"She's all yours, Harry. I've already checked out with the tower."
"O.K. That gyro any worse?"
"No, it seems to have steadied a bit. Nothing else gone wrong, either."
"Looks like we're in luck for a change."
"Let me have the parka and I'll clear out. I'll think of you up here while I'm relaxing. Just imagine; a whole twenty-four hours off, and not even any training scheduled."
"Someone slipped up, I'll bet. By the way, be sure to look at the fireworks when you go out. They're better now than I've seen them at any time since they started."
"The meteor shower, you mean? Thanks. I'll take a look. I'll bet they're really cluttering up the radar screens. The Launch Control Officer must be going quietly nuts."
The Launch Control Officer wasn't going nuts. Anyone who went nuts under stress simply didn't pass the psychological tests required of prospective Launch Control Officers. However, he was decidedly unhappy. He sat in a dimly-lighted room, facing three oscilloscope screens. On each of them a pie-wedge section was illuminated by a white line which swept back and forth like a windshield wiper. Unlike a windshield wiper, however, it put little white blobs on the screen, instead of removing them. Each blob represented something which had returned a radar echo. The center screen was his own radar. The outer two were televised images of the radar screens at the stations a hundred miles on either side of him, part of a chain of stations extending from Alaska to Greenland. In the room, behind him, and facing sets of screens similar to his, sat his assistants. They located the incoming objects on the screen and set automatic computers to determining velocity, trajectory, and probable impact point.
This information appeared as coded symbols beside the tracks on the center screen of the Launch Control Officer, as well as all duplicate screens. The Launch Control Officer, and he alone, had the responsibility to determine whether the parameters for a given track were compatible with an invading Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, or whether the track represented something harmless. If he failed to launch an interceptor at a track that turned out to be hostile, it meant the death of an American city. However, if he made a habit of launching interceptors at false targets, he would soon run out of interceptors. And only under the pressure of actual war would the incredible cost of shipping in more interceptors during the winter be paid without a second thought. Normally, no more could be shipped in until spring. That would mean a gap in the chain that could not be covered adequately by interceptors from the adjacent stations.