Skyprobe (24 page)

It said, “Oh, God, we’ve lost the whole ball of wax. She’s a red-hot molten lump . . . those guys just fried, up there.” That was all; the set didn’t come alive again. Shaw’s face was white, drained of blood; his mind felt drained of emotion. He saw the sudden look of pity on Ingrid’s face and he thought dully, I’m all washed up now . . . they’d better find me a soft number back home, clerking in the Ministry. This is all the good I’ve been. . . .

* * *

Up in Skyprobe IV the end had been mercifully fast.

Schuster had very suddenly noticed a strange overheating of the air inside the capsule, something that almost at once became unbearable, and that was all. He and Wayne Morris and Danvers-Marshall had died before the instrument panel had begun to melt and the metal of the contour seats had started to run; they were already incinerated when, inside the next split second, the fuel cell went up and the spacecraft simply fell inwards. So they never knew about the final act and never knew that their bodies had been cremated or that their remains were now embedded for all time in the molten structure of their craft; for when the heat came off, the metal began to cool and the solid lump dropped, all forward motion gone now, dropped like a huge stone and went sizzling into the Pacific just beyond Howland Island.

* * *

Rencke had taken his chance when Shaw’s grip started to slacken after that American broadcast. The Swiss rammed his head backwards and took Shaw hard in the teeth, then tore away from his grasp, turned, and gave him a heavy knee-jab in the pit of his stomach. When Shaw had got his wind back Rencke had vanished out of the door, which was only just visible now through the clouds of smoke.

Ingrid took Shaw’s arm. She was choking. With tears running down her cheeks she said, “
Smith, you could not know!
You must not take any blame for yourself. At least you have stopped any secrets falling into these men’s hands. You must think of this, not of what happened up there.”

Unsteadily he said, “It’s no use. I killed them and that’s it.”

“Smith . . . you must not give up!”

“Don’t worry,” he said in a flat voice. “I won’t give up, not yet. I have to get you away from here, for one thing. Meanwhile, there’s something I have to see to. While I’m doing it, get dressed.”

As the girl started to pull on the Chinese clothing again, Shaw went back to the broadcaster he had used earlier and snapped the switch over; the transmitter might or might not be still alive but he had to try. Into the microphone he said, “This is Shaw calling . . . Shaw calling London and Washington from the Sea of Okhotsk. Believe me, I’m . . . sorry . . . for what happened. Desperately sorry.” His voice choked, then he went on more strongly, “This is vital. I urge immediate repeat immediate stand-down of all retaliatory measures. Base is in unidentified island inside the main Kurile group. I know this is Russian territory . . . but the Russian Government is definitely not repeat not concerned. I stress this. What happened was horrible . . . but it must not be made an excuse for a shooting war. Moscow has never been behind this. The man wholly responsible on his own initiative was the defecting Russian scientist Kalitzkin. I urge most strongly that the US and British Governments accept this without question, and that aircraft be flown in peacefully to the Kuriles soonest possible.”

Shaw let go the switch. His eyes streaming from the smoke he said to Ingrid, “At least I’ve helped to stop a war. Maybe. Now let’s get out of here.”

Her eyes were bright with more than the tears from the smoke as she came close and looked into his face. “Take care of yourself, Smith!” she said. “Pull yourself together. There is still Rencke.”

He nodded. “I know. I’ll take care—and of you too. Keep close, but keep behind me unless I tell you different. That’s an order.” He gave a bitter laugh. “You said once that you liked being taken charge of. I don’t know if I’m the one to do it, though.”

“Yes, Smith!” Her eyes searched his face. “Oh, Smith, you must not take this too badly—”

“Save your breath!” he snapped back at her. He took her arm, moved for the doorway. “Remember we haven’t got unlimited time if you want to fulfil your ambition to kill Rencke.”

They ran ahead through the smoke, and out of the blazing control room. They headed to their right, with the smoke pouring out behind them, running on round the deserted passage until they hit the steps leading upward to the fresh air and the biting cold. No-one had bothered to close the sealing doors at the top—no doubt the operator had run with the rest. As Shaw and the girl came out with the smoke billowing in their wake they saw the running men clearing the area as fast as they could go, the last of them streaming panic-stricken out of a gateway in the wire perimeter fence, possibly fearing some explosion down below that would rip the surface apart.

Behind the running technicians was the bulky figure of Rudolf Rencke.

Shaw called, “
Rencke!
”

Rencke looked back over his shoulder.

In the day’s full light his face was murderous. From somewhere he had got hold of another gun, a sub-machine-gun, and now, suddenly, he checked himself. He crouched, and fired in a swinging arc. Shaw grabbed Ingrid and pulled her to the ground. Bullets whistled past Shaw’s ears— Rencke was rattled now, too insanely furious to take good aim.

But a moment later, as Shaw took aim on him, he steadied up.

Shaw saw the pin-point of fire as Rencke’s gun jerked and almost simultaneously he felt the agonizing thuds as the bullets took him. He rolled over on the ground with both his shoulders shattered. Then his right knee-cap disappeared, splintered into fragments by another heavy bullet. Rencke stopped shooting then, and through a mask of pain Shaw watched Ingrid take up the gun he himself had dropped when his shoulders went. Her face was hard and tight and very determined. She fired with cool deliberation, avoiding by a miracle the bullets the Swiss was now sending across again, and she got Rencke in his gun-hand. Dropping the gun, the Swiss turned and ran.

Ingrid looked down at Shaw. “Now,” she said, “I am going to disobey orders. I shall be back. Do not worry. I am going to kill Rencke.”

He licked at his lips, felt his blood soaking into the earth. There was nothing he could do to stop her or help her. The girl disappeared from his field of vision and he heard the shooting. With a desperate effort he rolled over, forcing his pain-filled body on to his stomach so that he could watch. The girl was going like the wind, her long-legged, supple body easily outrunning the heavy Swiss. Now she had picked up Rencke’s sub-machine-gun . . . and she was shooting expertly. She was shooting, not to kill Rencke— but to deflect him from his path through the gateway and to urge him the way she wanted him to go, worrying him with lead like a dog driving a flock of sheep into a pen.

At first Shaw didn’t understand and then something dawned and in amazement he turned his head, painfully, to look at the vast, drooping beam-plate.

That was the way the girl was driving Rencke!
Maybe when the Swiss had taken her from the cell that night he had told her about the Mazurov Beam’s odd magnetic side-effect. Maybe he’d have done that to scare her. Maybe . . . Shaw’s thoughts were verging, he felt, on delirium . . . maybe a girl could be threatened with being loaded down with metal and sucked into that magnetic field. But now the boot was on the other foot . . . it wasn’t going to work, though. Rencke wasn’t made of metal . . . maybe Ingrid just had an idea the beam
per se
would be enough to kill Rencke.

Rencke, as it happened, didn’t need to be made of metal anyway.

Suddenly the great plate shifted, shifted as Shaw watched, moving with a jolt to lean farther over on the drooping stalk, and after that everything seemed to happen at once. The heavy wire fence was now within the field of the Mazurov Beam—and the beam was still very much

alive. The treble-banked barricade ripped from out of the earth and streamed raggedly towards the plate, which was already drawing metal particles from the fresh stretch of ground on which it was now concentrated. The barbs of the fence missed Ingrid by inches but they gathered up Rencke, who went over as if hit by a tank.

Shaw almost forgot his pain.

Rencke, wrapped now in a cocoon of barbs, was being carried through the air towards the plate, fast. He was completely helpless, like a baby, unable to do anything to stop himself. And he was screaming ... he was screaming from sheer terror and from the excruciating agony of the tight-bound wire barbs and of the millions of minute metal particles that went flinging across the space and drove into and through his protesting body. The screaming didn’t last long, however; it ended very abruptly when those particles pierced Rencke’s skull and drove through his brain. He was pierced like a pincushion in every square centimetre of his flesh and bone and sinew, and when finally he embedded soggily in the metal growth on the plate, he was no more than a shredded, bloodied mass of trembling and very dead flesh that quickly vanished as more and more metal was collected.

Shaw lost consciousness then.

Ingrid, still carrying the gun loosely in her hands, came back to him and knelt by his side on the cold, bare ground. “Smith,” she said. “Oh, Smith. . . .” She kissed his dead-white cheeks. Now, at last, the Kurilean fog was rolling in—thick whorls of vapour that seemed to grow from the earth and the surrounding sea to lift in ghostly wreaths to the sky. In a few minutes Ingrid couldn’t see the plate or its stalk. She did what she could for Shaw and then she sat by his side and they waited there for the Americans to come.