The Missing Link

The Missing Link

by

Burt Sage

It was June, 1963. Jobs were scarce. I had just graduated with my Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from NYU and was looking for my first job.

My degree in Electrical Engineering was kind of misleading. If I had had more room on my resume, I would have described the revolutionary changes that were occurring in my field. It was no longer about motors and generators and transformers and long distance energy transmission. Now it was all about solid state physics, signal processing, both optical and electronic, and image processing. Vacuum tubes were becoming collector’s items. It would have been more appropriate to say that I had a degree in optical physics, not electrical engineering. But Electrical Engineering was what was written on my diploma.

I had moved into an apartment in Southeast DC with Ed, a good friend from my undergraduate college days. Efforts to find a job closer to my apartment had not panned out, so here I was in Falls Church, Virginia, at least 45 minutes around the Beltway from my apartment. Like I said, jobs were scarce.

“At least this is a large commercial district,” I thought. “If this first company doesn’t have anything, there are several more companies of this kind in the area.”

The first company was General Analytics Inc. It had been listed in my job hunter’s guide as a Think Tank working with the Government to advance electronic systems. As was the custom those days, all I had with me was my one page resume.

The Sunday Newspaper had printed an ad by General Analytics saying they were looking to hire recent engineering graduates in several disciplines including electrical engineering. So I went in, walked up to the receptionist, told her I was responding to that ad, and handed her my resume. She glanced at it cursorily for a few seconds. Then her eyes got big and she said, “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

And she was ‘right back’. “The President will see you now,” she said.

“The President?” I thought. “Is this my lucky day?”

“This is a secure facility,” the receptionist said. “I or someone else must be with you at all times.”

As we walked through several code-access doors further into the bowels of this building, I was sure we were headed down—not the direction we should be going to meet with a President.

Finally we went through the last code-access door into one of the finest fitness centers I have ever seen. At the far end of the room a table tennis arena had been set up. We walked over there and sat down. “The President should be here shortly,” she said.

A few minutes later a middle aged, well-built gentleman walked in dressed in a white Polo shirt and white shorts. With him was a tall, thin, bespectacled man who looked like a financial officer.

“Hi,” he said. “My name is Stanley, and I’m President. This is our Vice President, Jerry. And you are…” he paused.

“Doug,” I said. “Doug Carter. I’m here to apply for one of your entry level engineering positions.”

“Of course you are,” Stanley said. “We’ll get to that. But first, I see from your resume that you are your college’s table tennis champion. Is that right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Game on, then,” Stanley said. “Let’s play.”

I looked at myself. Tie and jacket with button-down dress shirt. Dress pants, dress socks, and dress shoes. “You want to play me like this?” I asked.

“Play any way you want,” Stanley said. “You can take off as much or as little as you want. Shirley will leave. And I have a range of rackets for you to choose from.”

I went down to bare feet, white undershirt, and trousers. And they did have my favorite style racket. After a few minutes, I said, “Game on.”

For several minutes we just volleyed back and forth. Then came a few test shots to try to discover each other’s weaknesses. Soon it was clear that he was good, and that we would have good games. But he had a weakness that played into one of my strengths. The first two games were close, but I won.

Suddenly I asked myself, “Should I lose on purpose? Will winning or losing have any impact on getting the job?” I decided to play my best and let the rest of the day just play out.

The next three games I won handily. After the last one, Stanley threw his racket on the table and motioned me to a chair against the wall. He joined me on a second chair.

“I can see that you are indeed your college’s champion. You play well. You’re not Olympic team material, but you’re good.”

“People in my line of work know that I am a huge table tennis fan,” Stanley continued. “When I read your resume, I wondered if you knew that and had added it to your resume to make it easier to get to see me. I now know that this part of your resume is accurate. Is the rest accurate?”

“Of course,” I said. And I thought ‘Who in the world would falsify their resume. Sooner or later they would be found out. It wouldn’t be pretty.’

“Please get dressed,” Stanley said. “Jerry will take you to his office where you can fill out an employment application and the paperwork needed to get you a Secret clearance. You are a US citizen, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” Stanley said. “Can you start next Monday?”

“Of course,” I said.

Stanley then shook my hand and disappeared. Jerry took me to his office and I spent the next two hours filling out forms. When I was done to Jerry’s satisfaction, Jerry mentioned the job benefits. There would be full health care and a salary (not hourly wage) higher than I ever imagined.

Bright and early the following Monday I showed up for my first day at work. I was to share an office with Bob, a ten year veteran of what he called the battle to get funded. His job was to find requests for proposals (RFPs) to do research that General Analytics was skilled in doing. Immediately I became familiar with the Commerce Business Daily, a government publication that reported this kind of government activity. It was not unusual for there to be over 100 RFPs on any given day. It was a full day’s work going through them so Bob welcomed my help. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do; I wanted to do hands on research. Still, I was getting paid, and building my resume. And the people who came to General Analytics were high level people. Once I got my clearance, I would be in meetings with them. My contact list would grow.

I got my Secret clearance after about 6 months. I could now attend technical meetings. But as a junior analyst, I was told to be quiet and let the senior people do the talking. Asking questions myself at this point was highly frowned upon.

A couple of weeks after getting my clearance, I came across an RFP that I thought fit our skills. Well, in particular, my skills. The RFP was unclassified, so there were no technical details. But there were keywords, including optical signal processing, mathematics, and optical imaging that I found interesting. Bob didn’t think there was a fit, but finally agreed that we should go to the formal briefing held by the sponsoring agency, the Air Force. He said it would be good for me to see what the Pentagon was like.

The meeting room was actually a small auditorium. A small stage was almost completely filled with a large conference table surrounded by about 20 executive chairs. A projection screen was on the back wall of the stage. The audience section was five rows of theater seats for at most 30 people. Bob and I were the only two from General Analytics to go. We were among the last to arrive. As usual, only the front row seats were now available. Bob and I took our seats there—maybe six feet from the chair at the head of the conference table.

Shortly after our arrival, the sponsoring team arrived and filled the 20 chairs around the table. A three star general took the seat at the head of the table, right in front of me. Seated around the table were Air Force officers and civilian experts, each of whom identified themselves.

The format of the meeting was a series of presentations on the sponsor’s desired research, followed by an opportunity to ask questions. The final prepared talk was very short, with the presenter simply stating “We must find a way to take better pictures of these Russian space objects”.

We all have known moments when a room is filled with people but there is absolute silence, when you can almost hear people breathe. It was at just such a moment that I whispered to Bob, “Well shoot, that’s easy.”

I think everyone in the room heard it because they all looked up. The lights came on in the room, and the three star turned around and looked up at those of us in the theater seats.

“Who said that?” he loudly asked.

At this point Bob was trying to crawl under his seat.

“I did,” I said, leaning forward.

The general sized me up for a moment, then said, sarcastically, “Really? You think this is easy? My team has been working for months getting ready for this meeting. Our best minds have tackled this problem with no solution. You’re a child. You look like you’re barely out of diapers. And you think YOU have the answer?”

“Yes,” I said. By now Bob had moved as far away from me as he could.

With a wave of his hand, the general said, “Let’s have it.”

“I did make a few assumptions,” I started.

“Of course,” the general said, and he rolled his eyes.

“I assumed you have good orbital parameters of these objects, that is, you can track one and point a telescope at it at any point in time. Is that true?” I asked.

“Of course,” the general shot back.

“I also assumed that you could map this orbit against the fixed stars so that you would know when the orbiting object was about to occlude one of the stars.”

The general’s voice started to change. “Yes, we can do that.”

“Finally, I assumed that you have big telescopes, say 48 or 60 inches in diameter, and cameras that can snap a picture with an exposure time of just a millisecond or two,” I continued.

The general now looked at one of his team members who quickly indicated that they did have this equipment.

“Good,” I said. “Here’s how the idea works. Mathematically, the optical image of a point source like a star in the absence of the atmosphere can be calculated. When you take an image of a star through the atmosphere, the distortion caused by the atmosphere can be determined by comparing the observed image to the theoretical image. This is done using Fourier Transform mathematics. When the object you want to image is very close to a star, the distortion of the object is the same as the distortion of the star since the light from both the star and the object have passed through the same section of the atmosphere at the same time. Using the calculated distortion from the image of the star and Inverse Fourier Transform Mathematics, a distortion correction factor can be calculated and applied to the image of the object. In principle, you should be able to create an image of the object as if the atmosphere isn’t there. This is best done when the object is in the sun but the telescope is in the dark, that is, just after dusk on the ground.”

The body language of the general was now dramatically different. When I stopped talking, there were a few seconds of silence. Then he turned to the others at the table and with a loud voice said, “Jim?”

Jim turned out to be an atmospheric optics specialist from Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California. For a few seconds he also said nothing. Then, with measured tones, he said, “General, I think he may be on to something.” Then, with more excitement, he added, “And the good news is that we have everything we need to test his idea right now. We just installed the new IBM mainframe and its software includes Fourier Transform mathematics. We have all the other stuff, the orbit, the star map, the telescope, and the camera. What’s really new here, the ‘missing link’ if you will, is the juxtaposition of a star with the object so that we could use the star image as a reference. It’ll take only a week or two to try this out.”

“Well, then,” the general said to everyone in the room. “This meeting is adjourned. We’ll be in touch if we need to renew this RFP. You may all leave—except you, young man.”

As everyone was leaving, the general waved me down to the conference table to a chair beside him. Bob took a seat next to me so that I was between him and the general.

“What’s your name?” the general asked.

“My name is Douglas Carter and I work for General Analytics.”

The General smiled. “I know your company. You guys do good work. How long have you been there?’

“About eight months,” I said.

“Do you have any idea what just happened here?” the General asked.

“Not really,” I said.

“We had budgeted $2 million for 2 years to tackle this problem. With delays and cost over-runs, this contract would likely have taken three years and cost $3 million. And even then we probably would have had to build some contraption to test the proposed solution with even more expense and time delay. If your idea works, you’ll have saved the government this money. But, more importantly, we’ll have information about the Russian space program at least three years earlier than we expected.”

The general’s tone changed abruptly. “But what you did has caused you a pretty big personal problem. You were here to get information so you could prepare a proposal to do the work. You weren’t sent here to solve the problem. Most likely, given what you proposed, General Analytics would have gotten the contract. You cost your company a $2 million contract. Your boss isn’t going to like that.”

“Here’s what I’m going to do,” the General continued. “I know your President. I’ll call him and let him know what happened, and give him assurances that General Analytics will be remembered when future proposals are considered. I think you’ll be fine.”

On the way back to the office, Bob didn’t say very much. His only words were to the effect that he had no idea how this was going to turn out.

When we got back to the office, the receptionist told me that the President wanted to see me immediately when I returned.

I didn’t know what to expect. In his office he greeted me with a smile and a pat on the back. He told me that he and the general were in discussions about my future. The remark that I remember, though, was “Looks like you can do more than just play table tennis.”

Over the next month or so two remarkable things happened. First, I was told that the General wanted me to work on laser-based weapons systems with his team over in the Pentagon. Here I was, just out of graduate school, and I would have a desk at the Pentagon.

The second thing was an envelope marked Top Secret that appeared on that desk a couple of weeks later. It contained two pictures—one of a Russian space object without correction and one of the image corrected in the manner I proposed. And it also included a Thank You note from the General. On the corrected image you could clearly see the CCCP along the side of the object and, more importantly, you could count the nozzles of the propulsion system.