Footfall

The President looked thoughtful. “Perhaps I agree.” He turned to Ed Gillespie. “General, we’re pretty shorthanded here. I believe you’re presently without an assignment?”

“Yes, sir,”

“Good. I want you to head up the team for Project Archangel. Look into feasibility, armament, who you need for a design team, where you’d build it, how long it would take. Report to Admiral Carrell when you know something. Perhaps these gentlemen can help you.” He looked to the writers.

“Sure,” Curtis said. “One thing, though—”

“Yes?”

“We could use my partner. Nat Reynolds. Last I heard, he was in Kansas City .”

“Combat area,” General Toland said.

“Nat’s pretty agile, though. He may have got away. And he’s just the right kind of crazy,” Curtis said earnestly.

“Major Crichton can see to that,” the President said. “Now, to return to something you said earlier. Lasers?”

“Yes, sir,” Curtis said “I believe they’ll use lasers to launch theft ships from the ground”

“Why?”

“Why wouldn’t they? They’ve got good lasers, much better than we have, and it’s certainly simple enough if you’ve got lasers and power.”

“I asked the wrong question,” Coffey said. “How?”

Curtis looked smug again. He sketched. “If you fire a laser up the back end of a rocket-a standard rocket-motor bell shape, but thick-you get much the same effect as if you carried rocket fuel aboard, but there’s a lot more payload, because you can leave your power source on the ground. Your working mass, your exhaust, is air and vaporized rocket motor, hotter than hell, with a terrific exhaust velocity. It uses a lot of power, but it’ll sure work. Pity we never built one.”

“Where would they get the power?” the President asked. “They’ve blown up all our dams. They can’t just plug into a wall socket,”

Curtis pointed to a photograph pinned to his blackboard. It showed a strange, winged object, fuzzily seen against the back ground of space.

“Ransom found that picture, among a lot of them Major Crichton’s people gave us to look at,” he said. “Joe—”

Ransom shrugged. “An amateur astronomer brought that in to the intelligence people. I don’t know how he talked the guards into getting it inside, but I ended up with it. It looks like they’re deploying big solar grids, way up in geosynchronous orbit.”

“We looked into building those,” the President said.

“Sure,” Curtis said dryly. “But Space Power Satellites were rejected. Too costly, and too vulnerable to attack.”

“They’re vulnerable?”

“Not to anything we have now,” Curtis said. “To attack something in space you’ve got to be able to get at space.”

Coffey looked around for support. Admiral Carrell shrugged. “It’s true enough,” he said. “They’ll shoot down anything we send up long before it can get that high.”

“So what can we do?”

“ Archangel ,” Ed Gillespie said. “When we send something up, it needs to be big and powerful and well armed. I’ll get on it.”

“And meanwhile, they’re throwing asteroids at us,” the President said. “General, I think you’d better work fast.” He turned to go.

“One more thing, Mr. President,” Curtis said insistently.

“Yes?”

“Today’s attack. I suppose you’ll be sending in lots of armor.”

The President looked puzzled.

“We’ll do it right, Doctor,” General Toland said. He turned to leave. “And I’d like to get at it.”

“Thor,” Curtis said.

Toland stopped. “What’s that? It sounds like something I’ve heard of—”

“Project Thor was recommended by a strategy analysis group back in the eighties,” Curtis said. “flying crowbars.” He sketched rapidly. “You take a big iron bar. Give it a rudimentary sensor, and a steerable vane for guidance. Put bundles of them in orbit. To use it, call it down from orbit, aimed at the area you’re working on. It has a simple brain, just smart enough to recognize what a tank looks like from overhead. When it sees a tank silhouette, it steers toward it. Drop ten or twenty thousand of those over an armored division, and what happens?”

“Holy shit,” Toland said.

“Are these feasible?” Admiral Carrell asked.

“Yes, sir,” Anson said. “They can seek out ships as well as tanks—”

“But we never built them,” Curtis said. “We were too cheap.”

“We would not have them now in any case,” Carrell said. “General, perhaps you should give some thought to camouflage for your tanks—”

“Or call off the attack until there’s heavy cloud cover,” Curtis said. “I’m not sure how well camouflage works. Another thing, look out for laser illumination. Thor could be built to home in that way.”

“Yes. We use that method now,” Toland said. His tone indicated triumph. These guys didn’t know everything.

“Maybe we should delay the attack,” the President said. General Toland glanced at his watch. “Too late. With our unreliable communications, some units would get the word and some wouldn’t. The ones that didn’t would go in alone, and they’d sure be slaughtered. On that score, we’ve got to get back up to Operations.”

“Thank you, gentlemen,” the President said.

As they left, Jenny heard Curtis muttering. “What do they do if it doesn’t work? They’ll have to call the Russians for help.”