The zenith angle (4 page)

in his office and two T-1 trunk lines into his house.

He needed to be practical, though. Outer space would just have to do. Dottie understood this, so she let him work. Dottie needed serious Net access even worse than Van did. Astrophysicists were the world’s heaviest users of scientific broadband. When an astrophysicist wanted to “send a file,” that meant some colossal mountain of data that would simulate the entire atmosphere of the gas-giant Jupiter. Astronomers had such ferocious need for bandwidth that they were up for any scheme that might get it for them, no matter how far-fetched. They even hooked millions of PCs together, in giant volunteer networks, that combed the galaxy around the clock for alien radio signals. Van was doing his best for the two of them. It was a family matter and a question of professional pride. Through misplaced company loyalty, Van had hastily found and grabbed one of Mondiale’s

“Cosmoband” Internet satellite rigs. Since the Cosmoband product was commercially available and sold off-the-shelf to Mondiale’s customers, Van had assumed he would just hook up the dish and get going. But Mondiale had told the world an evil lie.

Van’s PCs worked. His Ethernet worked, after some effort. The batteries worked, until they ran out. The Cosmoband satellite rig was an alien from outer space.

Like most commercial space companies, Cosmoband was battered and humbled. To the awful surprise of its starry-eyed investors, Cosmoband had lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Cosmoband’s little fleet of leftover satellites were scraping the bottom of the cosmic barrel, haunting the niche markets, doing automatic meter-reading and freight-truck asset tracking.

The crippled Cosmoband had been snapped up in one of Mondiale’s legendary acquisition frenzies. This treatment only added to Cosmoband’s troubles. Mondiale’s brass ignored the company, because it lacked any go-go stock-booming growth rates. All the original Cosmoband rocket engineers had run away. Cosmoband’s remaining people were a rabble of cheap hucksters. They offered their so-called Interplanetary Internet in tiny back-page ads in
Popular Mechanics
and
Scientific American.
They had no service guarantees. No service person anywhere ever answered Cosmoband’s phones. And their klutzy old software didn’t mesh with Microsoft’s new releases. Van wanted to punch a big metal hole through the top of the Rover, to install the Cosmoband dish on a truck mount. Dottie, who loved the truck, hated this idea, and worse yet, to do this was no use. No satellite dish ever worked on a car or truck that was moving. The least little bump or pothole always knocked satellite dishes right off their signal.

Marveling at this gross stupidity, Van studied his blurry satellite documentation, badly printed in distant Korea. Baby Ted filled his diapers and shrieked until the Rover’s walls rang with his rage. No one had explained to poor Ted why he had to spend forty-four hours and thirty-nine minutes strapped into a crashproofed car seat. Ted had turned from yuppie puppy into a mobile papoose in bondage. Ted was into a straight-out raw deal.

At a darkened roadside stop near Springfield, Missouri, Dottie pumped gas, her delicate hands clutching the ridged nozzle and heaving Arab oil into the Range Rover’s 24.6-gallon belly. Van was alarmed to find himself actually setting foot in the state of Missouri. He’d flown over the state dozens of times and had never touched Missouri in his life. But Missouri had Coca-Cola and gasoline. Missouri had a stop-and-go mart with a nice clear view of the southern horizon. The mart had heavy-duty power plugs on its outside walls. No one was watching them to see if somebody borrowed a lot of electricity. So Missouri would do.

Yawning Helga, the peevish baby, and a frowning Dottie vanished in search of bathrooms, beef jerky, and Hershey bars. Van parked the Rover in a grimy corner of the tarmac, next to a dripping drain hole and a rusty Dumpster. He plugged in. Then he hauled out his big plastic satellite dish and a tangle of multicolored cables. He set up under moth-clouded streetlights.

Passersby honked at him. The skeptical people of Missouri were laughing at him and his weird satellite gizmo. Cosmoband’s mobile Internet dish looked like a half-melted white surfboard welded to a chrome bar stool. Van was a grown man with a beard and a bad temper, wrestling a
Star Wars
Storm Trooper contraption.

Shaking with road jitters, Van booted the ground-control positioner. The Cosmoband receiver whined and labored grumpily. Then, with dim, mechanical reluctance, it connected. The dish’s target was dusty, old-fashioned, and underused. It was one-fifth the size of Van’s Range Rover. And it was orbiting twenty-three thousand miles above the Earth. Van triumphantly sucked e-mail from the sky.

Dottie appeared. “Honey bear, you want a Slurpee or something?”

“Nope.”

She examined the cables. “Can I log on now?”

“Yep. Right through the LAN.”

A smile broke. “That’s great, Derek!”

As the Rover rolled on, Van read all his mail. Then they stopped the truck again, he hauled the dish out, and grabbed fresh work out of a sequence of Mondiale internal Web sites. He struggled with Mondiale’s broken router code. He spewed more mail back into the sky. Then he did this again. And again. He did it under the stars, and at dawn. Then he slept on the futon. Then he did it again. When they reached Burbank, Van was driving the Rover, the only one left awake. He was six hours ahead of schedule. They had crossed four time zones and broken speed laws in eight states.

THREE

BURBANK, CALIFORNIA, SEPTEMBER 14, 2001

E
xcept for his bone-weariness and persistent itches inside his stale clothes, Van had no problem driving around Burbank. He had spent a lot of time in Burbank with his grandfather, in summers and on holidays. For a time, during his marriage to Grandmother Number Two, Elmer “Chuck” Vandeveer had owned a weekend ranch up in the hills, not far from the Ronald Reagan spread. The times spent on the ranch were Van’s happiest childhood memories. He had much enjoyed falling off horses, setting fire to bales of hay, and shooting rats and rabbits there.

Grandpa Chuck was one of the world’s top aerodynamicists. As a jet designer, he tackled his toy ranch as a make-or-break project: feverishly digging post holes, efficiently splitting firewood. Even Grandpa’s relaxation was high performance. Grandpa’s only true home, the place where he logged all his overtime, the source of his deepest passions in life, was a windowless, two-story concrete bunker, near the Burbank airport. It had lead-lined rooms for antisurveillance. It was frequented by the Air Force elite and the CIA.

Grandpa belonged to the Lockheed Skunk Works.

The city of Burbank had exploded since Van’s childhood in the 1970s, eating every orange grove and rolling up the hills. The palmy streets near the airport were still vaguely familiar to him. Van sensed that he himself had transformed even more radically than the town of Burbank. From a little kid with a popsicle stick, a stammer, bad allergies, and a plastic
Star Wars
X-wing fighter, into a big, quiet, bearded geek with black glasses, smelling of sweat.

Something wasn’t adding up here. Van thumbed at the Rover’s GPS, alarmed. He had input the proper street address, but he didn’t recognize the neighborhood at all. This was not his grandfather’s elder-care facility.

Van had rarely seen his grandfather during the long hectic frenzy of the dot-com boom. Since he’d left Stanford, he’d scarcely seen his grandfather at all. Old folks’ homes were far from cheerful places. Phone calls, e-mail, digital Christmas cards, and digital photos of the baby. That was pretty much it between himself and his grandpa Chuck. But now the GPS had guided him to a completely unknown destination. It appeared to be a private home, a cheap stucco duplex. Worse yet, it was only 6:17 in the morning, local California time. Van pulled to the overgrown grassy curb and stopped the Rover. He got out, and gently shut the solid door, with care for his sleeping brood. When he stretched, his cramped spine popped loudly in three places. Carpal tunnel twinged in his overworked wrists.

Feeling lost and absurd, Van approached the front door. Duplex A belonged to “C. Chang,” while Duplex B listed a “J. Srinivasan.” Van had rushed headlong to California to find his grandfather mysteriously replaced by two immigrant families. And he had no other address for Elmer Vandeveer. Van dismally pondered his next move. It was past eight o’clock on the East Coast. He might call his mother in Georgia, and ask her if she knew anything about his grandfather’s strange disappearance. Van’s mother was long-divorced from his father. She had settled down with a gentlemanly Southern dentist, who spared her the impossible treatment she had gotten from Van’s father. Van had never liked explaining difficult things to his mother, on the phone or off of it. Van and his mother were from two very different worlds. Van’s world was serious and technical, while her world was just plain messy. Even though his mother meant well and tried to listen, she always ended up taking offense. For Van to call his own father was completely out of the question. Van never knew his father’s phone number, or even if his father had a home or a phone. Not only did they not talk, they had nothing to say to each other.

Van certainly wasn’t going to call the local cops in Burbank and ask around for Missing Persons. The cops would page the NCIC database, and even twenty years into retirement, a top-secret engineer who built spy planes was not the kind of guy who ought to just go missing. That situation could get ugly fast. Van might, conceivably, ask Jeb for help. In the world of federal databases, Jeb knew everybody who was anybody. Jeb had been there on the ground floor, literally laying the pipes. But Jeb would be ticked-off that his star recruit had lost his own grandfather—and lacked the smarts to find him. Van decided to case the joint. That was risky and probably dumb, but at least it was practical. It didn’t feel much worse than raiding some teenage hacker punk’s house as the family snoozed. It was dawn, birds were twittering, and the place looked quiet and sleepy.

Van opened a rusty wrought-iron gate thick with bougainvillea. He tiptoed warily down a narrow, weedy brick path, clustered with wet pink blooms. Was there one loose doorknob around here, maybe?

Just one window left open to the California breezes? Any open entrance around here? Any system vulnerability where a nearsighted computer scientist, six feet one and putting on weight, might illegally break-and-enter the home of some total strangers? Had he gone completely insane? What the hell was he thinking here? At any moment Van expected the white flick of a motion-sensor light. The frenzied barking of a Doberman. The cocking of a shotgun.

Van peeked warily through a barred window and around an untucked curtain. The Srinivasan home featured brightly patterned carpets, a sandalwood screen, a wicker couch with thick colorful pillows, and a silent TV. Dusty yellow garlands hung around a dead man’s framed portrait on the far wall. Battling his sense of despair, Van cleaned his glasses on his shirttail. Then he sidled around the house. He heard a voice.

Van edged closer and peered through another window, this one damp and grimy, with rusting iron bars and a warped sill of cheap aluminum. He had found a kid’s room, a boy’s, to judge by the cheery sports wallpaper and the sky-blue ceiling. The ceiling was hung with a dozen dusty airplane models, dangling on stout black threads. They were World War II fighters: a snarling P-51 Mustang, a Messerschmidt with the Iron Cross, a red-dotted Zero.

A kid’s wooden desk had a full set of modeling tools. Testor’s enamels, brushes, tweezers, a big square magnifying-glass lamp, and a very odd kind of glue gun. A half-completed model was pinched by alligator clips in a jointed metal armature.

The voice came from a gumdrop-colored Macintosh computer. Van disliked Macintoshes. First, because they were cute toys for artists rather than serious computers. Second, the female Macintosh voice that read error messages aloud sounded eerily like Dottie’s voice. Not Dottie’s normal voice, but the voice Dottie used when she was really upset with him. When Dottie was being very, very clear with him about something.

The Macintosh was reading a text file aloud. The bedroom’s faded walls, wallpapered in yellow race cars, were piled with battered white filing boxes. Many of the boxes had ruptured, spilling thick heaps of blue-stenciled engineering paper.

Van’s grandfather, wearing ratty pink slippers and a pale blue terry-cloth bathrobe, came shuffling from the open door of the bathroom. He settled himself with painful care on a plain metal stool in front of the desk. Then he clicked at his candy-colored one-button Macintosh mouse.

“Step one,” the Mac said in its female voice. “Attach C-1, Instrument Panel F, and C-2, Instrument Panel R, to A-1, fuselage top.”

Van’s grandfather raised the arm of the lamp and made its beam hover over the desk. It threw thick shadows over the model’s jigsaw bits of gray plastic.

Van tapped at the window.

It was no use. The old man was hard of hearing. His eyes were going, too. His hair was gone, a few untrimmed snowy wisps. The muscle had shrunk from his spindly legs. His once-thick neck was bent and baggy, and his face, once so round, so red and beefy, was pale and creased and liver-spotted. Van was gazing through the window into a time machine. It promised him a painful future of bypass surgery, of bellyaches and Rogaine.

Van reached into his cargo pants and found his laser pointer. He beamed the laser’s red dot through the window.

The old man caught on. He rose from the metal stool and teetered to the iron-barred window. Van waved at him.

Grandpa Chuck turned down the cheap window latch and tugged at the dew-spotted frame. The window was jammed. Van got a purchase on it with the screwdriver blade of his Swiss Army knife. The window jerked open an inch and a half. They gazed at each other through the bars.

“How are you, son?” said the old man.

“I’m fine, Grandpa. You?”

“Not too good, not too bad.” Van’s grandfather scowled. His scowl was scary. He had been an important man, once. A man who gave orders and had them obeyed.