A Fair Defense
by C. Stuart Hardwick
Claressa Smallwood wiped her eyes, stared at her tear-streaked reflection and, forcing more measured breaths, willed the last sniffles away.
Get it together, Clare. Don’t let Daddy see you like this.
He’d never gotten over Momma, not the loss nor the bills, and the last thing he needed now was to see his only daughter falling apart as they hauled her off to juvie. Not when she was all that kept him going, plodding along like a comic-book mummy trying to read a compass through the wrappings. Only north for him was the future, her future, and now she’d taken that away from him, hadn’t she?
Should’ve thought of that before hauling off and belting Patty Steadman. But a girl could only take so much. The new high school had four years of chemistry and electronics, but it also had more social strata than a Jane Austen novel. Claressa wasn’t rich nor an athlete nor even dance team or band material. She was a nerd, a transfer, a nobody, and if the white kids dissed her on account of being black, the black kids shunned her for “acting too white.”
That wasn’t entirely fair. That sort were the exception more than the rule, but it only takes one bad egg to spoil an omelet. And it’s not like the others were going to leap to her defense. Why would they? High school would pass like salmonella and they’d all go on to college or trade school or marriage or whatever and live among adults who knew enough at least to pretend to be decent most of the time.
And that’s how Claressa saw it, too, at least till she went and won the science fair. That upset the local ecology, raised her standing just slightly from “not worth the bother” to “worth making an example of.”
And Ms. Childress, bless her heart, had thought she was helping, writing to NASA and starting a funding drive. The project was good: “Expanding Elastomeric Polymer Nets for Space Debris Remediation.” With a little work it could’ve been great for next year, the kind of project that wins national, gets attention, earns college money and internships.
But not this time. NASA had passed, and to raise that injury to exponential insult, when Ms. Childress (who knew as much about crowdfunding as Pookie, the classroom turtle) delivered the news, Patty’s spies had been eavesdropping. One thing had led to another and there she was behind the cafeteria, clocking Bratty Patty with a loaded book bag before the foul-mouthed witch could see it coming.
And now here she was, crying in the bathroom of the West Capshaw Police Station where they’d hauled her after pulling her out of English with everybody staring, not on account of her dramatic rendition of Ms. Eliza Doolittle’s cockney dialogue, but at her fumbling to collect spilled books under the impatient gaze of the principal and a chubby peace officer with a piece.
Well let them stare. If they didn’t respect her performance, maybe they’d fear her new rep instead, little Ms. Al Capone in corn rows. At least the gossip would keep them awake through lunch after they got done boring each other stiff with their halting, monotone readings.
But now she had to go out, and there would be Patty with a smug look and a story no doubt embroidered by claims of a dying tooth, and all the cops and Patty’s car-salesman dad who owned half of Madison County and had probably donated the TV in the break room here.
She’d as soon have died right here, melted into a puddle and down the drain to feed some distant algal bloom. But Daddy would be out there too.
“Buck up, Claressa.” That’s what Momma would’ve said. “No sense crying over spilled ketchup, just don’t track it on the rug!”
The once-white bathroom door had chips through the many-layered paint revealing a sort of insect-blood green underneath. Claressa drew herself up, gave one last blot with her jacket sleeve, and forced the door open with a too-loud bang. Then before her nerve could falter, she strode down the little hall toward the waiting lady cop and the big room with all the desks and cubicles.
Buck up.
The lady cop opened the outer door and let Claressa pass. Sure enough, Daddy had come. He was sitting quietly, clean and shaved and wearing a tie and sport coat. A good day then; well, so far.
On closer inspection, though, he didn’t look like a dad called in on consequence of a delinquent toss-up. He was rocking slightly, not so anyone else would’ve noticed, looking down just enough to mask the gray starting to creep up from his temples. Claressa ran through the applicable emotions: anger, disappointment, disgust, concern . . . none of them seemed to fit. His hands clutched his cell phone in his lap, not so he could read it but as if wanting to wad it up.
The bill collector, which he didn’t think she knew about. What he looked like he was was . . . trapped.
The crash had made him a widower, but had taken three horrible weeks to do the job. They’d sent him home with a clean bill of health, a ruinous bill of accounts, and a bottle of pills for the heartache. Through all the vacant smiles and tears, Claressa hadn’t pressed, even when the mail and the trash piled up. Even when the plant sent him home that day and he sat on the sofa with the TV off, ashen and rocking like now. She’d let him be, given time to heal.
But he just wasn’t healing, wasn’t the man he had been, and as she watched him rocking like a little boy, like something shaken and discarded by a dog, her spine prickled with cold dread that he might not ever be again.
Patty and her dad were absent. Instead, there was a military man with what looked like an old-fashioned bus driver’s hat tucked under his arm. He stood stiffly, as if sitting in one of the vinyl chairs might soil the pretty blue fabric of his uniform.
As the lady cop shewed Claressa forward, a man in plain clothes but with a badge on his belt stepped up to the uniformed man and said, “Everything’s in order, sir.” The uniformed man nodded. Claressa’s father looked up at the exchange. He saw her, rumpled up and took her hand.
“Baby girl . . . um, this man’s from the Air Force and says he needs to . . . Um, he needs us to . . .” He looked up at the taller man. “What is it you need again, Mr. . . . um . . . ?”
The uniformed man glanced at his watch and stepped after the plain-clothed man, who was clearly waiting for them to follow. “Colonel Frank Hutchins, OSI. I need you to come with me.”
“OS . . . what now?” Claressa’s father leaned forward slightly and looked away as if listening to an intrusive whisper.
Colonel Hutchins’s gaze followed, but finding nothing of interest, he answered, “I’m sorry, sir, I thought they’d explained. I’m from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, our version of the FBI.” He looked down at Claressa. “Don’t worry, you’re not in any trouble; you’re needed to aid in an investigation. Someone thought it would be less conspicuous to work through local law enforcement. I’m sorry for all the trouble, but if you’ll both come along, we’re under a bit of time pressure.”
Apparently so. Behind the station, on a raised concrete platform out past the parking and the transformers and the satellite dishes, a big dark helicopter sat roaring, the whup, whup, whup of its rotor accelerating as they approached. They climbed inside, the door slid shut, and they lurched away in darkness, window shades and the wind and roar forestalling conversation or even a good look around.
Slowly, Claressa’s eyes adjusted, but by the time her heart stopped pounding enough to find the shade release and wonder what trouble it would cause to slip the harness and press her nose up against the glass, they were turning and rocking and her ears popped as they swooped back down to the ground.
Sunlight flooded in. Two soldiers in camouflage fatigues hurried them out and a short way across broiling concrete to what looked like a small corporate jet. At its steps, the Office of Special Investigations man gave a crisp salute to a younger man in a darker uniform with six large buttons sweeping across his chest like a sash. Claressa and her father were conducted inside and the door pulled up as the engines spooled to life.
This was much nicer than the helicopter, with lots of bright windows and dark blue leather seats in little groupings like in limousines in the movies. As soon as Claressa and her father claimed theirs, they were joined by the young man from outside and a pleasant-looking middle-aged woman with the same dark uniform but a lot more ribbon boards on her chest.
“Welcome aboard, Ms. Smallwood,” she said, sitting opposite Claressa. “I’m Major General Lina Gutierrez, United States Space Force. I need to talk to you about your science fair project.”
The jet’s powerful climb so thrilled Claressa that only after a layer of cloud had obscured the terrain did she realize the general was patiently waiting. She turned, pulled her knees up to her chest, then dropped them again to keep her sneakers off the upholstery.
She ducked her head. “Sorry, ma’am.”
General Gutierrez gave a little laugh. “Not at all. Do you think I’m as old as all that?”
She did, in fact. The general had the look of someone long too harried for regular exercise, though well burnished by the sun, and her black, loosely curled, shoulder-length hair shielded telltale gray near the roots. Only the eyes belied age. Light as caramel, they shone with youthful intensity.
Locking them now on Claressa, the general got down to business. She wanted to know all about the project: where Claressa had gotten the idea (the wall-clinging sticky frogs she played with as a kid), where they came up with the formula (Daddy, a chemist on leave from BASF), how they’d tested it (a vacuum chamber made of steel pipe and pressure cooker parts and an arsenal of model rocket motors).
Basically, she wanted the science fair spiel. The problem: space debris tends to degrade into tiny bits too small to track but big enough to blast holes in anything they hit at orbital speed, and they’re hard to clean up without causing exactly the type of impacts that cause even more debris. The hypothesis: a lightweight, elastic, self-healing polymer similar to that used to weatherproof modern windows and doors might sweep up such debris while remaining intact, then be collected or tracked and left to deorbit due to its vastly increased drag. The conclusion: rudimentary tests were promising, but there was a lot more work to be done. The polymer needed refinement, in particular to stop it sticking to itself and clumping up into a ball. Next steps: would require money they didn’t have and access to NASA test facilities they’d been denied.
Gutierrez said, “Oh, you weren’t denied.”
Claressa started, “But—”
“You were . . . intercepted.”
The general tipped the Hello Kitty–stickered lid from a white cardboard file box strapped into the seat beside her. A box which, until this morning, has been on the shelf of Claressa’s closet between her roller skates and a toy accordion.
“Is this it?”
She pulled out the six-ounce jelly jar in which Claressa’s elastomeric goop had been displayed at the science fair. Warily eyeing her guests, she carefully unscrewed the lid and prodded inside with a pen knife. She poked around as if for a dollop of butter, but the stuff pulled from the blade as fast as it was disturbed. Finally, she caught a bit on the tip of the blade and pulled up a tendril that, stretched to the limits of her reach, snapped back and healed over instantly.
“How the devil do you form it?”
“With a cheese slicer,” Claressa said.
The general raised a suspicious eyebrow and Claressa continued. “We cut it with piano wire and a jet of distilled water. The hydrogen bonds keep it from healing before you can cut it, then the water boils away in the—”
Claressa’s dad had squeezed her forearm. “Can I ask where you’re taking us?”
“Kirtland Air Force Base.”
“Kirtland? That’s . . . um . . .” He stared, blinking as if from a tic, then repeated, “That’s in New Mexico, isn’t it? Clara has finals coming up.”
“Kirtland is home to the Space Rapid Capabilities Office and the Air Force Research Laboratory.”
“That other man, um . . . that other man said something about an investigation.”
The general turned to Claressa. “Ms. Smallwood, you asked NASA for a few thousand dollars and help developing your idea for next year’s science fair. I’m offering you the full resources of the United States government to develop it into something we can deploy in space right now, this week. That’s the investigation.”
Claressa’s mouth dropped open. She didn’t know what to say. Surprisingly, her father did.
“Now hold on just a minute, um . . . hold on a minute. You come in here all cloak and dagger and whisk us off across the country without, um . . . without a by your leave and we’re supposed to believe that’s, um . . . that’s what, out of the goodness of your heart?”
“No, Mr. Smallwood, out of necessity. We need what you’ve come up with for national defense, and we need it immediately. It might sound melodramatic, but you will literally be helping your country.”
Mr. Smallwood huffed. “It’s a science fair project! Um . . .”
“And you will be generously compensated.”
He gave no sign of having heard. “It’s a science fair project! It’s a good idea, but the impact velocities Clare tested aren’t remotely realistic and the goop’s not stable enough for storage and handling, much less the space environment, um . . . space environment. I’d like to know how it’s so godawful vital, that . . . um . . .”
“I can tell you all that once the paperwork—”
“What’s that?”
“There are some papers I need you to sign, and then—”
Mr. Smallwood’s nodding head skipped a beat and realigned along a new axis. “Sign nothing! That’s my little girl’s future you’re talking about, and I won’t, um . . . I won’t see it taken away and turned into a weapon!”
“Mr. Smallwood, I can assure you what we’ll be working on is purely defensive—”
Again, he huffed. “So was Agent Orange.”
“Mr. Smallwood . . .” The general sighed, and Claressa thought she looked as if he’d suddenly turned into a particularly stubborn garden gnome, making further conversation worse than useless. She turned, in fact, and looked down into Claressa’s eyes.
“Ms. . . . Claressa, just about anything can be made into a weapon, that’s true, but weapons can protect lives and property as well as destroy them. Come to the lab tomorrow and you’ll see.” She glanced at the gnome but directed her words as before. “In the meantime, I believe they have all your school things up front. You might want to do some studying. You’re going to have a busy few days.”
At Kirtland, Claressa and her dad were given a cheaply furnished but well-maintained room and, in the morning, a rather intimidating ride in a big white police SUV. The latter was provided by two camouflage-wearing soldiers who brought donuts and juice and fussed at Claressa’s father for not being up and dressed at the prescribed time.
The lab complex was across the base, a cluster of cinder block and steel-clad structures a few blocks from the flight line and all generously provisioned with warnings against unauthorized entry. The soldiers walked them through a keypad-secured door and into a boxy metal building that from the outside might have been a warehouse, but on the inside looked more like the office wing at the front of Claressa’s school.
Both impressions faded as they left the glassed-in security station and rode up in an elevator. A young woman in fatigues stood watch outside a conference room. Inside, beside a long wooden table, a wall of glass overlooked an open, multistory laboratory filled with tangles of piping and wiring around a gray central tower with landings like a refinery stack.
Claressa and her dad sat, backs to the window, across from two men and a woman in civilian clothes already at the table. Two more soldiers came in wearing fatigues, one offering to fetch coffee, the other delivering documents that Claressa’s dad glanced at and shoved away.
“I’m not . . . um, I’m not signing anything. I know my rights.”
General Gutierrez, also now in the same incongruous wilderness camouflage fatigues as the others, stepped through the door with a to-go coffee and assumed the head of the table. He repeated his objection, adding, “And I’m not telling you the formula.”
“Oh, we already have that.” This was one of the civilians, a young red-headed man in jeans and a white golf shirt. “Spectroscopy had it by oh-nine-hundred, and we ran up a batch overnight. We’re getting ready now to put it to the test. Should be interesting.”
The general sipped her coffee.
“The paperwork’s actually more for your benefit, Mr. Smallwood. We have cameras watching me tell you that by executive order of the President of the United States, what you two are about to learn, everything you’ve developed thus far for your project, and anything you henceforth develop or learn relating to it, is now classified. Releasing it to or discussing it with anyone not authorized in writing through my command will result in your prosecution under the Classified Information Procedures Act.”
She turned to one of her soldiers. “I think that ought to cover it?”
The woman nodded.
Claressa’s father started up, shouting. “You can’t, um—” But he seemed to lose his footing. The soldier to his right caught his arm and stopped him falling against the glass. He didn’t seem to appreciate the help and shucked off the hand before dropping back into his chair.
“Clara’s worked hard, and um . . . worked hard on this, and you just can’t . . .”
The others might not have understood his emotional response, the tears welling up in his eyes; Claressa did. He’d made the goop before the accident, before the involuntary leave, and Claressa had made most everything else using YouTube videos for guidance and scraps from his workshop and Mr. Fargeson’s junk pile down the street. That it had worked and not killed anyone was a miracle not likely to be repeated. And while pride kept his troubles held close, money was principal among them. Her future was his being, college her future, and scholarship money her way into college. If they were taking her project away, they would destroy his very reason for being.
He sat quivering, as if caught between the desires to hide beneath the table and launch himself at the general’s throat.
The general sighed and tapped the lid of her cup. “Captain Sims, tell them.”
Sims, the serviceman who’d just helped Claressa’s father, was the same young man from yesterday on the plane. He swiveled toward Claressa and her dad and interlocked his fingers before him, gesticulating with his index fingers as he spoke.
“You probably know that GPS depends on satellites. Each carries an atomic clock, and positions on Earth’s surface are determined by triangulation and careful timing of the signals coming from multiple satellites.”
Claressa’s father said, “Yeah, so?”
“So at least twenty-four satellites are needed to provide sufficient visibility to all points on Earth, and we normally maintain a few spares. Right now we’re at twenty-two. Total.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Someone’s disabling our satellites. We don’t know how, exactly, but we can see the interceptors pacing them and approaching. Once they do, we lose the satellite. We’ve already gone through our on-orbit reserves, two new models sent up as spares and four older ones decommissioned but still functional. Any more losses and the constellation will become seriously compromised. The immediate concern is that precision munitions will become vulnerable to jamming, maybe useless. The opening salvo in an asymmetric war.”
“Well, then shoot them down. Isn’t that what you folks are here for?”
“That would create debris clouds that would compromise the entire orbit. Plus these hostiles are the size of coffee makers, nearly impossible to hit, and even making the attempt might reveal capabilities we would prefer to keep hidden, given that this might be a prelude to a larger attack.”
Claressa’s dad looked down. “Well, I guess you’re screwed then. What’s it to do with us?”
“We’ve fast-tracked four replacement satellites, but that’s all we have in the pipeline. It could take months to get another batch ready. We need a way to protect these in the meantime. Some sort of defensive pack we can strap to a finished satellite that won’t compromise its operation.”
General Gutierrez turned in her chair.
“Mr. Smallwood, Claressa, this may be a prelude to war or it might be the war itself. GPS has become vital to far more than targeting smart bombs and helping taxis find their way. It’s integral to farming, construction, flood control, energy distribution, weather forecasting, logistics; even ATMs and cell phone networks depend on the atomic clocks on those satellites.”
“We’re not . . . um. We’re not helping you militarize space!”
“That ship sailed long ago, Mr. Smallwood and, not to put too fine a point on it, you need the military. In the U.S., it’s twelve percent of the federal budget, about the same as Medicaid. It would be great if we could shift that money elsewhere, space exploration maybe, or the eradication of poverty, however you buy that exactly.
“But there are people out there who, whatever we build, whatever we do to provide for the general welfare, are ready to step up and take it or smash it if we let them. That’s just the way life is. They wait for their chance to knock us down with another Pearl Harbor, another 9/11, and our eyes and ears in the sky stop it happening. And when we must, they let us put bombs through windows instead of carpet-bombing cities like in the old days. And because both those things are true, those who would attack us cool their heels, and we have peace without the sword of Damocles of Mutually Assured Destruction hanging over us like during the Cold War.
“The price of peace is eternal vigilance, haven’t you ever heard that? It’s a high price, paid through a power that sometimes tempts the best and the worst among us, but it’s a bargain nonetheless. There are wolves at the door, Mr. Smallwood—no, real human enemies who are hidden and far more dangerous than wolves—and we need your help driving them off. That’s all.
“Your daughter’s idea for sweeping up trash is just what we need to neutralize these hostiles without creating more debris. It doesn’t have to be perfect, or cheap, or even particularly safe. It just has to work. Long enough to stave off a shooting war down here on the ground.”
“I don’t know . . . Um, I don’t know . . .”
On the other side of the glass, a buzzer echoed through the chamber.
On the table, a speaker phone Claressa hadn’t noticed till now announced itself with an amplified clatter and a disembodied voice: “We’re ready.”
The woman unmuted the phone long enough to say, “Roger. Standing by,” and her colleagues huddled around her laptop. “Here we go.”
The echoing sound of pumps, a bang that shook the glass and made Claressa’s heart jump, and a momentary and muffled whoosh. Then there was silence till the phone squawked again and the tinny voice said, “Check from index thirty-two ninety.”
The laptop keys clattered. The woman looked up, crestfallen. “It didn’t work.”
“Hah!” Claressa’s dad scoffed. “Don’t need the formula, eh?”
“It’s not the chemistry, sir,” said the man who’d spoken earlier. “This test was a control using your sample. It just doesn’t work under our more realistic conditions. We fired a pancake of your goop through hard vacuum at three hundred meters a second. It appears to have struck the target and disintegrated. That’s what we were afraid of. It’s useless for our purposes.” He looked up at Claressa. “And for sweeping up trash, too, I’m sorry to say.”
Claressa’s dad stared, befuddled. “Maybe it’s, um . . . maybe it’s gone bad after what? Eight, nine months?”
Gutierrez sighed. “Or maybe we really are screwed.”
The meeting broke up after the general admonished her experts to “figure it out,” and an underling to “see that he signs so we can get him into the lab.”
The latter, at least, was not difficult. While the others went off after coffee, donuts, and facilities, Claressa chastised her father for rejecting the documents without first reading them. She skimmed them for him. The Space Force was offering money, she said, and while she had no idea if it was a fair price, he was out of work and to judge by the recent phone calls, out of money. Maybe the government was stealing her idea, but she would have more of them. Fat lot of use ideas would be if they ended up out on the street.
He started a few times as if trying for the right angle to argue from. In the end he just sighed. Reluctantly, grumbling, he signed. Probably, she thought, it was less because of anything she’d said than that his goop hadn’t worked and he didn’t know why...and cooperating with these brainiacs in their fancy government lab was the only way he ever would.
The brainiacs returned, led by the red-headed man, who introduced himself as Dr. Walter Carlson and, with a toothy grin, offered Claressa a saucer-sized blueberry donut. “From a shop in front of the BX,” he said, “better than crap from the machines.”
Paperwork signed, the Smallwoods were issued badges and guidance on which doors they weren’t any good for, and Dr. Carlson showed them down the hallway to an equipment-packed room recognizable as a chemistry lab by the spatially labyrinthine glassware and the juxtaposed odors of gunpowder and bleach.
The first order of business was to confirm the formula the Kirtland team had derived by mass and nuclear magnetic-resonance spectroscopy, then run up a new batch under Mr. Smallwood’s direction in order to exactly reproduce the goop he’d made at BASF and so hopefully Claressa’s experimental results.
Second and third test shots, using the goop made at Kirtland overnight, ended the same as the first. Mr. Smallwood’s new batch would take a few hours to “cook,” so he and Claressa left the chemists for a short ride across base to see a mock-up of one of the new GPS satellites.
It was bigger than Claressa had imagined, a cube the size of eight dishwashers all stacked together, covered with tarps and gold plastic sheeting, gunmetal-blue solar panels stretching out left and right the width of a badminton court. As they walked around it, a studious young man with a dark complexion, Master Sergeant Lee Turley, pointed out where the kicker rocket would be during launch, where the antennas and thrusters were located, and where, in the confines of the tall fiberglass faring that would protect it during launch, there would be any room left over to squeeze in defensive countermeasures. Very little, was the answer, perhaps enough for eight stacked gallon cans in the middle of two of the six faces.
Claressa’s dad shook his head, impressed with the engineering on display despite his desire to appear aloof, but no doubt wondering, like Claressa was, how anything useful could be packed into so tight a space.
“Have you thought about the interface for, um . . . the interface for power and data? You have test jacks or something we can use?”
Looking up at the satellite, Turley answered, “Yes sir, that’s actually—” He spun around. “Mr. Smallwood?”
A worker, directing the operation of an overhead hoist, had backed into Claressa’s dad who’d ignored the insult, instead staggering forward like a robot kicked in the ass but not given any program except to keep its feet. Turley grabbed his arm and quizzically met his vacant gaze.
“Sir? Are you all right? Sir?”
“Wha? What?” Mr. Smallwood startled and pushed the hand away. “What are . . . Where am I?”
Turley turned to Claressa. “Is he . . . is he drunk or something?”
Claressa harrumphed. She’d heard those men this morning while her dad was hunting socks, joking about the beer cans in the trash. Cans he had nothing to do with. And she saw the way the others looked at him, not just today but for all these months since the accident. People were so stupid, popping off, forming opinions without knowing what they were talking about or lifting a finger to find out. Sometimes she just wanted to punch someone, and she was still just young enough, she figured, to maybe just get away with it once.
“My daddy is not a drunk!” she said, belting Sergeant Turley good in the stomach. Or at least she would have. He’d caught her hand and now stood impassively staring.
“No, ma’am. I’m sure he’s not. I’m sure . . . I didn’t mean anything by it.”
This was, Claressa thought, the most mature reaction she’d ever received from an adult.
Claressa’s cheeks burned. “I’m sorry,” she said, but the damage was already done.
The MPs drove her and her father back to the first building. Mr. Smallwood was taken to see the chemists. Claressa was taken to see the general, who kept her waiting while phone calls were made—calls she could hear through the anteroom just well enough to tell they were about her and her father.
The aide let her in. The general frankly asked, apologizing, about alcohol and drugs. Claressa attested that her father had not been prescribed and was not using so far as she was aware, any drug of any kind that would upset his equilibrium. When the general asked if there was anything else she could think of “that might explain your father’s odd behavior,” she had no answer. It was his equilibrium itself that was the problem.
And so, with a brief stop to wash her face, Claressa was taken to join him and the others eating lasagna in a mess hall employing the exact same collapsible furniture as her school. She couldn’t help thinking, with his cell phone locked away, he seemed particularly on edge—rather like a junkie needing a fix. The comparison did nothing for her nerves.
In her absence, another test had been performed, this time with the nice, fresh goop cooked up under her father’s supervision and an impact velocity of one hundred meters per second, more closely replicating her science fair experiment. The results had been exactly the same—disintegration.
***
This, Claressa knew, could not be right. She wiped sticky cobbler from her lips and said, “Let me see your setup, how you set up the experiment.”
With Gutierrez’s consent, and after everyone had finished eating, the civilians led the Smallwoods back across base to the cavernous, four-story laboratory. At its center stood a towering three-story vacuum chamber that could be flash evacuated using a steam condenser in the basement. Inside was an electromagnetic rail gun that could accelerate test articles to near orbital speed, though in the last test it had barely been set to idle. At the base of the tower was a conical target chamber of thick steel and concrete, surrounded by water tanks to absorb noise and the energy of any catastrophic breach should one occur.
Past a gap in the tanks, what looked like a bank-vault door stood open, and inside the gleaming steel interior, two soldiers were scraping what was left of Claressa’s science fair dreams off the splattered floor and walls. In their midst, a sort of small metal soccer ball stood on a pole. This was obviously the target, crowned with the tattered, leathery remains of what should have been a pliable, translucent wrapping of self-adhering goo.
Claressa couldn’t believe what she was looking at. She’d assumed the grown-up, college-trained military brainiacs would have known better than she had, all those months ago in her improvised garage-floor workshop. “How’d you make your pancake?”
“What?”
Claressa’s dad said, “She means the projectile.”
“Oh. In a hydraulic press, why?”
Claressa clapped. “That won’t work. I started out using a rolling pin, but the pressure causes cross-linking and stiffens the goop. You end up with praline instead of bubble gum.”
“Then how’d you do it?”
“A turntable and a power drill. Let centrifugal force pull the bonds open so it stays soft till after impact. We used waxed paper to keep it from sticking. Daddy says the molecules have lots of side branches that interlock like Velcro. Sticks to everything, especially itself, and is prone to polymerization, but it’s stable enough if you just don’t squeeze too hard.”
“Of course,” said her dad, leaning in through the open hatch, “you’d need stabilizers and, um . . . need stabilizers and plasticizers to tune it for space and the particular application.”
The redhead, Mr. Carlson, Claressa recalled, shook his head. “A few minutes of plasticity would be enough.” Subdued for most of the day, he suddenly had a gleam in his eye. “Guys,” he said to his colleagues in the chamber, “you finish here. We’re going to build a turntable.”
By dinner, Carlson and the base’s merry band of guerrilla engineers had built a contraption that could spin out disks of goop a millimeter thin and big as a sombrero. They needed one that big to prevent its own inertia from squishing and embrittling it during acceleration. By midnight they had the right balance and had managed one test, successfully plastering an eighty-centimeter projectile disk cleanly around the target. When they opened the door to look inside, the goop was still pliable, drooping and quivering beneath the target globe like gelatinous alien snot.
Carlson let out a whistle and raised his hand to give Claressa a high five, but turned at a bang as the stairwell door flew open behind them.
“Ms. Smallwood? Ms. Smallwood, it’s your father!”
“Daddy!”
Claressa’s father lay sprawled on the landing halfway up the stairs. A guardian knelt over him, shining a cell-phone light in his eyes.
“They’re responding now, ma’am, but I’m pretty sure they were fixed when we found him.” He was talking to someone on speaker. He tapped off the light and held the device to his ear. After a moment he said, “Yes, ma’am, we’ll do that.”
As another guardian checked over his legs, Mr. Smallwood cried out and bolted awake, blindly batting hands away. “The house . . . the house! You can’t . . .” Then he looked around, evidently bewildered by his surroundings.
“Daddy, it’s me. We’re here with the Space Force, remember?”
As reality dawned, he relaxed somewhat against the helping hands. “I know where we are, I’m not senile. I just took a wrong step is all.”
The rebuff stung. Something was wrong, something way more than a simple wrong step. From the top of the staircase a young man’s voice echoed—one of their police escort’s mentioning the beer cans at the “BOQ,” and from below came the sound of a woman, asking about something that sounded like “foreclosure.” Had Sam Smallwood’s prideful denials finally come to that? Were they about to be out on the street? Was that why he’d been so agitated, so irritable? Why he’d fallen? Was she to blame too?
He shucked off another hand and climbed drunkenly to his feet, to the dismay of all those around him.
“Sir, sir! You may have broken that foot!”
“You could have a concussion!”
He fought and twisted like their old poodle Beatrix when confronted with the bathtub, but a downtrodden, middle-aged, unemployed chemist was no match for three Space Force Samaritans in their prime of life and he knew it.
“All right, all right,” he said at last, and acquiesced to being hoisted between two broad shoulders. The men carried him down and Claressa followed. General Gutierrez stopped her at the door, giving Claressa’s shoulder a gentle squeeze.
“They’ll get him checked out. Let’s give them space and I’ll have someone drive you over. In the meantime, there’s nothing like staying busy to set your mind at ease. Why don’t we let Mr. Bently show you the materials science lab—”
“My father’s not a drunk!”
“I didn’t say—”
“He’s not a drunk and he doesn’t do drugs! He’s just . . . it’s just, since . . . since . . .”
Claressa’s voice cracked as her eyes filled embarrassingly with tears. “Are we gonna lose our house?”
The dam burst. All these months, Claressa had been lying to herself, pretending everything was all right, pouring herself into schoolwork and the science fair and ignoring her father’s deteriorating condition, covering for and shielding him while hoping it was just his grief. But it wasn’t. Something bigger was wrong, the sort of something that could leave her all alone in the wide world, or worse . . . and she’d known it and let it go on for months when she might have told someone, anyone, and tried to get him some help.
She tried to say something like that to the general, but her voice box wasn’t working. For the first time in her entire life she felt utterly lost and exposed, and deep in this fortress of order and impersonal formality with the weight of the world suddenly foist upon her.
She just stood there, hopeless, face wet with tears, terrified and ashamed. She squeezed her eyes shut, but then opened them wide in surprise. Major General Lina Gutierrez of the United States Space Force was holding her tight, patting her back, telling her everything would all be all right.
Claressa’s father had indeed broken his foot, but if his fall had in any other way thrown him farther off his azimuth, the fact was not obvious as yet. The orderly had brought breakfast of sausage and eggs, and he’d rewarded Claressa for buttering his toast with a bite and a hearty hug.
“Go on,” he said. “I know you want to see it work, and they’re taking me for tests anyhow. You’ll be bored here, and you’re more, um . . . you’re more inventor than I am. Go invent.”
Claressa agreed and kissed his cheek and stole another bite before bouncing to the door.
She was as terrified as she’d been last night, as frightened of what was to come. And yet, if not happy exactly, this morning she felt strangely invigorated. At last they would know. They were asking the right questions, here and over in the laboratory. Everything now was going to work out, if not well, at least as well as it could. The world wouldn’t all fall apart for lack of trying.
She turned to her father, twisted her fingertips into a finger-heart, then turned to the door and snapped them before her waiting escort.
“Come on,” she said, “the world’s not gonna save itself.”
With the goop finally sorted, it was time to work on delivery. This was something Claressa had given a lot of thought to, but she wasn’t an engineer and hadn’t known anything about the interceptors or the satellites or the weight, power, and other integration requirements.
The Kirtland team had all that knowledge, however, and it didn’t take long to settle into a productive working relationship. Cynthia Clay, integration specialist with Northrop Grumman, would set Claressa a challenge to which she had already thought up a solution. Cynthia’s team would then explain half a dozen reasons that solution wouldn’t work, and Claressa, with the irrepressible creativity of youth, would propose something more practical. Then that would be shot down and the cycle would repeat.
This went on over and over again for two days while Claressa’s dad was in the hospital. By the time all his tests had been run, all the wrinkles had been ironed out of the countermeasure design and the chemistry of the goop, and it was up to other teams to bring it all to fruition.
The design they’d come up with was, Claressa thought, eminently practical and actually pretty clever. A usefully large pancake of goop would never survive launch, much less fit inside the rocket fairing. So instead of a pancake, the goop would remain packed in an aluminum cylinder about the size of two stacked paint cans. Aluminum was used simply because it could be quickly fabricated and would need no special testing. Lubricated with liquid paraffin and sealed against vacuum, the packaged goop would be affixed atop a simple base module built around commercially available, off-the-shelf cubesat components.
At launch, this would all hang alongside the GPS satellite like a lamprey, mounted to its chassis by an electrically actuated “shoulder joint” pivot and fixed against the satellite by the self-same strap already securing one of the two solar arrays. Each satellite would be launched with two countermeasures, one on each side, and servicing drones could affix the devices to three of the four models of satellite already in orbit.
The brainiacs had already come up with the necessary sensors and software upgrades. After deployment of the solar arrays, the countermeasures would be free to move. When an interceptor came into range, a countermeasure would swing to face it. A small RDX squib would cut a retaining wire tying the countermeasure to its base and securing the walls of the goop bucket. This would also release a valve, freeing high-test hydrogen peroxide to flow across a catalyst and flash into steam, some of which would be tapped to pressurize the peroxide tank, the rest of which would be exhausted through two canted, rearward facing nozzles.
The countermeasure would then rocket away at nearly three g’s, well below the compression limit at which the goop would become embrittled, and would spin itself up as it did so. At a certain rotational speed, which it would reach when clear of the host satellite, a second tie would break, freeing the walls of the goop bucket to peel away and be flung off into space along with all traces of paraffin as the goop spun, pizza-dough style, out into a broad, flat pancake. By the time it reached its target, computer modeling showed the pancake could be over three meters across and moving three hundred meters per second.
None of this was the clever bit. The clever bit was all chemistry and materials science, worked out between Mr. Carlson, Mr. Bently, and Clarresa’s dad, largely on napkins at his bedside. Fragmented carbon nanofilaments mixed into the goop would block the passage of radio waves. When the pancake hit the fan, as it were, it would engulf any target up to a certain size completely, forming a rubbery, translucent Faraday-cage balloon, isolating it from outside radio control and obscuring any optical sensors or communications links.
The fibers would also strengthen the membranous goop, helping it form a larger, more robust pancake, while chemical stabilizers and elastomizers would extend its flexibility and heat resistance enough so that as the interceptor fired its thrusters to try and reestablish control, their exhaust would only inflate the goop like a balloon while painting the inside with soot, further blinding the interceptor. Over a period of half an orbit or so, UV light from the sun would then excite a chemical photoinitiator in the goop, triggering long-chain polymerization and converting the rubbery balloon into a tough, hard shell durable enough to survive for a few weeks while its added drag pulled the interceptor down toward a fiery doom.
Ion thrusters in the base module could further manipulate the interceptor, push it away from its target, and help accelerate its demise, There was even a nonpropulsive pressure relief in case an interceptor tried to use engine exhaust to overinflate and rupture the shell to free itself.
The countermeasure was, in short, foolproof, except only a fool would assume that. You could never know what you didn’t know, and the proof would only come in the doing.
Dr. Laura Rubin was trim for someone touching middle-age, a bit dour, as if unaccustomed to smiling, but with crow’s feet and cheek lines suggesting that when smiles came, they were hearty. She pulled the privacy curtain back and directed Claressa to a bedside stool.
Her father took her hand and Dr. Rubin leaned in with a light to check his pupils.
“Tell me about this accident.”
Claressa told all she knew, that her dad had hit a patch of black ice driving her mom to a Christmas party. Her dad filled in that the car had flown down an embankment, that the best airbags could only do so much. He’d known the place, knew it far better now, blamed himself for the fatal lapse . . . He knew the hospital, the doctor, and other relevant details, but his delivery was punctuated by the habitual pause and repetition that had grown so noticeable of late, like an old-fashioned phono-record skipping, as if his brain had developed a short and was constantly rebooting itself.
With an effort, Claressa held her tears at bay. Light was finally shining on her dad; she wouldn’t do anything that pulled it away. “Is he . . . has he had a stroke?”
“No, I don’t think so. His scans reveal no ischemic or infarc—that is, there are no obvious areas in his brain damaged by a blocked or reduced blood flow. There are traces of what might be glial scarring; that’s just a sign that the brain suffered an injury and healed, which stands to reason after a car crash like he suffered. But I don’t think . . .
“Claressa, Mr. Smallwood, what you are experiencing are what we call absence seizures, sometimes called petit mal seizures. It’s rare to see onset in adults, and it obviously can be very dangerous if it happens at just the wrong moment, if you’re climbing stairs or—”
“Well, that explains . . .” Mr. Smallwood said.
“What’s that?”
“At the plant . . . I was overseeing LRC2, a chemical production line, not my usual work, um . . . not my usual work, but I’m the senior chemist and it was a new line. Nothing too complicated but you . . . um, but you have to watch the pressure inside the separator and, well, I let it blow out, somehow. They thought I’d, um . . . They thought I’d been drinking and put me on leave. Of course I never tested . . . but . . . there’s a lot of liability and money involved . . . I, um . . . I . . .”
“I was going to say, ‘or when driving to a Christmas party.’”
“Come again?”
“Mr. Smallwood, have you ever been treated for diabetes?”
He thought a moment, his gaze appraising, suspicious. “A blood test once maybe, why?”
“Because right now, you’re hypoglycemic and showing elevated insulin levels and increased C-peptide levels. Your pancreas looks healthy except . . .”
“Except what?”
“Mr. Smallwood, I have a hunch. I think you might have a pancreatic tumor. I don’t mean cancer. A benign tumor throwing your metabolism into chaos.”
“You think I have diabetes?”
“No, Mr. Smallwood, quite the opposite. And insulinoma can be tiny and hidden in the structure of the pancreas, difficult to find on an MRI. Even so, it can crank out enough insulin to force your blood-sugar levels to crash, enough to induce absence seizures in an otherwise healthy, adult brain.”
Mr. Smallwood’s mouth fell slack. For a moment, Claressa though he was having a spell.
“You mean . . . wait a minute, you mean the crash didn’t cause the, um . . . the crash didn’t cause the seizures?”
“If I’m right, the seizures may have caused the crash.”
“But that would . . .”
Claressa watched as her father’s face transformed. She ran through the applicable emotions, joy, loss, relief . . . what fit was something bittersweet, cathartic relief mixed with loss and acceptance.
“You mean . . .” Tears filled his eyes and the hand holding Claressa’s shook violently.
“I don’t want to promise,” Dr. Rubin said. “I mean we really have to run more tests, get you under the new high-res scanner their working on over at Sandia. But if I’m right and we’re able to remove the tumor, both the hypoglycemia and the seizures might resolve.”
Dr. Rubin furrowed her brows. She clearly didn’t understand her patient’s emotional reaction. Claressa did.
“You mean,” said her father, wiping tears with the heel of his free hand, fighting to breath without giving in to sobs. “Um . . . You mean I didn’t kill her.”
“Ms. Smallwood, may I have a word?”
A police guard was escorting Claressa from the laboratory building where she’d come to say goodbye to Dr. Carlson, Ms. Clay, Mr. Bently, and others from the various labs who’d dropped by for cake and to see the wunderkind who’d just helped save the quarter-trillion-dollar GPS system and, as some of them knew, possibly prevented World War III.
At General Gutierrez’s voice, the guard paused. Gutierrez caught up and said, “We’ll just be a moment,” nodding through the door of a vacant conference room they’d just passed. The guard put her back to the wall and clasped her hands behind her.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Claressa and the general stepped inside and the general latched the door behind them.
The general had her morning coffee. She took a water bottle from the sideboard and set it before Claressa. “For the road,” she said, “airplane water . . .” She scrunched up her nose in disgust.
“Ms. . . . Claressa . . . First, I have to remind you that everything you’ve seen related to the project and this laboratory is classified. You are not to discuss it with anyone, ever, you understand that, right?”
“No, ma’am, I mean yes, ma’am, I understand.”
“But I also want you to know that anything you’ve learned more generally—about chemistry, spacecraft, how engineering is done in a crisis, I don’t know, teamwork, problem solving, those sorts of things—these things are all part of your toolkit now. These are things you can take with you throughout your life.”
“Really?”
The general nodded, “And I think you’ll find they’re more than you realize. You’re a smart girl, Claressa. There are more good ideas ahead of you, even though, as you’ve seen, ideas don’t always work out quite as we conceive them.”
While her dad went through further testing, Claressa knew, two of the four new GPS satellites had been fitted with countermeasures and flown to Vandenberg Space Force base where crews had worked around the clock to integrate them with waiting boosters and launch them into space. The enemy had been waiting, too, and no sooner had the new machines reached orbit than interceptors had closed in for the kill.
But the countermeasures had worked, rendering the interlopers harmless, useless, and doomed to burn up within the month. Contractors were now rushing to equip upcoming satellites with the same system, and robotic servicing flights were in the works to retrofit most of the rest of the constellation.
The attempt had revealed at least one parking orbit in which tiny interceptor sats now waited like ducks in a gooey shooting gallery. They could wait. The enemy had lost their advantage, and they couldn’t realistically regain it without betraying their launch site and ultimately, their masters and agenda. The immediate threat was gone, and the whole, globe-spanning intelligence apparatus of the United States, in space and on the ground, would now turn to neutralizing it for good.
This was nothing like Claressa’s naive “save the world” dream of cleaning up orbital space, but it was thrilling to know she might really have saved it, just in a very different way.
Claressa nodded.
“I’ve arranged for your father to get his job back.”
“Really! That’s great!” Claressa jumped up and hugged the general, who stiffened at first, then relaxed and waited till she again took her seat.
“And I’ve arranged to put your compensation in a trust. It’s enough to send you to college and help ensure your father gets the care he needs, and more if you spend it wisely.”
Claressa’s face beamed. “Really?” Tears threatened to fall. “That’s . . . thank you!”
“And as for your house . . . I’m not completely sure a U.S. Space Force general has the legal authority to blackball a regional financial servicing firm, but I didn’t get these for tiptoeing around.” The general fingered the star on her collar. “You talked to Dr. Rubin?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Your dad’s going to need some help for a while, Claressa . . . to make sure he makes his appointments and pays his bills and takes his medication until he kind of gets stable. Can you help him do that?”
Claressa nodded.
“Good girl.”
Gutierrez handed Claressa a business card. “I know these are old-fashioned, but you can put me in your contacts and let me know if . . . if you ever need any help.”
Claressa looked up, eyes wide. “Ms. . . . General, why are you doing all this for us?”
Gutierrez paused as if deciding how much to reveal, then she let out a sigh. “When I was little, my teacher used to call me a retard. She stuck me in the back of class and told my parents I should be put in a special school. But I wasn’t, and you know why?”
Claressa shook her head, “No, ma’am.”
“My dad came to see the teacher. He asked all about the class, how all the work was done on the blackboard, how I was sat in the back for misbehavior and always in trouble for getting up. Then he had me take my seat, stood in the front, and asked how many fingers he was holding up.”
“Oh my gosh! You couldn’t see?”
“I couldn’t see. I didn’t know I needed glasses. I didn’t know how everyone else got by so easily. I’d just stand at the sharpener or fool with the terrarium, trying to memorize the board before I got yelled at. And that worked just well enough to keep a lousy teacher from noticing I couldn’t see across the room.”
“Oh my gosh! That’s terrible!”
Gutierrez nodded.
“Neither of my parents had a college degree. Neither had any power. But my dad got elected to the school board and made sure every kid got an eye exam. And I grew up with an exceptionally good memory, if I do say so myself.
“And that’s your answer, Claressa. I can’t solve all the world’s problems, I can only do my bit. But I can help one man get the care he needs so one smart little girl gets her chance. Make the most of it, Claressa, and one day you’ll do more still.”
Claressa sat up straight and beamed.
“And when you do, Claressa . . .” Gutierrez tapped the business card where Claressa had it pressed against the table. “. . . do give me a call. We can use someone like you.“
***
Winner of the Jim Baen and L. Ron Hubbard Writer’s of the Future awards, C. Stuart Hardwick is a regular in Analog magazine, known for hard sci-fi that soars through the cosmos, exploring the depths of human nature and the mysteries of space and time. His evocative prose, enriched by scientific rigor, ignites the imagination and leaves an indelible mark on the human mind.
When he’s not at the keyboard or on his bicycle, Stuart can often be found building or dismantling things with equal glee, helping electrons find their way across the lonely Texas power grid, or developing new novel-writing software when he should, just maybe, be writing new novels instead. More, including free stories, at www.cStuartHardwick.com.