Chapter 3: Seeing a ghost

Haines felt like he had seen a ghost.

He chose to come to New York on New Year's Eve, trying to see if he could pick up a woman he liked by watching a play on Broadway and go on a date to spend the last day of 1959.

As a result, not only did he not find anyone to pick up, but his pager kept calling him the next morning, telling him to quickly find a place to contact the Redstone Arsenal Redstone Rocket Research Headquarters.

To say a few more words, the pager, also commonly known as a beeper in Huaguo, had been widely used in Jewish hospitals in New York as early as the 1940s, and the Detroit Police Department had started using the first pager-like system as early as 1921.

These pagers were all provided by Motorola.

And as one of NASA's core suppliers, Motorola's wireless equipment was used for the voice signals transmitted from the moon back to Earth.

Therefore, it was perfectly normal for them to provide a complete pager system for NASA employees.

Haines was already annoyed and troubled, and he was also asked what he considered an extremely idiotic question by his boss.

The sound of snow particles shattering against the brass frame of the telephone booth made Haines's voice tremble as he repeated the Atlas rocket launch window calculation formula for the third time.

He held the black receiver with his left shoulder, and his right index finger unconsciously traced the Newton gravitational perturbation correction formula on the fogged glass.

He subconsciously wrote a string of formulas about orbital calibration on the mist-covered glass to organize the logic for his argument, and by the way, belittle the intelligence of his boss on the other end of the phone.

"Listen, the calculation team of Director von Braun insists that the error tolerance of the third-term coefficient..."

Haines's blurred trajectory in the elliptic integral region suddenly had a new focus of vision. The Asian youth outside the glass accurately placed his index finger on the path of his fingertip movement, and the two were performing a bizarre synchronous calculation through the glass.

The first variable synchronization break appeared at the Bessel function node: before Haines could draw the third term of the latitude perturbation compensation factor, the other's moist fingertip had already finished drawing the fourth-order differential equation of the Zhurakin-7 perturbation.

The yellowish glass surface was experiencing a mathematical avalanche. The spherical harmonic function terms composed of ice crystals bloomed one after another, and the coefficient of the fifth perturbation term appeared in the condensed water droplets. This was the fourth and fifth terms that even NASA had not 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, which he had just had a slight idea about, was torn apart by the other party with complex domain analytical continuation.

The white air exhaled by the youth etched a more perfect solution on the outside of the glass—the other party's fourth term was more precise than the convergence domain that the Houston team had spent seventeen hours calculating with an IBM 7090.

The breathing frequency formed a terrifying positive correlation with the expansion rate of the formula: when Haines's handwriting trembled due to the surge of adrenaline, the finger speed outside the fogged glass was growing geometrically.

A kind of mathematical intuition transcending the Cartesian coordinate system spiraled up along the airflow sprayed by the telephone booth's heater.

"No! This is impossible!" Haines heard a crisp sound from his cervical spine like the failure of a titanium alloy stress ring.

The roar of the boss in the receiver merged with the tapping sound outside the glass at this moment.

First of all, what the other party wrote was very logical. He was writing the Newton gravitational perturbation correction formula, and the number of people in New York who could understand this thing could be counted on two hands.

Haines had already deduced this thing to the third term, and it was precisely because he had deduced it to the third term that he had the opportunity to go out for a break.

As a GS-9 engineer, there was a certain degree of freedom.

As a result, the boss said on the phone that his calculation was wrong.

He only wrote the second term on the window frost, and as a result, the subsequent third, fourth, and fifth terms were directly completed.

And the completed third term was exactly the same as the result he calculated.

By the time Haines realized that the Asian young man on the other side of the window frost had helped him complete it, besides being shocked that the other party could deduce the formula to the fourth and fifth terms.

It was also because the other party was standing outside the telephone booth, facing him.

According to reason, simply completing the formula, what he saw should be reversed. It was impossible for the current overlapping phenomenon to occur.

Then there was only one explanation, and that was that what the other party did was reverse writing.

Whether it was the reverse writing itself, or understanding and completing the Newton gravitational perturbation correction formula, either of these two points alone was very powerful, and the combination of the two made people feel even more incredible.

"Sorry, boss, let's talk when I get back." He pressed the phone directly, and then hurriedly wiped all the mist on the window frost with his sleeve. If this formula were seen by someone with ulterior motives and passed back to Soviet Russia, he would be in big trouble.

The boss on the other end of the phone, the technical director of the Redstone Rocket, Arthur Rudolph, who was responsible for the improvement of the propulsion system and the Mercury manned space program, roared at the phone: "Damn Haines, if I were still working in Germany, you would have been thrown into a concentration camp by me long ago!"

Rudolph couldn't help but be anxious.

Because their biggest competitor, Soviet Russia, was leading them in the aerospace field, and NASA's failure was not long ago.

Soviet Russia launched the first artificial satellite in history in October 1957. Subsequently, in order to help America regain its face, NASA chose to launch their artificial satellite—Vanguard TV3—in November of the same year.

In order to boost morale, they chose to broadcast the launch live to the entire American public. However, what the public, Washington, and the White House saw was the tragic scene of the rocket igniting and taking off, and then crashing and exploding.

After America's failure, Soviet Russia soon launched a second artificial satellite.

The pressure this brought to NASA was huge.

Like Arthur Rudolph, who had worked for the former NAZI and whose hands were still stained with the blood of thousands of concentration camp workers during the construction of the NAZI V-2 rocket factory, it was no wonder he was anxious.

In order not to be sent to the war crimes tribunal, he urgently needed to prove his value to NASA.

"Sir, hello, I am Haines, Ebenezer Haines. I work for NASA. Can we talk?" Haines leaned into Lin Ran's ear and whispered.

Everyone was a smart person, able to understand the formula he wrote, and able to calculate the third term exactly the same as he did.

Haines had no intention of hiding his true identity at all.

Snow had already begun to fall in the sky of New York in January. Before Lin Ran could answer, Haines continued: "Sir, if you are willing to talk to me, then follow me."

After Haines finished speaking, he didn't wait for Lin Ran to answer and turned around and left.

Lin Ran didn't speak either and hurriedly followed.

If he had a choice, Lin Ran would naturally hope to obtain more information and then plan slowly, rather than exposing a bit of his ability to this white man who was suspected to be a NASA engineer.

But the problem now was: he had no choice. ===== CHAPTER 4 =====