A Meeting With Medusa (38 page)

Susan Maxton was a couple of years younger than Forbes. When he’d met her during the war she’d been an intense young Oxford graduate, drafted into the Royal Signals, making rather hazardous trips to V2 impact sites across the scarred countryside of southern England. She had been seeking surviving bits of the sophisticated guidance systems that had delivered Hitler’s missiles—advanced far beyond anything the Allies had, she said—and since the war she’d travelled to Germany, to Peenemunde and the Ruhr and elsewhere, delving into more Nazi secrets.

It was all supposed to be classified, of course. He didn’t believe half of what she hinted to him so excitedly, all that lurid stuff of secret Nazi labs which had come within a hair of developing an A-bomb for Hitler—or even a way of transporting people by telephone wires, so Hitler could have mounted a new electronic
Blitzkrieg
even from the heart of his collapsing Reich!

After the war, they had agreed, Forbes and Max were going to marry. But it hadn’t happened yet. Like so many women during the war, Max had developed what Forbes had been brought up to regard as an altogether unhealthy liking for her work…

No doubt it would all pan out. And in the meantime, as his ground crew at Hatfield pointedly reminded him by radio, it was time to stop wool-gathering and get on with his day’s work.

He took a couple of plugs of cotton wool and stuffed them in his ears. Then he tipped up the nose of the Vampire once more and, pouring on the coals, launched the kite at the pale sky.

The blue was marvellous, and it deepened as he rose.

He throttled back on the jet as the air grew thinner. The Vampire arced towards the top of its climb, sixty thousand feet up.

The Earth itself was spread out beneath him, curving gently, landscape painted over it green and brown and grey, and the sky above was so deep blue it was almost black. From an English suburb to the edge of space, in a few minutes. Ruddy peculiar.

Of course the hairy stuff was still to come, as he went into a high-speed compressibility dive on the way home. He’d expect to lose control around twenty-four thou, saying a few prayers as per, until he reached the denser air at fifteen thou or so and his controls came back.

Still, if he did the right things, he would be home in time for lunch.

He stuffed the nose down and began his long fall back into the atmosphere.

1957: Preston, England

Susan Maxton Forbes watched, amused, as her husband made his slow ceremonial walk through the English Electric design offices. Even as the electrifying countdown to the latest Blue Streak launch played over a crackling radio line from Woomera, the young aerodynamicists clustered around Henry. She had to admit he carried it off well.

‘Impressive place,’ he said for the fifth time.

‘Well, you should have seen us just after the war,’ said one grizzled old-timer (aged perhaps thirty-four). ‘All we had was a disused garage over in Corporation Street. But it was there we hatched the Canberra.’

‘Ah! I tested her, you know. “The plane that makes time stand still”—’

‘Yes,’ said a breathy young thing. ‘It must have been exciting.’

‘Not really. Journalists can get jolly good stories out of test pilots. But the work is methodical, progressive, technical.’

‘Will you feel like that when you take up our Mustard, Henry?’

‘I should ruddy hope so, or I won’t get paid!’

There was general laughter. They walked on to another part of the office, and Max took the chance to slip an arm through her husband’s and steer him away from the breathy young thing.

‘Don’t tell me you don’t enjoy all this attention,’ she whispered to him.

‘Of course I do. You know me. All this bushy-tailed enthusiasm makes me feel a bit less of an old duffer—’

They exchanged a glance, and he shut up. It was just such exchanges about age that usually led into their gloomy arguments about whether they should have a sprog, and if so when, or even if they should have already…

She squeezed his arm. ‘I just wish people got so excited about my work,’ she said.

He grunted. ‘There was enough bally-hoo when you sent through that wooden cube. Nothing else in the
Daily Mirror
for weeks, it seemed; even forced Suez off the front page—’

‘But it didn’t work. The cube came through in little spheres, and—’

‘But they put it in the ruddy Science Museum even so! What more do you want? Not to mention that poor hamster that died of shock, that you had stuffed.’

She giggled. ‘I suppose it was all a little cruel. But I don’t mean that, the stunts for the press. It’s the intellectual adventure…’

He pulled a face, and sniffed the flower in his buttonhole. ‘Ah.
Intellectual
.’

‘The way we’re settling the problems that baffled the Germans—how to get around the wretched Uncertainty Principle…’

She tried to explain the latest progress at the Plessey labs in their research into the principles of radio-transportation. In fact matter wouldn’t be transported, but rather the information which encoded, say, a human being. It had been thought radio-transporters were impossible, because you’d need to map the position and velocity of every particle of a person, and that would violate the Uncertainty Principle.

But there was a loophole.

It had been a real drama: the struggles, the dead ends, the race with the Americans at Bell Labs to be first… before the researchers realised that an unknown quantum state could be disassembled into, then later reconstructed from, purely classical information using measurements called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations, and that said classical information could be sent down a wire as easily as a telegraph message…

That was the nub of it, although there was the devil in the detail of bandwidth and sampling requirements and storage capacity.

‘Of course you can’t copy quantum information,’ she said. ‘You have to
destroy
the object you’re going to radio-transport. And it’s just as well, or our machine would work as a copier—imagine a hundred Hitlers roaming the planet, each with an equally valid claim to being the original!’

He grunted, looking at drafting tables and jigs. ‘If you ask me, a hundred Bill Haleys would be worse.’

She knew he wasn’t really listening.

Now they were buttonholed by the manager here, a portly young man with thinning hair who wanted to lecture them about the Mustard.

‘…“Mustard” for Multi-Unit Space Transport and Recovery Device, you see… We know the Americans are going for the dustbin theory, a virtually uncontrollable capsule. But the practical way forward in space has to be a recoverable vehicle, if only the Aviation Ministry will back us…’

Max listened sourly. What was a spaceship, after all, but plumbing? And all these glamorous spaceship projects were only coming about because of anticipation of the potential of radio-transport, and the international race to launch the first extraterrestrial relays into stationary orbit around the Earth.

And meanwhile in her field, all but ignored, such exciting developments were going on, right at the fringe of human understanding! Even now she had a letter in her purse from Eugene Wigner at Princeton, about his ideas on using quantum tunnelling effects to get around the light-speed barrier…

If only Henry could see it, they were actually on the same team—in fact, they were mutually dependent! But his suspicion of an expertise he didn’t share, and of her own growing reputation, seemed only to be deepening the gap between them.

Now, in remote Woomera, the Blue Streak countdown was nearing its climax.
Ten, nine, eight
… The two of them gathered with the English Electric staff under a loudspeaker. ‘To think,’ said the portly manager, ‘that once Prospero is up there, we’ll be able to watch the next launch on our televisions!’

Or, Max thought, simply step to Australia in person…

Maybe, she thought, we should have had children after all. But is the desire to solve our own problems any good motive for wanting a child? If only I could answer such simple questions as well as I can master the paradoxes of quantum mechanics…

Three, two, one
.

1967: Woomera, South Australia

In the upended cockpit, lying on his back with his legs in the air, Forbes listened to the voices relayed from the Operations Room, cultured British and crisp Australian. Everything was going well, and he was content to let his co-pilot—a bright young chap even if he was a Yorkshireman—field the various instructions and requests, and press whichever tit was appropriate.

Anyway, Forbes was relaxed. The G forces he would have to endure during the
Congreve
’s flight would be easier than those he’d tolerated during dogfights with 109s, when he’d hauled Spits through turns so tight he’d actually blacked out. And besides, nobody could get through as many hours on readiness—preparing for more trade with the Hun, and nothing to distract him but shove-ha’penny in the Dispersal Hut—as
he
had without learning to take it easy…

Forbes leaned forward and peered through his periscope. The red-brown Australian desert spread for miles around him, lifeless save for salt bushes and clumps of spiny grass. He peered down the flank of the Mustard, and lox vapour swirled across his vision.

The
Congreve
, ready for launch, looked like three Comet aircraft stood on end, belly to belly, with a crew of two in each nose. Fuelled by hydrogen and oxygen, the three units would take off together, the boosters feeding fuel to the central core; and then, at two hundred thou a hundred and fifty seconds after launch, the boosters would break away for their turbojet landings and allow the core, under Forbes’s command, to carry on to orbit. Since the three aircraft were reusable and of a single design, the boffins claimed Mustards could be twenty or thirty times cheaper per pound of payload than the converted missiles the Americans and Russians used: so cheap, in fact, that the imminence of this first flight had caused the Americans to close down their own rather vainglorious ballistic-capsule manned programme, including the planned Apollo Moon missions.

…But now the bally thing has to work, Forbes thought gloomily. The new space outposts, to be reached by the Wire platforms nestling in the kite’s belly, depended on the Mustard’s heavy-lift capacity. The Herschel Space Telescope, for instance, was already being assembled at the Pilkington glass factory in Lancashire…

The launch complex stood on an escarpment overlooking a dry lake, isolated save for the gleaming shells of lox tanks. The launch stand was not much more than a metal platform, in fact, with a single gaunt gantry rising alongside the ship itself.

The Woomera facilities were rather crude compared to Cape Canaveral, where he’d done a little training with the Americans. The Atlantic Union had smoothed his path there, although he was sure the Americans would have been generous enough to help anyhow. Unlike, for example, the French, although he knew he was being an old bigot to frame such a thought. He’d been delighted when the government had finally given up its attempts to persuade the European Common Market to let in Britain. A union with America made much more sense, in terms of a common culture and language—especially now the Wire had made distances on the Earth’s surface irrelevant.

Since May 1962, when Harold Macmillan had launched the first Wire link to Paris with a silly Union Jack stunt, the Wire and its possibilities had exploded across the world. Trade and travel had been transformed.

The Americans had been particularly inventive, as you might expect. There had been that awful Kennedy business in Dallas—the first flash crowd, they called it now—and the transporting of wounded GIs home from Vietnam to their parents’ arms within minutes of their injury—and LBJ’s campaign to enforce desegregation laws by putting Wire platforms in every school yard…

And on it went, the Wonder of the Second Elizabethan Age, and, because Max at Plessey had won her race with the Americans, it was British, by God. Sometimes it seemed you couldn’t open a newspaper without having those silly slogans thrust in your face—‘Travel By Phone!’ ‘It’s Quicker By Wire!’. The young, particularly, seemed to be flourishing in this new distance-free world, if sometimes in rather peculiar ways. Even today, those caterwauling ninnies the Beatles were Wiring their way around the world singing ‘All You Need is Love’ live before two hundred million people.

The Wire had touched them all. Max had actually got rich, by investing in companies developing the new digital computers required to run the spreading Wire networks.

…If only she could have been here to see this, his apotheosis! But, as ever, she was too busy.

The Wire had turned his own life into something of a paradox, however. Only one flight-ready Mustard had been built; only a handful of flights would be required to haul up the orbital receiver platforms, and after that the Wire could take over, hauling freight and passengers up to orbit much more cheaply than any rocket ever could.

And what then? The Americans were talking of a new international programme to push on to the Moon. Forbes, despite his age, was considered a leading candidate to work on that. To the ruddy Moon! But it would mean another decade or more of intensive training and testing. And of course Max would just say he was running away again. Chasing a youth he’d already lost…

What nonsense. He expected it would all get easier when the divorce came through, and he could let this odd jealousy the Wire inspired in him fade away.

But that’s all for tomorrow, old lad, he told himself. First you need to get through today with your hide intact…

For in just eight minutes, Henry Forbes, fifty years old, would be a thousand miles high—in orbit around the Earth itself.

Two seconds before launch, six main engines ignited. There was a flare of brilliant white light. Smoke, white, but tinged with red Australian dust, billowed out to left and right of the triple spacecraft. Forbes heard a deep, throaty roar, far beneath him, like a door slamming in hell—

And, just for a second, he was transported back across more than twenty years, to that raid on the V2 launch site at Haagsche Bosch, when one of the birds had actually taken off in front of him, a cool pillar of flame rising up among the contrails of the warring kites…