Fade Out

by Patrick Tilley

  As one of the contributing sensor stations to the United States Air Force’s SPACETRACK program, Jodrell Bank had a current catalogue of all manmade objects in space. The SPACETRACK centre in Colorado also supplied them with a constantly updated Look Angle List, which gave each station the exact position of all known objects in space in relation to their own ground location.

  The Mark One team fed the co-ordinates of the mystery object into the computer for comparison with all currently listed items. The co-ordinates didn’t match up with anything on the list. That meant it was new – and worth watching. The movement of the radio telescope was also controlled by the computer. New instructions were hurriedly keyed in and, as the Earth rotated, it kept the big dish pointed towards the same spot in the sky.

  Four hours after the first unexpected blip, another radar pulse bounced back. The signal was as fuzzy as the first, but to Jodrell Bank it was a clear indication that something was orbiting the Earth once every four hours. From the two observations they were able to arrive at an approximation of its size and its height above the Earth.

  Alerted by Jodrell Bank, a satellite tracking station in Carnarvon, Western Australia, pointed its radar antennae skyward. In Australia, it was already Sunday. After several hours’ search, they picked up Jodrell Bank’s target and were able to establish its speed, height, and plane of orbit.

  Carnarvon transmitted its data by teleprinter to England where it was processed by Jodrell Bank’s computer. By five o’clock on Sunday afternoon, the Mark Three dish was skin-tracking the spacecraft. A new printout from the computer showed that it had been launched into a perfect circular orbit.

  The acquisition of the spacecraft coincided with the arrival of Jodrell Bank’s director, Dr Geoffrey Cargill, at his home in the nearby village of Twemlow Green. Cargill had been in Russia attending a scientific symposium at the Moscow Academy of Sciences. One of the unscheduled items on the agenda had been some lively theorizing about Friday’s twenty-minute radar fade-out. Cargill had got his luggage as far as the hall when his deputy director phoned and told him the news. Cargill abandoned the cucumber sandwiches and tea his housekeeper had prepared and took three minutes off his previous best door-to-door time.

  While he had been in Moscow, Cargill had pumped his Russian colleagues for details of their forthcoming space program. As usual, the Russians had sidestepped his questions. All he’d managed to cull were vague generalizations about some of their long-range research objectives. It was infuriating. There was absolutely no need for the blighters to be so damned cagey. Admittedly Jodrell Bank had close links with the American space program, but the place was still British, thank God. The chaps in Moscow obviously thought he was working for the CIA.

  Cargill scanned the computer printout analysing the orbital characteristics of the spacecraft and remembered his conversations in Moscow. One of the things he had been trying to substantiate was a particularly strong rumour that the Russians were almost ready to launch a large automated spacelab destined to go into orbit around Jupiter.

  His hosts had smiled at his questions but had declined to comment. Seeing his frustration, Vasily Grigorienko, an astrophysicist from Star City, had patted him on the shoulder and said, ‘I’m sure you understand that in this country there are times when it’s advisable not to be too specific. There are so many things that can go wrong. Let us just say that we still hope to give you a few surprises.’

  To which the other Russians in the group had raised their glasses.

  The cheeky buggers, thought Cargill. While he’d been ferreting around in Moscow, they had already put the damn thing into orbit. But there had been none of the usual data transmissions from the spacecraft, nor any interrogation signals from Russian ground stations – or any announcement. Cargill suddenly realized what Grigorienko had been trying to tell him. There had been a major balls-up. The Jupiter probe was up but in trouble.

  Cargill told his deputy controller to relay all the data to America. He looked at his watch. It was 5:55 P.M. He was bang on time to get a front-page story in tomorrow’s morning papers – in London and New York. With luck, he’d beat the rest of the world to it. It would be another major scoop for Jodrell Bank and a much-needed boost for British scientific skills and technology. And it wouldn’t do Geoffrey Cargill any harm either.

  Sunday/August 5

  WESTERN WHITE HOUSE/CALIFORNIA

  Following the fashion of his predecessors, the President had set up his own weekend White House. It was situated on a rocky strip of the West Coast up towards Arena Point. The climate wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but the President didn’t like dry heat or sterile air conditioning. He needed mist-lined mountain country, steep-rising stands of towering redwoods, a fresh wind off the sea in his face.

  His wife Anne liked things that way too. He counted himself fortunate in having made a politically-advantageous marriage to someone he genuinely loved. Anne had not only returned that love, she had used her family’s vast wealth to help bring him to power.

  It had been a long haul. As the first American President of Italian descent, Lorenzo had had to fight the inevitable campaign of smear and innuendo that if elected he would turn out to be the Mafia’s man in the White House. The same tactics had been used to cripple Geraldine Ferraro’s ambitions to high office but, after a string of investigations and open hearings which had examined his private life, his professional career, tax returns and business connections, he had emerged as the squeaky clean candidate. Having won the nomination he had gone on to win the election. But it had not been a landslide and, like many of his predecessors, he had problems with Congress and the Senate. Compromise had become the name of the game – and that was why Mel Fraser had been appointed Secretary of Defense.

  The Californian estate which his wife had inherited and which was now the West Coast White House had been big enough to accommodate the necessary staff and secure enough to shelter a President without extensive alterations and additions. The communications facility and the helicopter pad had been the only problems but as soon as he had decided to set up shop there, everything had been organized swiftly and efficiently. The homely touches he had left to Anne and her gaggle of gay decorators who had already left their mark on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Connors didn’t go out in the big cabin cruiser with the President. He watched from the small stone jetty as Silvermann shepherded his five favourite newsmen aboard and waved briefly as Sant’Anna I pulled away. The waiting Navy patrol boat took up station on the starboard rear quarter, then throttled back its big engines to match the Sant’Anna’s thirty-five knots. The freshening wind whipped up spray from the wavetops and the sunlight, bouncing through the breakers, turned them a clear blue-green. Connors took a few deep breaths of sea air, then went back up the steps to the house.

  Just about the time the President hooked into his first sailfish, Jodrell Bank’s data about the Jupiter probe began to clatter out of the high-speed teleprinter at NORAD’s SPACETRACK centre, Ent AFB, Colorado. It was 11:05 Mountain Standard Time. The man who got the first buzz stateside was a NORAD civilian employee, Willard D. (for Duane) Charles, from Ridgewood, New Jersey. Charles had been running a routine check on the multitudinous collection of orbiting satellites and space junk that ranged in size from a Hasselblad camera to the new Russian heavy-weight Mir. Jodrell Bank’s item was even bigger.

  Charles alerted SPACETRACK’S duty officer and routed the orbital data into the computer Within minutes, it had calculated Look Angle co-ordinates for every sensor station in the SPACETRACK network and was relaying the information to them. All they had to do to pick up the Jupiter probe was to point their radar or radio telescope in the given direction. There was only one small problem. The probe was orbiting beyond the range of most of the SPACETRACK radar stations.

  NORAD called General Clayson in Washington and finally located him with Wedderkind and his scientific conglomerate at the Air Force Research Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Clayson pulled
Wedderkind out of a meeting in mid-theory and told him about Jodrell Bank’s discovery.

  Wedderkind knew that Cargill had a well-earned scientific reputation, but he also knew more about the Jupiter probe than Cargill did. He put in a fast call to Arkhip Karamatov at Houston. Karamatov was head of the Russian group liaising with NASA on plans for a new series of joint space ventures. Karamatov confirmed Wedderkind’s 80 per cent hunch. The Jupiter probe was still grounded. So what had the Russians put up there? It was a question that Karamatov wasn’t able to answer. On the East Coast, the sudden wave of speculation put a lot of people off their Sunday dinner. Clayson ordered a total security clampdown on the sighting, and called the Western White House.

  The President got the news from Connors over the ship-to-shore scrambler phone. The skipper of the Sant’Anna I called the Navy patrol boat alongside; the President and Silvermann stepped over the rail and headed back to shore at sixty-five knots.

  Luckily, the White House newsman had already got pictures of him smiling alongside a seven-foot sailfish.

  Connors was waiting on the jetty as the patrol boat pulled alongside. Way out on the horizon was the white blob of Sant’Anna I’s hull. As the patrol boat nudged the jetty, the President jumped down without grabbing Connors’ outstretched hand. Silvermann waited for the gangplank.

  The first thing the President said was, ‘How big is it?’

  ‘We don’t have any firm data yet. First estimates put it somewhere around two hundred and fifty tons – ’

  ‘Jee-zuss.’

  ‘– polar orbit, about four thousand miles out.’

  The President turned to Silvermann. ‘Listen, keep your boys out of the way for the rest of the afternoon. And give me a good cover story.’

  Silvermann nodded. Connors followed the President up to the house.

  From the upstairs study on the north side of the house, you could look towards the tree-lined range that shielded the head of the Sacramento Valley, northward to Mount Linn, and out across the Pacific. Two of the Secret Service men who patrolled the grounds walked briefly into view. Through the trees, further down the slope, Connors caught a glimpse of the moored patrol boat. The Sant’Anna I, now way out, was heading north past the point on an impromptu sight-seeing trip.

  ‘Who’s coming besides Clayson and Wedderkind?’

  Connors pivoted around from the west window. ‘Fraser’s bringing Gene Samuels, and McKenna’s on his way too.’

  Samuels was head of the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and McKenna, the director of the CIA. Another keen Sunday fisherman, he had been dug out of the Canadian woods near the Minnesota border.

  The chair the President sat in matched the one behind his desk in Washington. He liked chairs that rocked and swivelled. ‘Who else do you think we should call in on this?’

  ‘Nobody.’ There are too many of us in on this already, thought Connors. Was it possible that he could have totally misjudged the Russians’ intentions? Obviously. The few simple facts spoke for themselves. He sensed that the President had already linked the radar breakdown with whatever it was that the Russians had put into orbit.

  Silvermann came in. ‘Anything I can do?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the President. ‘See if you can rustle me up a chicken sandwich or something. How about you, Bob?’

  ‘No, thanks. I already had lunch.’

  ‘One chicken sandwich –?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Coming up,’ said Silvermann. The door closed behind him.

  ‘Do you think we should go back to Washington?’

  ‘No. I think we should sit tight.’ Connors sat down facing the President. ‘Let them come to you. If we’re going to get into a hassle, at least we can do it in private.’

  The President thought it over and nodded his agreement. He leaned on the desk, cupped his nose and mouth between the palms of his hands and closed his eyes. Tell it to me over again.’

  ‘It’s in a circular parking orbit, north to south over the poles, once every four hours. Speed, thirteen thousand plus. Altitude four thousand miles. Two of NASA’s tracking stations are on to it now. Plus Jodrell Bank.’

  ‘Why is it orbiting so far out?’

  ‘Nobody’s come up with a good answer to that yet. It could be to avoid detection. Most of the skin-tracking radar stations – they’re the ones that track satellites by bouncing a pulse off the satellite itself – only operate effectively up to a height of about a thousand miles. Most tracking in deep space depends on receiving a signal from the spacecraft itself.’

  ‘And that’s where the radio telescopes come in.’

  ‘Right. They can pinpoint and amplify radio signals from more than a million miles away. We’ve bounced radar pulses off Mars, but to do it you need one hell of a lot of power.’

  ‘Like they have at Jodrell Bank.’

  ‘Right,’ said Connors.

  ‘Don’t we have optical tracking equipment?’

  ‘Yes, a whole stack. The Air Force has a setup down in New Mexico that can pick up satellites twenty thousand miles away. The problem with optical sensors is that they only work when their part of the world is in darkness and the satellite is illuminated by the sun.’

  ‘I can wait till tonight,’ said the President. ‘If it’s as big as you say – ’

  ‘Well, ah – those figures are provisional. There seems to be some difficulty in estimating its size accurately. The type of signal that is bouncing back indicates that the spacecraft has a surface that absorbs or distorts radar waves. Like the Air Force’s new stealth bomber. And none of our monitoring units have picked up any of the usual telemetric transmissions to Russian ground stations.’

  A wild ray of hope brought a mild grin to the President’s face. ‘Maybe the English were right about that part of it. Maybe the Russians have lost contact. That really would be something, wouldn’t it?’ He stood up.

  ‘Yes.’ Connors hesitated. ‘The only problem is that Jodrell Bank has recorded two slight changes in the angle of orbit since they first picked it up on their radar.’

  The grin faded. ‘So someone’s steering it.’

  ‘It’s possible – except that we haven’t picked up any signals from the ground either. That could mean one of two things. It’s either automatic or – ’

  The President was ahead of him. ‘Or it could be out of control.’

  ‘It’s just a thought I had.’

  ‘It’s the one I like best.’ The President sat down again.

  Silvermann came back with two chicken on rye.

  Melvin Fraser and Gene Samuels were the last to arrive at the big round table in the Pine Room, upstairs, next to the study.

  Connors sat on the President’s right. Clayson and Wedderkind were looking a bit grey around the edges. McKenna’s rimless eyeglasses reflected ice-blue objectivity. Fraser and Samuels radiated happy malice. There were a few short sparring rounds. Then Clayson got right into it.

  ‘Since the first sighting, we’ve recorded two adjustments to the angle of orbit. Each course change has been preceded by a ten-second breakdown in our radar navigation and surveillance systems – similar to the twenty-minute break on Friday.’

  Connors sat back in his chair and exchanged glances with Wedderkind.

  ‘This would appear to indicate that the source of the interference is the propulsion unit of the spacecraft.’

  ‘You mean when the motor’s working, our radar isn’t,’ said the President.

  ‘It’s one of the theories we’re looking at,’ admitted Clayson.

  ‘So that could explain why we were unable to track it from the moment of lift-off until it went into orbit.’

  Clayson nodded to Fraser, then turned to catch the President’s next question.

  ‘This is obviously a radically new kind of power plant. Any ideas on what it might be?’

  Wedderkind got in first. ‘There’s only one that, in theory, could have some localized impact on radar and radio transmissions. A plasma-pow
ered thrust device. I must admit to being a little disturbed by the idea that the Russians could have got one of those off the ground.’

  ‘I’m even more disturbed by the thought of what it’s pushing around up there,’ said the President. ‘How about some ideas on that?’

  Connors watched Fraser exchange a look with Samuels. They’d obviously been rehearsing the answer to that one on the way over from Washington.

  ‘There’s only one thing that the Russians would want to put up there in secret,’ said Fraser. ‘And I’m sure we all know what that is.’

  Connors saw three years of carefully constructed global diplomacy collapsing like a deck of cards. Three years in which the Russians, responding to the continued deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles, had moved fleets of truck-mounted SS-20s and -22s into forward positions in Eastern Europe and, despite all the talk about disarmament, had maintained their overall numerical superiority in land- and sea-based nuclear weapon systems. Three years in which the numbers game continued to be played by teams of smooth-suited career-diplomats across the table at Geneva and elsewhere. And now this…

  The President said, ‘Just in case we don’t all know, Mel, why don’t you spell it out?’

  Fraser took a deep breath and shot a triumphant look at Connors. ‘Gene and I think this could be their orbital nuclear-strike platform we talked about at the NSC meeting last January.’

  ‘The idea of which we then discounted.’ The President shot a sharp glance at Connors.

  Code name SWAYBACK… Connors remembered the discussion, and the Defense Intelligence Agency file that Gene Samuels had presented at the routine monthly meeting of the National Security Council. The Russians had completed advanced studies of an orbital spacecraft from which nuclear missiles could be launched against the United States from outer space. It was an idea that both countries had played around with for a long time. Tacked on to the end of the DIA digest was an unconfirmed report that construction of a prototype was under way…