Skyprobe

by Philip McCutchan

  She said softly, “If that is what you really feel you must do, it is possible that I can help.”

  He tensed. “You, Ingrid? How?”

  “I have told you, my mother’s cousin is very wealthy. She has wealthy friends. One of them is here now, in Hong Kong. Out in the harbour he has a motor-yacht, a big vessel that is new and fast, Smith. If I speak to him . . . it is possible that he would be willing to allow you the use of the yacht.”

  Shaw let out a long breath. “It’s a nice thought, but even if your friend were willing, it still wouldn’t help. I haven’t the time for a cruise, Ingrid. When I move north, it has to be by air. There’s a lot of distance involved.”

  She was silent for a moment, then she said, “Nothing will be lost by talking to this man. He is a man of many interests, and it may be that he can help, for though he lives now in Japan, he is a Swiss . . . and he also has suffered from Rudolf Rencke. Do you understand? He is discreet also. You need tell him nothing that is secret in any case. I will talk to him myself—you can leave that to me.” She caressed his ear. “Will you trust me, Smith, and come with me to see him?”

  Frowning, he studied her face. He asked, “Why are you doing this?”

  She said at once, “Smith, I told you I wished very much to help you, or I think I did. This is quite true, but there is also something else. I have told you what Rencke did to my sister. Chiefly I wish to see Rudolf Rencke destroyed . . . and I believe it is your ultimate aim to destroy him, is this not so?”

  Grimly Shaw said, “Ultimately, yes.”

  “Then let me help you. Had Rencke been in Hong Kong as I believed, I intended to help you, Smith. I intended to let it be known that I was here also, so that I could become the honey-pot that attracts the bee—always he has desired me physically, you see—and so that I could lead him into a prepared trap for you to arrest him or whatever it is you do. But in view of what you say about Rencke not being in Hong Kong—and you are the person who knows about these things—I believe my friend is well worth your seeing.”

  Shaw said, “Time’s short. Suppose I agree . . . when could a meeting be fixed?”

  “Oh, I can take you to him tonight! I will telephone my cousin and she will send round her car.” She moved a little against him. “In the meantime, we shall have a little wait. My cousin’s friend is entertaining aboard the yacht tonight. We must give his guests time to leave, you will agree? So, Smith—oh, Smith. . . .”

  There was meaning and entreaty in her voice. Without speaking, Shaw reached for the light and switched it off.

  * * *

  On the line from the NASA base to the White House Klaber said, “No, Mr. President, there’s still nothing.” Not a word had been received from the capsule since Washington’s coded signal had been passed the day before. “They’re right out of communication.”

  The line rattled in his ear. “You don’t consider that’s due to any technical fault, I gather?”

  “No, sir, I do not, definitely. Not now. I’d say Danvers-Marshall has control inside the capsule, all right. He’s just playing safe and not letting them talk to us, though I don’t see why he feels the need to worry now. God knows, Mr. President . . . there’s nothing any of us can do down here! Even the launching—”

  “Klaber,” the President broke in,, “in the event of any trouble, I’m prepared to lose the capsule if necessary. But I’m not prepared to risk the men inside it.” There was a pause. “The search for the interference base is not going along too well currently, and we may have to act fast. We’ll have to try a rendezvous with Skyprobe IV and take those men off if it looks like becoming necessary. We must take a chance on Danvers-Marshall doing some damage if he has got control already . . . I do not believe he would risk his own neck, Klaber, up there, once he sees another spacecraft docking on the capsule. I’m asking you to step up the program for getting Skyprobe V into space.”

  Klaber said, “We’re advancing everything, Mr. President, just as fast as humanly possible.” His voice was edgy with strain and tiredness. He himself had now come to believe that to launch Skyprobe V was the only hope left —if only it could be done. “I can’t make it any faster . . . and I’m bound to report again, I don’t believe it can be achieved in the time, even though the computer fault’s been corrected now.”

  There was a silence as the President fought down his rising impatience, his feeling of terrible impotence. He wasn’t the man to harry responsible officials when he knew they were doing their best, as he knew Klaber was. There couldn’t be anyone better than Klaber to handle the job.

  He said abruptly, “All right, Klaber, you’re the man on the spot. I’m happy to leave it to you—but just bear in mind what the implications are likely to be . . . if anything goes wrong.”

  “I’ll do that, sir.”

  When the President rang off the NASA chief put back the phone on his desk with a hand that shook badly. As Klaber had told the President, he didn’t believe there was any real prospect of going into docking procedure in the time available; and no-one knew what might happen when the Eastern maniacs started their interference programme. This sort of thing was virgin territory so far as NASA was concerned. Klaber’s mind ran, as it had been running ever since the news from London had broken, over the appalling possibilities. Currently they didn’t even know whether or not Skyprobe’s retro-system would operate. One thing, just one thing, needed to go haywire and the men were all done for. If anything hit the capsule, say if it were to be breached in any way on its ferociously fast descent into unauthorized and probably incapable hands . . . and say the Britisher used a gun in a panic and split the astronauts’ space suits . . . then the blood of Schuster and Morris was going, literally, to boil and they would die in seconds.

  EIGHTEEN

  Shaw had thought, What the hell . . . he hadn’t currently any alternative to offer anyway. The man could be worth talking to and not much time would be lost if he proved unhelpful. So he had agreed; and within two hours, after Ingrid had called her cousin, they were in the back of a luxurious limousine behind a Chinese chauffeur, driving out of the Kowloon streets and heading in the general direction of the border with Communist China.

  They were forced to go slow in the dark, narrow thoroughfares, which even at this time of night were, in some cases at least, crowded still. Yellow faces pressed close, looking through the glass; the driver kept his finger on his siren, urging them from his path without noticeable success. Shaw sat silent for the most part, glancing now and again at Ingrid Lange as light from the streets fell across her face. As at last the car came clear of the streets and the ramshackle dwellings and shops, the speed was increased and they drove fast through colonies of stinking, broken-down huts filled with human squalor, until they hit the desolation of the open country north and east of Kowloon. They ran below the Kowloon hills, whose sides were in places covered with the shanty towns of the squatter area, the area that housed so many refugees from Red China, an area filled with the opium ‘divans,’ the shacks used by the addicts as shelters where they could indulge their vice.

  Long before they reached the border and the frontier guards the car was turned off along a road to the right. This road led through a landscape as desolate as the earlier country had been, a landscape backed now by the hills of Red China, visible distantly across the water beneath a high, bright moon. After some five miles they turned off this road and headed along what was little better than an earth track, going slow on a rough, potholed surface. They came down to a small creek, no more than an indentation of the coastline—behind the island of Kat O in Mirs Bay, some way south of Starling Inlet, the girl told Shaw.

  Here the car rolled to a stop.

  Shaw and Ingrid got out into the cold night air. Away to their left they saw a fleet of sampans lying, some out in the creek, others lying a dozen deep in trots at two or three ramshackle jetties, wooden structures running drunkenly out into deep water and looking as though they were held together by string and good
intentions. The sampans appeared deserted, but Shaw knew that beneath each of the midship canopies whole families would be ekeing out a sordid, pathetically overcrowded existence of poverty and hardship and complete lack of privacy.

  He asked, “What now?”

  “The chauffeur will call up a sampan, Smith.” As the girl spoke the Chinese gave a shrill cry, which, after waiting briefly, he repeated twice more. At last a dim, bent figure emerged from beneath the canopy of a sampan out in the creek, and after some further delay this sampan got under way and edged in to lie at the end of one of the wooden jetties, the befouled water lapping gently at its sides.

  Shaw and Ingrid followed the chauffeur along the jetty and jumped down into the sampan. Ingrid told the Chinese driver to wait with the car, and then the sampan was cast off by its villainous-looking navigator and propelled into deeper water by a hefty shove from a pole. Thence it moved out of the creek into the bay proper under the impulse of a single long-bladed oar. After half an hour’s irritatingly slow progress across the water the rowing stopped and gently the craft bumped against the accommodation-ladder of a large motor-yacht, a fast-looking, sumptuous affair painted in white and gold-leaf. Under the moon Shaw could see clearly the name Lac Brienz painted on a board fixed to the bulkhead of a deckhouse.

  A tall man wearing a white dinner-jacket stood at the head of the accommodation-ladder, looking down at the sampan in some surprise.

  Ingrid called up to him, “Monsieur Dahl, may we come aboard, please?”

  “Why, my dear, of course! What a happy surprise, to be sure!” The voice was pleasant and easy. “I am delighted to see you.”

  “No more than I am to see you tonight, Monsieur Dahl,” Ingrid said as she went up the ladder with Shaw behind her. At the top she turned to make the introductions. “May I introduce a friend of mine? This is Mr. Smith . . . Smith, this is Monsieur Dahl, formerly of Zurich.”

  The two men shook hands. Dahl was a man of around sixty, a tall, thin man with a sensitive, mobile face and greying hair. Shaw looked into his eyes; his impression was of a decent man. The smile as he shook hands was genuine, the face was trustworthy and sincere. Dahl said, “You will come to my stateroom, please. I am sure there is much purpose in this visit, young lady!” he added to the girl. He took her arm and led her aft along the deck to a companion-way. Shaw followed them down, and into a sumptuously fitted stateroom opening off a carpeted alleyway. A steward in a starched white jacket presided over a tray of drinks. Dahl dismissed him and poured the drinks himself. As he did so he said, “Now, my little lady, you may tell me what is on that busy mind of yours.”

  She said abruptly, leaning forward with her fingers interlaced around her knees, “I wish for help—help for Smith and for me also. I shall come quickly to the point. I need not ask you, M. Dahl, if you remember Rudolf Rencke.”

  Dahl’s hand jerked; a little whisky split from the glass which he was carrying across to Shaw. He said, “No, you need not ask that certainly. But why, exactly, do you remind me of a man I would so much prefer to forget?”

  Ingrid glanced across at Shaw. Her face 'was pale now, he noticed, pale and determined. She said crisply, “Smith will tell you as much as he thinks able to, M. Dahl. After that, I shall have some things to say to you. I have already promised Smith that you will help him, by the way.”

  Dahl’s face broke into a broad smile. “Have you indeed, young lady? Then it seems, as a chivalrous man, that I am already committed!”

  * * *

  Afterwards Shaw knew that it was Ingrid who had clinched the deal. She had done most of the talking, and she had done it to extremely good effect. Dahl, it seemed, had a helicopter which he kept on a private airfield outside the town of Sapporo on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. This helicopter, he said, he was very willing to place at Shaw’s disposal providing Shaw could find his own air transport to Japan.

  “I can fix that all right,” Shaw said. “Monsieur Dahl, I don’t know how to thank you for this.”

  The Swiss smiled and shrugged. “Please think nothing of it. I shall be amply repaid by your complete success since, as I would gather, that success will lead to Rencke’s being dealt with as he so much deserves. Apart from this, I ask only that you take good care of Miss Lange.”

  Shaw said promptly, “I’ll do that, all right—by leaving her in the care of her cousin. Or of you, M. Dahl.”

  Dahl shook his head. “I am flying tomorrow to Zurich on business. Besides, Miss Lange is a very determined young lady . . . and something tells me she has decided to fly north with you.” He looked at the girl. “Is this not so?”

  “It is,” Ingrid answered firmly. “Now, Smith, there is to be no argument on this matter. I have told you already, I mean to help you. Remember what I said at Mi Ling’s. It was to help you and to destroy Rencke that I came here to Hong Kong. I do not mean to be cheated out of that. I—"

  “But look—”

  “No, I will not look, Smith!” she said almost fiercely. “I repeat once again, it is for this that I have come, for this that I have approached M. Dahl on your behalf.” She beat a fist against her breast. “There is something here . . . I feel it constantly . . . that will not rest until I myself have seen Rencke destroyed!”

  Shaw looked into her eyes; she meant every word she had uttered. He said with a smile, “I’m not licensing you to kill! But you can come as far as Sapporo anyway, providing you’re willing to do exactly as I tell you from now on out. All right?”

  She came to him and put her arms around him. She kissed him. “Very much all right!” she said.

  * * *

  The chauffeur-driven limousine was still waiting when Shaw and Ingrid went back to the creek in the sampan. They were driven on Shaw’s orders to Kai Tak airport, after which the chauffeur took the car back to the Shanghai Hotel. Shaw had an interview with a high official of the airport and within ninety minutes of leaving the Lac Brienz he and the girl were heading out for Tokyo, where another flight had been booked ahead for Sapporo. At Sapporo, Dahl had promised, they would find his pilot, an Australian named Ewan MacAllister, waiting for them with transport to the private airfield. MacAllister, it seemed, was always looking for excitement. “You can trust him,” the Swiss had said. “Before you leave I shall give you a letter for him. If there is trouble you will find him most useful.”

  NINETEEN

  The ships searching for the unknown recovery base were nothing like enough and they couldn’t hope to cover efficiently in the time left an area as vast as all the North Pacific, though the fleet had been reinforced by every available long-range aircraft. The huge area of search extended from the Equator roughly up to the 60th Parallel, and from the China coast to 120 degrees West longitude; for, as Shaw had suggested, the recovery operation could be planned to take place from a ship on station, waiting for the capsule to be ditched near her. The searching vessels were steaming to their limits, the USAF land-based squadrons were flying right around the clock, but so far nothing, no clue of any sort, had been discovered and nothing in the least untoward had been reported by any of the patrols.

  * * *

  The President was on the line again from the White House, this time to enquire about the spacemen’s families. Klaber said, “They’re not too good, sir. You can’t blame them for that, I guess.” He didn’t add, out of consideration for the immense load the President was carrying, that Linda Morris hadn’t eaten since the first news of the fault had come through, and that now she was lying in her bed at the Schuster home, dry-eyed, without speaking, but with her lips moving ceaselessly in prayer and her body quite rigid. In the event, she had taken things worse than Mary Schuster. Klaber preferred to keep off the subject of the families. He asked, “How’s the situation politically, sir?”

  “There’s been a lot of activity,” the President told him. “I’ve just seen the Russian Ambassador. He’s emphatic the East has nothing to do with any threat. Naturally, that’s the fine he’d be expected to take . . . b
ut I have to confess he sounded completely genuine. He’s been in touch with the Kremlin and they’ve sounded out Peking with the same result. And he left me in no doubt the East are definitely not bluffing when they say they’ll regard any attack by our ships or aircraft as an outright act of war. If we attack anything that can be considered within their spheres of influence, World War Three starts, Klaber. Time’s getting short and it seems we are not going to get Skyprobe V up into orbit after all. Do you have any suggestions at this stage for cutting out the threatened interference, if we assume it to be a radio interception?”

  Klaber said steadily, “Mr. President, we have not stopped thinking along those lines. The only suggestion is that we jam all we can when the capsule re-enters, but frankly I doubt if that can be effective in the absence of any information as to the kind of signal. . . there’s just one man who might be able to help and he’s right up there in the capsule—and I guess you know I’m not referring to Schuster or Morris.”

  There was a pause, then the President said quietly, “All right, Klaber, I know you’ve done your best. I’ll call you again if anything comes through.”

  The line went dead. Klaber sat on at his desk, his head in his hands. His mind was spinning with fatigue and worry and an angry impotence—and concern, as ever, for his men in space. Everyone was going mad, he felt . . . the world’s Press was in a state of uproar and he was right at the storm centre. The newspapers in the States were demanding immediate action by the government; the scare stories about a foreign power being involved had had their due effect—the State Department had been forced to admit the possible existence of some unspecified threat and this admission had been seized upon by the extremists, by the emotional-reactors, and they were dynamite in the current situation. Skyprobe and its possible horrific fate if anything went wrong were on every man’s Ups. If the astronauts couldn’t be brought down, public opinion insisted, extreme pressure should be brought to bear on the Eastern Powers, in whose territories the threat, if it existed at all, must obviously lie. There should be counter-threats of massive retaliation to be put into effect at once if anything should actually happen to the capsule and its crew.