Code to Zero (2000)

by Ken Follett

  They were based in Hangar D and Hangar R, which were side by side. The standard aircraft hangar design had been found to be well suited to missiles: there was a large central space where the rockets could be checked out, with two-storey wings either side for offices and smaller laboratories.

  Elspeth was in Hangar R. She had a typewriter and a desk in the office of her boss, Wily Fredrickson, the launch conductor, who spent almost all his time elsewhere. Her job was to prepare and distribute the launch timetable.

  Trouble was, the timetable changed constantly. Nobody in America had sent a rocket into space before. New problems arose all the time, and the engineers were forever improvising ways to jury-rig a component or bypass a system. Here, duct tape was called missile tape.

  So Elspeth produced regular updates of the timetable. She had to stay in touch with every group on the team, record changes of plan in her shorthand notebook, then transfer her notes to typed and Xeroxed sheets and distribute them. The job required her to go everywhere and know almost everything. When there was a hitch, she learned of it right away; and she was among the first to know about the solution, too. Her title was secretary, and she was paid a secretary's wages, but no one could have done the job without a science degree. However, she did not resent the low pay. She was grateful for a job that challenged her. Some of her Radcliffe classmates were still taking dictation from men in grey flannel suits.

  Her noon update was ready, and she picked Up the stack of papers and set out to distribute them. She was rushed off her feet, 'but that suited her today: it stopped her worrying constantly about Luke. If she followed her inclination, she would be on the phone to Anthony every few minutes, asking if there was any news. But that would be stupid. He would contact her if anything went wrong, she told herself. Meanwhile she should concentrate on her work, Elspeth went first to the press department, where public relations officers were working the phones, telling trusted reporters that there would be a launch tonight The army wanted journalists on the scene to witness their triumph. However, the information was not to be released until after the event. -Scheduled launches were often delayed, or even cancelled, as unforeseen snags arose. The missile men had learned, from bitter experience, that a routine postponement to solve technical problems could be made to look like an abject failure when the newspapers reported it So they had a deal with all the major news organizations. They gave advance notification of launches only on condition that nothing would be published until there was 'fire in the tail', which meant that the rocket engine had been ignited.

  It was an all-male office, and several men stared at Elspeth as she walked across the room and handed a timetable to the chief press officer. She knew she was attractive, with her pale Viking looks and tall, statuesque figure; but there was something formidable about her - the determined set of her mouth, maybe, or the dangerous light in her green eyes - that made men who were inclined to whistle, or call her 'Honeybunch', think again.

  In the Missile Firing Laboratory she found five shirt-sleeved scientists standing at a bench, staring worriedly at a flat piece of metal that looked as if it had been in a fire. The group leader, Dr Keller, said: 'Good afternoon, Elspeth.' He spoke in heavily accented English. Like most of the scientists, he was a German who had been captured at the end of the war and brought to America to work on the missile programme.

  She handed him a copy of her update, and he took it without looking at it. Elspeth nodded at the object on the table and said: 'What's that?'

  'A jet vane.'

  Elspeth knew that the first stage was steered by vanes inside the tail. 'What happened to it?'

  'The burning fuel erodes the metal,' he explained. His German accent became stronger as he warmed to his subject 'This always happens, to some extent However, with normal alcohol fuel, the vanes last long enough to. do their job. Today, by contrast we are using a new fuel, Hydyne, that has a longer burning time and higher exhaust velocity - but it may erode the vanes so much that they become ineffective for steering.' He spread his hands in a gesture of exasperation. 'We have not had time to run sufficiently many tests.'

  'I guess all I need to know is whether this is going to delay the launch.' She felt she could not stand ' a postponement The suspense was already killing her.

  'That's what we're trying to decide.' Keller looked around at his colleagues. 'And I think our answer is going to be: Let's take the chance.' The others nodded gloomily.

  Elspeth felt relieved. 'I'll keep my fingers crossed,' she said, turning to leave.

  'That's about as useful as anything we can do,' Keller said, and the others laughed ruefully.

  She went outside into the scorching Florida sun. The hangars stood in a sandy clearing hacked out of the low scrub that covered the Cape - palmetto palms and scrub oaks and sharp sandspur grass that would cut your skin if you walked barefoot. She crossed a dusty apron and entered Hangar D, its welcome shade falling across her face like the touch of a cool breeze.

  In the telemetry room Elspeth saw Hans Mueller, known as Hank. He pointed a finger at her and said: 'One hundred thirty-five.'

  It was a game they played. She had to say what was unusual about the number. 'Too easy,' she said. 'Take the first digit, add the square of the second digit, plus the cube of the third, and you get the number you first thought of.' She gave him the equation.

  'All right,' he said. 'So what is the next-highest number that follows the pattern?'

  She thought hard, then said: 'One hundred and seventy-five.'

  1 + 7 squared + 5 cubed = 175

  'Correct! You win the big prize.' He fished in his pocket and brought out a dime.

  She took it I'll give you a chance to win it back,' she said. 'One hundred thirty-six.'

  'Ah.' He frowned. 'Wait. Sum the cubes of its digits.'

  1 cubed +3 cubed + 6 cubed =244

  'Now repeat the process, and you get the number you first thought of!'

  2 cubed +4 cubed +4 cubed =136

  She gave him back his dime, and a copy of her update.

  As she went out, her eye was caught by a telegram pinned to the wall: I'VE HAD MY LITTLE SATELLITE, NOW YOU HAVE YOURS. Mueller noticed her reading it and explained: 'It's from Stuhlinger's wife.' Stuhlinger was chief of research. 'She had a baby boy.' Elspeth smiled.

  She found Willy Fredrickson in the communications room with two army technicians, testing the teletype link to the Pentagon. Her boss was a tally thin man, bald with a fringe of curly hair, like a medieval monk. The teletype machine was not working, and Willy was frustrated, but as he took the update he gave her a grateful look and said: 'Elspeth, you are twenty-two-carat gold.'

  A moment later, two people approached Willy: a young army officer carrying a chart, and Stimmens, one of the scientists. The officer said: 'We got a problem.' He handed Willy the chart, and went on: 'The jet stream has moved south, and it's blowing at 146 knots.'

  Elspeth's heart sank. She knew what this meant The jet stream was a high-altitude wind in the stratosphere between 30,000 and 40,000 feet It did not normally extend over Cape Canaveral, but it could move. And if it was too fierce, it might throw the missile off course.

  Willy said: 'How far south is it?'

  'All over Florida,' the officer replied.

  Willy turned to Stimmens. 'We've allowed for this, haven't we?'

  'Not really,' Stimmens said. 'It's all guesswork, of course, but we figure the missile can withstand winds up to 120 knots, no higher.'

  Willy turned back to the officer. 'What's the forecast for tonight?'

  'Up to 177 knots, and no sign of the jet stream moving back north.'

  'Hell.' Willy ran a hand over his smooth pate. Elspeth knew what he was thinking. The launch might have to be postponed until tomorrow. 'Send up a weather balloon, please,' he ordered. 'We'll review the forecast again at five o'clock.'

  Elspeth made a note to add the weather-review meeting to her timetable, then she left, feeling despondent. They could solve engineering proble
ms, but there was nothing they could do about the weather.

  Outside, she got into a jeep and drove to Launch Complex 26. The road was a dusty, unpaved track through the brush, and the jeep bounced, on the ruts. She startled a white-tailed deer that was drinking from a ditch, and it bounded off into the bushes. There was a lot of wildlife on the Cape, hiding in the low scrub. People said there were alligators and Florida panthers, but Elspeth had never seen either.

  She pulled up outside the blockhouse and looked across to Launch Pad three hundred yards away. The gantry was a derrick from an oil rig, adapted for this purpose and coated with orange rust-resistant paint to protect it from corrosion by the humid, salty Florida air. At one side was an elevator for access to the platforms. The whole edifice was brutally practical, quite without grace, Elspeth thought; a functional structure bolted together with no regard for how it looked.

  The long white pencil of the Jupiter G rocket seemed caught in the tangle of orange girders like a dragonfly in a spider web. The men called it 'she', despite its phallic shape, and Elspeth too thought of the rocket as female. A bridal veil of canvas covers had concealed the upper stages from prying eyes since it arrived here; but that had now been removed, and the missile stood fully revealed, sunshine gleaming off its spotless paintwork.

  The scientists were not very political, but even they knew that the eyes of the world were on them. Four months ago, the Soviet Union had stunned the world by sending up the first space satellite, the Sputnik. In all the countries where the tug-of-war between capitalism and communism was still going on, from Italy to India, throughout Latin America and Africa arid Indochina, the message was heard: Communist science is best. A month later the Soviets had sent up a second satellite, Sputnik 2, with a dog on board. Americans were devastated. A dog today, a man tomorrow.

  President Eisenhower promised an American satellite before the end of the year. On the first Friday in December, at fifteen minutes to noon, the US Navy launched its Vanguard rocket in front of the world's press. It rose a few feet into the air, burst into flames, toppled sideways and smashed to pieces on the concrete. IT'S A FLOPNIK! said one headline.

  The Jupiter C was America's last hope.' There was no third option. If this failed today, the United States was out of the space race. The propaganda defeat was the least of the consequences. The American space programme would be in total disarray, and the USSR would control outer space for the foreseeable future.

  All that, Elspeth thought, resting on this one rocket Vehicles were banned from the launch-pad area, except for essential ones such as fuel trucks, so she left her car and walked across the open space between blockhouse and gantry, following the line of a metal conduit that housed the cables linking the two locations. Attached to the back of the derrick at ground level was a long steel cabin, the same orange colour, containing offices and machinery. Elspeth entered by a metal door at the rear.

  The gantry supervisor, Harry Lane, sat on a folding chair, wearing a hard hat and engineer boots, studying a blueprint 'Hi, Harry,' she said brightly.

  He grunted. He did not like to see women around the launch pad, and no sense of courtesy constrained him from letting her know it She dropped an update on a metal table and left She returned to the blockhouse, a low white building with slit windows of thick green glass. The blast doors stood open, and she walked inside. There were three compartments: an instrumentation room, which ran the width of the building, and two firing rooms, A on the left and B on the right, angled towards the two launch pads served by this blockhouse. Elspeth stepped into Firing Room B.

  The strong sunlight coming through the green glass cast a weird light over the whole place, so that it looked like the inside of an aquarium. In front of the windows, a row of scientists sat at a bank of control panels. They all wore short-sleeved shirts, she noticed, as if it were a uniform. They had headsets through which they could talk to the men on the launch pad. They could look over their panels and see the rocket through the windows, or check the colour television screens that showed the same picture. Along the back wall of the firing room, a row of pen recorders stood shoulder to shoulder, tracking temperatures, pressures in the fuel system, and electrical activity. In the far corner was a scale showing the weight of the missile on the launch pad. There was an air of quiet urgency as the men murmured into their headsets and worked their panels, turning a knob here, throwing a switch there, constantly checking the dials and counters. Over their heads, a countdown clock showed the minutes left to ignition. As Elspeth looked, the hand clicked down from 600 to 599.

  She handed out her update and left the building. Driving back to the hangar, her mind turned to Luke and she realized she had a perfect excuse for calling Anthony. She would tell him about the jet stream, then ask about Luke.

  That perked her up, and she hurried into the hangar and up the stairs to her office. She dialed Anthony's direct line and got him right away. 'The launch is likely to be postponed until tomorrow,' she told him. 'There are strong winds in the stratosphere.'

  'I didn't know there were winds up there.'

  'It's called the jet stream. The postponement isn't definite, there's a weather-review meeting at five. How's Luke?'

  'Let me know the upshot of that meeting, okay?'

  'Of course. How's Luke?'

  'Well, we have a problem there.'

  Her heart missed a beat. 'What kind of a problem?'

  'We've lost him.'

  Elspeth felt cold. 'What?'

  'He slipped away from my men.'

  'Jesus help us,' she said. 'Now we're in trouble.'

  .

  1941

  Luke arrived back in Boston at dawn. He parked the old Ford, slipped in through the back door of Cambridge House, and climbed the service stairs to his room. Anthony was fast asleep. Luke washed his face and fell into bed in his underwear.

  Next thing he knew, Anthony was shaking him, saying 'Luke! Get up!'

  He opened his eyes. He knew that something bad had happened, but he could not recall what it was. 'What's the time?' he mumbled.

  'It's one o'clock, and Elspeth is waiting for you downstairs.'

  The mention of Elspeth's name jogged his memory, and he recalled what the calamity was. He did not love her any more. .'Oh, God,' he said.

  'You'd better go down and see her.'

  He had fallen in love with Billie Josephson. That was the disaster. It would make a train wreck of all their lives: his own, Elspeth's, Billie's and Anthony's.

  'Hell,' he said, and he got up.

  He stripped off his underwear and took a cold shower. When he closed his eyes he saw Billie, her dark eyes flashing, her red mouth laughing, her white throat. He pulled on a pair of flannels, a sweater, and tennis shoes, then staggered downstairs.

  Elspeth was waiting in the lobby, the only part of the building where girls were allowed, except on specially designated Ladies' Afternoons. It was a spacious hall with a fireplace and comfortable chairs. She was as eye-catching as ever, in a wool dress the colour of bluebells and a big hat. Yesterday, the sight of her would have gladdened his heart; today, the knowledge that she had dressed up for him just made him feel even, more wretched.

  She laughed when she saw him. You look like a small boy who can't wake up!'

  He kissed her cheek and slumped into a chair. 'It took hours to get to Newport,' he said.-

  'You've obviously forgotten you're supposed to take me to lunch!' Elspeth said brightly.

  He looked at her. She was beautiful, but he did not love her. He did not know whether he had loved her before, but he was sure he did not now. He was the worst kind of heel. She was so gay this morning, and he was going to ruin her happiness. He did not know how to tell her, He felt so ashamed it was like a pain in his heart He had to say something. 'Can we skip lunch? I haven't even shaved.'

  A troubled shadow crossed her pale, proud face, and he realized that she knew perfectly well something was wrong; but her reply was carefree. 'Of course,' she said. 'Knigh
ts in shining armour need their beauty sleep.'

  He told himself he would have a serious talk with her, and be completely honest, later in the day. 'I'm sorry you got dressed up for nothing,' he said miserably.

  'It wasn't for nothing - I saw you. And your fellow housemen seemed to like my outfit' She stood up. 'Anyway, Professor and Mrs. Durkham are having a jolly-up.' That was Radcliffe slang for a party.

  Luke stood and helped her into her coat 'We could meet later.' He-had to tell her today - it would be deceitful to let any more time pass without revealing the truth.

  'That'll be fine,' she said gaily. 'Pick me up at six.' She blew him a kiss and walked out like a movie star. He knew she was faking, but it was a good act He returned woefully to his room. Anthony was reading the Sunday paper. 'I made coffee,' he said.

  'Thanks.' Luke poured a cup.

  'I owe you big time,' Anthony went on. 'You saved Billie's hide last night'

  'You'd do the same for me.' Luke sipped his coffee and began to feel better. 'Seems we got away with it Has anyone said anything to you this morning?'

  'Not a thing.'

  'Billie's quite a gal,' Luke said. He knew it was dangerous to talk about her, but he could not help it 'Isn't she great?' Anthony said. Luke observed with dismay at the look of pride on his room-mate's face. Anthony went on: 'I kept asking myself: 'Why shouldn't she go out with me?' But I didn't think she would. I don't know why, maybe because she's so neat and pretty. And when she said yes, I couldn't believe my ears. I wanted to ask for it in writing.'

  Extravagant overstatement was Anthony's way of being amusing, and Luke forced a smile, but secretly he was appalled. To steal someone else's girlfriend was despicable in any circumstances, but the fact that Anthony was obviously crazy about Billie made everything even worse.