Skyprobe

by Philip McCutchan

  Schuster and Morris were thinking about their families, wondering how they were taking all this, wondering—for they knew they hadn’t been told in full—just what the Press was making out of it all and what the effect of that would be on their wives as they waited helplessly for the pay-off. They knew quite well that the docking procedure was going to be touch-and-go and that the only real hope lay in Danvers-Marshall losing his nerve at the last moment and deciding that a treason charge was preferable to a fry-up, a cremation in space as the result of any shooting.

  * * *

  Klaber was on the air again, talking to Schuster. He said, “There has been a small delay, but everything is going fine now. Skyprobe V should rendezvous and dock on her third orbit after launch. You know the transfer drill, I guess. The only difference this time is the height you’re orbiting at, and that shouldn’t make too much difference. Okay, Greg?”

  “Okay,” came Schuster’s voice.

  “Good luck, then, Greg. I’m going off the air again, but I’ll be back. Remember, you ditch in the new capsule in the same place you would have done in Skyprobe IV. The recovery fleet is all ready for you.”

  Klaber switched off and walked across to join the control chief once more. Countdown would soon begin now. Klaber tried not to keep on thinking that the whole operation depended for its success or failure on Danvers-Marshall’s reaction once he saw docking was imminent.

  * * *

  When the guards had opened up the cages Kalitzkin said, “In thirty-three hours, Commander, Skyprobe IV will reach the safe limit of her life in space. It is time for you to be instructed in what you are to say when we go into the diversion procedure.”

  “You needn’t bother,” Shaw said calmly, watching the Russian’s face. “I’m not saying anything.”

  Kalitzkin shrugged. “I shall pay no attention to that. I believe you will be only too anxious to meet our wishes Commander, when you realize the alternative—so you had better learn in the meantime.”

  “If you think I’m going to help you out, you’re crazy.”

  Rencke, who had been listening from Ingrid’s cage, came across the gangway. He murmured something in Kalitzkin’s ear and pushed his way towards Shaw. He reached for his whip and drew it from his belt, running the leather thong through his fingers suggestively. “You will do as Dr. Kalitzkin says,” he told Shaw.

  “You’re wasting your time, Rencke.”

  Four guns pointed at Shaw’s stomach. They could make a nasty mess of him; but Rencke wanted him alive. Rencke’s arm moved like lightning and the stock of the whip took Shaw hard across the face. Blood ran down his chin and dropped onto his chest. Anxiously Kalitzkin interceded. “Not again,” he said. “Please! He must speak clearly, and not with pain or injury that might become apparent when he talks. We had agreed to use the girl. . .

  Rencke shrugged; he didn’t mind who took the punishment. “I leave it to you, Doctor,” he said shortly. “You are in charge here.”

  “Thank you.” Kalitzkin turned to Shaw. “You must do as we ask,” he said, “or there will be trouble for the girl.”

  “You’ve already had my answer.”

  “Very well, but I believe you will change your mind.” The Russian caught Rencke’s eye and nodded. Rencke moved back to Ingrid Lange’s cage. One of the guards moved in behind him. As before, Rencke’s hand moved fast. The whiplash came down hard, whistling through the air, and the girl spun round, giving a low sob of pain. Shaw noticed the heavy red mark, spreading across her back. Twice more Rencke used the whip and was lifting it again when Shaw snapped,

  “Stop that, Rencke!”

  Kalitzkin mopped at his forehead and looked much relieved. “You will learn what is required, Commander? It would be so much better if you did.”

  Shaw’s mouth was hard, his fingers itching with a yen to squeeze the breath from Rencke’s throat. “I’ll learn,” he answered briefly.

  “Good!” Kalitzkin brought his hands together and rubbed them. “It is simple enough, and will not take long. But because perfection is essential, there must be much repetition, you understand? Perhaps I should tell you now—if at the time of the actual broadcast you do not speak exactly as you will learn from me, or if you add anything else of your own, not only will the microphone instantly go dead, but something nasty and very painful will at once happen to Miss Lange.” He cleared his throat. “You will now repeat after me as follows. . . .”

  * * *

  What Shaw had to say was brief and easy to remember but he recognized its brilliance and its complete effectiveness; he knew that it was quite enough to convince the West and make the brass give one big sigh of sheer relief. They would rush to obey his demands, falling over themselves to call off the search and withdraw all forces immediately from the sensitive areas. They would remain in this happy state of bliss for quite long enough to allow Kalitzkin to deal with the capsule without interruption. Afterwards, when the capsule had vanished and Shaw had failed to re-appear, the world would obviously be at war. The official Russian protests of innocence would never, in the emotional state the West would be in, be believed for a moment. It just was not possible.

  After the rehearsal Kalitzkin said, “Tomorrow, when we have completed the final test, we shall rehearse you in the control room itself so that there will be no hitches of any sort.”

  After that Rencke and Kalitzkin and the guards pulled out. They left with Ingrid, still naked. She walked out with her head high but her body shaking uncontrollably as Rencke’s hand clutched at her arm.

  Impotently, his fists bunched at his sides, Shaw watched from behind the bars of his cage.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  In the morning, after a bleak, cold dawn had crept unwillingly across the North Pacific and touched the Kuriles to bring up an iron-hard landscape lying beneath a grim, metallic but so far frog-free sky, Ingrid Lange was brought back to her cage by the guards. She walked erect but she turned her face away from Shaw as she pushed through the barred gate, though not before he had seen the look in her eyes—as well as the bruised flesh of her flanks.

  She had suffered a good deal during the hours she had been with Rencke. Shaw’s face was like granite. If it was the last thing he ever did in this life, he was going to get Rudolf Rencke.

  * * *

  Now Skyprobe IV was within the range of the tracking station in West Australia. Schuster had been informed some while before that the countdown had started, that all was going well; and by now he knew that Skyprobe V was all set to go from Kennedy within the next few minutes. The atmosphere in the capsule was tense, the nerves of all three men were at their fullest stretch. Schuster had rehearsed again and again in his mind what he had to do to take control from Danvers-Marshall for the docking. He was certain Danvers-Marshall would crack once Skyprobe V approached. For his part Danvers-Marshall had continued doing all he could to persuade the astronauts to get the docking negatived; he would, he had insisted, use his gun if that docking was allowed to take place. He was still plugging this line when West Australia came on the air. He was saying, “Greg, there’s not much time left. You’ve got to get them to negative blast-off. For God’s sake . . . just say there’s another fault and you won’t be able to open up the hatch. Greg. . . .” His voice was pleading now. “Greg, we don’t all want to die up here!”

  Schuster snapped savagely, “Shut up! I’m trying to hear the station. If you want to play safe, just give me that gun, that’s all!” There was a good deal of distracting background chatter from the ground and he couldn’t make out what was being passed. The voice itself was high and excited and that didn’t help either. But in a while something came through clearly, something unbelievable that rocked Schuster.

  Danvers-Marshall asked, “What was that?”

  Schuster sat silent for a moment, his thoughts bitter, all hope suddenly evaporated. Then he said bleakly, “You’re safe for a while yet, you Red bastard! Skyprobe V isn’t coming up at all. They found a fault just before blast-off.�
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  He realized a moment later that he shouldn’t have said anything to Danvers-Marshall—he ought to have let him stew, let his nerves grow tender; but it was too late now. Danvers-Marshall was humming a tune, indicating his sheer relief. This apart, there was the silence of total dismay in the capsule. Schuster and Morris sat glumly in their seats, almost in a state of shock now that their last hope, faint though it may have been, had vanished on the Kennedy launch pad. Skyprobe IV continued on its way, with Danvers-Marshall’s hand in full and unchallenged control.

  * * *

  They came back soon to Kennedy, back over the launch pads of the Moonport. Klaber’s voice came up to them, close to tears of fury, frustration and anxiety. Jerkily the NASA chief said, “Greg, it was a complete burn-out of a whole range of equipment we can’t possibly replace in the time. We have just twenty-four hours to go and believe me, it’s out. It’s literally impossible to go through the whole procedure in the time.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Schuster said bleakly.

  “I’m sorry, Greg, You can imagine how we all feel, down here ... all we saw was just the burst of orange and yellow smoke from out the base of the rocket and after that—just nothing. The rocket just didn’t lift off the pad. The engines cut two seconds after ignition . . . the system found the fault and automatically shut off the engine, but by that time the damage had been done.”

  “What about the crew?”

  “They’re all right, thank God,” Klaber said.

  Soon after that Klaber went out of communication. As Skyprobe IV went on for the Canaries he walked to his car and drove back to his office. If only they had more time . . . in twenty-four hours they couldn’t hope to make the repair, start the countdown, blast-off, get a capsule into orbit, and dock on. There was nothing more any man could do now other than to hope the searching forces found the base—or that the Britisher, Shaw, was still on the job after all and could get results in time. And without a shooting war.

  * * *

  After a meagre breakfast Shaw was removed from the cage by four armed Chinese guards. He was taken along the corridors of the silo and up a flight of concrete steps to the control room, where one large television screen, standing apart from a number of smaller ones, showed the top of the silo and the heavy camouflage netting that concealed the concrete-lidded pit beneath.

  Rencke and Kalitzkin were there already, Rencke staring at the dominating television screen and Kalitzkin talking earnestly, with much emphatic gesticulation, to a group of technicians from a total of around fifty men who were watching the banks of dials and radar screens which, together with the screens of the closed-circuit television that kept the prison cages and the ground above the base under surveillance, walled in the circular-shaped, brilliantly fit compartment. More technicians sat at rows of panels running down the centre aisle, some with headphones clamped over their ears, busily taking down signals from the outside world, no doubt gathering in the situation reports as the searching forces of the West made contact with one another.

  Rencke turned as Shaw was brought in. Giving a happy smile he walked across. He said, “There is news from America, Commander. You would like to hear it?”

  Shaw felt a stab of alarm. “Well?” he asked.

  Rencke said, “The spacecraft they had been preparing at Cape Kennedy will not now enter space. There was a fault, and the launch was negatived just before blast-off.”

  Shaw’s fists clenched. Now he was really on his own. . . . He said bitterly, “That’s dead lucky for you, isn’t it.”

  Rencke smiled again. “We were never worried about the possibility in any case.” There was a gloating sneer in his voice and once again Shaw felt the almost overwhelming urge to kill, to smash that smug white face to a pulp. Rencke turned as Kalitzkin came across towards them. The Russian said,

  “We are now ready to start the final test. It is not so much a test as a rehearsal, of course, at this stage. Come with me, Commander.” He gestured to the guards and they marched Shaw along behind him, two of them pinioning his arms, past the television screens—on one of these Shaw could see Ingrid Lange still in the cage on the floor below, and on another his own empty cage, though the alleyway between the two did not appear to be covered—and stopped in front of a square grey construction like a computer, a large but low-built affair of glass and metal topped by a panel containing rows of press-buttons and dials and a number of electric bulbs, all of them currently dead. All except two of the press-buttons were coloured red. The two exceptions, set in the centre of the panel and surrounded by a heavy red-painted line, were bigger than the remainder and coloured purple.

  Lightly Kalitzkin touched one of these purple buttons. “This,” he said, “raises the attractor-plate. The other switches the beam through—that is, when we are in manual control, of course. We would normally go into automatic control the moment our radar picks up the capsule on its re-entry, but if necessary we are able to follow the indications of our various instruments by means of the manual controls.” He reached down beside the panel and indicated a large, red-painted hand-wheel. “We use this to direct the Masurov Beam in the first instance to the expected point of re-entry, the point that will be ordered by Danvers-Marshall once the capsule is told by mission control at Cape Kennedy to stand by for splashdown. After that, after re-entry you understand, the automatic control takes over and the beam is directed straight onto the capsule . . . but if anything should go wrong with the automatic control, we can still use our manual system. The handwheel, naturally, is power-assisted for moving the plate. It will be the manual control that we shall use today.” He paused. “Do you wish to ask questions now?”

  “Not for the moment—”

  “Very well, then. Now, we are virtually ready at this instant—it takes little time to raise the plate, as you will see shortly, and in any case we shall know the time of reentry within a minute or so as we are picking up all the NASA transmissions. It is all very simple in operation,” Kalitzkin added, “though I can assure you it has not been simple in planning and construction.” He moved along the control room, calm, confident and easy, utterly relaxed. “This is where you will talk to the West, Commander.” He indicated some complex radio equipment. “Under Comrade Rencke’s orders, you will speak from here, exactly as rehearsed, the moment I give you the signal tomorrow morning. And now . . . now I have the really interesting thing to show you!”

  Kalitzkin turned away and walked back to the central control panel. Here he was immediately opposite the television screen showing the ground level above the silo. Evidently men had been at work up there while Kalitzkin had been giving his conducted tour, for the camouflage netting had been pulled clear and groups of the Chinese workers were standing around in heavy quilted clothing and fur caps, stamping their feet and flinging their arms about their bodies in an attempt to keep out the bitter dawn cold.

  Kalitzkin raised his eyebrows at one of the technicians, a man who appeared to be the next-in-charge of the control room under the overall direction of Kalitzkin himself. This man nodded. In Russian he reported, “All is ready, Comrade Doctor.”

  “Thank you, Ivan.” Kalitzkin looked at a clock, then reached for the control panel before him and pressed three switches with careful precision and deliberation. An alarm sounded in the open air and was relayed on the television screen, the men on the ground above moved aside, their breath steaming in the air like so many kettles on the boil, as the concrete covers slid apart. Faintly from somewhere beneath the floor of the control room a high whining sound was heard. Kalitzkin pressed the first of the purple buttons, which went down and engaged in the ‘on’ position with a loud click. At once a tremor started to run through the compartment, faint at first but growing stronger. All the technicians were now closely watching the proliferation of dials and gauges, or listening intently, like doctors with their stethoscopes, through earphones. Kalitzkin, who was currently watching the readings on his own control panel, glanced up now and agai
n at the dominating television screen showing the earth above. Shaw and Rencke both had their attention fully on the screen now; the huge round plate appeared after a brief interval, filling the whole space where the covers had been, and then moved on, slow now, purposeful, menacing, until it stood on its stalk some sixty feet above ground level. Shaw watched in fascination. Then the high whining note and the tremors ceased, ending, as the thick metal shaft reached its maximum height, in a jar that shook the whole of the control room.

  Kalitzkin said, “When we first home the Masurov Beam on to Skyprobe, the plate will be at its present height. As the capsule comes nearer, we shall retract the plate until it is at ground level, as it was when your helicopter landed. Meanwhile, I have something else to show you.” His hand dropped to the red-painted wheel beside the panel. He began to turn this; there was a hum as the power-assisted mechanism operated and the television screen showed the metal plate dropping on its stalk, and the stalk itself inclining, until the operating face was angled fifty degrees with the ground.

  Kalitzkin let go the handwheel and glanced at Shaw. “In a moment,” he said, “I shall connect the power and the plate will come alive. I have so directed its angle, as you can see, that its force will be felt only upon the earth of this one island. What I have to show you is an almost accidental side-effect of my invention, but I believe you will be very much surprised and impressed by what happens!” He was trembling with excited anticipation now, eager to show off his toy. “Please watch the screen very closely.”