Skyprobe

by Philip McCutchan

  ONE

  “Excuse me, please,” the man said, pushing past Shaw to the bar. Shaw knew the man had been tailing him from Savile Row. He’d spotted him for what he was outside the Civil Service Commission in Burlington Gardens. Shaw’s intention had been to take advantage of one of London’s really nice winter mornings—it was a clear day, with puffy white clouds scudding before a light wind across a blue sky—by walking through to the London Hilton where later a girl would be expecting him to buy her lunch. But the tail, who wasn’t particularly skilful, had looked interesting; so Shaw, strolling casually on into Bond Street and crossing into Stafford Street, had paused for a moment outside The Goat tavern. He had gone in. The bar was packed. Shaw had pushed through the crowd and ordered a Scotch-on-the-rocks and from the corner of his eye he’d seen the tail coming in. A roll-your-own cigarette was dangling messily from the man’s lower lip.

  Shaw said genially as the man pushed past, “Don’t mind me, squeeze in.”

  The man looked flustered. “Thank you so much,” he said, taking up the invitation without further pressing. He ordered a Worthington. Shaw fancied there was more than a trace of a Polish accent. The tail was a tall man, thin, balding and grey—around sixty-five at a guess, could be more, and far from robust, though he had an ex-officer look about him. Army—he carried the stamp of it, in spite of the dangling roll-your-own cigarette. That wasn’t in character, was probably part of the tail act, a pathetic attempt to alter his image. Taking the change from a ten-shilling note the man turned over the few pennies he had been given, examining them closely.

  Shaw had a feeling he wasn’t all that unfamiliar with the British coinage. “Interested in numismatics?” he asked casually.

  The man looked up, looked back at Shaw with large, dark eyes, sad eyes like a spaniel’s. “When they are worth more than their face value, yes,” he answered. The crowd at the bar jostled him; his thin, fragile body swayed, then was held against the bar by a fat, heavy man whose red neck over-bulged a stiff white collar. The tail looked with wry envy at Shaw’s slim-waisted, deep-chested steadfastness. “Pennies of the 1950’s are worth, perhaps, ten shillings each. You see, not many were minted in those years.” Shaw put on a look of interest. He said, “Yes, I’d heard that.” The man wanted to talk to him, but not about pennies. He lifted his whisky, looked at the man over the rim of the glass. “I wonder if you happen to know any other . . . out-of-the-way facts, by any chance?”

  The man stiffened, swallowed, then nodded. The pupils of his eyes seemed to contract, and sweat broke out in beads on his forehead. He was very close to Shaw now and his mouth wasn’t far from Shaw’s ear. He said in a whisper, scarcely moving his lips, “Commander . . . I would like to talk to you privately. It is urgent—believe me.”

  “Tell me a little more, if you can.” As an agent Shaw was always on duty and he had no quarrel with the fact; but the girl in the Hilton was attractive and she didn’t enjoy being kept waiting, and he’d had his share of cranks. Also, he disliked wasting his time.

  The voice only just reached him. “Not here. I dare not. There is a man who would kill me—a man named Rudolf Rencke, of whom you have perhaps heard.”

  “I’m sorry, I haven’t.” Shaw felt certain he’d been right about the man being a Pole. “Who are you, if I may ask?” The man hesitated. “I prefer not to say.”

  “You’ve been a soldier. Polish Army?”

  The man didn’t answer but Shaw could tell from the look in his eyes that he’d been right chi the beam. Shaw waited, looking unco-operative; there was a long silence and then the Pole whispered, “There is a threat to the American spacecraft, Skyprobe IV, now in orbit. I will say no more here.”

  Shaw felt a stab of alarm, automatically took a swift look around the bar. Skyprobe IV was hot, very hot. He said, “You don’t need to. That’s good enough. Leave here as soon as you’ve finished your drink. Be in Green Park in twenty minutes . . . the centre path running down to the Palace from immediately opposite 94 Piccadilly. Find a bench—join me when I walk past you. We’ll go for a stroll.” He gave the man a sharp, appraising look. “You’re sure you haven’t been tailed here?”

  “I am sure.”

  “Right, then.” He nodded; the Pole finished his drink and left, the cigarette still dangling. Shaw took his time over his whisky, wondering what form a threat to a spacecraft that had already been thirteen days in orbit could possibly take. After ten minutes he left The Goat and headed for the rendezvous. It wasn’t the lunch-hour yet and there were not so many people about as there would be soon. Half-way along the path, beneath the trees, he saw the Pole, sitting in the corner of a bench by himself. He was leaning against the arm-rest and he looked ill, but when Shaw reached him he saw the man was stone cold dead. He opened the jacket. Blood was draining down the front of the shirt and a razor-sharp tip of steel protruded a fraction of an inch through the chest wall and the shirt. That steel had been slid through from the back and had probably penetrated the heart on the way. Shaw pulled the body towards him and saw an inch of metal, round like a rod, sticking out between the shoulderblades. The steel was no more than a quarter of an inch in diameter and it had two deep grooves ringing it. The killer had most probably used a detachable haft, and very possibly this had been spring-loaded, so that the spike would drive in without anyone who happened to be around seeing more than a piece of wood. The dead man’s skinny body wouldn’t have needed more than six or seven inches of steel at the most. There probably hadn’t been time for the killer to withdraw the spike; somebody would have been coming along the path.

  Rudolf Rencke, whoever he was, evidently couldn’t be trifled with. . . .

  Shaw let the body sink back in its corner; to the casual eye, the Pole merely looked as if he were sleeping. Shaw went back fast for Piccadilly and got hold of a policeman. He took the officer into the park and showed him his special pass from the Ministry of Defence. “From now on,” he said crisply, “I don’t come into this. I want you to have the body taken to the Yard—and then you forget about me. All right?”

  “I don’t know about that, sir,” the constable objected. He leafed through his notebook. “You’ll have to—” Firmly, Shaw interrupted. “I’ll have to do precisely nothing at all. You’ll find your own bosses’ll confirm that. In the meantime, do as I say and leave me out of your notebook and your conversation in the canteen, or you’ll have the Home Secretary himself hurling you pensionless out of the Force with his own hands!”

  Shaw made for a telephone box. He rang the Hilton and left a message. Then he called the Defence Ministry. When he was put through to the Special Services Division of Defence Intelligence he spoke to Latymer’s confidential secretary. “Tell the Chief I’m on my way to see him,” he said. “This is urgent and it won’t keep.”

  * * *

  Thirteen days before at Kennedy, in the very early hours, the men had walked one behind the other towards the gantry elevator, past the central blockhouse where the technicians were scanning the control panels as the countdown drew inexorably to its end. Awkward in their cumbersome gear the men rode up in the elevator, tense now, not speaking at this stage as they approached the final moment of separation from the earth. That separation would last for twenty-one days in an orbit farther from the earth than had ever yet been attempted by a manned vehicle. There was an aeromedic with them as well—a slight, fair man with a pink-cheeked face who was also silent as they rode up along the length of the great rocket that stood caged in the gantry’s framework. Without appearing to do so, he was watching the men’s reactions closely, making a last-minute appraisal of their fitness to endure an extended orbital flight that would open up wider possibilities of space exploration than had so far been thought possible, and would put even the moon-probe mi
racle in the shade eventually.

  At the top, as they stepped out of the elevator, they looked down on the concrete apron far below, and away beyond it to the huge Vehicle Assembly Building in the High Bay Area of America’s Moonport a few miles northwest of Cape Kennedy itself. Searchlights played— there was light everywhere, and noise—above all, noise . . . demoniac, fearful—noise that drummed and reverberated against the ears, the shriek of pipes channelling in the liquid oxygen, the raised voices of the men still at work around the capsule, somewhere below them a siren wailing like a banshee in the night, even the sound of their own heartbeats and the blood pounding in their ears. Around them now and again through the steam vapour they could see the men in their white coveralls, checking and re-checking.

  Now they were level with the entry-hatch to the capsule, waiting for them in its neat plastic sheath. The doctor put a hand on the shoulder of one of the men. “Okay, Greg,” he said. “Let’s have you aboard now. You’re fine.”

  “Sure we are, doc.” The astronauts moved on towards the steps leading to the hatch. They climbed in stiffly, awkwardly, and settled themselves into the contour seats.

  “Good luck,” the aeromedic said, smiling for the first time. He looked into the capsule. “It’s luxury,” he remarked, “when you think of the early space vehicles, the museum pieces. You’ve got all the room you want.”

  Talk . . . easy, meaningless talk, as always at the last moment. They looked back at the aeromedic through the transparency of their visors.

  “Don’t forget the fitness checks. Be seeing you.”

  The hatch was closed on them.

  Thirty minutes later the inertial guidance system hummed into life and there was a hissing sound as the pressurization gas forced its way into the capsule; soon after this the umbilical connection that carried the power and air feeders—the last link with earth—fell away beneath.

  Seconds later the blast-off came. Orange-yellow smoke burst from the rocket’s tail. Skyprobe IV climbed from the Kennedy base to its orbiting position 900 miles up in space, climbed fast and steady to the dark, high arch of the heavens, carrying with it, besides its human cargo and a

  massive amount of new and highly secret equipment, the prestige of the United States and an expenditure of around 780 million dollars.

  They were given a ‘go’ and a few seconds over forty minutes from blast-off, the spacecraft, using a brand-new fuel that was also under an experimental try-out, entered its first orbit at 27,000 m.p.h., then turned around to keep station on the 60-foot second stage of the launching rocket that had followed it into space.

  TWO

  “A dead Pole—and Rudolf Rencke.” Latymer rolled a round ebony ruler in his well-kept hands and looked at Shaw through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “The fact Rencke’s involved gives this thing a very nasty ring of truth. And I say nasty with a careful eye to my choice of words.”

  Shaw said, “I gather you know him.”

  “I know of him. I’ve never met him.”

  Shaw lifted an eyebrow.

  Latymer put down the ruler and arranged the various objects on his desk carefully and then spoke with precision. “Rencke,” he said, “is a bastard—in our sense of the word, that is. I know nothing of his birth. He’s a big, bald, square-headed bastard with a surplus of gleaming white teeth—I’ve seen photographs. If he’s in this country, it’ll certainly be under an alias. Rencke—he’s a Swiss, by the way—is an international manipulator, known to be ready and willing to sell his services, and they’re pretty unsavoury, to anyone who makes it worth his while. He’s also other things. . .

  “Such as?”

  Latymer stubbed out his cigarette in a jade ash-tray and took another from a silver box. He passed the box to Shaw. Shaw flicked his lighter. Latymer said, “He’s a murderer several times over. And a rapist. And a sadist. . . but he’s also a man of great intelligence, even if you wouldn’t think so from his photographs. Possibly cunning would be a better word than intelligence.” His hard green eyes stared shrewdly at Shaw. “Didn’t this Pole give you any clue at all as to how Rencke might be involved?”

  “No, sir. Nothing apart from the fact he might do him in.”

  “And you’ve no idea who the Pole was? He didn’t ring any bells at all?”

  “None—as I said, it was obvious he’d been in someone’s army. Judging by his age, I’d say he could have been in the war, probably one of the Poles who came over here to carry on after Hitler went into Poland. That’s all I can offer.”

  “H’m. . . Latymer sat back, running a hand over the skin grafts in his face. After a moment he took up the ruler again and aimed it revolverwise at Shaw’s head. “I’m taking this report seriously—and not just because of Rencke. Your Pole died to try to pass his message on, and the very fact someone thought him worth killing before he said too much, lends his words a certain additional weight! Now: if anything does happen to Skyprobe IV the future of space exploration will begin to look pretty bleak. Quite apart from the fact there are men up there in space, we have to remember there’s never yet been any kind of threat to the space programmes of either East or West. There’s any number of nasty implications in this for the future, Shaw. Retaliation’s just one of them.” He paused, leaned back, looked up at the ceiling for a few moments, then returned to the vertical and stared unblinkingly at Shaw. He asked suddenly, “What the devil could a threat to an orbiting spacecraft consist of? What’s your theory?”

  “I haven’t one,” Shaw answered. “It has me beaten.” He blew smoke thoughtfully. “Unless someone means to send up something to meet Skyprobe IV head on!”

  Latymer gave a cold, sardonic smile. “Somehow I doubt that.” He leaned forward. “Tell me, Shaw—what do you know of Skyprobe IV? Don’t bother—I’ll tell you, to make sure of covering any gaps in your space education. To start with, as you’ll know from the Press and television, the capsule was blasted off thirteen days ago from Cape Kennedy and it has another eight to go, orbiting at a far higher level than has ever yet been attempted, and at a higher speed too. But that’s not the whole story. Briefly, and this is classified information, the Skyprobe project was planned as an exploration flight—and the underlying object is, to open up possibilities of establishing staging posts for interplanetary travel beyond the moon. These staging posts would naturally extend far beyond the manned orbital space stations belonging to the moonprobe boys. If the flight’s successful, and so far it has been, then the West is going to be put firmly ahead of Russia for many years to come. It could be revolutionary in terms of space exploration. And there’s something else, Shaw.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “How many men,” Latymer asked slowly, “do you suppose that capsule contains?”

  Shaw said, “Why, two, sir. Majors Schuster and Morris of the US Air Force.”

  “That,” Latymer said flatly, “is where you’re so wrong. There are three men aboard.”

  Shaw stared. “Three!”

  “That’s what I said. It doesn’t go beyond this room, I need hardly say. The Press boys never got a smell of the third man. Both NASA and CIA did a first-class security job on that. Naturally, a biggish number of technicians and so on had to know there would be a third man aboard, but mostly they don’t know his identity. The reason for the secrecy is simple: the very name alone of the third man would have given away something of the nature of the flight’s objectives. So apart from the heads of NASA and CIA and the men directly concerned with the flight—aeromedics and so on—the third man’s identity is known only to the President, the Secretary of State and the Chiefs of Staff in the United States, and over here by the Prime Minister, the Defence Minister and myself. Also, of course, his wife. The reason we in Britain were told is because he happens to be a British subject by birth. He’s a naturalized American citizen now, but because of who he is, we were still informed.” Latymer paused. “Is that enough to give you a clue?”

  “Are you speaking of Danvers-Marshall, sir?” Shaw�
�s tone was disbelieving. He leaned forward and jerked cigarette ash into the jade receptacle. “He's in the capsule?”

  “He is. And that’s one reason why, in my opinion, we as well as the United States come into this. Professor Neil Danvers-Marshall—none other—is orbiting with Schuster and Morris. He’s a man who likes to see for himself, to feel the same strains as his team, though as a matter of fact this is the first time he’s actually been in continuing orbit. This present distance-probe is his pet project. What d’you know about him, Shaw?”

  “Not much, frankly, apart from his reputation as a space scientist. . . and that in spite of his British birth he’s one of the top men in the US Space Administration—”

  “The very top, Shaw, in his particular line. He’s responsible only to the Head of NASA. He’d been working for years in the closest co-operation with the US on space research before he went over there permanently ... as a matter of fact, it would be perfectly true to say he’s the one single man who’s got at his finger-tips all the West’s space secrets, all the data of past flights, details of projected plans and so forth. He’s a practical scientist who is also a brilliant administrator, co-ordinator, and planner. He’s a man of great brain and foresight, with the ability, so it’s said, to think constructively well into the future. He’s decades ahead of his time.” Latymer’s eyes searched Shaw’s face. “Now—would you care to tell me what he’s not?”

  Shaw grinned. “All right, sir—I get you! He’s not the sort of man any hostile Power would want to smash a blunt object into—”

  “Exactly—so your theory of a collision in space isn’t on at all. To my humble mind, they’d be much more likely to want to get their hands on him alive and intact—so they can get all those secrets out of him, including the details of a certain brand-new fuel Skyprobe’s using. Also the new fuel used in the launch rocket. Believe me, it’s a fantastic achievement to get a manned vehicle orbiting at the height Skyprobe IV has reached—and basically it’s Danvers-Marshall who put it there.”