Some of Hopper's problem solving would have clearly overlapped between the war zone and the homefront. It was common knowledge that by the time the atomic bomb fell on Berlin in 1942, Roosevelt had been secretly recruiting German scientists to defect to the United States for years. What was Hopper doing during that time? What were her contemporaries in Commerce doing? Was Secretary Wallace just guarding the homefront, waiting for the Administrations to gain every technical advance and scientist they could? What did Hopper know about Commerce in those days? What had she seen since?
Lost in thought, Mackey suddenly turned around in his seat to find hazy green mountains ahead of them. Wherever they were, it was beyond the atlas memory of Mackey's P-car. He had never traveled so far from the District in a single car trip before.
"Where are we going? The Advanced Research Projects Bureau is in Arlington. We're way past Chantilly by now."
Hopper smiled, in the manner with which Mackey was fast becoming familiar, and gave a little nod. "Mr. Mackey, we are going to go break into a mountain, and see what the weather is like inside."
"Good evening, I'm Frank Mathers, and this is National Issues, your nightly Postal Bureau program about the most important political topics of the day.
"Tonight our topic is lunar development. We have with us in the studio Dr. John Brauer, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Lunar Planning of the Aeronautics and Space Technology Bureau in the Department of Transportation, and Miss Jane Alton, Assistant Secretary for Off-Planet Geology at the General Land Service of the Department of Commerce.
"Miss Alton, if I might direct my first question at you: The ASTB pioneered the technology that took the United States to the moon, and established the first long-term research facilities on the surface. They, along with the Postal Bureau, operate the shuttles that go regularly between lunar and earth orbit. Given their clear accomplishments in the field of lunar development, why is it that the Commerce Department feels that private industry should be allowed to lead the development of the earth's lucrative satellite?"
"First let me say, Frank, it is a pleasure to be here with you and in the esteemed company of Dr. Brauer, the studio audience, and those folks watching at home. At the Commerce Department, we know well and respect the fact that the Department of Transportation has developed the technologies that allow us to explore the moon and its resources. This is their mandate from the President, and their job, on behalf of the American people. But as we all know, Technocratic Administrationism was an experiment that worked well for a while, and then had to be phased out. The Transportation Department is not in the business of enriching itself, but in the business of aiding the business of the private citizenry. They have developed the technologies that transport us to the moon, and now it is time to get out of the way and allow private industry to make use of that technology."
"Dr. Brauer, do you agree with this view?"
"Thank you, Frank, Miss Alton, National Issues viewers. While I certainly agree that the mandate of the ATSB and the Transportation Department is to develop the means for accessing the moon, it does not stop there. Consider the P-car system, to take a basic example. Having built a connection from, say, Chicago to Detroit, we cannot just give it to the American people and expect them to care for this highly technological system. That wouldn't be fair to the public, and it wouldn't be fair to the technology. The reason that American technology is the envy of the world is not simply because we invented it, but because we have the systems in place to maintain it. Traveling to the moon is not like taking a P-car to your local pedestrian mall. We work extensively with private partners in order to produce and deliver many of the Department of Transportation's products, to the public's benefit, but we cannot just take American citizens to the moon and drop them off there. It would be a disaster of unprecedented proportions. To think that—"
"If I might interrupt, Dr. Brauer, I think that your phrasing of the situation is not accurate, if you are saying that . . ."
Chapter 2
Under The Weather
As the P-car slowed and exited the main track, Mackey turned in his seat to look down the narrow track through the woods. The console next to Hopper flashed with a red warning light, and she reached over to quickly type an override command.
Mackey read the screen aloud. "Mount Weather Facility, Weather Service. Facility closed. Why is it closed?"
Hopper opened the storage compartment beneath the bench seat on which she sat, and withdrew a black attaché case. She clicked it open, facing away from Mackey, and removed a number of items. "It is not closed. They've only set the track signals to say that it is closed."
She handed him a badge, which he instinctively attached to the front of his suit jacket. Only then did he look at the information on the front of it. It was his photograph, but the text read "Frank Lanagan, General Land Service." Hopper attached a badge to her suit, reading "Laura Flanagan, National Park Service."
Before Mackey could open his mouth, Hopper pre-empted him. "Mr. Mackey, I'm going to need you to play along here. Naturally, I could have had a Section 25 Approval for Interdepartmental Cooperation in my hand in the time between when I left my office chair and when I reached my office door. But that would have precipitated a series of phone calls that would have reached this facility before I could even come down to the Electromagnetic Bureau and collect you. In the interest of Orthogonal Procedures, we are proceeding a bit unconventionally."
Forging a governmental ID was a felony, Assistant Secretary or not. A lot more than just his professional career was now in Hopper's hands. She handed him a file folder marked "Climate Projections, 1972-1986" and smiled.
"We have an appointment to discuss the land price fluctuations that can be expected due to expected drought conditions across California over the next decade."
The engineering part of Mackey's personality was intrigued for a moment, until he realized that of course they would not be discussing any climate predictions. "F. Lanagan and L. Flanagan? We couldn't get better cover names? You don't think that's a just a bit suspicious?"
"They're real names, if you can believe it. A strange glitch of reality. Stranger even than the fact that their files were merged with ours over at the Office of Personnel Management during a routine tape backup, and so we received their new Identification Cards, affixed with our photographs. The Personnel Management Identification Office is going to have a devil of a time figuring out how those wires got crossed in their database. Someone will be under a stack of paper three inches thick over that mishap."
The buried facility appeared as if planted in the middle of the forest, which was currently sprouting with the season's new green leaves. The P-car pulled up to the gate, innocuous enough in chain link and barbed wire, stretching out through the woods in both directions as far as anyone could see. The car stopped as the electricity was automatically cut. The security officer inspected their badges, as well as the form that Hopper handed over through the car's document portal. The electricity switched on, and the car continued along the rail past the gate and descended into a tunnel within a concrete shroud, curving down into the mountain.
"What is this facility?"
"Originally, it was just a weather station. But weather is on the surface. They've been building downward into the mountain since the 1950s, gradually increasing the size of the complex. We estimate there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 Weather Service employees inside Mount Weather."
"That's a lot of meteorologists in offices without windows."
"Indeed."
The parking area was not dissimilar from the parking area of the Electromagnetic Bureau, or any underground employee car park at any governmental site, for that matter. The car stopped at the entrance to the complex, and as they exited, Hopper inserted an auto-park card. Once they closed the door, the car moved off of its own accord, the signals directing the car towards a free space. There was no attendant here,
just an automated parking terminal that printed a punched claim card, which Hopper accepted and stowed in her pocket.
And then they were off, making an illegal entry into a government facility. It was mundane enough of an activity in practice, simply walking in the door. Mackey stifled his nervousness at the significance of the act as he tried to keep up with Hopper's brisk pace.
The facility was nice, but nondescript. The walls on the entry level were paneled in dull orange, with a small plaque molded with the Weather Service emblem—a lightning bolt striking across a dark sky—the only sign of where they were and whom they were supposed to be. Hopper proceeded past the automated directory down the hallway, making one dull orange turn and then another, past fluorescent-lit offices and dark concrete stairwells descending further into the earth. Mackey tried not to make eye contact with any of the Weather Service employees they passed in the hallway. Luckily, the Assistant Secretary's gait caused most to step aside demurely, out of the path of someone with clear executive purpose.
She whispered to him as they walked. "If you worked in something called the Predictive Analysis Office, what sort of clout would that bring in the Weather Service?"
Mackey considered what he knew about the Weather Service organizational scheme. "Well, that would be fairly high level, if we were talking about a Transportation agency. Future-forward, operations strategy, that sort of thing. But in the Weather Service, it's all models and prediction, isn't it? So if it is work they specifically call ‘Predictive Analysis,' it would have to differ from standard weather modelling. Some other kinds of agency number crunching, or second-level analytics. That means progress reports, and data entry. I'd say bottom rungs, first or second tier services, depending on how tied Predictive Analysis is to current priority projects."
They entered an elevator and Hopper considered the buttons. They were marked Level 1 through Level 9, with 9 on the bottom of the stack.
"Just a couple floors above facilities management then." Hopper punched Level 7, and the stainless steel doors banged shut.
When they opened again, they revealed a similar hallway, linoleum tiled, this time with walls in off-yellow paint. Several more of the overhead fluorescent bulbs were dark than on the floor above. Hopper exited, a bit more cautiously now, looking around her for any signs of Weather Service employees, but still walking straight ahead down the hallway.
"Should we check an office directory?" Mackey whispered.
"It's not listed."
Most of the offices were dark, blinds drawn across the reinforced window glass that partitioned them from the hallway, doors shut. Each office was marked with a designation, consisting of numbers and letters, but no signs, names, or titles. They rounded a corner, and the labyrinth continued.
Mackey stopped to examine one room designation marker. They slid out of narrow metal tracks along the doorframe, apparently meant to be swapped. The designation in question read AF-7-1. He checked the neighboring designations as they proceeded down the hall.
AF-7-2, AF-7-3, RS-7-1, RS-7-2, PS-7-1.
On the dusty linoleum floor, Mackey saw a piece of paper, creased as if it had been folded in three, to be placed in an envelope. He picked it up.
It was an internal order form for office supplies, signed by a D. Setzler. Setzler had ordered three D-45 pads and a box of hanging folders. The form was dated three months previous. Unwilling to place litter back on the ground, he tucked the piece of paper inside the folder of climate predictions that he carried.
"Time to prove your usefulness, Mackey," Hopper prompted. "What have you got for me?"
"It's the Predictive Analysis Office, not the Predictive Analysis Division?" Mackey asked.
Hopper looked at him, trying to read in his eyes what he was reading in the signs. "Yes, that's it. Why?"
"Commerce has two separate hierarchical levels designated ‘Office.' One is equivalent to a ‘Section' in Transportation, in other words, a large, high-level group: what we might call a major Office. But they also call what we label a ‘Station,' the smallest-level grouping, an ‘Office.' A minor Office, one might say. In that case, an Office is bottom of the chart, two to ten employees maximum. If we are assuming that Predictive Analysis isn't a big project for the Weather Service, then it isn't a major Office. I could envision it classified as Division level within the Service, which is the next distinction, below major Office. But if you're sure it's explicitly an Office, then it would have to be minor. So it's likely not an area that we're looking for, so much as a particular room."
Mackey gestured at the signs. "These are removable. So they can reassign the rooms. I don't know what PS and RS are, but I would be willing to bet Predictive Analysis is a PA."
Hopper smiled. "I'll take that bet."
They continued down the dark hallway, seeing no one. The faint murmur of office conversation echoed from distant directions. Mackey tried to make out where it might be coming from. All the offices on the hall seemed to be empty, dark, closed. Somewhere, far away, a telephone rang. Was he just imagining the sounds one would expect to hear from a hallway full of offices? The hiss of HVAC had a way of masking sounds, and rendering them directionless.
They turned a corner, and down the off-yellow hallway, there was a bright spot some thirty yards away. All the fluorescent bulbs there were brightly lit, new and gleaming, with fresh starters to eliminate the flickering that was scattered across the rest of the level, like drooping, twitching eyes amid an office in need of a coffee break. Mackey would have approached this unnaturally bright spot hesitantly, like a baited trap. Hopper did no such thing, walking briskly towards it, and stopping. When Mackey caught up, he saw a large steel door with a complex security console mounted in the wall next to it.
"Our badges won't work on that, will they?"
Hopper didn't answer, instead looking at the darkened office across the passage: PA-7-1. She gestured at it to Mackey, using just the angle of her head. "I have a badge to open this one."
From a small tab on the edge of her briefcase, she pulled out a thin black metal bar, concealed within the reinforced bottom of the case. Pulling on the door handle and inserting the bar along the jamb, she quickly pushed, and the door popped. She disappeared inside, and with a fervent hope that this would be over as soon as possible, Mackey followed, removing his hat by habit as he stepped inside.
The room was completely dark except for a slight red glow from the indicator lamps of hissing machinery along the wall, and a bit of the bright fluorescent light filtering in around the edges of the blinds, pulled down across the window onto the hallway. The office was not very large, but it was quite warm, and full of everpresent hum. It was the sound of fans, the buzzing of electromagnets coursing with current, the small vibrations given off by the motors that otherwise silently rotated reels, drives, and mechanical feed trays. There was no question that the small, dark office was stacked with computers.
Hopper produced a flashlight and scanned their surroundings. Indeed, an entire wall of the small office appeared in the brilliant beam, filled with a computer cabinets, noisy although idle, powered on but not currently processing. The printer was still, magnetic tapes motionless, and console screen dark. Opposite the machine was a small desk, covered in files. Hopper's light was drawn to a low table on one side of the desk, empty, with thick cables leading to the computer. She leaned in for a closer look. Mackey looked over her shoulder, unsure of what she was looking for. Hopper traced the cable back towards the machine. In the ambient light of her torch, Mackey examined the desk, looking for a nameplate or a business card.
"This is it," she announced, after examining a wall plate. "This is how they connected their IMP between the phone line in the wall and the computer. They accessed the data from this office." Hopper gestured at the magnetic tapes with the flashlight. "No doubt they've recorded the data they were after and removed it by now, but this is where it happened. The cab
les are virtually identical to what we built at ARPB." She turned her attention to the desk. "What have you got over here?"
Mackey shrugged. "No nameplate, no personal office belongings at all. Just a stack of dossiers, aerial photos of some kind."
Hopper leaned over the desk, paging through the files. She passed the flashlight to Mackey, who held it and directed it at the desk. She held up a photo attached by paperclip to a typewritten page. As she turned it back and forth in the light, the paper slipped off the photograph and descended to the desk below. Mackey picked it up idly and began reading.
"This isn't an aerial photograph," Hopper pronounced solemnly. "It's a satellite photograph. There's no oblique on the buildings. It is taken from orbit."
Mackey squinted through his glasses in the dark. "What are these strange diagrams here? This seems like a standard personnel form, except for these circles with the lines through them."
He held it in the light for Hopper to see. It was a ring with a bunch of symbols inscribed around the outer edge. The ring was drawn into twelve segments, like the hours of a clock. In the center was a smaller circle, cut across by lines at various irregular angles, and a multitude of smaller symbols. They weren't like any engineering symbols or foreign alphabet that Mackey have ever seen.
"I believe those are astrological birth charts. What do you mean, a personnel form?"
"It says here Milton Landry. There's a date of birth, mailing address, and federal employment history. He works for the Postal Bureau."
"What Section?"
"Doesn't say."
"Who else is here?"
Mackey shuffled through the dossiers, looking for names. "A bunch of mid-level bureaucrats here, from the looks of it. Barbara Johnson, Mass Transit Bureau; Pedro Silva, Infrastructure Bureau; Michael Brewer, National Automated Transport Safety Bureau; George Halbersham, Postal Bureau. William Alexander . . . I know William Alexander. Yes, William X. Alexander, that's Bill Alexander, an engineer in the Radio Communications Section, Electromagnetic Bureau. Why is there a file on him here in the Weather Service, with an astrological chart on it? Clipped to a satellite photograph?"
Orthogonal Procedures Page 3
