Skyprobe (6 page)

Rencke took a pull at his cigar and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again, smiled as charmingly as he knew how, and lashed out with his right shoe. His leg muscles must have been enormously strong. The kick took Shaw right in the groin and he whitened with agony as the men kept his body upright. Twice more Rencke repeated the performance and then, through a drumming in his ears, Shaw heard him say, “That will be all for now, thank you, Moss. We shall remain here until after dark, then it will be quite safe to remove him.”

* * *

Shaw was slugged from behind and given a jab with a hypodermic that put him out like a light and he didn’t know another thing until he came to in the back of a large car travelling fast through the night. There was a blinding pain in his head and he felt sick. Vaguely in the lights from passing cars he saw that Moss was driving. He himself was flanked by the other man and by Rudolf Rencke who, when he felt Shaw stirring, pushed a gun hard into his side.

Rencke said in that soft, suave voice, “No movements, please, and no sound.”

“Where are we going?”

“There will be no questions.”

“Have it your way,” Shaw answered. He closed his eyes, tried to ignore the throbbing in his head. Everything swung around him and he opened his eyes again, looked out at the tracery of trees and hedges as they came up ghost-like in the white beams of the headlights. Wherever they were heading, they were certainly well outside London already. In front Moss wound his window down a little way and cool air, refreshing air, swept over Shaw. The night was very dark, with a hint of rain to come. The land looked flat and low-lying and Shaw picked up the smell of the sea and ships; they were probably somewhere around the Thames estuary. A little after this they came to Purfleet, thus roughly confirming his geographical estimate, went on through and then came upon scattered houses. Moss swung the car into the drive of a big early-Victorian house standing isolated in its own ground about half a mile beyond its nearest neighbour. The car was driven to earth in a garage and Shaw was ordered out and escorted across a cobbled yard that had evidently once been a stableyard,

towards the kitchen regions of the house. Once inside he was led to a cellar entry. His hands were tied behind his back and he was thrust through the doorway. A light was burning and he saw that he was at the top of a greasy, crumbling stone stairway. He moved gingerly down five steps and then something shifted under his feet and he fell the rest of the way. It was quite a long descent and he landed up on large lumps of coal. But he knew how to fall; he wasn’t hurt. Before he could take a look at his surroundings the light went out. He was left in pitch blackness. A voice from up top called down, “You can’t get away, so don’t try. If you do, we’ll know all about it. Just remember, we have a very effective alarm system but we won’t be too pleased if it sounds off in the night.” After that the door was slammed shut and Shaw heard the lock and bolts operate.

* * *

Across the Atlantic, down south in the soft early-evening air of Florida, a four-seater aircraft made a neat landing at the Kennedy base and its occupants hurried to a waiting Thunderbird that drove them fast to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration executive building. The top brass of NASA was getting rattled and the executive chief had called yet another conference and had asked that a representative be sent from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Washington had sent the Vice-Chief of Staff, US Air Force, and three aides. The Chief of Staff, together with the Secretary of Defense, had already been working almost non-stop on the report that had come through from Whitehall.

Also present at the Kennedy conference were physicists and space-research men from Professor Danvers-Marshall’s own ground team, the top aeromedic and an assistant, and technical and executive officers from mission control. The aeromedics affirmed that the routine checks showed the men in the capsule to be fit and well, if tired; they had reported feelings of sickness but there had been no vomiting. Everything was going according to schedule and there was no suggestion of even the smallest degree of anoxia, which was one of the biggest worries in the health line. Mission control, too, said there were no problems

from their angle; the flight was proceeding perfectly smoothly. The research men were satisfied with the results they were getting. Naturally, the reports had not yet been fully analysed and it would be a matter of weeks rather than days after the capsule was down before the value of the marathon high orbiting could be properly assessed and all the information duly computerized and evaluated; but meanwhile the performance of the new fuel was known to have been entirely satisfactory.

No decisions were taken, but the possibility that they might have to order a premature splashdown was much on everyone’s minds. When the meeting broke up the NASA chief, Leroy Klaber, was left with the man from Washington and his own Personal Assistant. Klaber, a short, grey man, thickset and with a prematurely lined face that showed his current anxieties, walked across to a wide window, uncurtained now, from which he had a panoramic view of the base, of the gantries and the hangars and the service towers. Tonight he was on edge, his movements were jerky and nervous; he didn’t want to see anyone get hurt and he didn’t want to see a fiasco, by which he meant a panic splashdown, either. Skyprobe IV was breaking new ground and the flight had to go right . . . it just had to. Klaber stood with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders Slumped, drooping so that his chest seemed to slide down into his stomach, looking out and down at the lights and the activity . . . the activity, he thought to himself, that was constant at Kennedy, day and night, night and day, world without end, Amen. . . .

Harry Lutz, his PA, said suddenly, “What was that, Mr. Klaber?” and Klaber realized with a start that he’d said the last few words of his thoughts out aloud. He turned from the window and walked slowly back towards the conference table. He said, “It wasn’t worth repeating, Harry.” He passed a hand across his eyes. “General,” he said to the Air Force officer, “if anything definite comes through —if this really is a threat the British have dug up, and remember there’s been no backing, no follow-up to it yet— no-one will recommend immediate splashdown quicker than I will. You know that. But. . . we’ve just nothing to go on—nothing! Only what this Shaw has picked up.”

The Vice-Chief of Staff lit a cigarette. He blew a stream of smoke. He said quietly, “I told the conference, Mr. Klaber—”

“That Shaw is known to the Pentagon and he has done a job or two for us already—all right, so now I know that!” Klaber’s tone was distinctly touchy; he was a peppery man at any time. “But it does not have to cut any ice with me, General! So far as I am concerned, so far as I can be concerned, he is just an agent who has picked up something so goddam vague it almost does not signify! The sun does not shine out of the top of his head, General. He could be so wrong, you know that?” His face creased up like a monkey’s.

The general nodded. “Sure he could! I hope he is. But can we deliberately, in view of his report, leave three lives at possible risk, to say nothing of all that top secret new equipment aboard the capsule?”

Klaber made a weary gesture. “We’ve been into all that! We’re doing what we can. I told you, my boys are working right around the clock to get another spacecraft up. I know that won’t save the equipment if the worst happens, whatever the worst is and that we don’t know either, but my men are my first consideration.” Much of the activity going on below the wide window was in fact due to the frantic efforts being made to prepare a launch pad for sending up another vehicle. It could in certain circumstances become necessary to try to transfer the men in Skyprobe IV. “It takes twenty-nine days normally and the second spacecraft currently has a computer fault anyway. It’s probably hopeless and it probably won’t ever be needed if you ask me, but we’re trying all we know how, just as a precaution. Those fives are still my responsibility and I don’t want you or anybody else to think I regard that responsibility lightly, General. But I don’t need to remind you that this flight, if its successful, is going to put us a couple of decades ahead of the Russians, and maybe swing the uncommitted nations round to hitch their stars to us in the West, right?”

“That’s agreed. Militarily, we’re banking on complete success too. So we don’t want to bring the capsule down early, either. Only—”

Klaber went on as though he had scarcely heard. “The world is watching Skyprobe IV. All the world, General!” He slammed a fist into his open palm. “In this country every man, woman and child is going to be watching the TV screens for news of the capsule during all the next seven days. Or that’s what they expect to be doing. If the order goes up to ditch . . . well, we’re going to look so dam foolish it won't be true, if this thing, this threat, turns out to be all hooey! We’ll have to give a reason, too. You can’t interrupt a flight like this without saying a word.” He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped runnels of sweat from his face. “Look, I have to keep remembering one thing above all till we know some more and I’m going to say it again and keep on saying it: the threat, if it exists at all, could be a deliberate plant, a calculated leak as phoney as hell, just to make us bring down the capsule and finish ofi the project. Bluff us into it. And if we fall
once
for that particular kind of blackmail. . . when do we ever get back into business again?”

The airman said heavily, “I’m well aware of that risk, too. But you know my point of view on that, Mr. Klaber. It’s a lesser risk to bring the capsule down now and bring it down intact, rather than let the world see we can’t control our own space flights.” He gave a grim laugh. “Aren’t we going to look much bigger mugs if that happens, Mr. Klaber?”

Klaber threw up his arms. He said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know. All I do know is—I’m going to give it a while longer before I even think about ordering Schuster to fire the retro-rockets. And something else: I’m still clamping right down on telling those men up there what we know— or rather, what we goddam
don’t
know—from the British security boys!”

The general took up his briefcase, slipped in some papers and snapped it shut. “In that case,” he said, “I’ll get back to Washington.” He stood for a moment looking hard at Klaber, his heavy, dark-shadowed face sombre. “Before I go, however, I’ll remind you, Mr. Klaber, that this time it’s a Presidential decision whether or not the capsule is ordered to ditch ahead of schedule. In the last analysis . . . you won’t be called upon to make that decision yourself.”

Klaber nodded. “I know the President takes the final decision,” he said, “but only as a result of the advice he gets. And I’m only one of his advisers—I know that too.” He paused. “You know something, General?”

“What?” Again the Air Force officer looked hard at Klaber, frowning from beneath shaggy, overhanging brows.

“Every minute,” Klaber said, “I’m thanking God I don’t have to take that final decision by myself.”

“Sure—I know.” The general was sympathetic now. “It’s a hell of a strain, don’t imagine I don’t know that. There’s a strain on
us
too—the possibility of a full-scale nuclear war developing if anybody’s allowed to interfere with that capsule. And I still say it’d be a dam sight safer down, and that’s how I’m going to report.” He reached out a hand and took Klaber’s, and smiled. “Sorry. I reckon I’ll be back before long.”

When he had seen the Air Force chief and his aides into the car Klaber went along to his own office leading off the conference room. He spoke to Lutz, who went across to a cupboard and poured two stiff whiskies. Lutz came back to where Klaber was standing and passed his chief a tumbler. Klaber took the whisky at a gulp and said, “That’s better.” He looked up at his PA. “What’s on your mind now, Harry?”

Harry Lutz said, “The Press, Mr. Klaber.” Lutz had a perpetually anxious look, as if he were everlastingly wondering what he had left undone.

“The Press?” Klaber lifted an eyebrow. “So what?”

“So this: suppose something leaks, either here or in Britain? Suppose the Press boys get to this before we release it?” The anxious look deepened. “You thought of that, Mr. Klaber?”

“So far as I know, Harry, I’ve thought of everything.” The space chief smiled bleakly, without humour. “That’s just one of the points. The Press won’t be told a thing without my say-so, and they won’t release it even then, till I say.”

“You sure of that, Mr. Klaber?” Lutz ran a hand over his face. He was always apprehensive of the Press.

Klaber said grimly, “They had better not, Harry.” He looked at his watch, checked it with the atomic-action clock on the wall of his office. “I’m going down for a bite to eat, Harry. Call me at once if Washington’s on the line again.”

* * *

They came for Shaw when a faint daylight had been trying hard for the last three hours to filter through a dirty, cobweb-festooned grating that admitted air to the cellar. He heard the creak as the door opened and then, briefly, footsteps on the stone. The footsteps stopped short of half way down and the outline of a man showed up against the light of day coming more strongly through the door from the passageway beyond.

It was the man Rencke had spoken of as Horn, the one who had been alongside Shaw in the car. Horn sounded American. He called down, “Right, mac. On your feet. You’re wanted.”

The light glinted on metal; it was a .45 revolver and it was wearing a silencer. The Essex riverside probably wasn’t quite the place for the sub-machine-gun Rencke had been carrying the day before, but that heavy revolver could blow a hole in a man’s body big enough to run a fist through. Shaw got to his feet, sliding about on loose coal, unable to steady himself with his tied hands. The American didn’t help out; he just stood there on the steps, behind the gun, enjoying a sense of power. Shaw moved towards the steps and the gunman backed up ahead of him. At the top he was told to turn to the left, and he walked ahead of the gun along a passage until he was halted by a door standing ajar. He was told to kick this door open and when he did so he was pushed ahead into a cloakroom. Moss was waiting inside, finishing a cigarette. While the American covered Shaw with the revolver Moss untied his hands, then leaned back against a tiled wall and, with the hand that didn’t hold a gun, started picking his nose.