Free [The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) by Stephen Moss Page B

and Laurie’s somewhat naïve plans. Once again she had found herself reflecting that Neal was smarter than even he gave himself credit for, though she had no intention of fueling his self-confidence and resulting dubious sense of diplomacy further by telling him so.
    Two months later they had a prototype for the tool they would need to find the meteors, and she had come down to Florida a couple of days ahead of the generals, admirals, and other White House advisors who would be arriving tomorrow to view the demonstration.
    They had spent the first day going over the theory and design of the scanner, or Gamma-supplemented Radar Sonar Seismographic and Planar Array. They had been incredibly creative in their thinking, and had come up with some fundamentally new ways to approach the problem, but essentially the system worked by combining multiple existing scanning techniques, and using them in unison. The readings of all of these were then cross-referenced using a series of complex algorithms developed by the team to single out features of the scanned area that met a series of criteria, each identified by a different part of the scanner.
    That had been yesterday, but despite her interest in the scientific rigor, she was keen to see the machine in action. It had been necessary to bring her up to speed, however, as the team arriving would be looking to her for reassurance that there was meat behind what the civilian team was saying.
    Though today they would see it in person, Neal had taken some pleasure in teasing her further by spending two hours explaining the tests they had developed for it. After all, before the navy would agree to dispatch the tool and the team to one of its vessels to go hunting, they would have to prove to the arriving dignitaries that it would work in waters that were really two miles deep.
    With Laurie’s patience running dangerously thin, Neal had eventually brought her from the meeting room where they had reviewed the countless equations, and out into the ‘lab.’
    As they stood there amongst the tanks and cranes, they were both starting to feel like they had chosen the wrong specialization, for no astrophysics experiment had used labs like this since the moon landing tests. Sure, they had their Hubble telescope, but you didn’t wear overalls and a tool belt to work on things like that, you wore a full-body encounter suit and re-breather, and most astrophysicists were unlikely to be doing that anytime soon.
    The probe dangling in the huge tank, which they stood watching, was scanning through the water. It sought a variety of identically shaped objects which had been strewn on the bottom of the tank, each of a different material and correspondingly different density. The test for the probe was to see if it could detect the position and density of each object in a series of controlled tests, with remote-controlled underwater cranes moving them between each running of the test.
    The cranes would also rearrange a set of even smaller iron blocks into different patterns, testing the ability of the probe to achieve the necessary resolution for the greater vertical distances that would eventually be required.
    All of this was done amidst a bed of sand and small rocks designed to mimic a natural ocean bed. This, and the debris in the water, should prove enough to demonstrate the machine’s ability to see through everything, up to, and including, mud.
    There was one other test that they would keep in reserve in case their audience was not convinced by this massive and impressive show. The second test was fairly expensive, a little strange, and very messy, so they would only show it if someone in the review board asked the same question that Laurie had asked immediately after Neal had finished explaining the first test.
    While considerations of cost and clean-up affected the test’s appeal for the Institute’s administrators and financiers, Neal and most of his colleagues were hoping more than a little