Pulp Fiction | The Finger in the Sky Affair by Peter Leslie

by Unknown

  They dashed on. And then, rounding a curve in the road, came suddenly to a halt. The walls of the town bulged abruptly here into two turret-like belvederes. As they stood in the nearer of these, Helga Grossbreitner faced them across the gap from behind the parapet of the further one.

  "All right, Solo," she called, her body a lighter patch against the dark. "This is as far as you go. I'm out of range of your sleep dart toy—and this is another gun in my hand, in case you're making foolish plans based on my having to reload. You and your friends stay right there."

  "Put it down, Helga," Solo called back quietly. "There's three of us and you don't have a chance. The whole place will be swarming with S�reté and Deuxi�me Bureau men at any moment."

  "Don't give me that, lover boy. Don't kid yourself you're good enough to take on THRUSH and win!...I'm going over this wall. There will be a car waiting for me on the La Colle road. And tomorrow I'll be making my report to the Council. Your life won't be worth a nickel..."

  "Why don't you shout now?"

  The girl hesitated, a stray beam of light from somewhere glinting on the barrel of the gun in her hand. "I...have my reasons," she said. "Besides I'm not an executioner: we have special people for that...Now I'm going over. And I warn you: any heads looking over the battlements after me will be silhouetted. I won't hesitate to fire then."

  "Helga..."

  "I mean it, lover boy. Just watch out after tomorrow, that's all."

  Dimly, they saw her climb to the parapet. And then suddenly, in what seemed a flash of blinding brilliance, all the lights of the town came on at once. Windows, doorways, balconies and streets sprang into instant relief against the night as some municipal official somewhere threw a master switch.

  Taken utterly by surprise, Helga gasped, looked upwards into the pitiless glare of a street light immediately over the belvedere, and lost her footing on the crumbling stone.

  For an eternal moment, they saw her poised over the abyss. Then, with a strangled cry, she disappeared backwards over the wall.

  A long time later, it seemed, there were two dreadful thuds followed by the sound of something heavy crashing among branches.

  And after that there was silence.

  Chapter 16 — The finger in the sky

  "But, Illya, I don't understand how they did it. How exactly did the laser thing work?"

  Kuryakin smiled fondly at Sherry Rogers. The network of fine creases wrinkling her nose when she grinned fascinated him. "It is extremely interesting, Sherry," he said earnestly. "You know what laser really stands for?"

  "Indeed I don't."

  "It stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation...l-a-s-e-r."

  "Great. So how did they shoot down planes with it?"

  "Well, you know how ordinary light, ordinary white light, is made of energy of many different wavelengths? And all these different-sized waves bounce about in all directions?"

  "As a matter of fact I did know that."

  "Good. Then you'll realize at once why a laser is so powerful, when I tell you it emits only coherent light."

  "I'm sorry, I..."

  Kuryakin laughed aloud. "Coherent light is light in which all the wavelengths are exactly the same—and not only that: the individual light rays, all of the same wavelength or color, all march as it were in step, trough to trough and crest to crest. Somebody once compared this kind of light and ordinary light as being like a platoon of well-drilled soldiers in comparison with a disorderly mob."

  "Yes, yes, Illya. But —"

  "When light waves march in step like this, such frequency-coherent light can perform astonishing feats. This is because the way a laser makes the light causes the rays to come out parallel, instead of radiating from a point, as they do with conventional light sources. And since the energy of the rays is not dissipated by the beam spreading out, there's a very intense concentration of energy within a very small area. Thus lasers can cut holes in metal, weld things together —"

  "Illya. How can a beam of light cut holes in metal?"

  "Because light's a form of energy—and as I told you, lasers concentrate it within a tiny space, because of the way they're made."

  "All right," Sherry Rogers said resignedly, lighting another cigarette and stirring her coffee with an indulgent smile. "How are they made then?"

  They were sitting at a table beneath a striped umbrella on the airport terrace, waiting for the Air France Boeing which was to take Solo back to New York to report to Waverly. Since Sherry had been given forty-eight hours leave—and since Kuryakin was still owed the leave which had been interrupted when the assignment began—he had decided to stay in Nice with her for the remainder of his time off.

  "Originally," the Russian continued remorselessly, "lasers were made by putting a rod-shaped crystal of synthetic ruby inside a xenon flashtube—the kind of thing they use for an electronic camera flash. When the ruby is irradiated by the flash, the light raises the energy of one of the components of the synthetic stone...kind of supercharges it...until, by a molecular process you would hardly understand, it burst out of one end of the tube in the form of the laser beam I have described."

  "And it was one of these which brought down the planes?"

  "No. It was a ruby laser which Helga used to set fire to the room—and which I used to burn the hole in the steel shutter. But there were two other kinds of laser in the apparatus also. Remember the thing had three barrels?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "The one they used to bring down the planes was a so-called 'cold' laser—a gas laser using a mixture of helium and neon at very low pressure. The irradiation in this case comes from an ordinary radio transmitter: you probably saw the one they had on the bench. It works rather like fluorescent light, in a long thin tube of Pyrex...But this was a rather special one: there was a third gas mixed in the tube, which gave the beam very—shall we say?—special qualities."

  "And those were?" Sherry asked idly, waving to Solo and Matheson, who had appeared at the far end of the terrace and were making their way through the tables towards them.

  "The beam in the infrared range, like the others, and therefore invisible to the eye—passes through many normal substances without burning them. But it is warm enough to affect toridium, a soft, heavy metal tremendously subject to heat changes. And there is a toridium core in the memory unit of the altitude stage of the Murchison-Spears box."

  "And so when the beam fell on the box..."

  "The toridium expanded, altering the altitude reading of the equipment and causing the controls of the plane to change in such a way as to make it crash. Once the beam is switched off, though, the metal returns to normal and shows no sign that it has been tampered with."

  "And the adjustment is so fine that the beam would affect gear in the front of the aircraft but not at the back?"

  "Up to a range of seven or eight miles—yes."

  "Hello, hello, hello," Matheson called, dropping into a vacant chair at the table. "Have you solved the secret of the secret weapon yet, young man? There was hardly anything of the bally thing left after that fire. My chaps don't know where to start."

  "It was very ingenious, really," Illya said seriously. "A triple-barreled affair. The operator could select an optically pumped ruby laser, a gas laser using a mixture of helium, neon and phrenium, or an injection laser—the usual forward-based semiconductor diode of gallium arsenide."

  "In a cryostat, I suppose?"

  "Yes—a double bottle of liquid helium and liquid nitrogen. I imagine THRUSH used it for long range communications."

  "Enough of this love talk," Sherry Rogers interrupted sweetly, her nose wrinkling at Illya. "Mr. Solo has a plane to catch, and we have a holiday to take..."

  * * *

  "It's all very well for you people, lazing in the sun," Napoleon Solo said crossly as they said goodbye in the departure lounge. "I've got to go back and make out my report. I should have realized it was Helga, the moment that Mustang came at me on
the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue: she was the only one who could have known I'd be leaving the building at that time...I'm not sure I approve of all this intercontinental dependency; it's most unsettling, being whisked from country to country like this. Especially when you've lost the girl..."

  He was still looking disgruntled as he settled himself comfortably into the seat of the luxurious Air France 707 and fastened his seat belt.

  "If you please, monsieur," a husky voice breathed in his ear. "You take something for the take-off, no?"

  The French stewardess holding out the tray of chewing gum and candy was young and slim. Beneath the dark blue uniform cap, raven hair framed a face that was all lustrous eyes and full, wide lips.

  "You permit, monsieur, that I sit beside you during take-off?" she inquired, sinking into the empty place beside him and picking up the two halves of the belt.

  "All the way across, baby," Napoleon Solo said feelingly. "All the way...Maybe there's something to be said for N.A.T.O. after all...And vive l'Air France too!"

  The silver plane hurtled along the runway, soared into the air over the speedboats creaming the Baie des Anges, banked steeply, and climbed rapidly until it was lost to view in the intense cobalt of the sky.

  THE END

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  posted 6.16.2002, transcribed by Graculus