Analog SFF, June 2011 by Dell Magazine Authors Read Free Book Online Page B

implausible.
    It took a while for the penny to drop. It took an hour of calculations, punctuated by two quick peeks in on Simon, asleep amid a jumble of toys, to work out the geometry and confirm her suspicions.
    There had been interference, all right: The signal bleeping blocked , after a round trip of almost two billion miles. By Phoebe's sunshield.
    Of course the Moon, the first-and-real Moon, sometimes got in the radar telescope's way—but on its stately orbit Luna crossed the plane of the ecliptic, potentially blocking the line of sight to other targets in the solar system, only once every couple weeks. Phoebe and its sunshield whizzed around the Earth in less than six hours! Damnation, she knew that. Phoebe and its shield were small, but her luck was bound to run out.
    As it had.
    Valerie sighed. She could plan future observations around them, but what a nuisance. Long-term, the observatory needed to reprogram ASTRID—astronomer's integrated desktop—to keep Phoebe-compromised observations from ever getting scheduled. And—
    And it had not been a penny that had dropped before. Wrong metaphor. A shoe had dropped. No, a big honking boot. And now, so did the other one.
    Phoebe was not the big problem. The big problem was everything that Phoebe portended. . . .
    * * * *
    Marcus loitered in a vending room, sipping a cup of lousy coffee, savoring the break from an interminable meeting. Sunlight streamed through the room's window wall, which offered an otherwise uninspiring view of an interior courtyard.
    A predisposition to fog from off the Potomac had given this neighborhood its name, but diplomatic obfuscation was what preserved the label. To most of the world, Foggy Bottom meant the State Department, in whose blocky headquarters Marcus had unhappily spent his afternoon. Ellen had gotten a call just as the meeting started. She left, giving him only a you-know-how-it-is shrug for explanation.
    Today was nonetheless a change of pace, because this meeting involved international whining. As the demo powersat approached completion, more and more countries were objecting to powersats as weapons of mass destruction.
    And so Marcus had gotten to explain microwave downlinks to a roomful of Foreign Service Officers. Yes, the beam carried a lot of power. That was the project's purpose : bringing power to the ground. And of course the beam was concentrated, to minimize the dedicated collection area on the ground.
    Then it had been on to safety interlocks. Every collection station had a guide beacon that the power satellite used as its target. If a collection station detected the power beam slipping off-center, off went the beacon and the satellite ceased transmission.
    "Target?” an FSO had repeated.
    "A poor choice of words,” Marcus had answered. He wasn't a diplomat. Aimed would be no better. “Directed. The satellite directs the beam at the collection station."
    "And beams only at collection stations?” another FSO had asked. “My online identity has been hijacked twice, and you wouldn't believe what a pain in the posterior that was. So you'll understand that I'm just a tad skeptical about how secure any system is."
    "Yes, only at collection stations.” In his mind, Marcus had added an exclamation point. And speculated about birthdays and children's names used as passwords. “Downlink coordinates are hard-coded into the powersat. By design, we can only update coordinates physically, on PS-1 itself. To update the list of authorized collection stations, we'll dispatch a robot probe."
    "Switchable on and off. The downlink point commanded from the ground."
    Who wants a system that can't be turned off? “The idea,” Marcus had explained, “is to deliver power where it is most valuable, and that varies. It could be the DC area in summer, and maybe only in the hottest part of the day when the use of air conditioning peaks. It could be Fargo in winter, during a cold snap, when the demand surges for heat. Or filling in when