Bluebolt One

Julian Hartog walked across the utility-furnished office to the window, moving with his peculiarly characteristic loping stride, as quiet and purposeful as a tiger.

He said in a deep, grating voice, “It’s starting, Steve.”

Stephen Geisler didn’t seem to have heard; and Hartog looked out across the hard, dry earth between the control-station’s admin, buildings and the flagstaff where the naval ensigns of Britain and the United States drooped limply like butter muslin, side by side on a dead level, and looking oddly out of place among the lush, heavy trees which hemmed in the station. He looked away towards the cloud-bank forming, dark and menacing and yet welcome, along the top of the Naka Hills. All the night before he had lain awake, as he had lain awake for so many nights now. He had tossed and turned, haggard-eyed beneath the mosquito-netting, and listened to the mutter of Africa close at hand beyond the high-voltage cables and the barbed-wire mesh which formed the perimeter of the base. Like all else that lived and breathed and moved in the airless heat, he had waited for the blessed breaking of the rains which were now some weeks overdue.

But in Hartog’s case it hadn’t been just the stifling atmosphere. He’d had hardly any sleep ever since the strangers from Jinda had contacted him so casually, and yet at the same time so threateningly with their hints about a past which he had himself tried to forget. . . .

Now, he said again more loudly, “It’s starting, Steve.” He brooded, black brows drawn together over a high-bridged nose and a saturnine face with clusters of tiny red veins over prominent cheek-bones. “And by God we need it!”

Geisler looked up then and nodded. He said, “Sure.” He stretched his stocky sailor’s body and sighed, puckering up the sunburned flesh of his round face so that the eyes, the eyes which lately had lost their normally cheerful twinkle, seemed almost to disappear. “Maybe the blacks’ll be more settled, once the rains come.”

He said that with more hope than belief.

Hartog turned impatiently. “Ah, stuff it!” His big, rubbery mouth twisted in contempt and he spoke brutally. “The bastards are used to their own stinking climate. That’s a damn silly thing to say.”

The American base commander stared at him. “Gee, I just made a remark, didn’t I, that’s all—”

Hartog took no notice. “Rain or shine, it’s made no difference to the rest of Africa, has it? Besides, it’s not just routine rioting, the kind we’re all used to these days. This thing’s directed against
us
—specifically
us
. You know that as well as I do. It’s a pity some people in high places haven’t hoisted it in yet!” He crossed the room again. Tall and enigmatic, he loomed over the Navy man like a restless evil genius. Dropping into a wickerwork chair and pushing his lanky body back with his feet, he lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “They won’t be satisfied—the blacks, I mean—till we’ve packed up and gone, Steve.” He gave a hard, jerky laugh. “Just don’t know what’s good for ’em, that’s the long and short of it.”

Geisler said mildly, “Can’t help seeing their point of view in some ways.”

“Perhaps you can’t. I can.” Hartog waved a powerful arm. “I can’t answer for you. All I know is, I’ve had a bellyful of this lot. And now I’ve got a bellyache.”

Stephen Geisler sighed and rubbed at his eyes, feeling the sting of sheer tiredness in them. He’d had almost two years now of unremitting work and worry and responsibility as base commander, an anxious period in which he had established the control post right from the bare earth upward, and waited, until just a few weeks earlier, for Bluebolt One to be put into orbit from Cape Canaveral, after which the station had taken over control of the new satellite and its load. It had been a responsibility borne in circumstances which were getting every one down, had worn their nerves to the final pitch when tempers could sometimes no longer be controlled and men did stupid things for no real reason. But Julian Hartog, Geisler’s chief civilian scientist from the British Ministry of Nuclear Development, and the real brains of the operations staff, had gone a little beyond that lately, and Geisler didn’t like the implications.

He said, “That kind of attitude doesn’t help, Julian.”

Hartog sneered. “I’m sick and tired of making the best of an impossible situation. People like you—well, you don’t notice things so much.” He broke off moodily, flicked ash off his cigarette, and then went on, “You’d think some one would be taking an interest in us. . . seeing what’s going on in the rest of Africa. I tell you, Steve, we’re forgotten men. Out of sight, out of mind. And I’m fed up to the teeth with waiting for some damn idiot in a safe Government office back in London or Washington to tick over, get off his fat, overpaid backside and act. One of these days. . . d’you know what’ll happen?”

He sat forward and leaned close to Geisler. The C.O. smelt whisky, strong on his breath. He suspected, not for the first time, that Hartog was drinking on duty now. He asked, “No. What?”

Hartog said, “
I
may get to hear of something that’ll shake ’em rigid. If I do I’ll let you know. Only it’ll probably be too late by then.”

Geisler felt a vague sense of fear. “What d’you mean by that, Julian?”

Hartog stuck out his lower lip and pulled at it with nicotine-stained fingers. There was a slight grin on his lips now. He said slowly, “Why, nothing, Steve. Just—nothing.”

Geisler studied him. He fancied there had been a subdued trace of something like hysteria in Hartog’s voice, a curious high note. He said, “If it was nothing you wouldn’t have spoken in the first place. Want to tell me anything else?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m just warning you. Don’t go and do anything stupid. I’ve done all I can by putting in my reports.”

Briefly, Hartog swore; he got up suddenly, lurching just a little. Then he turned away, away from Stephen Geisler’s eyes, and banged out of the office. Geisler heard the outer door slam, saw Hartog go out on to the veranda and walk across towards the control-tower.

A few minutes later Hartog heard the thunder rolling overhead. Then came the long-awaited cloud-burst and he saw the solid water sheeting down over the glass dome above him, making the control-room look like a tank submerged in the sea. Big shoulders thrown back and his hands on his hips, he stood there staring upward, his lips moving soundlessly. A few moments later he swung away and crossed the room, going over to a radar screen beside the main instrument panel. He looked moodily down at a small circle of brilliant green light, a circle which appeared to be moving but which in fact was stationary; it was the actual outlines of the world’s countries and oceans which moved behind the dot on the radar screen. That brilliant green circle represented Bluebolt One, so that at any given moment the position, relative to the earth, of the big satellite which was orbiting some two hundred miles up in space could be seen pictorially as well as being pin-pointed with deadly precision from the dials in front of the operator’s seat.

Hartog put down the instrument with which he had been carrying out a routine check of the mass of complicated electronic equipment and studied the moving map. There seemed to be something about it which was mesmerizing him. It was the sheer immensity of the power-potential which that small green circle of light, hanging over the world’s map, represented; the concentration of destruction, of misery and terror in the shining, cylindrical body of Bluebolt, as it sped round and round the world endlessly . . . endlessly, that was, until one day the balloon went up for ever and somebody got on the wire in London or Washington and the urgent, clamant message came through, the message which would order Julian Hartog into the operator’s seat to make a target setting from the cipher table and then press the first transmission key. . . .

Hartog reached out a hand and laid long, sensitive fingers gently on that key.

He felt a strange tingling sensation in his spine as he did this and he stepped back, breathing fast. He found he was sweating profusely, and he took up a white towel and wiped his face and neck. He stared upward through the glass dome at the beaming-mast with its intricate antennae which moved fractionally, almost imperceptibly unless you knew it was in motion, lining up in automatic response to Bluebolt as the satellite sped down the length of Africa from approximately NNE to SSW. At the top of the short mast a curious attachment, rather like the spread wings of a butterfly, canted upward very gently, held straight for a brief moment, and then very gradually began to lower, facing this time towards the south and Cape Town.

On the night prior to the breaking of the rains in Nogolia Commander Esmonde Shaw had been working late at the Admiralty, engaged on some routine paper-work in connexion with an assignment which he had recently carried out. He had left just in time to catch a train from Trafalgar Square which connected with the last westbound Piccadilly Line train to Barons Court and home. He could not have known that before he reached Barons Court he would be out of that train and walking by torchlight, with the guard, along the track.

But that was just what he was doing—fumbling, tripping over rails and dirt, scraping his shoulder against the tunnel wall.

The current had been cut off now, by the contact procedure with the telephone wires running along those walls; but Shaw and the guard pressed their bodies away from the ‘live’ rail running cold and shining, and still somehow deadly, up the centre of the track—pressed away instinctively even though they knew it was perfectly safe.

There was a faint draught blowing through the tunnel, but even so the air was close, fetid with the day-long exhalations of the crowded tubes. Drips of water streaked the grime of the walls, fell now and again on to Shaw’s head and shoulders as he edged his tall, wiry frame along behind the guard, who was outlined in the back-glare from his torch. That torch sliced ahead into the total darkness, the almost tangible darkness stretching away below South Kensington, a darkness no longer relieved by the squares of yellow light from the train’s windows. It was like walking into some long-sealed tomb. The muffled sound of an eastbound train boomed out hollowly, shaking the very air of the tunnel, and when it had passed in its own sealed-off tomb their footsteps echoed again along the track, eerily. Shaw heard the heavy breathing of the guard ahead of him. The man was clearly scared, scared for his own skin because of what people might be going to say.

That guard was a coloured man—from Africa, by the look of him; a man from a troubled, unhappy continent, now a stranger in a largely hostile land—and Shaw couldn’t help feeling sympathy on that score alone. He knew that London’s coloured population had plenty to contend with in the deep-seated feelings of hostility which their skins seemed so often to arouse, and possibly because of that latent hostility the man was scared of what might happen to him now that a white man had died, scared that ‘they’ might not believe his story.

The two went along as fast as they could, Shaw’s head bent away from possible projections, the instinctive self-preservation of a tall man even when he knows he has plenty of clearance.

He asked, “Can you see anything yet?”

“No. I can’t see anything. Sir, it wasn’t my fault.” Shaw, who earlier had seen the greenish tinge of the ebony face— the robust, open face—and the rolling fright in the eyes, caught the note of panic now. “That man, he’d been drinking, sure. He just came for me.”

Shaw nodded slightly, thinking back. He himself and an elderly man had been alone in the last-but-one compartment, and the guard had been alone with that other man, the one who was now almost certainly dead, in his compartment immediately in rear of Shaw’s. Shaw had seen, through the connecting doors, what had looked like a struggle and then the other man had disappeared from his line of vision and then, perhaps a quarter of a minute later, the train had slowed and stopped. After that, Shaw had lowered the window in his compartment and banged on the guard’s window. The coloured man, who was badly frightened, had told him that a passenger had forced the door open and had fallen out. After some argument as to the right of passengers on the track, Shaw had used the authority latent in his quiet voice and his bearing, and had carried his point that two might save life where one might not; and so here they were walking back in the direction of Gloucester Road station, towards where it had happened.

The guard said for the third time, “Certain sure they’re going to say it was my fault. But it wasn’t. That man, he just gets up and comes for me, then he makes for the door ... maybe he’s drunk and he thinks we’re just coming into Earl’s Court, maybe he wants to kill himself, maybe. . . I don’t know. I tried to stop him, honest I did.”

Shaw grunted non-committally, ran a hand over his long, determined jaw. Personally, he was prepared to believe the man. He looked a decent lad, and honest. He said, “Well, that’s not my concern, laddie. Press on. Perhaps it’s not as bad as we think.”

“Please. . . God, it isn’t.”

Shaw scarcely noticed the slight hesitation then, though he was to recall it later. He said, “Don’t start worrying yet, anyway. Any reason why he should have attacked you?”

“No.”

“Did you know him—had you seen him before?”

The guard hesitated for a moment. “I’d seen him, sir, when I’d been on this late turn. I didn’t know him, though.”

“He was a regular user of this last train?”

“Maybe he was. I just don’t know about that. I just saw him once or twice.”

They groped forward, streaked now with dirt where they’d rubbed the walls of the tunnel, faces running with sweat. A few moments later Shaw heard the hiss of breath from the guard, and the man stopped. The beam of his torch wavered.

Shaw said briskly, “Here, lad. Give it to me.”

He took the torch from shaking fingers, shone the beam ahead on to the track, felt his scalp tingling as he looked at what had so recently been a living body and was now very, very dead indeed. The man was lying half across the ‘live’ rail, and there was still a stench of scorched flesh and cloth; it fanned into Shaw’s nostrils on the draught as he went forward, bent down and examined the broken body. The legs were severed. It looked as though he’d swung back into the spinning wheels of the rear compartment as he’d fallen, and the legs had been nipped off neatly at the knee-joints. The head lolled horribly; the back of the skull was smashed in like an egg. Since this would be a police affair Shaw didn’t want to disturb anything by going through the pockets for means of identification. He said, “Nothing we can do for him, poor beggar. We’ll have to get word through. . . we mustn’t move him ourselves, you understand?”