David's Sling (28 page)

Lila shrugged. "I don't know. I don't know. " She slumped into the chair. Nathan and Kelvin left her alone with her Oriole and Kurt's Caesar.

The wreckage of Hyacinth remained in the shallow grave of the ravine and the next hopper in the test group took its place in the gauntlet. Marigold now scurried across the plains and into combat with enemy bunkers—low, sloping bulwarks of earth and concrete. Juan, Lila, and Flo watched the patterns of fire and crossfire quietly—too quietly. So quietly that Nathan sensed a problem. He looked around the room and asked, "What's wrong?"

A sick look of exhaustion crossed Juan's features. "We fixed it, we think. But we're still not sure why our fix worked. "

Kelvin started to turn purple. "You don't
know
?" He looked from side to side, then back. "What about your sim? What was wrong with it?"

Juan drew his long, elegant fingers down across his face, to pause at his throat. His hand settled there to rest, emphasizing the slow, calming rhythm of his breathing. "Nothing. "

The general's eyes bugged out. "How can that be?"

No one answered. Nathan broke the deadlock. "General, let me assure you that the answers will not become any clearer if you and I stand here pressuring everybody. The worst enemy of anyone trying to find a subtle problem is anxiety. Make them anxious enough by hounding them, and they'll never find it. " Nathan tapped Kelvin on the shoulder. "Besides, we haven't breathed enough dust yet today. Let's go outside and watch this run with binoculars." With a stiff turn, Kelvin followed him out of the Refrigerator, onto the wind-swept ridge overlooking the silica mines. Nathan peered down over the valley and muttered, "Where is everything?"

At this Kelvin laughed, a short release of tension. "You'd be a terrible failure as a HopperHunter, Nathan Pilstrom. Or as a forward observer. " His index finger plucked points out of the desert, commenting, "Bunker, arty, copter field, bunker . . ." His sure, precise pointing reminded Nathan of the movements of programmers, pointing and clicking on the software objects they controlled. With a touch of revelation, Nathan saw General Kelvin in a new light: he was a programmer of battlefields.

Kelvin stopped listing out objects, squinted, and held his binoculars up to look at a far corner of the valley. "And there's the hopper," he said with a lingering smile.

Nathan held up his binoculars and watched the hopper's crazy war dance across the field, leaving chaos wherever it went. It seemed somehow more ridiculous when viewed from this vantage point; before, they had always watched the action through the hoppers own cameras. But their new perspective also gave Nathan a striking view of the hopper's effectiveness. When watching through the hopper's cameras, he never saw the reactions of the men to the hopper's attacks. With the binoculars, Nathan could linger to watch the consequences. The opposing troops always stopped in confusion, melting from a tight team to a loose rabble.

Kelvin echoed his thoughts. "Ridiculous," he muttered about the Hunter, "but deadly."

Marigold completed the gauntlet with swift precision, a surgeon carefully slicing tumors from dusty flesh. But when Nathan returned to stick his head inside the Refrigerator, no one looked flush with success. "We'll see what the next round shows," Juan said with a grim, remote expression.

So Nathan and the general took one of the helicopters to the new site for SkyHunter tests. Lila had preceded them. Squinting through the tornado of sand thrown up by their landing, they could see her elation as she screwed a sensor clump back into place.

Breaking from the copter cabin, Nathan ran through the miniature sandstorm holding his breath, while tears formed in his gritty eyes.

"I've got it," she yelled in triumph over the din of the helicopter's blades and engine. "I can beat the shadows by adding some extra interpolations on near-infrared bands. All we need to do is switch a couple of our sensing fibers, to get our sensitivity up."

No applause met her explanation. "Hardware problem?" Kelvin asked with fear-filled violence.

Lila stepped back in confusion, not understanding Kelvin's harsh response. She'd expected people to be pleased that they'd found the solution.

"Well, it's partly software for the interpretation, but we'll need hardware mods as well."

Kelvin seemed frozen. Nathan took a deep breath and smiled brightly. I'm delighted that you've found a fix. Will your fix work with the Hoppers as well?"

Lila nodded. "Yeah, and it'll fix the problem in the Crowbars, too. Even though we haven't seen it there yet, we would have."

"Great. How long before we can get Oriole modified for the new sensors?"

"Oriole's going to fly home now. We'll be ready for more testing by evening."

So Nathan and the general shuttled back to the Refrigerator. But when their helicopter arrived, the van was empty. The Eagle Scout was gone. Kelvin spotted the Eagle down in the valley. "They're all down there looking at the Hopper that crashed—Hyacinth. "

Nathan gazed through the binoculars and sagged. "That isn't Hyacinth, he said. "That's Marigold. " He swallowed with disappointment. They had lost another Hopper in a ravine wreck.

Eventually, the Eagle trundled back up the mountainside. Juan sat at the wheel, the shadows under his eyes deeper than Nathan had ever seen them before.

He spoke with the exhaustion of a hospital attendant who has watched a favorite patient enter the operating room for the last time. "We know what the problem is. It's not the software at all, and there wasn't a problem with the sims. The problem is that the Hopper's hardware doesn't meet spec. Its direction control gets sloppy at high speeds."

"How long will it take to fix?" Kelvin asked.

"I don't know." Juan pointed inside the van, where Florence had already disappeared. "Flo's patching through to Cameron Corporation right now. "

Long minutes later, Flo announced they would have an improved Hopper the next day. General Kelvin called them back, to discuss the importance of the Hopper to the nation, and the urgency of getting it today. But altering a fundamental feature of the design was not something that could be hastened by forceful orders from a high authority; they could no more deliver a new machine today than they could repeal the law of gravity.

They continued to test for the rest of the afternoon, but the enthusiasm dropped as low as the safe speed for the last Hopper. No other problems appeared, but it was a pathetic group of developers that slumped in the Tieton Room that evening. No hint of hopefulness could be seen in the orange light of sunset.

Into this gloom Leslie Evans strode—and stopped, as though hitting a wall. "Good God," he exclaimed, "whose funeral is this?"

Juan answered with a pale smile, despite the dark tan of his face. "Yes, it's a funeral all right. Marigold's. And Hyacinth's."

"Yeah, I heard there was some trouble," Les said. I happened to be at Cameron while General Kelvin was chewing them out." He smiled. "They were agitated by the importance of the problem, but they didn't know what to do about it. So I calmed them down and we held an engineering discussion. We figured out some short cuts for putting together a single quicky prototype." He shrugged. "So they gave me an improved Hopper to bring with me. Anyone interested in a little after-dinner testing?

The gloom yielded to a few cautious gleams of hope. Juan stood up and stretched. "You know, I've always been a night person."

"Me, too," Lila agreed.

Kurt shook his head. "The firing range is a treacherous place at night. I'd better come along, too, in case we need to drive around once we get there."

"And I can drive a second jeep, if we need it." Kelvin offered with a smile. "I know my way around here, too."

By nine in the evening they had the new Hopper, Morning Glory, flying a pitch-black course. The Oriole, with new sensors in place, joined it. One by one, they ran the whole series of tests, with only the glimmer of the Yakima stars to fight by. By eleven, they had tried and passed all the tests save one. "This last one is a real cruncher," Juan explained, a mischievous glow in his eyes. "I've got magnesium strobes all over the place. If the Hunters can figure out what they're doing while getting zapped by light like
that
, they may work on a real battlefield."

Kurt objected. "There's nothing like that on a battlefield.

Juan shrugged. "True. But there are many things on a real battlefield that we can't try here. If the Hunters can deal with
this
unanticipated problem, perhaps they can deal with others."

Lila leered at Kurt. "What's wrong, Kurt? Afraid?" She nodded to Juan. "Run it. We'll pass."

She radiated such certainty that Juan coughed back a chuckle. "We shall see."

Across the velvet darkness, the starlight's twinkle retreated from shafts of seering white flashes. The flashes burst against the hillsides, splintering in blinding reflections. Stepping outside, Nathan could dimly hear the whir of Morning Glory, rising and falling in pitch with the busy variations in speed and direction. Lila stepped out to join him. "No effect," she said. "Morning Glory soaks up the data when the lights flash, and flies blind between-times. " She laughed with exultation. "It works."

One by one the others joined them in the cold of a desert midnight. The flashes made one last effort to confuse the Hopper with a violent outpouring of light, then sank into the blackness.

General Kelvin looked around the group. In the faint glow from the Refrigerator's windows, Nathan could see the heady excitement on everyone's faces. Everyone was wide-eyed, despite the long day and longer night: indeed, the success tasted so sweet
because
of that long night.

Kelvin raised an eyebrow at Juan. "Well, mister, are we ready?"

Nathan watched Juan's eyelids droop into the shadows. "No, General, we're not ready. " A smile twitched his lips, and his eyes popped open with furious energy—a fury directed not at the general, but rather at the universe that found so many ways to twist and destroy human endeavor. "But we shouldn't let that stop us. Tell somebody to build as a couple thousand of these things."

They arrived back at the Thunderbird at two in the morn- lag. It was Monday, though it did not feel like the beginning tf the week to anyone. No one was tired. Lila, Juan, and Kurt dragged Ronnie and Florence off to find some dancing music. Nathan, Leslie, and Kelvin turned to the next problem.

Leslie was tapping on the chair arm in Nathan's room, obviously pleased with himself.

Kelvin almost glowered as he asked, "How many days will it take to get Hunters into Europe?"

"About one," Leslie replied. His tapping fingers stopped. "You know, historically, the United States has always won its wars by use of a distinctively American form of brute force: we have won, not because of the hi-tech of our weapons, or the brilliance of our generals—with all due respect, General. We have won because of the hi-tech of our commercial industry—our ability to create huge quantities of equipment in a short time, to drown the enemy in planes and guns and tanks. How can you beat the Americans, who build things faster than you can shoot them?"

Nathan didn't know the punch line yet, but he knew the lead-in. "To beat the Americans, you have to start and finish the war so fast that they don't have time to build anything. "

Leslie nodded his thanks. "Right. Stomp 'em before they can move." He looked back at Kelvin. "And that strategy would have worked back in the '80's or the '90's. There was no way we could've mobilized our industry in time to respond to a surprise attack." He leaped up from his seat, no longer able to control himself. "And today, we still can't mobilize very fast to produce the specialized, custom-built machines our Department of Defense calls weapons. There are only two foundries in the nation that can cast a tank hull. The rest were closed down by the Environmental Protection Agency ages ago, because big foundries were dirty foundries. The whole American economy developed new techniques and new products that didn't need those kinds of foundries—everyone but the military.

Leslie paced faster as he spoke; the room seemed too small to contain him. With his wide, alert eyes, his silver hair, and his tone of authority, he looked like a renowned scientist desperately trying to impart some fraction of his wisdom to slow students. "But the Sling Project and the last ten years of automation have revolutionized our ability to respond to surprise attacks. In the past decade, America has groped its way to a new form of industry. We made the change just in time."

Nathan saw the double meaning; he could see by Leslie's expression that it was intended. Nathan spoke. "Leslie's referring to just-in-time inventorying. In fully automated manufacturing, the manufacturer keeps a minimum of stock in-house. Instead, he links up through a computer network—StockNet, for most companies, another one of the networks run by the Institute—to his customers and to the companies who supply him his raw materials. As his customers' orders increase, his own orders for more parts automatically go out to his own suppliers. The whole sequence can ripple through an industrial network literally at the speed of light. "

Leslie nodded. "It allows dynamic reallocation of resources on a scale that astounds even me, and I've been working with it ever since retiring from the Air Force." His eyes focused on the distance. "In about fifteen minutes, you will watch the most massive reallocation of resources in the history of the world." He strode to Nathan's room terminal. "And thanks to Nathan and the Zetetic StockNet, we will have front-row seats."

General Kelvin sat in quiet disbelief. Nathan felt some sympathy, though he had a dim idea of what would happen now. He had faith in Leslie's analysis: Garrett Technology, the tiny company that Leslie operated and that was nominally in charge of systems integration for the Sling, made most of its money by solving automated manufacturing problems.

Leslie turned from the terminal. "General, we'll need your authorization to hook into MAC." MAC, Nathan knew, was the Military Airlift Command.

Kelvin grunted. "Very well—but it'll be hard to get enough military aircraft to fly all our Hunters over there."