Skyprobe

by Philip McCutchan

  He bent towards a microphone and, speaking in Russian, said, “Stage One complete . . . stand by for Stage Two. Report in sequence, starting now.”

  He waited; brief reports were passed on a tannoy system and one by one tiny lights began to glow on the control panel. When all were fit Kalitzkin, speaking again into his microphone, announced: “Stage Two.” He began counting: ". . . ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero.” On zero, with a steady and deliberate movement of his hand, he depressed the second of the two purple buttons. Simultaneously the lights in the control room dimmed and a single bright-red lamp glowed above Kalitzkin’s panel. And almost at once there came from the television screen one of the weirdest sounds Shaw had ever heard, the sound of a hailstorm much magnified, and the whole surface of the metal plate seemed suddenly to have grown an irregular covering of what looked at first sight like a shaggy fur coat but which Shaw soon realized was in fact a whole mass of metal, small particles that had been drawn irresistibly through the air to impinge upon, and stick to, the plate. As he watched the surface covering grew deeper, and now and then some larger object was drawn in to hurtle visibly across the screen and embed itself in the rest. It was a terrifying mass of metal on the move. Kalitzkin, looking at his face, saw his expression. With triumph in his voice the Russian said, “You see? The beam has acted as a magnet and is attracting to itself all that there is of metal in its path. There are metal ores on this island, you understand—the plate has in effect excavated them from out of the earth! Some of the smaller fragments are travelling at very nearly the speed of fight! Now, Commander, perhaps you have some idea of what my invention is able to achieve—even, as I have said, in the field of mere side-effect?”

  Shaw had been impressed but his response was cold. “That was small stuff. And it was close. The capsule’s an entirely different matter and it won’t respond to magnetism.”

  Kalitzkin laughed. “It will not need to. That is merely by the way. With the co-operation of my colleagues in China very satisfactory tests of the real qualities of the Masurov Beam have been made, as I told you—you will see! When the astronauts bring the capsule into the earth’s atmosphere it will become as good as mine. And immediately after that, you will make your broadcast to say that all is well. Now watch again, please.”

  Shaw looked back at the television screen.

  Kalitzkin moved the handwheel once more and the plate drooped farther over, the stalk itself inclining so that the plate hovered almost vertically above ground some thirty feet clear of the edge of the deep pit. Then Kalitzkin pressed another of the red buttons. There was a small plop as the second purple button snapped back into ‘off,’ the power died—and a small mountain of metal that must have weighed, at a guess, a couple of tons, slid to the ground. Clear and virgin again, the plate assumed an upward direction as Kalitzkin once more turned the handwheel and it remained there like some grotesque metal mushroom . . . or like the flower of some man-eating tropical plant greedily waiting for Skyprobe IV to drop into its mouth.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Soon after, the stalk was lowered back into its stowage and within a couple of minutes one of the radar operators reported that he had picked up aircraft to the eastward. They were distant and not closing, maintaining a northerly course, and Kalitzkin wasn’t in the least worried, certain in his own mind of the complete security and anonymity of his base. After Shaw had been put through the dress rehearsal of his talk to the West, the four guards took him over again and escorted him back to the cage. He saw Ingrid watching him through the sound-proof glass lining of the bars, with relief and gladness in her eyes at seeing him back unharmed. She smiled at him; he appreciated that smile and the sheer guts it indicated.

  He was locked in and left to brood.

  He had imprinted on his mind every detail of the control room’s layout, including the fact that the tell-tale television screens didn’t cover the gangway between his and Ingrid’s cages. That might be worth bearing in mind, perhaps; but he had little hope of being able to achieve any results at this stage. He knew that the ditching of the capsule couldn’t be delayed much beyond the extension limit next morning. Possibly they could delay an hour or so beyond it but that would have to be regarded as the absolute deadline; and it would certainly appear pretty pointless to the authorities in the States to put the men in further danger of their lives by delaying the splashdown beyond the known safe limit if the searching forces were still reporting blanks by the time the extra twenty-four hours were up.

  * * *

  In the Caribbean the recovery fleet, having no knowledge of the fact that Danvers-Marshall would order the retro-rockets to be fired off so as to bring the capsule in over the Pacific, had remained on station for the ditching.

  Splashdown was now definitely scheduled to be attempted at 0900 hours next day subject to revised orders only if the hostile base should be located in the meantime. Klaber had personally spoken again to the men in space and had told them of this decision, taken after full consultation with the President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his own technical aides.

  Once again Klaber asked, “You’re sure the retro-rockets are okay now?”

  “Sure I’m sure.” Danvers-Marshall wouldn’t be interfering with them again now; everything was moving his way. Schuster was trembling with frustration; even though there was no conceivable point in reporting the situation to control, since there was just nothing anybody on the ground could do about it—and they must have guessed by now anyway—he would have liked Klaber and the world to know for absolutely sure just what was going on inside the capsule. But a look over his shoulder had shown him that Danvers-Marshall’s eyes were staring insanely and he was becoming convinced the man’s mind had been affected by his position and he would be quite likely to start shooting if anything rattled him further.

  Klaber’s voice said unnecessarily, “Report at once if you have any trouble.” Klaber wanted to go on talking, hated the idea of cutting off and leaving them to it. Schuster sensed that; he knew Klaber well.

  He said, “Sure, sure,” and his tone was ironic. He couldn’t help that; there was going to be plenty of trouble and they just had to take it. Without the threat of a docking to be used against Danvers-Marshall any more, there wouldn’t be any future at all in risking the Britisher’s gun—and neither could they start anything on the way down. This thing had to be fought out after splashdown and not before—unless things got too much and he couldn’t stop himself, and if he did that, it was goodbye anyway.

  He had to watch it. . . .

  Suddenly Danvers-Marshall said, “Greg.”

  Schuster stiffened at something in the man’s tone. “Yeah?”

  “You’ll want to have a word with your families.”

  This was ghoulishness. “Like hell.”

  “Wayne?”

  “Leave them out of this, you Red bum.”

  “Look,” Danvers-Marshall persisted. “I’m sorry about all this. I’ve said that and I mean it. My hands were tied—”

  “Nuts.”

  “Well, if you don’t want to believe that, Greg, I can’t make you.” Danvers-Marshall’s voice was unsteady now. “That’s not to say I won’t go through with it . . . I will go right through with it, I assure you. But I want you to think of your families, both of you. They’ll want a word with you. Only, don’t say anything I wouldn’t want you to. That’s all.” He hesitated. “Greg . . . call up mission control. Tell them to put the families on.”

  “Get stuffed.”

  “I mean it, Greg. I’m telling you to do it.”

  Schuster took a deep breath and glanced over at Wayne Morris. Slowly Morris nodded . . . he wouldn’t mind having a last word, though he as well as Schuster knew Danvers-Marshall was only trying to help his own conscience over a sticky patch. Schuster sighed and called up the tracking station at Canaries. He said, “Tell Kennedy, we’d like a word with our families next time round.”

  Maybe it wasn’t suc
h a bad idea, at that. . . .

  * * *

  They did as they were asked and they put the families on—Linda Morris, and Mary Schuster, and the children. The children, of course, knew nothing of what was happening—they had been kept from school since the real uproar had started in the Press and naturally the newspapers had been kept from them too, and the television had also been forbidden; and they were not present when their mothers actually spoke to the men in the capsule.

  Schuster said, “It’s going to be all right, Mary. The fault’s corrected. Don’t worry about a thing.” They were all keeping off the real trouble, as if by mutual consent, though Schuster knew the wives must have been told by this time. “Just don’t worry, that’s all!”

  “We’ll try not to, Greg.” The technics of two-way radio kept the conversation formal, but her voice was beginning to falter already. “Oh, Greg. . . .” She let go the transmit switch.

  “I said, don’t worry! I mean that.” Schuster’s voice was sharp with his own anxiety—for his family, for Morris, for himself as well and for what was bound to happen on a world-wide scale. “I’ll be back . . . darling, I know it’s not easy, but you have to trust me now more than ever before. The fault in the system’s absolutely okay now . . . we’re fine, all of us, just fine.” Still no mention on either side about the Eastern threat. “I’m going to bring Skyprobe down . . . me and Wayne between us, that is.” He was aware all the time of Danvers-Marshall’s gun, of the scientist’s watchful eyes behind the transparent visor of the space helmet. Once again he said inadequately, “Just don’t worry, Mary dear.”

  Linda Morris came on the air after that, tearfully; then they put the children on, while the two women waited out of earshot. They didn’t trust themselves not to break down when they heard the kids speak. . . .

  With the children both Schuster and Morris sounded cheerful, happy ... no talk now of not worrying, it just didn’t arise. They were coming down safely and they would get a ticker-tape welcome on Broadway and the President himself would shake them by the hand and call them by their first names. “Know what I’m really looking forward to, though?” Morris asked. He answered his own question. “Seeing your ma pour me out a nice, long coke . . . with ice!”

  “Sure, I bet.” This was Wayne junior, despairingly. “Scotch-on-the-rocks more like, pop!”

  “Well—maybe. You kids sure have plenty cheek these days.” A pause, a longish one, and awkward. “See you, Junior.”

  “Sure . . . see you, pop.”

  “God bless, boy. Look after your ma and Bobbie.” A tremor had crept into his voice now and he was thinking: Oh, Christ, let’s get this over with.

  “What was that, pop?” There was faint bewilderment, a lack of understanding.

  “Oh . . . never mind. Just be good—till I get back. If you’re not I’ll tan your backside. Okay?”

  “Okay. . . ."

  Skyprobe IV raced on at her 27,000 m.p.h., away from the Kennedy base, away from the families’ voices, heading out once again across the globe. Later, as they came over the Pacific on the last leg of the next orbit, the spacemen passed unseeingly over the combined fleets searching, still without success, for the diversion base. Many of the ships and aircraft were well north now, however, and were beginning to narrow the field towards the Kuriles, although planes that had flown as close to the area as they dared, and had taken photographs, had reported no sign of activity on the fringes of that grim dead region.

  Nevertheless, a strong suspicion about the Kuriles had been worrying the fleet Admiral in the Pacific and as Skyprobe IV raced on a signal was already on its way to Washington announcing a positive intention to investigate the islands more closely. Aboard his flagship, an aircraft-carrier, that admiral had already watched the Phantoms preparing for take-off under war conditions. The Phantom III F6C’s—ninety of them—were making ready to be shot off the four-and-a-half acre angled flight-deck at their 20-second intervals and zoom into the blue at speeds of up to 1,700 m.p.h., carrying their deadly loads of napalm bombs which, exhausting with their intense heat all the oxygen in the area of fall as the low-grade jet fuel and gelignite burned, killed by suffocation or roasting in a 200-foot orange flame and billowing smoke. The Phantoms also carried the “Willy Peters,” white phosphorous bombs that burned for almost forty minutes, even under water; and infra-red heat-seeker rockets that could home on a cigarette end from upwards of a thousand feet. Mechanics were preparing the Vulcan gatlings, known as Puff-the-magic-dragons . . . guns whose six revolving barrels fired a hundred rounds a second. When the admiral’s signal reached the Pentagon and the White House it found the US high command in no mood to send out a negative despite the risks; instead, certain detailed orders went out to the ICBM sites and the early-warning stations in Alaska and the eastern states, while the combat operations center of the joint US-Canadian North American Air Defence Command, deep in its concrete ‘city’ below the 9,565-foot Cheyenne Mountain in the Rockies, received orders putting it, in effect, on an immediate war footing.

  * * *

  That night, as the minutes ticked away to splashdown and certain world catastrophe, Shaw lay awake hour after hour, thinking, planning until he forced himself to relax and clear his mind with sleep. When he woke, he formulated something that just might work out.

  At 0830 hours, with only half an hour left to go, the outer door was opened up and the four armed men marched again into the gangway between the cages and one of them unlocked the doors into each. Shaw and Ingrid were ordered out, under cover of the guns. When they were in the narrow gangway Shaw started to say something to the girl but was ordered brusquely to be silent.

  “All right, you—” Shaw broke off with a grimace, and then gave a grunt of apparent pain and lifted one foot off the ground, his face contorting.

  The man who seemed to be in charge of the party demanded irritably in English, “What is wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Shaw snapped. “I’m not a doctor. All I know is, it’s damn painful!”

  The guard made a noise of anger and impatience. “It is no matter. Pain is to be accepted. Must walk. Must not now waste time.”

  “Must be damned. I can’t put it on the ground. Someone’ll have to help me, that’s all. . . if you really want me to move. Personally, I’m quite willing to stay right here.” He was watching the man closely now; there was just one thing he could be sure of, and that was that whatever happened, whatever he did, these men weren’t high up enough in the hierarchy to take the risk of killing him or Ingrid. Neither Kaltizkin nor Rencke would be very pleased if they did that.

  The guard glared, stamped his foot, seemed about to give Shaw a push along the alleyway, then thought better of it. If the Englishman’s pain became worse he might not function as required in the control room . . . the Comrades wouldn’t like that either. The man nodded at one of his subordinates. He spoke in his own language, then moved aside as the other man came along towards Shaw. The second man took Shaw’s left arm in a tight grip, right up beneath the armpit. He started to drag Shaw forward.

  Shaw let his body go limp and then very suddenly he struck. He moved his right arm fast, got a grip on the man’s neck and, using all his strength, forced him across his body, freeing the grip on his upper arm. In the same instant as he grabbed the gun he felt the man’s neck crack.

  He let the body drop and jumped backwards, the gun weaving to cover all the remaining men. “Keep very quiet!” he snapped. “Move inwards from the door or you’re all dead.” As he spoke a tremor, as at the rehearsal, ran through the silo, shaking the cell alleyway. The tremor increased and there was a high whine of electrically-driven machinery. The attractor-plate was rising, moving out on its stalk into the open air, making ready for the final act.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The guards were dead scared now, fearing the reactions of Rencke and Kalitzkin as much as the physical threat from their former prisoners. Their eyes flickered warily as they watched for their chance.

&nbs
p; Shaw said, “Take their guns, Ingrid.”

  The girl came forward and removed the sub-machine-guns from the three men.

  “Keep one yourself and be ready to use it if I say. Put the other two down by my feet.”

  Ingrid did as she was told. Shaw ran his eye over the disarmed guards. “Now strip,” he told them. “All of you. At once.” The men shifted their feet but didn’t obey. Shaw jabbed his gun forward, ramming it hard into the belly of the nearest guard. “I said strip. I’ll give you all just five seconds to start, and if you don’t, I’ll blow this man’s guts right through his backbone. And after him, you two others.” He added, “Don’t let the television cameras give you a false sense of security. They can’t see into the gangway . . . maybe any shooting would be heard, but that’s not going to save you.”

  Shaw’s eyes were like ice.

  There was a silence and then the man under the closest threat decided his stomach was of more immediate importance to him than loyalty to Kalitzkin. He began to take off his clothing. The others followed his example. When they were all stripped right down Shaw said, “Ingrid, take them over from me and keep them covered. Don’t hesitate to shoot if you have to.” He laid down his own gun and then sorted out the clothing of the tallest of the three men and dressed himself quickly in it; the clothes fitted him adequately enough for his purpose. When he was fully dressed he took over the men again from Ingrid. “Now,” he told her, “get into one of those sets of clothing as fast as you can. Stuff your hair up tight under the cap . . . pull down the ear-flaps, and you may pass.”

  She grimaced. “Always provided anyone we meet is blind, Smith!”