Orbital Decay Read Online Free PDF Page B

if…if you gotta nuk’la bomb and we put it in the basement of the school , huh? An’ we called Miz McDaniels an’ said, you better stop Jeff and Mike and the other third grade g uys from beating us up an’ we getta watch TV during arithmetic, or we …
    The three men began to howl. When Bob switched the comlink back to the Fort Meade channel they could hear the reciprocal laughter from the men in Maryland. “Big Dog, that call originated in Jackson, Tennessee. Do you want a fix?”
    Ah , that ’ s a negatory , Weatherman. I don ’ t think we have a threat to national security there.
    “We copy, Big Dog.” Bob paused, studying his display. Dave checked his own screen and saw that three more possibles were being registered by the system. “The Ear’s picked up three more bogies,” John said. “Do you want us to monitor?”
    Negative , Weatherman , we can analyze them here. Big Dog calls his chowtime good eating and our compliments to the chef. Ah , Surfer Joe is ready to hang three in a few weeks. “Surfer Joe” was the code name for the Vandenberg AFB launch site, the point from the which the next cluster of SIGINT satellites would be boosted into polar orbit. Erase data and terminate link. See you , Big Dog out.
    “Weatherman out, Big Dog,” Bob said.
    “Woof woof,” John murmured, and typed a sequence of commands which both erased the key display and wiped the onetime program from the computer.
    As Dave shut down his keyboard and wiped the program Fort Meade had sent up, he glanced at the recorder he had just shut off. On that tape were two conversations: one between a pair of irate but not necessarily harmful Californians, the other between two kids somewhere in Tennessee. Private phone calls, which the NSA had monitored, recorded, and determined their points of origin. The guys in San Diego—especially Robert P. Rose, who had offhandedly mentioned shooting the President—were about to come under investigation by the Agency….
    For saying things they thought had been said in the privacy of their homes. Dave frowned as he worked. And I thought sedition laws had been found to be unconstitutional ….
    Big Ear. When the system was complete and fully operational, being able to locate and intercept phone calls that seemed to threaten national security would be just a drop in the bucket.
    Suddenly, Dave found himself getting worried: What in the hell am I helping to create ?

3
The Wheel
    I DON’T KNOW WHY We didn’t call Olympus Station “the Wheel.” In one of those grand, corny old science fiction movies of the 1950s, The Conquest of Space , there was a torus-shaped space station, and its crew called it the Wheel, but that’s not what we called ours.
    Maybe it was because the crew in that movie and the crew of Skycorp One had fundamental differences in attitude. Cap’n Wallace got a videotape of The Conquest of Space shipped up to us once, to show in the rec room on Saturday night. We all got a big laugh out of it, which annoyed Henry George Wallace because he took it seriously. There was no way we could. Spit-and-polish Air Force officer types going around saluting and eating food capsules—that wasn’t us by a long shot, with the possible exception of the NSA spooks in Meteorology. It embarrassed Wallace because that was his fantasy of how we were supposed to be, and that episode made him all the more reclusive—but I’ll get to that later.
    We called our wheel in space “Skycan,” which aptly summed up the living conditions. The Federation starship Enterprise it wasn’t. In fact, I can’t imagine a more boring place to live, except maybe for the Moon.
    Does it come as a surprise that living in space is boring? That the image of happy, enthusiastic spacemen giving their all for the future of stellar conquest is an idealistic myth? I think a few of the crewmen who flipped out and had to be sent back home did so because of the shock that space life is not the picnic it’s cut out to be.