Chapter 2: Holy Ghost
Haines felt like he was seeing a ghost.
He chose to come to New York on New Year’s Eve, trying to see if he could strike up a conversation with a desirable woman by watching a show on Broadway, and date her to spend the last day of 1959 together.
Not only did he fail to find a target to strike up a conversation with, but the next morning his pager kept paging him, urging him to find a place to contact the Redstone Rocket research and development headquarters at Redstone Arsenal.
To elaborate, the pager is what China commonly calls a BB machine, which had been widely used in New York Jewish hospitals as early as the 1940s, and the Detroit police department began using the first pager-like system in 1921.
These pagers were all supplied by Motorola.
And Motorola, as one of NASA’s core suppliers, used Motorola’s radio equipment for the voice signals transmitted from the Moon back to Earth.
Therefore, it was perfectly normal for them to provide a complete pager system to NASA’s employees.
Haines was already feeling frustrated and annoyed inside, and now his supervisor was asking him a question he considered extremely idiotic.
Snowflakes fell on the telephone booth making a rustling sound. Haines’s voice trembled somewhat as he recited the rocket launch window calculation formula.
He was holding the black earpiece between his left shoulder and ear, subconsciously writing a string of formulas about orbital calibration on the fogged-up glass to sort out the logic for his argument, and by the way demean the IQ of his supervisor on the other end of the phone.
“Listen, Director von Braun’s calculation team insists that the error tolerance of the third term coefficient…”
Haines’s blurry trajectory in the elliptic integral region suddenly had a new line of sight focus; the Asian youth outside the glass precisely placed his index finger on the path of Haines’s fingertip movement, and the two performed synchronous calculations across the glass.
“Are you listening? You need to call Director von Braun’s team right now to explain…”
The voice from the earpiece mixed with electromagnetic noise; Haines watched as the fourth term, of which he had only a tiny bit of idea, was destroyed by the other party using analytic continuation in the complex domain.
His own calculation steps had stopped, but the blurry figure across the fogged glass continued:
The youth wrote out a solution even more perfect than what he knew—the other’s fourth term was even more precise than the convergence domain that the Houston team had approximated after calculating for seventeen hours on the IBM 7090.
His breathing frequency accelerated with the gradual perfection of the formula: when Haines was so excited that his fingers trembled, the writing speed outside the frosted glass was increasing geometrically.
“No! This is impossible!” Haines.
At this moment, his supervisor’s roar from the earpiece converged with the tapping sound outside the glass.
First of all, what the other wrote was very logical; what he wrote was the gravitational perturbation correction formula, and the number of people in current New York who could understand this thing could be counted on two hands.
Haines had already derived this thing to the third term, and it was precisely because he derived it to the third term that he got the opportunity to go out for some air.
As a GS-9 level engineer, he had a certain degree of freedom.
But his immediate superior said on the phone that his calculation was wrong.
He had only written the second term on the windowpane, but the subsequent third, fourth, and fifth terms were directly completed.
And the completed third term matched exactly what he had calculated.
When Haines realized that it was the Chinese young man across from the windowpane who had helped him complete it, besides being shocked that the other could derive the formula to the fourth and fifth terms,
it was also because the other was standing outside the telephone booth, facing him.
Logically speaking, for a simple completion of the formula, what he saw looking over should be reversed, and it was impossible for the current overlap to occur.
So there was only one explanation: what the other was doing was reverse writing.
Whether it was the reverse writing itself or understanding and completing the gravitational perturbation correction formula, any one of these two points alone would be impressive, and combining them made it even more unbelievable.
“Sorry, boss, we’ll talk when I get back.” He directly hung up the phone, then hurriedly wiped off all the fog on the windowpane with his sleeve; if someone with ulterior motives saw this formula and passed it back to the Soviet Union, he would be in big trouble.
On the other end of the phone, Arthur Rudolf, the technical supervisor of the Redstone Rocket, responsible for propulsion system improvement and the Mercury manned program, growled into the phone: “Damn Haines, if I were still working in Germany, you’d have been thrown into a concentration camp by me long ago!”
Rudolf couldn’t possibly not be anxious.
Because their biggest competitor, the Soviet Union, was ahead of them in the field of aerospace, and NASA’s failure was not long ago.
The Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite in October 1957, and then NASA, to help America regain face, chose to launch their satellite—Vanguard TV3—in November of the same year.
To boost morale, they chose live television broadcast for the whole of America to watch the launch live, but what the public, Washington, and the White House saw was the rocket igniting and lifting off, then crashing to the ground and exploding in a tragic scene.
After America’s failure, the Soviet Union soon launched a second satellite.
The pressure this brought to NASA was enormous.
For someone like Arthur Rudolf, who had worked for the former NAZI, with the blood of thousands of concentration camp workers from the NAZI V-2 rocket factory construction still on his hands, it would be strange if he wasn’t anxious.
To avoid being sent to a war crimes trial court, he urgently needed to prove his value to NASA.
“Mister, hello, I’m Haines, Ebenezer Haines, I work for NASA, can we talk?” Haines leaned close to Lin Ran’s ear and said in a low voice.
They were all smart people, able to understand the formula he wrote and calculate the third term exactly the same as his.
Haines had no intention of hiding his true identity.
Snow had already begun to fall in the January New York sky, and before Lin Ran could answer, Haines continued: “Mister, if you’re willing to talk with me, then come with me.”
After Haines finished speaking, without waiting for Lin Ran’s answer, he turned and walked away.
Lin Ran didn’t speak either and hurriedly followed.
If he had a choice, Lin Ran would naturally prefer to gather more information and then proceed step by step, rather than exposing a bit of his ability to the white man in front of him who seemed to be a NASA engineer like this.
But the problem now was: he had no choice.
