The ELI Event B007R5LTNS

ten. His general attitude was too much flippant to suit Williams, but he had come to accept it as part of the package. And Bernardo was still the best analytical mind in the building.
    Bernardo loved old movies and knew many by heart, and at the moment he was on a Princess Bride kick. Instead of the regulation ID badge, today he wore a red and white stick-on that read, “Hello, my name is…”, below which he had scrawled, “…Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Luckily, Williams was too preoccupied to notice.
    “So, evil Prince Humperdinck,” Bernardo smiled, “any earth-shattering theories?”
    “Nothing. Not a damn thing. It’s bad enough we could be breached at all, worse still to take it in the shorts at Security Level 24, but…” He shook his head. “On a phone line! A friggin’ phone line!”
    Bernardo put his thumb and pinky to his cheek, making a pretend phone call. “Hello,” he said in his best proper-British voice. “Hello, NADCOM? Yes, could you please erase everything you have on your most dangerous weapon? You could? Oh, you’re too kind, really you are. Thank you ever so. I shall have my giant pop ’round with a fruit basket straightaway.” He laughed.
    Williams didn’t. “And if you think that’s bad, without the data we can’t even stop the sweep Pettis locked in for Friday.” He filled in fields on the screen and clicked buttons as he spoke. “I’m checking his parameters now to at least make sure it won’t burn out the satellite or something. Pettis’s entries are all wonky, anyway. He’s sloppy, he makes mistakes. Clearly he isn’t as technically adept as he…” Williams stopped mid-sentence.
    Bernardo, still amusing himself with mock security breach scenarios, was mildly annoyed at Williams’s sudden lack of attention. “What?” he asked flatly.
    “Oh, this can’t be,” Williams said, fingers flying over the keyboard. “This cannot possibly be.” He took a deep breath, slowly let it out. “Okay. Okay, I made a mistake. I miscalculated, that’s all. I’ll do it again.” He clicked Refresh, got a clean entry screen, and started over.
    “What?” Bernardo repeated.
    “Shh!”
    Bernardo obeyed and silently watched over Williams’s shoulder as he recalculated. A minute passed, two. Finally Williams clicked Submit, then sat back and shook his head. “Oh shit,” was all he said. He sat motionless, wide-eyed.
    “Um, hey buddy,” Bernardo asked, “you still with me here?”
    Williams suddenly became animated, agitated, gesturing at the screen. “Look at that! Pettis thinks this is safe? Safe? Look at it!” he shouted, leaping from his chair and pulling Bernardo into it. “Look at it!”
    “As you wish,” Bernardo said in mock earnest. He sat and looked over the formulas. The calculations, seriously difficult for most of his peers and impossibly complex for many, unfolded before him as he effortlessly exposed their secrets. “Right,” he muttered. “C sub i , C sub j are orthogonal, okay. RX sub a equals B over x yada yada yada, divided by N sub a comma j , blah blah blah. CY sub a is O over x , hamina hamina, N sub j comma a …” He stopped short, cocked his head. “Well, there’s your trouble,” he said, mostly to himself. “Reciprocative instability out the wazoo at the C sub i , C sub j union.”
    “Pettis said this was safe,” Williams said numbly. “This is monstrous. It's insane! The destruction this will cause—it's... it's inconceivable.”
    In Inigo Montoya’s Spanish accent, Bernardo said, “ Inconceivable. You keep using that word … I do not think it means what you think it means.”
    Williams ignored him. “Keep looking!”
    Bernardo squinted at the figures for a few more seconds, then pointed to a data element on the screen. “Um, is that what I think it is?”
    “Yes, the power setting. Eighty percent. Go on!”
    Bernardo pointed again. “And is that…?”
    “Yes! The object vector!”
    “Okay, that’s not good. There are some serious errors here. The object vector is compromised, big time. That recip instability I mentioned is gonna expand the spectrum, like, four thousand times.”
    “Four thousand times!” Williams echoed.
    “Yeah, I said that.” He looked back at the screen, then suddenly dropped the frivolous attitude and the funny accents. He pointed to the final figures. “Okay, wait—is that what I think it is?” Bernardo swallowed audibly.
    “Yes! The target site’s