The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1)(29)
They had tried to organize a good, specific query to the onboard computer system by coming up with a question about data transfer. Jennifer had gotten the idea, and Heather thought it a good one, that if they could get the ship to show them how it stored and transferred data, it would be a very basic starting point in understanding the underlying alien technology. But no matter how they phrased or visualized the question, the answering imagery was the same.
It looked like a simple pair of transistors or electronic microswitches. The problem was there were no wires or connections of any type between the switches the ship described, merely some symbols and mathematical equations that Heather did not understand.
It was frustrating because she thought they could probably build the switches themselves, given a good microscope, a computer, some small RadioShack stepper motors to accurately control the instruments, and an appropriate semiconductor material. But since it wouldn’t form a circuit, why bother? What was the point of a pair of tiny electronic switches that weren't connected to each other?
The really annoying part was that they had gotten this far a couple of weeks ago. Despite Heather pushing herself through as many advanced mathematics books as she could read, she was no closer to understanding the mysterious equations than she had been when she first saw them.
“Oh well,” she said to herself, sliding into her big, furry slippers and wrapping her flannel robe around her body. “It looks like a good cartoons and hot chocolate day.”
The morning slipped away in wonderful wastefulness, aided along its path to Lounge Lizardsville by a breakfast of homemade biscuits and honey, followed by a pot of hot cocoa set on a coaster beside the couch. The television was tuned to the Cartoon Network as huge, puffy snowflakes drifted down outside the windows. By ten, Heather still had not dressed and had no intention of doing so anytime soon.
At the moment, an epic battle of wits raged between Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. Having just plummeted to the bottom of the canyon—where he kicked up a small mushroom cloud of dust—the coyote had come up with a bold new plan.
Heather had always related to the hapless fellow. After all, his plans were truly ingenious, sometimes awe-inspiringly so. Still, no matter how brilliant a scheme he put together, the stupid bird would somehow violate several laws of nature and leave the coyote to suffer the consequences.
Curled into a tight ball on the couch, sipping happily at a fresh cocoa refill—“Thanks, Mom”—Heather watched as the coyote finished painting a perfect picture of a black tunnel through a rock wall. The wall, which lay along the bird's projected path, completely blocked the road so that when the bird came running down it, he would speed directly into the trap, pre-tenderizing himself in preparation for becoming roadrunner stew.
It was really impossible to get too much of this stuff. Sure enough, as she and the coyote watched in anticipation, the roadrunner screeched down the road directly up to the cliff. Then—once again thumbing his pointy nose at the pile of physics books that lay upstairs on Heather’s desk—the bird passed harmlessly through the fake tunnel, continuing out the other side.
And, as could be expected, the coyote raced after the roadrunner, only to splat against the black paint on the near side of the rock wall. He stumbled around afterward in a dazed fashion until he fell off the cliff, generating another small mushroom cloud at the bottom.
Fire exploded in Heather’s brain as everything clicked into place. Of course. The wall had two sides.
She jumped up and raced for the telephone. Hearing a familiar hello on the far end, she barely managed to keep her excited voice low enough that her mother did not hear.
“Jen! Jen, you won’t believe it. I can barely believe it myself, and all because of a cartoon. Never let anyone tell you cartoons are mindless.”
“Heather, I have no idea what you’re talking about or where this is going.”
Heather paused and took a deep, gulping breath. “I figured it out. I know what the microswitches do. I know how they work. With Mark’s help, I think we can make them.”
Chapter 20
Abdul Aziz was not a religious man, although he often wished he was. How many years had it been since he had heeded the call to prayer, since he had even set foot inside a mosque? Allah would not look kindly upon his laziness in such matters, but perhaps his service for all of his Muslim brethren would rate some measure of reward in the afterlife. Egyptian born, Syrian trained, experience hardened in a way that few could have survived, Abdul could hardly believe the good fortune that had crowned him this day.
Direct action. Seldom in the world of international espionage were governments willing to take direct action to achieve their purposes. It was messy. It often left a trail. No, mostly they preferred to work slowly over a number of years to infiltrate and acquire the information they desired.
The now-defunct Soviet Union had been the master of this tactic, although the newly capitalistic Chinese Communists were giving the former Soviets a run for their money. Even his own government was reluctant to take direct action far from its own borders, although that reluctance certainly did not extend to his country’s immediate neighbors.
But this Rho Project declaration by the United States government presented such a grave potential threat to the entire Muslim world that there was no time for anything less than direct action. The potential threat was abundant justification that any and all means be used to attain knowledge of what the United States had learned over the last sixty years—information the United Sates still refused to share freely with the world.