Vengeance 10 (57 page)

Von Braun pressed the transmit bar on his microphone and broke into the FCO’s increasingly frantic calls. He struggled to keep his own voice under control.

‘Franz, can you hear me?’ He paused a moment, hoping that Bethwig would respond to his voice. The sweep-second touched the numeral twenty.

‘We have a light on the board indicating a LOX turbine pump failure. Do you have the same?’

He released the transmit button and held his breath.

‘Yes. I think it’s nothing more than a short in the sensor.’ Bethwig’s voice seemed crisp enough.

‘It should be checked. It might be a true report.’

‘It might,’ Bethwig agreed, ‘but it would take three days to stand down and restart. We could all be dead by then.’

The second hand was passing forty. ‘You could be dead in seconds if the pump has failed.’

‘Maybe. But the amount of vibration here suggests both turbines are working properly. We’ll soon find out in any …’

A thunderous roar began to grow as the second hand touched sixty, and white light from twenty-one screaming rocket engines flooded the command centre.

The explosion deafened him, and the monstrous rocket shook him like a mouse in the teeth of a cat. Lights blinked on the board, green to red and red to green again, and he closed his eyes, waiting for extinction. The shaking grew as the bellowing was transmitted through the rocket’s fabric until it had become physical pain. He was being crushed; he could not breathe, and he opened his mouth to scream and realised in that instant that the pressure was gravity crushing him as acceleration mounted. He was blind and deaf, wrapped in a cocoon of his own terror, unintelligible voices in his earphones screaming in defiance of the roaring that was filling his head with pain as he lapsed into unconsciousness.

The noise was greater than anything Memling had ever dreamed possible. He pressed his hands to his ears and bowed forward, mouth open in a soundless scream to ease the pain. The rocket engines roared and bellowed and thundered and screamed in every conceivable register, and slowly, gently, the squat tower began to rise on a white column of flame brighter than a welder’s torch. For an instant he had an impression - one that would remain with him for the rest of his life - of the V-10 balancing on a column of pure flame, screaming like all the banshees of hell, rotating slowly about its axis so that one delta-shaped wing appeared from the darkness, shuddered for the merest instant, and was gone. He blinked at the after-image and tilted his head back, but the rocket was already a point of flame in the night sky fleeing through the cloud rack. He lay back flat on the ground then and stared hungrily as the flame grew longer and longer, tipped towards the south-west, and continued to lengthen, flaring into a widening cone that surprised him until he remembered that the gases would expand as the air thinned.

Memling watched the point of flame until it vanished in the thickening cloud and his own tears.

The silence was blessed. As was the absence of vibration and the sensation of motion. Bethwig lay in the couch, mind drifting aimlessly, body exhausted to the point of collapse. His eyes drifted to the chronometer hand, and he groaned as he saw it sweep inexorably to the point marking second-stage ignition. He tensed as the hand passed across the point, and deep in the bowels of the rocket the vibration began again, sound and fury exploding to press him deep against the couch with a huge, padded, smothering hand. The raving went on and on, but the vibration and the screaming were less severe this time and the acceleration was bearable. As he waited for the trial to end he turned his head with difficulty to the tiny view port.

At first he saw nothing but the window itself, and then a brilliant diamond drifted into view. It was a moment before his mind grasped the implication. He was the first human to see a star without the interfering blanket of earth’s atmosphere.

An endless time later something shot past and a bluish haze filled the port while Bethwig’s mind grappled with too many unexpected inputs. It has to be Earth, he thought, has to be; but it was so different from the way he had always pictured it. Where were the continents, the oceans, the clouds? It was all run together in a sapphire mist. He struggled against the restraints, trying to get closer, to see more, before he remembered the buckles, and that recalled him to his senses. Where in hell was he? What had happened? Was he in orbit? These and a thousand other questions nearly overwhelmed him. He closed his eyes to force his mind blank. When he opened them again, the transmission light was winking and someone, von Braun, was shouting into his earphones. He pressed the chin switch and acknowledged.

Memling stubbed his cigarette and carefully buried it in the sand. Old habits, he thought. He stared once more at the launch area, now curiously empty. Water fountained above the launch stand, and steam rose in rolling clouds to the west. The area was still flooded with light, but it seemed as if the entire island had been abandoned. When he turned to the north, he saw that even the dull reddish glow on the horizon from the burning tank farm had died away.

He slung the machine pistol over his shoulder and hesitated. Mankind had, in the midst of its most destructive war, taken its most civilised step towards the future - he hoped to God. Whether Bethwig survived or not made little difference in the long run. The step had been taken, and it could not be denied. Where one man had gone, others had to follow. He glanced upwards, searching for a tiny pinpoint of flame, but the cloud cover was solid to the west. He started to salute, then laughed at himself, turned, and went down the ridge towards the marshes to the south.

Von Braun walled himself off from the clamouring, cheering people by sitting quietly at his desk and staring at the dials and gauges that registered the condition and progress of the rocket. No one dared intrude; he had become an island of despair in the midst of celebration. Even Magnus was standing quietly to the side, watching his brother, not wanting to infringe on a private grief.

Dawn slid silently, inexorably out of the South China Sea and began to slip across the Indochina landmass. Borneo, a faint mixture of browns and greens, was in view on the horizon, and soon the second (stage would fire a final time before being left behind. Australia could have witnessed the event, Franz thought, if anyone had known to look. He had finished the final computations that would regulate the firing, and had pinned the several sheets to the control panel where he could see them, even though the results were as logical and obvious to him as street signs.

He had been sick for a while, but the Dramamine tablets had helped to settle the nausea, even if they had left him drowsy and content to wait and watch the Earth turn beneath. From six hundred and seventy-three kilometres’ altitude, there was no sign that two-thirds of the globe had been mobilised into competing killing machines of which he had, until lately, been a part. His mind shied away from that thought; he had made a pact with himself not to dwell on such subjects. Instead, he watched the splendour of the blue world beyond the port.

Von Braun’s voice woke him. He acknowledged and laughed at the concern in his friend’s voice.

‘Just resting, Wernher, while I still have a few moments. I’ve set the chronometer alarm, and there are two minutes to engine ignition.’

‘Franz, our calculations show you have three minutes twenty-three seconds on my mark ... mark! I suggest you recheck your calculations.’

Bethwig chuckled. ‘Have you ever known me to make an arithmetic mistake? What relative speed do you show?’

Von Braun relayed up the information, and Bethwig acknowledged. ‘You see, Wernher, that is the problem. You give me seventy-eight kilometres more than I have. Fifteen minutes ago I took a series of triangulations to measure my actual relative speed, whereas yours are only estimates. The next time, a chain of radar stations with the capability of detecting a spacecraft at several thousand kilometres would be very helpful ... we are coming up to the ignition sequence, Wernher. Pardon me for a moment.’

Von Braun started to protest, then stopped. Even though he was troubled by the dreamy quality of Franz’s voice, he realised that as the pilot Bethwig must be the final authority. From nearly seven hundred kilometres’ altitude he could measure his speed quite accurately with the aid of a sextant.

‘The next time,’ he had said, and von Braun shook his head in despair. The needles flickered and then began to move across their dials indicating that ignition had begun. He watched them mount, aware of the tension growing in him. On both this final performance of the second stage and Bethwig’s abilities as a pilot depended his fate. Unless the rocket gained a specific speed within very defined limits, it would either crash back to Earth when its orbit decayed or bypass the moon and fall into orbit around the sun. He stared fixedly at the dials, which provided his only connection to the mote speeding away from the planet, conscious also of the intense silence in the command centre as the crews watched with him. A needle jumped on the telemetry signal strength link, steadied, then fell to zero.

Von Braun continued to stare at the dial, willing the needle to move, but it never did.

The explosion had damaged the instrument bay, Bethwig decided. Half of the system board was blank, and here and there on the control panel dead gauges and signal lights told the rest of the story. At least one engine had exploded on ignition, but the damage must not have been extensive, as the other four had continued to fire. He moved the switch that caused the gyros to speed up. For a moment nothing happened and he thought they had failed as well, but then a star slipped past and a moment later Earth swam into view. He was somewhere over Central America, he decided as he shot a series of bearings. A few moments of figuring gave him his speed, now barely at the lower edge of the margin. Another decimal point or so ... He concentrated on doing what he could to repair the damage.

After an hour’s extensive work Bethwig knew that while the craft was continuing to operate, its performance was disintegrating steadily. From what he could calculate based on oxygen consumption, fragments of the engine must have ripped at least one pinhole somewhere below, or perhaps started a seam. The loss was not great, but it was steady, and at this rate the tanks would be exhausted in less than fifty hours. The fuel tanks had apparently escaped injury, as had his food and water stores. But the telemetry systems and the linked radio were out for good, as were the twin radar units he needed to perform the landing seventy-three hours away.

Bethwig chuckled to himself, and the sound was grim inside his helmet. He could be out of air before then, so it might make little difference. What he regretted most was the loss of the radio. Wernher would never know how far he had got, or that the rocket would reach the moon, whether he was dead or alive.

There was a choice; by shutting off the cabin atmosphere and feeding the oxygen into his suit, he could assure himself sufficient for another six days, three beyond what was needed to attempt the lunar landing but not enough to wait for re-supply. And he laughed aloud at the thought. Re-supply? he asked himself. There would be no re-supply. How in God’s name would they ever accomplish that? The SS would swarm all over Peenemunde, if they weren’t already there. In his arrogance he had calculated for everything but failure, and now von Braun and the rest would be lucky to escape with their lives. And with the radio gone, he could not even let them know that it hadn’t all been in vain. He smiled then at the punishments the gods were capable of inflicting upon man.

Bethwig made the decision and shut down the cabin pressurisation. He loosened the restraints so that he was floating, weightless, a few centimetres above the cushions and turned carefully, letting the friction of the straps hold him in position as he stared at the slowly receding planet beyond the view port. He would land on the moon if at all possible. Radar or not, he still had his eyes, damn it. Earth hung against a velvet blackness of incomparable richness, an amazing jewel. He was finally at peace with himself.

‘Don’t switch on the light, Wernher.’

Von Braun froze, arm partly extended.

‘Is anyone with you?’

Von Braun tried to speak, but his throat was suddenly dry and he had to swallow hard.

‘Well?’ the voice prompted.

‘No. No one. I... who are you?’

A table lamp went on, and von Braun blinked in the sudden glare before he made out the figure sitting on his couch, holding a machine pistol. The man was dressed in a uniform so ragged that he did not immediately recognise it as SS battledress. The face was stubbled and as dirty as the clothes, but the eyes drew von Braun the most. Pale green in the yellowish lamplight, they were steady and implacable. Von Braun had a feeling the man would kill him at the slightest sign of disobedience.

‘Who are you?’ he managed to croak.

‘Jan Memling.’

Von Braun sagged. ‘Good God in heaven, you scared the hell out of me.’ He straightened and motioned to a cabinet. ‘I need a drink.’

Memling nodded, and von Braun walked carefully across the room. He paused before he opened the door. ‘Do you wish to check first? There may be a gun.’

‘I have already.’

‘Yes.’ Von Braun rubbed his lower lip. ‘You would have.’ He poured two glasses of cognac and brought them across to the coffee table. He was stumbling with the fatigue of three days spent in the command centre, working until it was clear they could do no more.

‘What happened?’

He took a swallow, and then another, letting the liquid dissolve the cold in the pit of his stomach before he answered. Memling waited.

‘We don’t know.’

‘What are you talking about!’

‘We lost contact after second-stage ignition, as the engines were being fired to shift the rocket out of Earth orbit. We know the engines ignited, but after that...’ He shrugged.

‘It’s been three days …’