The zenith angle Read Online Free PDF

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