Chapter 2: A Living Ghost Encounter

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Haines felt as if he had seen a ghost. On New Year’s Eve, he had chosen to come to New York, hoping that by watching a Broadway show, he might find a chance to strike up a conversation with a woman he fancied and spend the last day of 1959 on a date. Instead, not only did he fail to find anyone to approach, but early the next morning his pager kept buzzing relentlessly, urging him to urgently find a place to contact the Redstone Arsenal’s Redstone Rocket development headquarters.

A brief explanation: a pager, commonly called a “beeper” in the United States, had been widely used since the 1940s, notably in New York’s Jewish hospitals. Detroit police had been operating the first pager-like system as early as 1921. These pagers were all provided by Motorola.

Motorola, as one of NASA’s core suppliers, was responsible for the wireless devices that transmitted the moon’s audio signals back to Earth. So it was only natural for them to provide NASA employees with a complete pager system.

Haines was already troubled and frustrated when his superior asked him what he considered a profoundly idiotic question. The sound of snowflakes shattering against the brass frame of the phone booth made Haines’ voice tremble for a third time as he repeated the Atlas rocket launch window calculation formula.

He held the black receiver against his left shoulder, while his right index finger absentmindedly traced Newton’s gravitational perturbation correction formula on the fogged glass. Subconsciously, he wrote a string of orbital calibration formulas on the misty glass to organize his argument and, at the same time, to belittle the intelligence of the boss on the other end of the line.

“Listen, Director von Braun’s calculation team insists that the error margin for the third coefficient…” Suddenly, a new focal point appeared within the blurry elliptical integral region. Outside the glass, an Asian young man placed his index finger precisely on the path traced by Haines’ fingertip. The two of them conducted a strange simultaneous calculation through the glass.

The first variable synchronization break occurred at the Bessel function node: before Haines could write out the third term of the latitude perturbation compensation factor, the other’s moist fingertip had already completed the fourth-order differential expression of the Zhura-Kin-7 perturbation.

The yellowed glass surface was undergoing a mathematical avalanche; spherical harmonic function terms composed of ice crystals blossomed one after another. The coefficient of the fifth perturbation term materialized in the condensation droplets—a fourth and fifth term that even NASA had not yet mastered!

“Are you listening? You need to call Director von Braun’s team immediately to explain—” The voice in the receiver was mixed with electromagnetic noise. Haines watched as the fourth term he had just begun to conceive was torn apart by the other’s extension into the complex domain.

The young man’s exhaled breath etched a more perfect solution on the outer side of the glass—the fourth term he derived was even more precise than the convergence domain that Houston’s team had approached after seventeen hours of calculation on an IBM 7090.

The correlation between breathing rate and formula expansion speed was terrifyingly positive: as adrenaline caused Haines’ handwriting to tremble, the finger movements outside the fogged glass accelerated geometrically.

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A kind of mathematical intuition transcending Cartesian coordinates spiraled upward along the warm airflow from the phone booth’s heater.

“No! This can’t be!” Haines heard the brittle crack of a titanium alloy stress ring failing in his cervical spine.

The boss’s furious roar in the receiver merged with the knocking sounds outside the glass.

Firstly, what the other had written was logically sound—he was working on Newton’s gravitational perturbation correction formula, a formula that few in New York could understand at the time. Haines had only derived it up to the third term, and precisely because of reaching the third term, he had been granted this brief break.

As a GS-9 level engineer, he enjoyed a certain degree of freedom.

Yet now his superior was telling him on the phone that his calculations were flawed.

He had written only the second term on the frosted glass, but the subsequent third, fourth, and fifth terms had been completed.

The third term matched exactly the result he had calculated.

When Haines realized that the Asian young man across the window had helped him complete the formula, he was stunned not only that the man had derived the fourth and fifth terms but also because the man was standing outside the phone booth, facing him.

Logically, if the formula was simply completed by looking, the pattern should have been reversed, making the current coincidence impossible.

There was only one explanation: the other was writing in reverse.

Whether considering the act of reverse writing itself or the ability to comprehend and extend Newton’s gravitational perturbation correction formula, either skill alone would be remarkable. To combine both was truly extraordinary.

“Sorry, boss, I’ll explain when I get back.” Haines abruptly hung up, then hurriedly wiped the fog off the glass with his sleeve. If anyone with ill intent saw the formula and passed it to the Soviets, he would be in deep trouble.

On the other end, Arthur Rudolph, the technical supervisor of the Redstone Rocket program, responsible for propulsion system improvements and the Mercury manned spaceflight program, snarled into the phone: “Damn you, Haines! If I were still working in Germany, I’d have thrown you into a concentration camp already!”

Rudolph had every reason to be anxious.

Their greatest competitor, the Soviets, were ahead of them in aerospace. NASA’s recent failures were fresh wounds.

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The Soviets had launched the world’s first artificial satellite in October 1957. To help America reclaim its prestige, NASA launched their own satellite, Pioneer TV-3, in November of the same year.

To boost morale, they chose to broadcast the launch live to the entire nation. But what the public, Washington, and the White House saw was a rocket igniting, lifting off, then crashing and exploding in a devastating spectacle.

After America’s failure, the Soviets quickly launched a second satellite.

This exerted enormous pressure on NASA.

Arthur Rudolph, a former Nazi with blood on his hands from the thousands of concentration camp prisoners forced to build the V-2 rocket factories, had every reason to be desperate. To avoid prosecution at the war crimes tribunal, he urgently needed to prove his worth to NASA.

“Sir, hello, I’m Haines—Ebenezer Haines. I work for NASA. May we talk?” Haines whispered into Lin Ran’s ear.

They were all intelligent men who could understand the formula he had written and calculate the third term exactly as he had.

Haines never thought to hide his true identity.

Snow had already begun to fall in the January New York sky. Before Lin Ran could answer, Haines continued, “Sir, if you’re willing to talk, please come with me.”

Without waiting for a response, Haines turned and walked away.

Lin Ran said nothing but hurried to follow.

If given the choice, Lin Ran would have preferred to gather more information and proceed cautiously rather than reveal his abilities to this seemingly NASA engineer right away.

But now, there was no choice.