Chapter 3: The Ghosts of History

“Qian Xuesen returned to the country five years ago, and McCarthy must have passed away a year or two ago as well. If I had a choice, I really wouldn’t want to get entangled in NASA’s whirlpool at this particular moment. Once I get back to 2020, I can carefully gather detailed information from 1960, leverage the information gap to my advantage, and even if I join NASA to participate in an exciting project like the manned moon landing, I must first manage any suspicious aspects of my identity, origin, and appearance before seeking entry. But for now, I can only take it step by step,” Lin Ran thought as he walked.

“The portal” has a cooldown period; it cannot be opened anywhere, anytime. It takes seventy-six hours—more than three days—before it can be opened again to return to Earth in 2020. According to the information the portal gave him, the initial cooldown time is seventy-two hours, and the more items you bring, the longer the cooldown. The time extension depends solely on the mass of what’s carried. If his weight increases in the future, the cooldown will increase accordingly.

Counting clothes, shoes, phone, and so on, the extra time added is only four hours, which is within an acceptable range. However, if he wanted to bring a 2020 car through the garage door into the 1960s, the cooldown would be at least a year.

If it’s just surviving three days in New York, Lin Ran believes his current abilities are more than enough. But his crisis now is not just simple survival—it’s a far more serious threat of exposure.

He has an iPhone XS, released by Apple in 2018, on him. This is the peak of tension between America and the Soviet Union. If the iPhone XS is exposed—such a distinctly different device—whether suspected as alien technology or a product from the future, once it’s revealed, he will never have peace in 1960.

Don’t say it’s impossible: the legend of Area 51 has long existed, and at this peak of imagination between America and the USSR, all sorts of wild theories abound. To win, they’ve even invested heavily in superpower research.

Once the iPhone is exposed, it’s perfectly reasonable to suspect it came from the future.

The North Face down jacket he’s wearing looks extraordinarily out of place in 1960’s Times Square, New York. From fabric to design to details, it clashes starkly with the fashion of the era.

Just walking behind Haynes, Lin Ran can see the curious and appraising glances from every passerby.

The waterproof and windproof fabric of the North Face jacket is smooth and shiny, a material completely unknown in the 1960s. People then mostly wore coats made of wool, cotton, or coarse tweed, which felt heavy and rough. His jacket’s fabric might reflect an odd gleam under the sunlight, easily attracting unwanted attention.

Lin Ran inwardly sighed, thankful he didn’t choose flashy bright yellow or red, nor the blue snow mountain design, but the dark blue camouflage, which doesn’t seem so strange amid the common black, gray, and brown coats seen that winter.

So survival is secondary; the real priority is finding a place to stay for three days without letting the iPhone in his pocket be exposed.

Better to be safe than sorry.

Maintaining appropriate contact with Haynes is a risk he can control, and there’s plenty of room to make up for mistakes in the future.

But if the iPhone leaks, no matter how much he tries to fix it, it will cause irreparable trouble.

Forget about joining NASA; if he could avoid being locked away indefinitely, he’d be grateful.

Thus, a place that fully appreciates the value of his mind is the best refuge.

Compared to the exceptional nature of his intellect, the down jacket is obviously less conspicuous.

His conversation with Haynes confirmed Lin Ran’s guess: Haynes’s attention was entirely focused on the Newtonian gravitational perturbation correction formula, paying no heed to the oddity of his attire.

“So, you just wore something that looks like a space suit concept outfit? Big deal,” Haynes thought.

As an excellent former aerospace graduate forced to change careers due to survival pressures, what could be more thrilling than personally participating in the space race of the 1960s?

This was a perfect entry point—no better time than now.

After much consideration, Lin Ran chose to complete the Newtonian gravitational perturbation correction formula on the glass of a phone booth, giving this era a small shock from the future.

In a private dining room of a restaurant carefully selected by Haynes, Lin Ran took the initiative to say, “Randolph Lin.”

He said no more. The situation was still unclear, and Lin Ran hadn’t yet decided what identity to fabricate for himself.

Haynes, sitting opposite, didn’t care about the Chinese man’s background; he only cared about how he had calculated the Newtonian gravitational perturbation correction formula.

“Randolph, you know what I just wrote on the glass, don’t you?”

Leaning against the brown leather sofa, Lin Ran wore an expression of self-evidence: “When a satellite passes over the equator, the extra mass of the Earth produces a stronger gravitational pull than at the poles. This additional force causes the satellite’s orbit to wobble. If this problem isn’t resolved, the satellite’s lifespan will be severely limited.”

Sure enough, Haynes not only immediately recognized the formula as the Newtonian gravitational perturbation correction formula, but also knew exactly what it was for.

This was no common knowledge.

As for casually completing the fourth and fifth terms of the formula, no one he knew could do that.

That was why, upon seeing the formula, Haynes had a stunned expression after careful thought.

Feeling stunned was understandable; in a sense, Lin Ran was indeed a ghost of history.

“Of course, whether it’s you or the Soviets, everyone is still aiming for functional achievement, not precise control. So although it affects lifespan, the equatorial bulge—specifically the second term—causes the satellite’s perigee to deviate from the planned orbit by three degrees per revolution. Even with a limited lifespan, it can stay in orbit for about ten years. This isn’t fatal.”

When Haynes heard the three-degree orbital deviation, he felt as if lightning struck his brain. His carotid artery throbbed. The Chinese man before him had accurately reproduced the angle deviation that Houston’s laboratory took 237 hours to calculate.

Now that McCarthy’s influence was gradually fading, indeed a very few Chinese engineers had recently returned to work at NASA.

But as far as Haynes knew, no Chinese worked in any American astronomical observatory.

Furthermore, America’s first artificial satellite, Explorer 1, was launched only two years ago, and it was just last year that they precisely calculated the effects of Earth’s non-spherical perturbations.

They had data to calculate the impact, and then, based on that data, derived the J2 term in the Newtonian gravitational perturbation correction formula.

That is, the second term.

This guy before him casually mentioned results accumulated over the past two years.

“Who exactly are you?” Haynes couldn’t hold back any longer.