I wondered.
2
NG FRED GREETED US AT our destination, a factory in the middle of nowhere. Unlike the underground installation I had visited earlier, this one was a complex of enormous structures made of corrugated metal. Two tremendously long concrete runways dwindled into the distance across the perfectly flat landscape. Ng Fred tugged at my arm. Henry was in the act of disappearing with General Yao into the building. Ng Fred, hurrying after them, rushed me through the door.
What I saw when I stepped inside astonished me. Five spaceships stood on their tails, their noses a few feet short of the ceiling two hundred feet above. They had stubby wings, two amidships and two at the tail, but they couldn’t possibly be airplanes, nor did they resemble any flying machine I had even seen in reality or the movies. Two large engines hung from either side of the tail. The ships had no windows. Painted on the fuselage was a picture of our blue planet, wreathed in white clouds. There were no other markings—no flags, no lettering, no numbers.
Henry, still locked into his silence, gazed wordlessly at these wonders. He seemed to be as spellbound as I was, even though he had certainly seen these extraordinary objects many times before. He had invented them—no one else who ever lived could possibly have done so. They belonged to him. They had been conceived in his brain and built with his money.
“Shuttles,” Ng Fred said. “Very new. We call them Spaceplanes.”
Hearing Ng Fred’s words, General Yao nodded—one curt bob of the head. It was inconceivable that he had not already seen pictures of these craft, taken by spies he had planted in the factory. Yet he seemed to be taken aback by the reality. The astonishing quickly became the familiar. By the time we completed our guided tour of the Spaceplane, its mystery was dispelled. It was just another wonder of technology, its eventual development foretold by the first stone tool. If mankind lived on, this machine would metamorphose over time into marvels that no one, except maybe Henry, could begin to imagine.
The Spaceplane was designed to carry two hundred passengers or six hundred tons of cargo. It would lift the components of the spheres and the scores of women who would build them into orbit. Fifty people could live aboard for weeks without resupply. Resupply by another Spaceplane would be a routine exercise.
“The ship requires no booster rockets,” Ng Fred said. “It will take off from a runway like an airplane, climb to the upper edge of the atmosphere, and then accelerate and escape Earth’s gravity. It will attain orbit at a distance of about five hundred miles from the planet. When its mission is achieved, it will return to Earth, land like an airplane, and be ready for turnaround just as quickly as an airplane—quicker, because it will not require refueling.”
“One moment,” General Yao said. “What powers these engines?”
“A new kind of propulsion devised by Henry.”
“What kind of propulsion exactly? Fission, fusion, charged particles, antimatter as in Star Trek, what?”
“That is proprietary information, General Yao. I’m sorry.”
“What’s its top speed in space?”
“I’m sorry, General. I can’t tell you that.”
“What is its range?”
“Or that.”
Yao fairly quivered with indignation at having these doors slammed in his face.
“You are a citizen of China,” he said to Ng Fred. “You felt no duty to inform your country of what was going on here?”
“We’re not in China, General.”
The two Chinese were speaking to each other in English—General Yao, I think, because he wanted Henry to know how insulted he was, Ng Fred because speaking Mandarin would double the affront.
“You have not tested this ship in space,” Yao said.
“No,” Ng Fred answered. “But we plan to do so soon.”
“You hope to do so soon. How many have you built?”
“Seven. Two more are in production.”
“Each one costs approximately what?”
“Ten billion dollars.”
“So Henry has spent ninety billion on this ship?”
“So far, not counting development costs, yes.”
“Why build so many before you have tested even one? It’s not like Henry Peel to be so incautious.”
“We are confident the product will perform as designed.”
“I’m touched by your faith,” Yao said. “You have trained the necessary pilots?”
“It’s a drone.”
“The pilot flies it by remote control?”
“It is controlled by a computer.”
“From what location?”
“The Spaceplane can be controlled from any point on Earth, or in space.”
“Will it be controlled from China?”
Ng Fred did not answer the question. I found this puzzling, but not so puzzling as General Yao found it. He seemed to be positively bewildered. He had been a silent partner in the enterprise from the beginning. Why this sudden stonewalling? General Yao fairly quivered with resentment.
At this point, Henry spoke his first words of the day.
“Seen enough?” he asked.
“Actually, no,” General Yao said. “Nor heard enough.”
Henry said, “General Yao, I hope we can speak plainly to each other, and that you will speak plainly afterward to your government.”
“That is also my hope, Henry,” General Yao said. “Who asks the first question?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why have you not told us before about the existence of this Spaceplane?”
“It was and is a trade secret.”
“The People’s Republic of China is not a competitor. Far from it.”
Henry replied, “This assembly plant is not on Chinese soil.”
“It would not be on Mongolian soil in the absence of China’s good offices in your behalf.”
“That’s debatable,” Henry said.
Yao said, “When you deal with China, you must trust China as it trusts you. You are not a sovereign state even if you have more money than most countries.”
Henry said, “General Yao, what point are you making?”
General Yao said, “I will come straight to it. I have made the point once before. If you insist on testing this vehicle, or anything like it, without giving notice to the rest of the world, and especially to the Americans, who may very well regard your Spaceplane as a new Chinese weapons system, you will seriously embarrass the People’s Republic of China and endanger its national security. My government cannot permit this to happen.”
General Yao rose to his feet. “And now I must go,” he said with no hint of his usual urbane smile. “Do you need a ride home?”
“Thank you,” Henry replied. “We can manage.”
He wasn’t smiling, either. He had the look of a man whose thoughts are far, far away.
Yao left, striding purposely. Lately, everyone seemed to be doing this.
I said, “What was that all about?”
“I’m not sure what Yao wants,” Henry said.
“How about a couple of Spaceplanes?” I asked.
“What would they do with them?”
“Hijack the mother ship?”
“Why would they do that?”
“To load the party leaders on board. To make the escape from this planet an all-Chinese affair—nobody but the Han in the next world.”
Henry widened his eyes. He fought a smile and lost. He laughed—just a couple of half-smothered snorts, but a laugh just the same.
“No wonder I love you,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re the most creative paranoiac I’ve ever known.”
No wonder I love you? Is that what he had just said? If so, he gave no sign of remembering it.
“What’s so paranoid about it?” I asked. “Henry, think about it. Are you not the Henry Peel who invented swarms of fighting hornets to repel boarders from Earth who might try to take over the mother ship?”
“Yes,” Henry said.
“Then
what does this scenario change?” I asked. “A smart pirate—General Yao, for example—might reason that it would be a lot easier and cheaper to capture the Spaceplanes while they’re still on the ground. Or is that paranoid?”
Henry said, “I’m listening.”
“Suppose Chinese special forces decided to slip across the Mongolian border in the dark of the moon and take possession of this place and the underground factory? How would you stop them?”
“How could I?”
“What about the chaps? Aren’t they all former Delta Force and the British equivalent and whatever?”
“They’d be outnumbered,” Henry said. “Besides, if we fought off the commando raid, they’d just bomb the factory.”
“What, and blow up their only chance for escape?”
This was not a direction in which Henry wanted to be taken. He held up a hand: Enough.
“If that was the intention, why would Yao tell me about it?” he asked.
“Maybe he was trying to warn you.”
“Why?”
“Friendship?”
“Please.”
“All right, then. He wants something.”
“Are you saying he wants to go along on the voyage?” Henry asked.
“You said it first,” I said.
Ng Fred, who had been listening, joined in.
“She has a point,” he said. “Maybe Yao does want to go on the voyage. Maybe the party leadership wants to go along, too. But maybe they’re not quite that farsighted. Maybe Yao is telling us something else.”
“Which is?” Henry asked.
“The Spaceplane is a revolutionary weapons platform. What would the White House do if it found out such a thing existed and this factory was in Saskatchewan and belonged to a Chinese?”
We all knew the answer to that question.
Henry stared at each of us in turn, and then climbed into his shell and pulled it shut. Emerging from it after a very long minute, he asked Ng Fred questions about the Spaceplane. Except for the two that were still under construction, the ships were ready to fly.
Ng Fred was, of course, telling Henry things he already knew. Nevertheless, Henry listened attentively—as if, like a normal human being, he simply wanted reassurance.
But this was Henry. Why would he need reassurance?
Nine
1
AT ONE MINUTE AFTER MIDNIGHT on New Year’s Day, the first of the Spaceplanes was launched. It positioned itself at the equator over Borneo, then climbed straight up to the edge of the atmosphere, broke free of Earth’s gravity, entered space, and settled into orbit. The launch was observed by American, Brazilian, Chinese, European, Indian, Japanese, and Russian satellites. It lacked the flaming exhaust that had been the signature of every other space vehicle ever launched by man; in fact it seemed to have no exhaust at all. Despite this peculiarity, it was treated as a commonplace event by the news media, which reported that China appeared to have launched a vehicle of some kind into high Earth orbit. The media’s nonchalance came as no surprise. Thousands of man-made objects already circled the planet. One more caused no excitement just because it didn’t have a flaming tail. The Chinese government maintained its customary silence. The following midnight, and for the next three midnights after that, another Spaceplane was launched, so that by the end of the week, five of the craft were in orbit.
This did create excitement. No nation had ever sent so many objects into space in such a short period of time. It suggested a new dimension of power. The cost alone boggled the minds of media pundits. What were the Chinese up to? Were these spacecraft manned? Were they headed for the other planets or perhaps for the stars? Or were the Chinese about to plunge the world into darkness and silence by destroying every communications and intelligence satellite in orbit except their own? Was this a prelude to war, or as many hoped even in America, the longed-for event that finally put an end to American supremacy on Earth and in space? The Chinese remained silent.
A week passed before a hitherto unknown public relations firm in Ulan Bator issued a press release in Khalkha Mongolian announcing that the launch of the Spaceplane fleet was the work of a Mongolian corporation whose name translated as CyberSci, Inc., which would soon launch a separate, larger spacecraft constructed from components carried into orbit by the Spaceplanes. No press conference was called. Neither Henry’s name nor that of any officer of the corporation was mentioned. Only the most rudimentary technical details were disclosed.
Media investigations uncovered no further information. CyberSci, Inc., had no office or telephone number or Internet address anywhere in the world. Neither the Spaceplane nor its propulsion system had been patented in the United States. It was possible that the system had been hidden in plain sight by patenting each of its thousands of parts in many different countries. Multinationalism had gone multiplanetary. CyberSci was holding its secrets close.
Meanwhile, the two remaining Spaceplanes were being loaded with components of the mother ship. By the end of the second week, they too launched themselves into orbit. The Spaceplanes they replaced returned to Mongolia, landed in darkness, and fifty young women filed aboard each of them. Within minutes, these workers were in orbit. A couple of days later, after they had had some experience of weightlessness, twenty-five women emerged from each Spaceplane. They wore bright red space suits. The space suits were much trimmer than the puffy Michelin Man costumes of earlier space walkers—so close-fitting, in fact, that the lithe figures of the nubile females who wore them could be discerned by the cameras. They immediately set to work. While one twenty-five-woman team unloaded the long strips that would form the outer shell of the spaceship, the other team fastened them together. All this was photographed and broadcast to Earth. After three hours of work, new teams replaced them. The women worked with choreographed precision, as if they were a synchronized swim team and space was a vast Olympic pool.
By the end of the third week, the first segment of the sphere that would be a segment of the mother ship looked in magnified television images like a crescent moon. The first one hundred workers returned to Earth. This time the Spaceplanes landed in daylight, in full view of the dozens of spy satellites that were watching. A second shift of workers took off immediately. Henry saw them safely into orbit, then departed, taking me with him but leaving Ng Fred, the nuts-and-bolts man, in charge of the routine. We had been in Mongolia, and the women had been in space, for three weeks.
The little brown airplane flew Henry and me back to the yurt compound. Why we traveled in such an archaic device was known only to Henry, but after watching the otherworldly perfection of the Spaceplanes and little else for twenty-one days, it was a comfort of sorts to be riding in a rickety machine that barely held gravity at bay.
General Yao awaited us at the yurts. He regarded us with cold eyes. I guessed that he hadn’t had a pleasant visit to Beijing. His insignia of rank had not changed, so for the time being at least he was still a general and a free man. Henry offered a friendly nod. It was not returned. The dust of Hsi-tau saved the moment by going up my nose and causing a paroxysm of sneezing. Henry and Yao, distracted from their staring contest, watched sympathetically.
Henry said, “I think we’d better get her inside.”
“Excellent idea,” said Yao.
Inside the big yurt, Daeng materialized and poured tea into translucent porcelain bowls. I expected Yao to wave his bowl away, but etiquette prevailed. Would it be the polite thing for a Chinese to wait to arrest or shoot his host until after drinking his tea? I had a feeling we might soon find out. We were in one of the most out-of-the-way places in the world and nobody except Ng Fred knew we were here. It was not inconceivable that Henry and I, and maybe Daeng as the only witness, might, at the very least, soon be joining Bear in chains. Henry seemed unperturbed by these possibilities. When he had emptied the bowl and handed it back to Daeng, Yao looked directly at him for the first time.
“First of all, Henry,” he said, “I offer you congratul
ations on your great achievement.”
“Thank you, General Yao,” said Henry, “but others deserve most of the credit.”
“Nonsense.”
Henry looked interested, but nothing more than that.
“You have stolen a march on the world,” Yao said. “Including your friends. The result is that you have very few friends left in China. Perhaps only one.”
As if he were the inscrutable Chinese and Yao the impetuous foreigner, Henry remained opaque. His expression was attentive, serious, pleasant. If he was apprehensive about what was coming next, as I certainly was, he gave no sign of it.
“Serious violations of Chinese law have been committed,” Yao said.
He enumerated them. The list was long—the smuggling of matériel into China itself and across Chinese territory, many unauthorized intrusions into Chinese airspace—in fact, practically every act, large or small, that Henry had committed on Chinese soil—including bringing me and many other foreigners to Hsi-tau, a restricted security area, without visas.
Yao continued. “You have, in addition, installed on nearby foreign soil advanced ballistic missiles that threaten military and civilian targets within China—weapons that could be launched at a moment’s notice. You did this under the pretext that they would be used peacefully to launch objects into space for scientific purposes and with the promise that any results would be shared with China. Now you have deployed advanced spacecraft into orbit that have obvious military capability, and you are building a space station that has the capacity to launch a devastating attack on China. You kept the existence of these spacecraft a secret from us. China asks itself what your true intentions have been and what they are now. It is clear that it cannot rely on your assurances in the future.”
As General Yao went along, his voice became louder and his military bearing more noticeable. He was standing at attention, boot heels together, shoulders back, face frozen. He had not removed his cap.
“I now come to the most serious of the infractions,” General Yao said. “You have manufactured your Spaceplanes, your booster rockets, and the components for your space station on foreign soil with Chinese labor. The work now being done in space is performed entirely by Chinese workers. Nearly all of these workers are young women. Without official permission or knowledge, they were removed without proper documents to a foreign country, and later sent into space without regard for their safety or good health.”
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