Chapter 1
July 17th, 1975
“Work, dang you!”
Dave Bowers was fifty-two, still weighed in at around one hundred and fifty-five pounds, same as when he’d left the Navy in 1946, and balding. He wore the standard uniform of his day, time and position: a short-sleeved white shirt, dark dress slacks, neatly polished black low quarters and a black tie.
His face worked as he lit a new Lucky Strike from the still-burning one in his lips, stubbed that one out, put the new one between his lips and quickly took a swig of cold, stale, coffee as he stared at the green screen.
The screen showed the readouts from the complex’s klystrons. The klystrons were the very heart of the powerful radar at the center of the anti-ballistic missile complex.
The Safeguard System was the newest and most powerful ABM system ever devised. Consisting of two sets of powerful and fast missiles, Spartan and Sprint, along with a long-range radar, PARC, and the targeting radar, SPARC. Although Safeguard only officially protected the ND Missile Pack, despite the ABM treaty it was a foot-in-the-door approach to creating a nationwide integrated anti-ballistic missile system using clean micro nuke warheads and an opportunity to make the country safe forever from the threat of annihilation by the Soviets.
The problem was that for the low-yield, low-fallout warheads, neutron bombs, to disable the Soviet Multiple Independent Reentry Systems, they had to explode close. Very close.
And the missiles, Sprint especially, had only seconds to intercept the Soviet MIRVs requiring not only very fast launch but hypervelocity speed.
Given the closing speeds, with MIRVs coming in at reentry speeds and Sprints going up even faster, as well as having to get the missiles into a very tight engagement basket, all of that required not only the fastest computers ever conceived but a very powerful tracking and aiming radar.
Which was where the klystrons came in.
Klystrons were a specialized linear beam vacuum tube that turned electrical power into microwaves. Those were then used as the radar’s emissions. Though there were other systems to create microwaves for the power they needed, klystrons were the only real choice.
Two General Electric AV188 klystrons, eight feet tall, filled with dielectric oil and topped by two-ton steel and lead plates to reduce x-ray radiation flooding the complex, were positioned on the bottom floor of the complex in their own two-story private tank. Each was capable of turning 150,000 volts of electricity, supplied by six massive generators, into a narrow beam of microwave energy that was the only thing capable of tracking the MIRVs closely enough and fast enough for the system to work.
The joke around the complex was they were so powerful they twisted more than electrons: they twisted the very nature of space and time.
In testing they were fine. Power them up and all good. Each had been checked and rechecked.
And each time they were powered up together…things went wrong.
“Come on, baby…”
Dave had joined up in ’43 to fight the Nazis and instead ended up on a destroyer in the Pacific as a radar operator. That led to a career in and out of the military as he built, designed and operated increasingly complex and powerful radars.
SPARC was his brainchild and his brainchild was not behaving.
“One-twenty kay,” Charlie read off as the power mounted.
Dave kept his eyes fixed on the resonant frequency indicator. In a klystron, RF energy is fed into an input cavity at or near its resonant frequency creating standing waves of RF energy. There were multiple additional steps to create the microwave beam, but the problem centered around the resonant frequency. Whenever they approached the resonant frequency at high power, the system started to destabilize. And he could not determine why.
“One-thirty,” Charlie read.
There it was again. The resonant frequency was moving up and down, up and down and there was no reason for it to do so. As the power increased it began to destabilize more and more until it was approaching “disastrous resonance” point.
“Power down,” Dave said. “Go to one-twenty again, then come back up slowly…”
Watching the numbers on a slow increase Dave started to see a pattern. The resonance was flickering in an almost…musical pattern? It wasn’t a regular up and down. More like bump-bump-bump-da-bump…almost like that hippy music everyone was listening to these days. He found himself nodding along, trying to feel out the rhythm.
“Hold there,” Dave said, twiddling knobs on his console. If there was a pattern, there was a way to counter the pattern.
Finally, he started to get the resonance under control.
“Power up, one-three-five,” Dave said.
“One-three-five, aye,” Charlie replied.
Charlie was former Navy, too. One of the reasons Dave had hired him.
“Steady at one-three-five,” Dave said. “One-four-zero.”
“One-four-zero, aye.”
Dave got the resonance back under control. Just hold steady, girl.
“One-four-five…”
More adjustments. Back under control.
“One-five-zero,” Dave said.
“One-five-zero, aye.”
He had it. It was holding. Resonance was in line. It was hold—
The resonance went into full cascade mode as his monitor went wild. For just a second, so short a time he wasn’t sure the rest of his life if it was just a hallucination, a strange, unrecognizable script flashed across his screen.
“SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT…!”
It was too late. The entire system started to smoke as alarms went off throughout the complex.
Dave had learned a lot of language in the Navy appropriate for this moment but inappropriate for the job.
“WHAT THE…FUDGE IS CAUSING THAT?”
* * *
“We’ve got one more shot at this or Congress is closing us down,” Roy Atwood said. The Project Director was also WWII generation but had managed to quit smoking. Dave wasn’t even trying the way things were going. “The overruns are costing like crazy. Dave?”
“There is no earthly reason this should be happening,” Dave said. “There is no reason the resonance should be interacting with anything outside the system, but it seems that something outside the system is acting on it.”
“Sabotage?” Eric Gartner was the Security Chief for the complex.
“If it is, the Ruskies have figured out how to sabotage something remotely,” Dave said, shaking his head. “I almost had the resonance cascade under control. One more time. I can get it. We can get it.”
July 25th, 1975
“What the hell?” Dave muttered.
This time as they powered up, there was no interference. It was like the resonance gremlins had just…left.
“One-three-zero…” Charlie called. “One-four-zero…One-four-five…”
There was no interference, resonance was staying in parameters. There was still some…flux. Something weird was happening in Klystron Two but it was working. That was the important part. He adjusted the output so it wouldn’t interfere with the radar beam.
“One-five-zero,” Charlie said.
“Klystrons nominal,” Dave said, calmly. They’d been working on those words for months and there was a leap of joy in his heart as he said them. But you stayed professional.
“Transfer, nominal.”
“Radar, nominal…”
It was working! They were gonna end the threat of nuclear annihilation!
September 15th, 1976
“What do you mean ‘We’re shut down’?” Dave asked, knowing the answer.
The complex had been fully operational for nearly a year and it was working like a charm. There was the continued…weirdness of Klystron Two but it was, if anything, working beyond its parameters. The radars were so accurate that they had to detune them so that the missiles would miss incoming warheads. In one test they had nearly achieved a direct hit.
He’d thought Congress would want more of them, not shut them down.
“The analysis is that with the increased number of Soviet MIRVs it would be functionally impossible to intercept all of them,” Roy said.
“That’s…not an accurate analysis,” Don Beatty replied. The Chief Strategic Analyst would tend to know such things.
“Whether it is or not, Congress funds and Congress decides,” Roy said. “So we’re shutting down on October 1st. And that’s that.”
January 6th, 1977
Roy Atwood looked down the Primary Personnel and Equipment Hallway and shook his head. $26 billion dollars. They’d gotten it working. Done what everyone said was impossible.
And now it was stripped out and emptied of all of that equipment they’d worked so hard to perfect. Including the now-working-perfectly klystrons. It could have worked. America could have been free of the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Just to have it shut down at the whim of some politicians who’d rather spend the money on post offices for their districts.
Congress giveth, Congress taketh away.
He threw the final breaker, turned his back, and walked out into the cold.
In the darkness of the Klystron Pool, there was a faint flicker of purplish-blue light.