The Zenith Angle by Bruce Sterling

Author:Bruce Sterling
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Washington (D.C.), Married People, Colorado, Political Fiction, Government Investigators, Fiction, Women Astronomers, Science Fiction, Suspense Fiction, Computer Security, Technological, Thrillers, Space Surveillance, Espionage, High Tech
ISBN: 0345460618
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2004-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

NINE

COLORADO, FEBRUARY 2002

Hickok wasn’t the kind of guy to silently nurse his grudges. His first stop outside the Cheyenne base was to pick up two fifths of Jack Daniel’s.

Van drove the Humvee as Hickok slurped his bourbon and griped. In going to visit Dottie, Van was borrowing Hickok’s courier truck.

The failure gnawed at Van. He was right, he knew he was right. Why hadn’t that worked? Why hadn’t he been more convincing?

Two reasons, really. The first was painful and personal. He, Dr. Derek Vandeveer, was a geek. He was a classic, bearded-weirdo, introspective nerd. Oh, yes, he could hold his own when people came to him with technical problems. But he didn’t have the grit that it took to really kick ass and take names. He should have had that kind of quality. He had nobody to blame for his weakness but himself. His grandfather would have broken that stupid Air Force general like a matchstick.

Almost. He’d been so close. If not for that ugly Mondiale business . . . but that shouldn’t have mattered. Or, at least, Mondiale was only one aspect of a much deeper crisis. He should never have sold out to private industry in the first place. At Stanford, at MIT, people had high standards. People had intellectual rigor. At Mondiale, nobody cared at all about principles. The method at Mondiale was to build a prototype in R&D. Then throw it over the wall to marketing and product development. That was what Van had just tried to do with this military professional. And it just hadn’t worked.

Van fiercely gripped the Humvee’s padded steering wheel. He was driving a vehicle the size of a living room, through dense Colorado commuter traffic, on snowy, hairpin mountain turns. White-line fever had him totally keyed-up.

Phantoms of shame and guilt danced on the snowy road ahead of him. Not only was he not a true leader, he was not truly a scientist, either. That was the tragic core of the whole ugly mess. Computer science was a fraud. It always had been. It was the only branch of science ever named after a gadget. He and his colleagues were basically no better than gizmo freaks. Now physics, now that was true science. Nobody ever called physics “lever science” or “billiard ball science.”

The fatal error in computer science was that it modeled complex systems without truly understanding them. Computers simulated complexity. You might know more or less what was likely to happen. But the causes remained unclear. When a hard-headed, practical man like General Wessler asked him “why,” all that Van could do was helplessly wave his hands.

He could have become a mathematician. He knew he had some skill there. Math would have been a much better choice for an ugly man who was shy and retiring. It was only personal weakness that had made him give in to the lure of computers. They called it “software engineering,” but that wasn’t engineering, either. If he’d been a true engineer like his grandfather, he would never have gone to the Space Force with such a cheap, lousy hack.

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