know exactly where we are, but why take chances?"

Hyacinth had reached the floor of the valley now. The camera jittered across the landscape as the hopper itself jumped in a staccato dance, fast, slow, left, right, a patternless modern ballet whose rhythm matched the beat of hailstones against a roof. Tanks and cannons would indeed have a very hard time lining up a shot on the unpredictable hopper.

Lila muttered, "I'm sorry the image is so hard to follow. The last time we came out here, I decided that we needed to reset the transmitted image to show an averaged view, after the second-stage image processing. But I forgot when we got back to the motel. She turned to the general with a shrug. "Next time it'll be easier to see what's happening, I promise."

Despite the bouncing of the screen, they could see the target on which the hopper now homed. A dozen troops hustled across the exposed land, occasionally turning to fire. It was easy to see which soldier was giving the orders, and Hyacinth saw it even as Nathan did. A crosshair appeared on the screen, and the image flashed bright red for a moment. Meanwhile, the speakers roared with the muffled sound of a machine gun.

Juan explained, "That was the hopper firing. Needless to say, since those are real troops, we're using blanks. Otherwise, we would have a very dead lieutenant out there."

The hopper turned to the right, away from the troops it had been approaching.

"What's wrong?" Kelvin asked. "Why isn't it finishing off that platoon?"

Nathan smiled. "For shame, General. We have no intention of wasting our limited ammunition on those men.

Didn't you notice which single person we shot? The one who gives the orders. The HopperHunter will leave those men, leaderless, to stop, or to go on in confusion to defeat. We can let them live—and we have to, because we don't carry enough ammunition to kill every soldier we see. "

Hyacinth hit a ravine and, dropping into its narrow channel, accelerated in a new direction. "This is scary," Ronnie muttered. "It's a good thing my software drives Hyacinth better than Kurt drives the van."