The Krone Experiment (11 page)

More careful manipulation of the boom brought
the Cosmos into the bay, the remaining wing just clearing the
hinges where the port clamshell would close. He hit the switch and
watched the doors swing shut on their captive with the relief of a
beleaguered traveler whose suitcase finally closes. He journeyed
once again into the bay and secured the huge bulk as well as
possible with various cables and clamps.

For a final time he floated up onto the
flight deck and buckled himself into the pilot’s seat. He
programmed the computer and they began the descent to near Earth
orbit. He suggested to Wahlquist that he discuss with mission
control the best mode of re-entry with an evaporated vertical
stabilizer, tilted his chair back, and slipped into a heavy
sleep.

He awoke fighting the sleep, caught in a fear
that if he did not arouse now he never would. He could sense
without opening his eyes that the booster was not firing. They were
in parking orbit.

“Back in a minute,” he told Wahlquist, as he
pried himself out of his chair. Down on the operations deck he
stripped off his gloves and undid his helmet. He went to the
medicine cabinet and washed down a couple of benzedrine tablets.
Wouldn’t do to sleep through re-entry.

Back in the pilot’s seat, he listened
intently to Wahlquist. They had immediately concluded that a
routine landing at the Cape was out of the question. Emergency
crews were assembling on the dry lake expanses of Edwards Air Force
Base in the Mohave. Part of the vertical stabilizer was still
intact and the guess was that it would provide sufficient stability
during re-entry. The problem was that maneuvering in the atmosphere
would be severely hampered. They could make some gentle turns with
judicious use of wing spoilers, but without the rudder a proper
coordinated turn was impossible. Not a job for computers, no
programs were written for laser-blasted equipment. Jupp had to fly.
He’d known that as he fell asleep, and as he had pawed for the
stimulant.

His senses were keen as they did the final
burn to start their descent. They began in standard orbital
orientation, upside down, rockets pointed in their direction of
travel. The rockets thrusted and they dropped into an ever lower,
ever faster trajectory. As they entered the atmosphere, they
flipped over to the normal atmospheric configuration, nose forward,
tiled belly down into the heat. Jupp immediately felt the
vibration. Something was wrong with the damaged tail. The mangled
remains of the rudder still clung to the lower portion of the
vertical stabilizer. The vibration grew to a teeth-clattering
shudder. Jupp felt a cool wisp of irony amidst his fear. They would
die now together, the shuttle and the Cosmos, after being through
so much.

His mind raced, scenes of childhood, his
technician’s sense wondering what would give out first, a wing come
off, a rupture in the hull? Then in a heartbeat it was gone. The
shorn rudder succumbed to its own lack of aerodynamic perfection.
The tremendous heat of re-entry ablated and then finally swept it
away.

They came out of radio blackout only fifty
miles off course. Jupp applied a little spoiler. Not the most
perfect turn, his flight instructor would have washed him out had
the ball drifted that much in training, but they were back on
course. There were the chase planes. God, they were lovely! There
was the strip. No graceful turns for position, they were going
right down the pipe.

He was going to miss the painted center
stripe by a quarter mile, but he couldn’t worry about that. Without
the capacity for a coordinated turn he could not risk a
destabilizing crab this close to the ground. A bit too hot, too.
Can’t be helped. Flaps down. Gear down. Nose up, drop the forward
speed as much as possible. Wasn’t this strip supposed to be long?
Isn’t that the warning marker? Nose higher, ease her down. Now,
nose down, even her up, here we go, flare, flare! Down, bounce,
down, down, DOWN!

Jupp heard the ground crew swarm over the
craft. He began the post-flight shutdown, responding automatically
to prompts from ground control. We’re down, he thought. We made it.
We brought the son-of-a-bitch back. I should feel happy. I do feel
happy. He looked over at Wahlquist. Below the sightless eyes was a
wide, relieved grin.

Then he felt the first grip of nausea.

*****

Chapter
4

Rhein Haartvedt hurried along the narrow,
dirty street in the fading light, trying to place his carefully
polished shoes in the least distasteful spots, his thoughts eddies
of conflicting currents. He badly wanted to give this speech, his
maiden public stand against apartheid, but conflicting images of
past and future crowded his mind. The knowledge tore at him that
the way of life that had nourished him, and that his loved ones
loved, must be destroyed. He pictured his father: tall, stern, and
unyielding, fair in his own way, but blind to the screaming
inequities of their system. He imagined his family—father, mother,
two sisters—shocked, hounded, uprooted, deprived of their
privileged existence, and he felt the pain they would feel at his
perceived betrayal.

He paused in a rutted intersection and looked
again at the crude map Roy M’Botulu had scrawled for him. Roy was
wise, witty, urbane. Unbelievable that he came from this place.
Rhein tried to ignore it, but the repulsive poverty and ignorance
radiated at him from every angle. To subjugate someone like Roy was
a crime of monstrous proportions, but was it conceivable that these
people could ever be raised from the squalor in which they mired
themselves? As a child, he knew in his heart that it was wrong that
all the faces at the table should be white, all the hands serving,
black. Roy had carefully fanned that flame of disquiet, had shown
him the depraved depths of the sin of man against man. He believed
those words, had made them his own, and wanted to fight for Roy’s
cause, but the quiet passions of a coffeehouse were not reflected
in the dim reality surrounding him now. Could these people really
rule themselves?

A greater question, could they rule Rhein’s
people? Irrationally, his mind filled with an image of his mother
in all her refinement banished to one of these hovels, serving some
filthy hag with a scrawny child stuck on one teat. Rhein shook his
head, banishing such thoughts. If Roy could rise above this, so
could others. For the hundredth time he mentally ran through the
opening lines of his speech, which were carefully memorized
Swahili. According to the map, the small meeting place was just a
block away, around the corner. Roy would be there to give him
strength.

He peered in the dark and stepped with his
left foot over a puddle. As he placed his foot on the other side
and leaned forward to design his next step, he felt strangely
heavy, and then he was dying.

Something shot from the puddle, shattered the
femur of his extended thigh near the pelvic joint, and ripped a
hole in his upper leg. Then, because he was leaning, it penetrated
again at the bottom of his rib cage, blew a thumb-sized hole in his
aorta, and punched out through the base of his neck, nicking his
ear.

Rhein collapsed forward heavily, his hips in
the puddle, his face in a pile of day-old dog shit. He struggled to
turn his nose from the stench and felt the fetid water seep into
his trousers. He blinked his eyes open and saw a small, fat-bellied
child staring at him from a doorway. A dark circle narrowed his
vision until all he could see were the eyes. White eyes. Strangely
sideways. Roy’s eyes. I’m dying Roy. Trouble for Roy. I’m sorry.
Roy.

*****

Maria Latvin held the hand of the figure that
lay with swaddled head against the crisp whiteness of the hospital
bed. She could feel the pressure of his hand, was sure he knew she
was there.

She looked through a faint mist of tears at
the gray, sixtyish man who stood on the other side of the bed.
Until the—accident, she had known Ralph Floyd only vaguely as
manager of the operations at Paul’s laboratory.

“What are you asking of me?” she asked
plaintively. “How can I do this thing?”

“Someone must care for him. You’ve seen that
he responds to you. There are many people who depend on him, now we
must depend on you.”

“But he needs medical help. I can not do
that.”

Floyd looked at the man standing quietly
behind Latvin’s chair, stethoscope draped around his neck.

“Dr. Crawford has done all he can for him
here at the lab in terms of immediate medical attention. His body
is healthy. He is just not in complete control of it. We need
someone to look after him, while we seek expert consultation for
his remaining—problems.”

“But shouldn’t he be taken somewhere, to a
city, to a big hospital?”

“There are many complications, my dear. He is
the head of a large complex structure, far more than this lab that
has been his recent headquarters. Much of this complex runs on its
own without his day to day intervention or control.” Floyd
shrugged. “But if he should die, there would be many problems. The
situation is even worse in his present state— alive, but not
competent to run his affairs. If that news should become general
knowledge, the result would be chaos. You must keep him, care for
him, while we seek to restore him to full health.”

Maria Latvin looked deeply into the eyes of
the older man. She did not know his true motivation. Was he merely
trying to maintain order in a difficult situation, or did he have
deeper desires for control of this complex of which he spoke? She
felt the pressure of the hand in hers again. She owed this man
much. Here was a chance to hold to him, and to the life she had
come to love so deeply, a bit longer.

Somebody stood up and turned on the room
lights. Isaacs jerked his head up from the photograph he had been
studying. In his bleariness he had not realized that the bright
Sunday afternoon sun had faded. He scanned the accumulated disarray
of their four-day marathon and looked out the window of the
conference room. He tried for a long moment to figure out what time
it must be from the purpling of the evening light. He finally
remembered to look at his watch. 8:38. Eastern daylight. God, was
he tired.

He thought back to the return of the shuttle,
the Cosmos laser satellite. Could that have been three weeks ago?
Now April was gone, spring replaced by the summer heat of early
May.

The Russians had immediately gone into
overdrive to put up another satellite. The laser had been delivered
from the development site at Saryshagan to the launch site at
Tyuratam four days ago. Isaacs’ Office of Scientific Intelligence
had worked around the clock to monitor the transition and the
operation at Tyuratam.

Isaacs looked again at the photograph from
the K-H 11 Digital Imaging Satellite. He had been trying to discern
some clue to the nature of the box of electronics sitting on the
gantry next to the rocket. Now he looked at the technician who
squatted next to it. From three hundred miles up the photograph
only showed a fuzzy image of the top of the man’s head, his back,
the tops of his thighs and his right arm extended to a knob on the
electronics. I bet that bastard’s tired too, Isaacs thought to
himself. Isaacs knew the man well, as well as one ever could by
studying the flat two-dimensional creatures that inhabited these
photos. They had picked him out from the first photographs taken a
month ago at Saryshagan by the un-slavic mop of curly hair that
occupied the rear half of his balding head. They had taken to
calling him Curly. Isaacs was amused at the odd resentment he had
felt when Boswank finally got a make on him, identifying him as
plain old Fyodr Rudikov. Fyodr was a subterfuge, an alias. His real
name was Curly.

Curly had arrived last Thursday at the launch
site at Tyuratam along with the laser components. Since then Curly
had been working sixteen-hour days, just like Isaacs’ team. The
launch of the new laser could be as soon as next month. Curly was
on the front line down there, beating himself and his crew to
greater effort. In this room, in the bowels of this building, and
in many others, thousands of American intelligence people focused
on the same event. When would the launch be? What were the
capabilities of this new laser? Could it be stopped? Should it be
stopped? Would it strike? Where? Were there defensive measures?

Isaacs shoved his rolled cuffs further up his
arms, then raised his arms in a stretch over his head. He looked at
the bedraggled group around him. Martinelli sat with one of his
aides in a circle of coffee cups and cigarette butts. They were
sorting the latest pile of useful photographs culled from the reams
that poured in from a host of satellites. Bill Baris huddled with
Pat Danielson at the far end of the table. Bill had isolated the
crates that housed the laser components from among the bewildering
array of associated rocket parts. The task now was to glean every
scrap of information they could as the relevant crates were
unpacked and their contents incorporated into the rocket.

Danielson ran liaison with the computer. When
Baris found some shred of evidence in a portion of one photograph,
Danielson or one of her cohorts would dash off to retrieve that
part of the photo from the computer memory and run it through a
panoply of analysis routines, reducing noise, heightening contrast,
pulling this feature then that from data, until they could do no
more. Then they would move to another photo or call to Martinelli
to order up a new one, concentrating on whatever feature seemed
likely to be particularly illuminating. The Russians knew they were
being spied upon. When they could not avoid exposing a piece, they
would sometimes move it about at random, specifically to foil
analysis teams. Then Isaacs’ group would race to see if they could
relocate the missing component, all the while searching for new
clues.