Authors: Alistair MacLean
"How is it coming, Bentall?"
"Very difficult and very complicated and continual interruptions by you don't help me any."
"Don't make it too difficult, Bentall. I want this test rocket wired and fused and ready to take off in two and a half hours."
"Your wants are a matter of complete indifference to me," I said nastily. "What's the hurry, anyway?"
"The Navy is waiting, Bentall. We mustn't keep the Navy waiting, must we?"
I thought this one over, then said: "Do you mean to tell me that you have the colossal effrontery to keep in radio touch with the
Neckar?"
"Don't be so naive. Of course we're in touch. There's no one more interested than myself to have the Black Shrike land on time, on target. Apart from which, the one sure way to rouse their suspicions and send them steaming back at high speed to Vardu is
not
to keep in touch with them. So hurry it up."
"I'm doing my best," I said coldly.
When he left, I got down to working out the firing circuits. Apart from the fact that they were coded, the instructions for the wiring were such as could have been carried out by any reasonably competent electrician. What could not have been done by the electrician was the calculation of the settings on the time clock-part of the mechanism in the box attached to the inside of the outer casing-which regulated the ignition of the nineteen propellant cylinders in their proper sequence.
From his notes it appeared that even Fairfield himself had been doubtful about the accuracy of his own recommendations as to firing sequences and times: they had been worked out on a purely theoretical basis, but theory and practise weren't the same things at all. The trouble lay in the nature of the solid fuel propellant itself. A completely stable mixture in limited quantities and at normal temperatures, it became highly unstable under extremes of heat and pressure and beyond a certain unknown critical mass: the trouble was that no one knew the precise limits of any of those factors, nor, even more worrying, did they know how they reacted upon one another.
What
was known was the highly lethal results of instability: when the safety limit was passed the fuel changed from a relatively slow burning propellant to an instantaneously explosive disruptive estimated, weight for weight, at five times the power of T.N.T.
It was to reduce the danger of mass that the propellant had been fitted in nineteen separate charges and it was to reduce the danger of too suddenly applied pressure that the charges had been arranged to ignite in seven consecutive stages: but, unfortunately, no one could do anything about the danger of heat. The propellant had its own inbuilt oxidising agent, but not nearly enough to ensure complete combustion: two high-speed turbine fans which started up two seconds before the ignition of the first four cylinders supplied air in quantity and under high pressure for the first fifteen seconds until the missile reached a high enough speed to supply itself with sufficient air through its giant air-scoops. But as the Black Shrike was absolutely dependent on its air supply, it meant that it had to leave the earth on a very flat trajectory indeed in order not to run out of atmosphere before the propellant burnt out: it was not until all the fuel was consumed that the missile's automatic brain lifted it sharply out of the atmosphere. But the need for even half a minute's supply of air meant a tremendous air resistance generating extremely high temperatures and while it was hoped that the water-cooled porcelain nose would cope* with part of the heat, no one knew what temperature would be generated in the heart of the rocket. All in all, I thought, it looked like a very dicey deal indeed.
The two switch-boxes I'd seen attached to the inner casing had both to be set before firing-the 'On' switch closed the firing circuits, the 'Armed' switch closed the circuit for the suicide box: if anything went wrong with the rocket in flight, such as a deviation to land or shipping lanes, it could be electronically instructed to commit suicide. In normal missiles fuelled by lox and kerosene, the flight could be stopped simply by sending out a radio message that automatically cut off the fuel supply: but there was no way of shutting off a solid fuel already in combustion. The cylinder I had seen in the middle of the propellant at the top of the rocket had been a sixty pound charge of T.N.T., fitted with a primer, and the hole I had seen in the centre of the primer was to accommodate a 77 grain electrically fired fulminate of mercury detonator, which was connected to the cable I'd seen dangling in the vicinity. The circuit for this was triggered, as were all controls in the rocket, by radio, a certain signal on a certain wavelength activating an electrical circuit in the same box as the one that contained the timing mechanism for the firing circuits: this current passed through a coil which in turn activated a solenoid switch-a soft iron core in the centre of the coil-and this completed the circuit which fired the detonator in the T.N.T. charge. Again Fairfield had been very doubtful of the outcome: what was intended was that the explosion of the T.N.T. should disintegrate the rocket: but it was just as likely, he had thought, that the instantaneous change in heat and pressure would cause the whole rocket to blow up in sympathetic detonation.
If I was picked as the first man to go to the moon, I thought, I'd just as soon not travel on the Black Shrike. Let someone else go first while Bentall remained earthbound and watched for the explosion.
I reached for the typewriter, made a list of which coloured and numbered firing cables marked which fuel cylinders, worked out an average of Fairfield's suggested figures for the timing sequences and stuck the paper in my pocket. I'd just done this when Hewell appeared.
"No, I'm damned well not finished," I said before he could open his mouth. "Why don't you leave me alone to get on with it?"
"How much longer?" he asked in his rumbling gravelly voice. "We're getting impatient, Bentall."
"I'm worried stiff. Maybe fifteen minutes. Leave one of your men outside and I'll knock when I'm finished."
He nodded and left. I got to thinking: some more, mainly about myself and my life expectancy and then I started thinking of the psychologists who speak of the tremendous power of the human mind, the power of positive thinking, and if you say to yourself a thousand times a day to be cheerful and optimistic and healthy, then you will end up that way: I tried it with a slight variation, I tried to see Bentall as a bent old man with silver hair but somehow the positive thinking didn't seem to work in my case, I couldn't see anything of the kind, all I could see was Bentall with a hole in the back of his head. Tonight, it would probably come tonight, but the one certain thing I knew was that it would come. The other scientists could live, but not me: I had to die, and I knew why. I got up and tore the cord from the window blind, but not with the idea of hanging myself before LeClerc and Hewell got round to torturing me to death or shooting me. I rolled the cord into a coil, stuck it in my hip pocket and knocked on the door. I heard the footsteps of the guard walking away.
A few minutes later the door opened again. This time both LeClerc and Hewell were there, accompanied by a couple of Chinese.
"Finished?" LeClerc asked abruptly.
"Finished."
"Right. Start wiring up right away." No thank-you's, no congratulations for Bentall's keen-witted intelligence in solving an abstruse problem. Just get started right away.
I shook my head.
"Not that easy, LeClerc. I must go to the blockhouse first."
"The blockhouse?" The blind-seeming eyes looked at me for a long moment. "Why?"
"You have the launch console there, that's why."
"The launch console?"
"The little box with all the knobs and buttons for remote radio control of the various circuits in the rocket," I explained patiently.
"I know it," he said coldly. "You don't have to examine that before fusing up the rocket."
"You're not the best judge of that," I said loftily.
He'd no option but to give in, which he might have done with better grace. He sent a guard to the captain's office for the keys while we walked in silence across the intervening half-mile, and not a very companionable silence either, but it didn't worry me. I didn't feel like talking, I felt like looking, looking at the white glitter of the sands, the shimmering green-blue of the lagoon, the cloudless blue of the sky above. I took a long long look at all of them, the look of a man who suspects that that look is going to have to last him for a long long time.
The blockhouse had all the strength and solidity of a medieval fortress with the notable difference that it was so deeply sunk in the ground that only the top two feet were visible. There were three radar scanners mounted on the top and three radio aerials and, what I hadn't seen before, the tops of four periscopes which could be tilted on a vertical axis and swung on a horizontal axis.
The entrance was at the back at the foot of a short flight of steps. The door was a massive steel affair mounted on equally massive hinges and must have weighed close on half a ton. It was designed to keep more than the flies out: the possibility of the shock of the equivalent of 100 tons of high explosive detonating just over 1,000 yards away was something that made such a door very essential indeed, even although it was at the back.
The Chinese arrived with two keys, heavy chromed flat-sided jobs like enormous Yale keys." He inserted one, turned it twice and shoved the door slowly open on smooth oiled hinges. He passed inside.
"My God!" I muttered. "What a dungeon." It looked exactly like that. A ten by twenty room, concrete floor, concrete walls, concrete roof, the heavy door through which we'd just come and another only just less heavy door in the opposite wall. And that was all, except for wooden benches round the wall and the tiny glow-worm of a lamp near the ceiling.
Nobody took me up on my conversational gambit. The Chinese crossed the dungeon and opened the other door with .the second key.
This part of the blockhouse was about the same size as the other, but brilliantly lit. One corner of the room, about five by five, was partitioned off with plywood, and it was an easy guess that the idea was to screen radar scopes from the bright light outside. In the other corner was a softly-humming petrol-powered generator with its exhaust pipe disappearing upwards through the roof. There were two tiny ventilators, one high up on either side. And in the middle, between the radar cabin and the generator, was the launch console. I crossed and looked down at it.
It wasn't much, just a sloping metallic box backed by a radio transmitter, with a number of labelled buttons set in a straight line, each button with a tell-tale lamp above it. The first button bore the legend 'Hydraulics' and the second 'Auxiliary'-those would be for the last-minute testing of the oil and electricity circuits: the third said 'Power-Disconnect', that would be for cutting off the battery-feeding external electricity sources: the fourth read 'Flight-Control', a radio signal to alert the guiding mechanism in the Shrike's electronic 'brain'. The fifth, with the legend 'Clamps' would, when pressed, show by lighting up the tell-tale that the gantry clamps supporting the missile were ready for instantaneous withdrawal when the missile took off. The sixth, 'Gantry-Ex', would move back the gantries leaving only the extension arms of the clamps in place: the seventh, the 'Commit' button, started up the power intake fans: two seconds after that, I knew, the revolving clock drum would trigger off the first four of the nineteen cylinders: ten seconds after that, another circuit would close and the suicide circuit would be ready and waiting, waiting only for the moment when something went wrong and the launch console operator pushed the eighth and last button. -
The last button. It was set well away from the other seven. There was no possibility of mistaking it, for it was a square white push set in the middle of a six inch square patch of red and labelled EGADS in steel letters-Electronic Ground Automatic Destruct System: and there was no possibility of triggering it by mistake for it was covered by a heavy wire mesh that had to be unclipped at two sides, and even then the button had to be turned 180° on its axis before it could be depressed.
I gazed at this for some time, fiddled about with the radio behind, took out my notes and consulted them. Hewell loomed over me which would have made it very difficult for me to concentrate if I had had to, which fortunately I hadn't. LeClerc just stood there looking at me with those blind white eyes of his, until one of the guards murmured something to him and pointed in the direction of the back door.
LeClerc left and was back in thirty seconds.
"All right, Bentall," he said curtly. "Hurry it up, will you? The
Neckar
has just reported that she is running into gale conditions which will make observations of the test impossible when and if the weather deteriorates any further. Seen all you want to?"
"I've seen all I want to."
"You can do it?"
"Sure I can do it"
"How long?"
"Fifteen minutes. Twenty at the most."
"Fifteen?" He paused. "Dr. Fairfield said it would take forty minutes."
"I don't care what Dr. Fairfield said."
"Right. You can start now."
"Start what now?"
"Wiring up the firing circuits, you fool."
"There must be some mistake somewhere," I said. "I never said anything about wiring up those circuits. Can you recall my saying I would. I've no intention of touching the damned circuits."
The gentle swinging of his malacca cane stopped. LeClerc took a step nearer me.
"You won't do it?" His voice was harsh, blurred with anger. "Then what the devil was the idea of wasting the past two and a half hours pretending you were figuring out how to do it?"
"That's it," I said. "That's the whole point of it. Wasting time. You heard what I said to Hargreaves. Time is on our side. You made a recording of it."
I knew it was coming and I saw it coming, but I felt about ninety that day and my reactions were correspondingly slow and the vicious lash of that cane with all LeClerc's fury and weight behind it across my left cheek and eye was a razor-edged sword splitting my face in half. I choked in agony, staggered back a couple of paces, then flung myself at the blurred figure before me. I hadn't recovered a foot when Hewell's two great hands closed over my bad arm and tore it off at the shoulder-later inspection showed it was still there, he must have stuck it back on again-and I swung round lashing out with all the power of my good right arm, but I was blind with agony and missed him completely. Before I could regain my balance one of the guards had me by the right arm and the cane was whistling towards me again. I somehow sensed it was coming, ducked and took the full weight of the blow on the top of my head. The cane swung back for a third blow, but this time it didn't reach me: Hewell released my left arm, jumped forward and caught LeClerc's wrist as it started on its downward swing. LeClerc's arm stopped short as abruptly as if it had come to the limit of a chain attached to the roof. He struggled to free himself, throwing the whole weight of his body on Hewell's hand: neither Hewell nor his hand moved an inch.