However, his unpredictable intelligence turned out to be extremely useful for certain small tasks. During the pre-job training, he learned faster than the other two candidates. This was partly because of his solid foundation in radio knowledge, and partly due to his strong comprehension skills. While the other two were still diligently studying at the company in Liuliqiao every day, he had already passed the practical exam and was officially allowed to take shifts at the station. And it didn’t even delay his driving lessons—on his very first official shift, he drove himself and Director Walker to the station.

You have to admit, people from these big ministries are really bold. Director Walker didn’t even have a driver’s license himself, yet he dared to let him drive. Not only was he not afraid, he even reassured him: vehicles with operation permits issued by the Ministry of Aerospace and CCTV are rarely stopped by traffic police. These are special passes, meant to ensure the normal operation of the satellite ground station. As long as you don’t hit anyone, you don’t even need to stop for minor scrapes and bumps. Even if someone gets your license plate, all they can do is negotiate with the Ministry of Aerospace’s security office, and in the end, nothing will happen—a classic case of relying on power to bully others.

Brian Carter enjoyed this kind of privilege. As an ordinary citizen, he used to complain about people with special privileges, but when privilege suddenly landed on his own head—even if it didn’t fully belong to him, just brushing up against it—he couldn’t help but feel delighted. Power is just that tempting; once you’ve had a taste, it’s even more alluring. Otherwise, so many people wouldn’t risk everything, leaving their families and even their lives, to chase after it.

The satellite company’s compound was quite large. A 24-meter-diameter dish stood squarely in the middle of the yard, with the equipment room right underneath. Inside, it was warm in winter and cool in summer, but people shouldn’t stay in there—once you step inside, your ears can’t hear anything. The combined noise from three microwave amplifiers and three five-horsepower air conditioners was like a hundred million green bean flies buzzing around. But you couldn’t avoid going in. Every two hours, the duty staff had to take the work log inside and carefully record dozens of parameters, a task that couldn’t be finished in less than half an hour. If any parameters were abnormal, you had to use the internal phone and the monitoring equipment in the duty room to cross-check. You couldn’t leave until you figured out the issue.

Even after returning to the duty room, there was still plenty to do: recording the monitoring equipment parameters every hour, and constantly keeping an eye on more than thirty large TVs to observe the actual performance of the received signals. If there was any static or screen distortion, you had to immediately contact the relevant department at the TV station, find the cause, and resolve it promptly.

The worst part was the room next door to the dormitory, filled with uninterruptible power supplies—four whole wardrobes’ worth. These were specially prepared for the monitoring equipment in the duty room and could last fourteen hours. The equipment room had three separate power supplies from three different grids; as long as Beijing didn’t have a total blackout, everything would be fine. As soon as these UPS units were turned on, they emitted a low-frequency noise. Normally, you might not notice it, but try lying down—once you close your eyes, a humming drone fills your ears. Everyone who’s ever been on duty here hates that sound with a passion—it’s impossible to sleep.

This is also the fundamental reason why a semi-confidential unit under a big ministry had to recruit operations staff from the public. Doing this job easily leads to nervous disorders; several veteran employees had already developed neurasthenia and refused to take shifts at the station anymore. They were all officially employed by the Ministry of Aerospace, with family members also working there, so they couldn’t be forced to take shifts. But with public recruitment, it was much easier—if you didn’t want the job, someone else would take it, and the paperwork wasn’t as complicated. Plus, the damage from low-frequency noise is slow; you wouldn’t notice anything unless you did the job for several years. In this respect, they were already violating labor laws by not informing employees of these potential hazards in advance. But in the 1990s, labor laws weren’t so well established—even if you wanted to complain, there was nowhere to go.

Besides all this, there was another tough and dangerous job every winter: clearing snow off the antenna. If snow accumulated on the antenna, it would affect transmission power. You couldn’t just tilt the antenna upright and let the snow fall off; it had to be cleared manually, with a long broom, safety harness, and crawling along the maintenance path onto the parabolic surface of the antenna.

In the bitter cold of midwinter, facing the biting northwest wind, climbing on the smooth, steeply angled surface of the antenna while sweeping snow—just thinking about it is enough to make you shudder. And you couldn’t get too close to the center of the antenna, where the microwave radiation was extremely strong—just like a microwave oven, very harmful to the human body. You also had to wear protective gear weighing dozens of pounds; anyone with less than excellent physical fitness couldn’t even climb up, let alone sweep snow.

But in Brian Carter’s eyes, this hardship didn’t seem like much. Since he was a child, he had a knack for letting sounds he didn’t like go in one ear and out the other. Plus, after working as a sound engineer for several years, he’d developed a strong tolerance for noise. He could eat and sleep just fine even with disco music blaring nearby, completely unfazed. He even invented a way to avoid the low-frequency noise from the UPS: move his bed into the duty room. With two rooms in between, you could barely hear the low-frequency hum in the duty room, so he could sleep soundly.