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Stories from the Verse
In Version
Chapter 3: Kondor 223
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Beam 158
Zeke entered the cafeteria; Kondor spotted him and waved for him to find him, although finding one six foot tall black human in military camouflage in a room filled with three to four foot tall colorful parakeets was hardly like finding that guy in the red-and-white striped shirt in those picture books. Zeke signaled that he saw, and headed into the line through the kitchen to get food. He was soon at the table, looking a bit flustered.
“So,” Kondor ventured, “tricky morning?”
“Well,” Zeke responded, “we got somethin’, but don’ know quite what.”
“Oh?”
“There’s radio traffic out there, but I haven’t been able to decipher it. You know how we use amplitude modulation, changing the intensity of the wave, and frequency modulation, varying the speed of the waveform, for our radio transmissions. We know there must be other ways to do it, and it seems that our aliens have found one, because my efforts to decipher these transmissions have been unsuccessful to this point.”
“But you’re certain they are communications?”
“They weren’t there a month ago, and they are clearly coming in bursts. I would wager if we had radio telescopes we could triangulate the positions of their ships from the signals.”
Kondor nodded. “That’s certainly worth something. Have you suggested it to engineering?”
“Not yet. Think I should?”
“Absolutely. I mean, I think Slade is overreacting, but just in case he’s right we should have every weapon on our side we can manage. In fact, you and I should get to work on a radio missile guidance system. If we can get missiles to home in on the alien radio signals we could take advantage of their technology to facilitate ours.”
This time Zeke nodded. “That’s a good idea. What are you doing after lunch?”
“I didn’t have any plans,” he shrugged. “Do you think we could make any progress?”
There was a short laugh. “Right. Let’s see. We need radio receivers with directional antennae that can focus on a source point, self-propelled explosives delivery devices with adjustable trajectory systems, and internal control circuits that can use the information from the first to control the second.”
“We’re going to need Derek,” Kondor replied, and Zeke laughed again.
“Yeah, at least. But heck, if we get started maybe we can introduce them before the war is lost and turn the tide. It’s happened before, right?”
“Indeed, it has. How is the radar coming?”
“Well. We are spotting their ships. Thus far they haven’t seemed to think countermeasures important, or else they don’t have them.”
Thinking for a moment, Kondor suggested, “I think that the so-called radar-invisible planes of my time used a coating that would absorb rather than reflect the radio frequencies used by most radar systems. There’s also chaff, more useful in anti-missile defenses, scattering detectable objects between the radar and the target to confuse the signal. That wouldn’t help hide a craft at distance because you could still see the main object, it would just become fuzzy from the surrounding objects.”
“So, what about invisible paint?”
“It might not be possible on an orbit-to-ground craft. Crossing the atmospheric boundary generates a lot of friction, and ships that do it have to have special coatings to get through. You couldn’t cover that coating with another, but I don’t know whether you could put that coating over the other without becoming detectable.”
Zeke apparently did understand that.
“Well, let’s finish our grub and we can start tackling some of these problems.”
Kondor nodded and took another bite of what Zeke had colorfully identified as grub.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #476: Versers Deduce. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
