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a gray three-piece suit and wire-framed glasses, Dr. Gene Stickle looked more like an accountant than a scientist. Despite his appearance, he was one of the leading experts in strategic missile systems in the world. He was the chief physicist of the Air Force Office of Science and Technology, and currently assigned to Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.
    He sat with another scientist and two colonels from the United States Air Force Space Command, at the nearest table facing the dais and the congressional panel. Stickle was the primary target of Senator Harford’s ire today, and to his credit, he responded with calm and deliberate speech.
    “The destruction at Twentynine Palms was accomplished by a directed-energy weapon system in Earth orbit, Senator.”
    An audible hush passed over the room. Silence reigned for a moment as the gravity of Stickles words sank in.
    “You mean a laser weapon, out in space?” Harford was momentarily stunned.
    “Yes. Or an advanced, particle-beam system.”
    “Are you serious? How is that possible? A laser or particle beam diverges, spreads out, dissipates its energy in the atmosphere. I know that much from the Star Wars hearings I’ve sat on. It would take an energy plant the size of a mountain to produce a pulse with enough energy to start a grass fire, let alone wipe out an entire airfield.”
    Harford’s bluster had momentarily gone, and he appeared genuinely confused and concerned. It seemed almost as if he were trying to reason Stickle out of some preposterous stand.
    “It was not a single pulse, Senator Harford,” continued Stickle, calmly. “That’s the one thing we do know about it, and the weapon is all the more formidable because of it.
    “An Air Force satellite was looking at the southern California area when the base was hit. The satellite is designed to image radiant energy in the IR—infrared—spectrum, and couldn’t image the beam itself, but it could image the impact point, or thermal bloom, as the instantaneous temperatures of things on the ground suddenly increased.”
    Stickle stood up and began to pace the aisle as he talked, his left hand in his pocket, his right hand casually emphasizing his words. “The beam is a CW—continuous wave—beam, which makes us think it is a laser or laserlike form of energy. Particle beam weapons are, by nature of their power requirements, at least in our experience, pulsed energy packets. Relatively low-powered generators charge up energy storage capacitors, and the capacitors release the stored energy in a short-duration burst. This is necessary to obtain momentary energy levels in a contained plasma sufficient to create a destructive pulse. The same is true of lasers to some extent. Only low-power devices can usually operate in the CW mode. We will know more when we have the results of the material analyses that are being done.”
    Stickle stopped pacing, and stared meditatively at his fingers for a moment, gathering his thoughts. The room was silent except for the hushed sounds of breathing, and the muffled stutter of weight being shifted in vinyl-covered chairseats. All faces looked expectantly at Stickle, waiting for him to proceed. He resumed pacing.
    “This weapon sweeps the target area with a sharply focused beam,” he said, finally raising his eyes to meet Harford’s frowning, confused countenance. “It traces a path back and forth across the target, like a child coloring in a picture with crayons, until the target area has been covered,” Stickle illustrated a zigzag, painting motion in the air with his free hand.
    “A television set or computer monitor recreates images in much the same way. An electron beam sweeps across the CRT screen from side-to-side, working its way down the screen from top to bottom in a zigzag path. It only takes a fraction of a second, about fifteen milliseconds—fifteen thousandths of a second—for the beam to traverse the screen from top to bottom, but to human senses, it appears