Skyprobe (3 page)

Again the light laugh, banishing fears. “Why, honey? I’m safe, up here!”

“Safe?”

“No girls, honey. Gee, you couldn’t
have
me in a safer place, you know that?”

Down there now, in their Florida homes, the two families went on waiting, ticking off the days, none of them aware that the British Defence Intelligence Staff in London was in any way involved with the men in orbit., Mary Schuster was kept busy, as she had been ever since blastoff, answering the endless questions from their three children—Jane, Lester and Jimmy. Questions that had to be answered sanely though she could scarcely concentrate for worry about her husband. The last thirteen days had been a long-drawn nightmare, the remaining days right through to splashdown would be as bad if not worse. In the past Gregory had often said his job was easy, hers the hard one. He would be all right, he had insisted repeatedly, she wasn’t to worry when the day came. Space flights were routine by this time, nothing in them, they had all the answers. The experimental days were long past and soon there would be a commuter service to the moon. But she knew this wasn’t entirely true, that this current flight at all events was the sheerest pioneering and highly experimental; and she had worried—badly. She hadn’t been able to keep back the tears that day when Gregory had driven down to Kennedy for the final checks and routines that had culminated in the blast-off. It hadn’t been so very different with the Morrises either, though Linda Morris was perhaps a mentally tougher and more carefree kind of girl.

Linda Morris was now answering the same kind of questions as Mary—for the hundredth time.

“Mom . . . say, mom—do you expect Pop’s feeling sick?”

“I don’t know, Bobbie. I hope not,” was all she could answer to that one, throwing back her fair hair as she did so and shielding her eyes to look up into the sky ... as if she was expecting to see Skyprobe IV sailing past with a wave from her husband.

“Don’t they get anoxious, mom?” Bobbie persisted.

“Anoxia . . . maybe they do, Bobbie, but that’s not sickness, or is it?”

Bobbie wrinkled his nose. “Gee, I don’t know . . . but if it is, being sick’d be awful messy in the capsule!”

“Will he black out?” This was the elder—Wayne junior.

“No . . . no, of course he won’t.” A hand went to her breast. “Please, Bobbie—both of you—no more questions for a while. Run away and play.” She suddenly felt distracted, as if she’d had a premonition. Unlike her, that. . . . And nothing had gone wrong with any space flight so far, not once the capsule was in orbit, but then there had always to be a first time. That was a cliche if ever there was one, but cliches could be real enough, real enough anyway to a wife for the next eight days. There had been that trouble with the fuel cell, too. She said, “I’ll fix lunch.” The boys nodded abstractedly and she turned and went into the house and a few minutes later she saw them zooming around the garden . . . being spacemen.

Danvers-Marshall hadn’t any children and his wife Katherine was not, currently, in America. At about the same time as Shaw had been in The Goat tavern she had received a cable that had made her book an immediate flight to London and she had flown out from New York to join her mother-in-law in a small village in Suffolk.

* * *

Shaw, his fingers dark with the accumulated dust of ages, was rewarded at last.

He came upon a file of a man who appeared to fit the specification: a man with an appendix scar and a missing left fifth toe. The body measurements, at least as to height, fitted also, so did the details of the teeth in some respects; also the probable age. The man whose file Shaw held in his hand had been Stefan Aleksander Spalinski, then a major in the army of Poland. When the female staff-sergeant brought Spalinski’s service file Shaw found that the man had been trained in Fife in Scotland as a paratrooper and had fought, apparently with some distinction for he had been mentioned in despatches and had a Polish decoration, with a Polish brigade in North Africa and Italy. He had been demobilized in June 1946 and had given his address as 14 Girvan Square, Kilburn.

None of the information on the service file was especially interesting in itself, except possibly for one thing: the dead man had been married during the war to an F.nglish girl named Vanessa Burnside, a widow. According to the pay documents the marriage had taken place on 4th December 1941 when Spalinski had been 34 years of age, and marriage allowance had been credited from that date until the end of his service, together with an allowance for one step-child, female, name Caroline Anne Burnside. There was no follow-up to this information; after demobilization the record ceased. The army, at any rate, had lost interest in Major, by this time Lieutenant-Colonel, S. A. Spalinski.

“Perhaps,” Shaw remarked to the lady staff-sergeant, “security hadn’t quite lost all interest. It might be time well spent finding out.” He sighed; at the time of his so recent death Spalinski—if indeed he had found the right man— could have been a widower, could have been divorced and re-married or could have remained single—or there could be a family waiting at this moment for his return home. . . .

But where, in that case, was home?

When Shaw examined the back files in the Foreign Office’s security section something emerged about home— but again, not very much. He discovered that records, -not particularly comprehensive ones, had in fact been kept of all Polish servicemen who had survived the war. Colonel Spalinski had, with his wife and step-daughter, returned to

Poland in the May of 1948, having lived at the Kilbum address until then; and there, the whole known story of Spalinski ended. There was no note of his return to the United Kingdom; this could have been because security had lost interest by that time—or it could have been because Spalinski had re-entered the country under an alias and with false papers.

A visit to 14 Girvan Square, Kilburn, admittedly a long shot after so many years, produced another blank. No-one could recall the Spalinskis.

* * *

Shaw went to talk discreetly with a noted space expert, a small earnest man with a large head and protuberant forehead, a man with a curiously bird-like expression and a high, squeaky voice. This man expounded eruditely on the problems of space travel and the possibility of some interceptory manoeuvre.

After a while Shaw interrupted the discourse. “In your opinion,” he asked carefully, “what could be used to, say, actually
bring down
a capsule from its orbit . . . and perhaps land it at some selected place by cutting out the normal control of the crew?”

The little man looked at him bleakly. “I can only suggest magic, my dear fellow,” he said. His tone had been highly disparaging, but a train of thought had been started in Shaw’s mind, a train of thought centred on the fact that Skyprobe IV was one of the new generation of spacecraft that made its re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere with its stem section intact. Because that stem section did not detach before re-entry, the capsule would retain its radio and fuel cells right through to splashdown and after . . . for what that was worth as a clue.

Late that night the security line, the scrambler that gave direct communication with the Special Services Division, rang in Shaw’s flat. He reached for the phone. “Shaw here,” he said.

“Ah—Shaw.” It was Latymer. “A news item, for what it’s worth. Danvers-MarshaU’s wife has landed at London airport ex New York. She’s gone straight to her mother-in-law in Long Melford, that’s in Suffolk—near Sudbury. Apparently the old lady’s ill.” The voice paused. “It just occurs to me you might find it useful to have a talk with her.”

“Oh . . . yes, sir?”

“Don’t sound so damned skeptical. She’s the closest thing we have to Danvers-Marshall, and women have an attribute they call intuition. Or so they tell me. I’m authorizing you to break security on this and tell her there’s some possibility of trouble. She might come up with something that’ll help. You’ll have to be cruel to be kind— get her worried about her husband’s safety and the results could be quite surprising. You see, if we assume the chief objective of the people behind the threat is Danvers-Marshall himself, then these people just might have cast some sort of shadow before them, if you follow. Something that might have been noticed by a woman—in retrospect that is, once she has cause for anxiety. I may be talking nonsense, but I don’t propose to neglect any possible avenues, however remote. This thing could be dynamite, Shaw . . . if that isn’t too old-world a simile.”

“I know that, sir. What’s the reaction from the States?” Latymer said, “Cautious disbelief that anything could really happen, except possibly some interception attempt by submarines on splashdown, as I suggested. They’ll be covering that, naturally. They say nothing can go wrong otherwise, but they’ll be on the alert for trouble and the CIA boys are already digging. For the time being they’re not saying anything to the men in the capsule—they don’t want to load them with the extra anxiety unnecessarily. What they do next, depends on what emerges. The wife’s name is Katherine, by the way. She’s also British by birth.” He passed the Danvers-Marshall address then abruptly rang off.

* * *

Skyprobe IV was over West Australia as, early next morning, Shaw let himself into his garage. The astronauts were looking down from the intense purple-blackness of the heavens at the vast expanse of the Southland, at the far-distant, twisting eddies and currents and tides of the sea off the Leeuwin and right along the coast to King Sound and beyond—indeed almost all Australia could be seen in a glance. Schuster and Morris felt almost like gods., all-powerful, all-seeing, as they cruised on through space. By the time Shaw was backing the NSU Wankel Spider two-seater convertible out of the garage the astronauts were already over the Brisbane River and Danvers-Marshall was snoring gently in a light sleep. As the capsule headed out across the Pacific and began to come within the calling area of the tracking station on Hawaii, Shaw was punishing the Wankel—she was a new acquisition, a gem of a car with a single rotor Wankel rotary piston engine, rear-mounted and with rear drive, capable of acceleration from zero to sixty in 14.5 seconds, and with a diaphragm clutch and four-speed, all-synchromesh gearbox. Shaw reached the straggling village of Long Melford soon after 0900 hours, finding the Danvers-Marshall home dose to The Bull inn. It was early for a call but there wasn’t time to worry too much about the conventions. A still-attractive woman of around fifty, with grey eyes and a mass of greying auburn hair—a woman with a shy, withdrawn manner that he found appealing—opened the door to him.

He asked, “Mrs. Danvers-Marshall?”

“Yes?” She looked back at him enquiringly.

“May I come in?” Shaw produced his pass. As she examined it he noticed the sudden whiteness in her face, the lines of worry around eyes and mouth that seemed to have deepened already. She asked, “Is this to do with my husband?”

“Why do you ask that, Mrs. Danvers-Marshall?”

She flushed this time as she met his eyes. “Why, he seems the only likely link with you people, Commander Shaw.”

He nodded. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. It does in fact concern your husband, and you may be able to help us.” He repeated, “May I come in?”

“Oh yes—of course.” She moved back jerkily from the door. “I’m so sorry, I—” She broke off and Shaw followed her into a cool hall, dark with old oak, and from there into a long drawing-room furnished with expensive antiques. She told him to sit, but remained standing herself, with her back to a big fireplace. He thought: she’s badly on edge . .. the Ministry pass has done that . . . it’s natural enough. Maybe. She was going to have a worse shock in a few minutes; irritably Shaw wished Latymer would run out on bright ideas. He was unconvinced that this was a good one.

Katherine Danvers-Marshall said, “Well, Commander?” The ‘a’ sound was short, flat; she had been too long in America for her British accent to survive entirely.

Shaw looked into her eyes. “First, I have to ask you to treat all I say as secret information.” He hesitated. “Can we be overheard?”

She shook her head. “There’s no-one in the house— except my mother-in-law, that is, and she’s in bed. The daily’s not here yet.”

“Right. Now, what I have to say mustn’t be discussed with anyone at all—not even with your mother-in-law.” Again he hesitated. “I’m bound to add this: the Official Secrets Act could be invoked in the event of any breach of security.”

“I understand all that,” she said with an underlying edginess in her voice. “I’ve lived with security a good many years now! Will you please get on with what you want to say, Commander?”

He said, “Yes, of course. I'll start by telling you we’re asking for your help so as to prevent any possibility of anything going wrong with Skyprobe IV while your husband’s in the capsule.” He caught the sudden look of fear in her eyes. “I’ll give you the facts straight, Mrs. Danvers-Marshall.” He told her briefly of his encounter in The Goat in Stafford Street, and of the killing of the man who had tried to pass him a message, and of the possibility of trouble developing with the spacecraft as its centre.

Her hands were shaking now. She saw he had noticed, and she clasped her fingers behind her back, standing before the fireplace like a man warming his backside. She asked, “Have you no idea what this . . . this threat might be?”

“No,” he told her. “I’m sorry to say it, but we have no ideas at all at the moment, no leads. I was wondering—”

“Who was the man?” she asked sharply.

He said, “I don’t know that either—not for certain. But I believe he was a Pole, and—”

“A Pole?”

“Yes. . . He looked at her searchingly, alerted by something in the rigidity of her stance. “Yes, he was a Pole. In fact, I believe him to have been a Colonel Stefan Aleksander Spalinski.” He stopped; her body had swayed a little and her face was a bad colour. He was about to get up and go to her when she stopped him with a gesture of her hand.

She asked, “Just what do you know about this Colonel Spalinski, Commander?”

Gravely he returned the question to her. “What do you know about him, Mrs. Danvers-Marshall?”