“But I must. For one thing, her parents’ll have to be told.”
“True. But just leave this to me, will you, Miss Blake? I can handle it better from my end.”
“But —”
“I’m sorry, but I have to insist. I’ve already told you, security’s involved. The utmost discretion is called for. I promise you, you’ll be informed when there’s any positive news.”
“Even though,” she asked sarcastically, “security’s involved, Commander Shaw?”
I said, “You won’t be told the details, naturally.”
“You seem very sure she’s mixed up in something nasty, don’t you?”
“Miss Blake,” I said, “I don’t know anything at all at this stage. Except that I can’t carry this conversation on any longer. You’ll appreciate you’re talking on an open line.”
She rang off then, after an apology. I called Focal House on the safe line and gave Max the facts as known, and in return he gave me something. Apparently he’d been on the point of ringing me, and his information was interesting: a check on Hartinger’s hotel room had revealed a small wooden box in a corner of the wardrobe, and in this box, which was punctured with a couple of airholes, was a mouse. The mouse was lively enough, and was eating, and it didn’t appear to have lost any skin. But once again the connexions were a shade too obvious and it seemed Dr Ewart Hartinger had been guilty of an act of smuggling and evading the quarantine regulations. Quite a risk for a man of his reputation and standing. He must have had a good deal on his mind, I decided. For now, Max promised a hush on this mouse.
Maybe Houston would still provide the answers.
*
I reached Houston’s terrible summer climate in the early evening and there was a man from NASA at the airport to meet me. I was given the VIP treatment — 6D2 was highly respected, even across the Atlantic — and Harry Kustig himself was a nice guy about my own age, with a cheerful face and a big smile. He was pretty guarded as he drove me in a Pontiac to the Manned Spacecraft Center, but, since he could hardly have expected to be eavesdropped upon in the car, I guessed this reserve was due to the fact he had a Britisher to deal with and wasn’t entirely certain how far the top brass would want him to go. When I asked him about the experimentation programme on the moon material, he said he wasn’t a doc, just an admin man — a pretty high one, as I discovered later.
I asked, “Have you had any of this skin-loss business around here, Mr Kustig?”
“Not that I know about, Commander. Nothing’s been reported, or if it has, it hasn’t reached me.”
“And it would have?”
He nodded. “If it looked like being important, it certainly would. Maybe the medics’ll be able to help on that.”
I said, “I am hoping they will. What about that yellow-brown dust in the rain? You’ve not been bothered by that either?”
“Again, not to my knowledge, Commander.”
“Uh-huh.” I slid a finger beneath my collar; it was sticky with sweat after the walk to the car. “What do you know about Hartinger?”
I got a sideways look. “I know he’ll be a great big loss.”
I said, “Sure. Anything else?”
“What have you in mind. Commander?”
“He was killed, Mr Kustig. I’d like to get a line on why.” I had decided that for the moment I wouldn’t say anything about that mouse in Hartinger’s wardrobe; there was no real reason, except that I wanted something in reserve. “It’d help if you could fill me in on his contacts and his interests and so on. I’m sure you’ll understand.”
“I understand all right,” Harry Kustig said. “But I don’t believe I can help much in that direction. Hartinger was … well, a dedicated man. He didn’t have many interests outside his work, which was aeromedics, as you know. He played golf, but I don’t, so we didn’t see much of each other in the line of sporting activities. And I don’t drink, so …”
“Meaning he did?”
Kustig hesitated. “I didn’t mean that as a criticism, Commander. He drank all right — but not a lot. Not too much. He just liked to relax for an hour or so in the evenings, and he found scotch the best unwinder. That’s all. It kind of made him sociable.”
“Wasn’t he normally sociable?”
Kustig swung the Pontiac round a bend, fast. “I wouldn’t say he was a man who cared a lot for the kind of company that goes in for small talk. He would have looked on that as a waste of time, and to Hartinger waste of time was a sin.” He grinned. “Apart from the unwinding period — he reckoned he needed that, in the interests of efficiency. And I’d say he was right. We’re all of us working under pressure here, the medics as much as anyone. If you don’t relax in one way or another, you’re liable to crack up. Here we are,” he added, bringing the Pontiac to a stop outside what I could see was the Admin building. He got out and I followed. It was damned hot, around 40 Centigrade in the shade, and I mopped at my face, which had started to stream with sweat now that the air was no longer rushing at me through the car’s open window. I followed Harry Kustig inside and into air-conditioning, and through the security check, which was very meticulously carried out, and we went up in an elevator to talk to the man in charge, a Colonel Ingram. The Colonel was a sharp-faced, intelligent-looking man with heavy spectacles which he had a habit of putting on and taking off all the time he was talking.
He got up from behind his desk as we came in and he shook my hand. “Glad to know you, Commander,” he said, in a Southern drawl. “I’ve heard quite a lot about you. I’ve seen the reports from your Ministry of Health, too. You can be assured I’ll do all I can to help, so just ask for what you want of us.”
“Thank you, Colonel, that’s nice to know.”
“Fine. So sit down, and go right ahead. By the way, to set your mind at rest about your accommodation, I’ve fixed for you to stay right here in the Center. I’ll have you taken along to your room when you want. Okay?”
I said that suited me fine; I would have plenty of opportunities of talking to people off duty, which could be a help. Then I repeated the questions I’d asked Harry Kustig and Ingram confirmed that the Center had had no complaints of either yellow dust or loss of skin surfaces. He was keenly interested in what I told him of the outbreaks in Britain and when I asked him point-blank if, prima facie, there could be a link with anything brought back from the moon he frowned and said, “I wouldn’t think so, Commander, but that’s a question for the medics to answer.”
I said, “Quite, but why don’t you think there could be a link?”
He shrugged, and glanced at Kustig. He said, “Well, our security arrangements are pretty leak-tight, you know. We take the quarantine very, very seriously. I’d say there just wouldn’t be a chance of anything getting out, even if there were anything to get out.”
I still didn’t say anything about Hartinger’s mouse, but I did ask him about Hartinger. He reached into a drawer and brought out a file, which he slid across the desk towards me. “You’ll find it all noted,” he said. “I suggest you read it first, then I’ll fill in if you want. In point of fact, I think you’ll find it all there.” He got me to sign for the file and stressed that it was not to be taken out of the Center under any circumstances, and that if I should happen to lose it, which he hoped to God I would not, I would be in bad trouble with the FBI. After that he handed me back to Harry Kustig with the suggestion that Kustig should take me along to see the medics. He took up an internal phone and checked that a Dr Flaherty was available. Ten minutes later Harry Kustig and I were in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory and talking to this Dr Flaherty, a big man with chunky face and an air of abstraction.
“It really is terrible news about Hartinger,” he said, rubbing his somewhat daunting chin. “He’s going to be one hell of a loss to us. Lesley, that’s his wife, she’s taking it very badly.”
“Is she going to England?” I asked.
He nodded. “She’ll be on her way now. They have friends over there, somewhere up in the n
orth I understand.”
“I’ll come back on that later, if I may,” I said. “In the meantime, I’d appreciate a break-down of what you do here in the laboratory, Dr Flaherty.”
“Sure,” Flaherty said at once. “You know, of course, that we have fairly recently discharged a spacecraft crew after their quarantine period. Maybe it would be best if I just run through the routine we applied to them, and then I’ll take you round the building. How’s that?”
“Fine,” I said. “It’s that very crew I’m most likely to be interested in, Doctor.”
He said, along the lines of what Colonel Ingram had already told me, “You won’t find your yellow dust ever got out from here, that’s for sure. We have very elaborate quarantine precautions, and every facility for enforcing them right down the line. I reckon you’ll know the routine by now.” And by now I sure did. I knew how, after splashdown and before they had transferred to the life-raft, the astronauts put on BIG’s — Biological Isolation Garments, which completely insulated them from all other personnel. I knew these BIG’s were then sprayed with a bacteria-killing solution, after which the men were lifted by helicopter to the prime recovery vessel, carrying their moon samples, around 125 pounds weight on this occasion. Once aboard the ship, they immediately entered the special container, the mobile quarantine facility in which they were flown to Ellington Air Force base near Houston. There was absolutely no direct human contact of any kind — no TV handshakes, no baseball caps with scrambled eggs on the peaks. Flaherty told me all this and also that the United States were conducting many experiments, particularly in the areas of mineralogy, chemical and isotope analysis, physical properties, and biochemical and organic analysis. “This, by the way, is not all done here at Houston. Some of it goes out to a number of universities and a mixed bag of industrial firms, private institutions, and government facilities. What we aim to do here, and what we did on this last occasion, was the simple fact of quarantine during which our medics tested the space crew for possible harmful intrusions. In addition we similarly tested the lunar samples and the spacecraft itself. We also performed such of the urgent scientific investigations as had to be completed within the period of the quarantine, and of course we repackaged the necessary lunar samples and distributed them to selected scientists for detailed analysis after the quarantine period. The further experiments are going on now, and will continue to go on almost indefinitely. It’s a very, very big task, Commander, and in fact we have not yet got all the answers even from the first moon landing.” He added, “One of our aims is still to determine if there is any life in the lunar material, even though the result at the start was negative.”
“Any answers on that yet, Doctor?”
He looked annoyed at the question but didn’t comment. Like Ingram had done earlier, I saw him catch Kustig’s eye and I fancied he had a suddenly cautious look. Maybe he wasn’t going to be entirely helpful and forthcoming; I’d come across the same sort of thing in scientists and medics before, plenty of times. It was tiresome, but you couldn’t blame them for wanting to hold on to their secrets and their discoveries. All the same, I had every intention of digging a little deeper into the possibilities of life in those lunar samples, because this was of obvious importance to my investigations; but I could wait a while for an opportune moment. Flaherty asked, “All clear so far?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to take that look around you offered, if I may, Doctor, then I can fill in with questions as we go.”
“Right,” he said, getting to his feet. “I’ll lead the way.” He didn’t waste any time; he bulked through the door with Harry Kustig and me behind him and we started on the conducted tour. It was quite a place, really impressive. Being currently unoccupied by any returning moon probers, it was all clean and empty and sterile and thoroughly decontaminated by processes which Flaherty outlined as we went along (pretty well everything was in fact burnt, including even the very air inhaled and exhaled by the astronauts); so I was able to see the lot. The laboratory was on three floors and it was cramful of scientific apparatus; its 83,000 square feet were divided into three functional areas — support and admin; crew reception; and sample operations; and both the last two areas were, Flaherty said, isolated biologically so that the stuff brought back from the moon couldn’t be contaminated by anything pertaining to the earth and, likewise, there would be absolutely no contamination of the world outside this place by the moon materials.
I asked, “How about the crew, after they’re released? Are you quite positive thirty days is long enough?”
Flaherty nodded. “Yes, we’re satisfied on the basis of current knowledge.”
“But is it a hundred per cent? I mean, there could be something you didn’t expect — after all, no-one knows for sure about possible moon diseases, do they?”
He said, “Well, that’s true enough, but I think we’re safe in our assumptions, Commander. It’s always been doubtful that we would find disease in the crews themselves —”
“Just a minute,” I said. “In that case, why wrap them in — what is it — a Biological Isolation Garment when they come back?”
He lifted his hands. “The BIG’s are just a normal, sensible precaution. If they did have any contamination on their persons, this would be held in insulation, away from any contact with earth. But I guess the most likely source of micro-organisms would naturally be the moon samples themselves. We feel altogether justified in discharging the crews after thirty days. You have to take the psychological aspect into account, Commander. Those men need to go back to their families just as soon as possible. The strain on the families themselves is really tremendous too, and we certainly do not wish to prolong that strain.”
“Point taken,” I said. We moved on, and we moved past a door with a red light in it, glowing behind a glass shield.
“What goes on there?” I asked.
Once again there was the eye-catching act, very brief but, I thought, pointed. Flaherty said, “Oh, nothing much. Just a series of experiments, that’s all, that we’re conducting ourselves.”
I grinned. “Trying to beat the outside scientists, by any chance?”
Flaherty grinned back; so did Harry Kustig, but both grins were a trifle fixed and unnatural. Flaherty said, “I guess that’s the idea.”
“I wish you all the luck in the world, then! This is by way of being your show initially, after all. What are the experiments, Doctor?”
“On moon samples,” Flaherty said.
“I guessed that much. Can you be more specific? This could have a bearing on my job, you realize?”
They didn’t like it at all. Flaherty scowled and Kustig looked thoroughly uncomfortable and embarrassed. I felt like a guest who has put his hosts on the spot by asking for a drink they don’t have in the house. But I couldn’t stand on ceremony; I felt very strongly that whatever was behind that door would have a very decided bearing on what I was investigating. I gave them a push. I said. “All secrets, gentlemen, are safe with me. I’ve no scientific axe to grind in any case.”
“I don’t know that I could let you in there anyway.” Flaherty said. “You’d need to be screened by the CIA first and given a grading. I don’t like calling you British foreigners, but there it is. I’m sorry.”
“I’ve no objection to submitting to CIA screening,” I said, “but it’ll take quite a lot of time and meanwhile we may not have too much of that. There’s something rather nasty spreading itself over Britain and before long the public’s going to get overheated about it. And my credentials are really quite good, you know. 6D2 doesn’t employ security risks, and I have reason to believe your Government takes my Directorate pretty seriously.”
“That’s very true,” Flaherty said, and Kustig nodded his agreement.
“Then —?”
Flaherty said flatly, “I’m sorry, Commander. No go.”
“But look —”
“I said I’m sorry. Believe me, I am. But I’m not taking you inside that door.”
I took a deep breath and played a hunch. I said, “You keep mice in there, don’t you? Experimental mice?”
They looked at me in concerned alarm mixed with more than a touch of anger. Flaherty’s big fleshy face was red and starting to sweat, in spite of the air-conditioning. Harshly he said, “What in hell do you know about it?”
I smiled at him. “Hartinger had a mouse,” I said, and that did it. I was glad I’d hung on to that piece of information as long as I had.
4
FLAHERTY snapped, “What d’you mean. Hartinger had a mouse?”
I said, “Just that, Doctor. He had a mouse. In a little wooden box. It was found in his hotel room after he was killed. Currently it’s nice and happy and safe in the Ministry of Health in London. I dare say their experts will be doing some tests on it, but at a guess I’d say they’re likely to find themselves baffled. Don’t you think you really ought to tell me what Dr Hartinger was working on?”
Flaherty’s hands were shaking and he looked as if he were about to burst a blood vessel; Harry Kustig’s face wore a blank mask, but I knew something was working away behind it and that he was thinking furiously what the next move ought to be now. In the end it was Kustig who took over. He said, “This could be serious, Clyde. I’d better have a word with Ingram.”
Flaherty nodded, clenched his fists and puffed out his cheeks in sheer anger and frustration. I could see that Dr Ewart Hartinger wasn’t at all popular at that moment — he had really let the side down flat. Anyway, we all went back to Flaherty’s office and Kustig got on the telephone to Colonel Ingram, contacting him in his home. It was a security line and Kustig spoke freely, giving me sharp glances from time to time during the conversation. When he rang off he said, “Ingram’s coming right over, Clyde.”
Hartinger's Mouse (Commander Shaw Book 12) Page 4