She followed Judy out of the building and walked along the concrete path with her to Geers’s office. They had nothing to say to each other, and nothing to share except a sort of wary indifference. Judy showed her into Geers’s room and left her. The Director was sitting behind his desk, telephoning.
“Yes, we’re coming along famously,” he was saying. “Only another check and we can start building.”
He put down the phone and Andromeda placed her papers on his desk, casually, as though she were bringing him a cup of tea.
“That is all you will need, Dr. Geers,” she told him.
Ten
Achievements
The new missile was built and tested at Thorness. When it had been fired and recovered, and copies made, the Prime Minister sent Burdett to see Vandenberg.
The General was more than a little worried about the Thorness project. It seemed to him to be going too fast to be sound. Although his chiefs wanted action quickly, he had grave doubts about this piece of foreign technology and wanted it sent for testing to the U.S.A.; but Her Majesty’s Government unexpectedly dug its toes in.
Burdett confronted him in the underground ops room.
“Just for once we have the means to go it alone.” The young minister looked very sharp and dapper and keen in his neat blue suit and old school tie. “Of course we shall co-ordinate with you when we come to use it.”
Vandenberg grunted. “Can we know how you’ll use it?”
“We shall make an interception.”
“How?”
“Reinhart will give us our target information from Bouldershaw, and Geers’s outfit will do the firing.”
“And if it fails?”
“It won’t fail.”
The two men faced each other uncompromisingly: Burdett smooth and smiling, the General solid and tough. After a moment Vandenberg shrugged.
“This has become a very domestic affair all of a sudden.”
They left it at that, and Burdett told Geers and Reinhart to go ahead.
At Bouldershaw fresh traces were picked up nearly every day. Harvey sat behind the great window overlooking the Fell and logged them as they went over.
“...August 12th, 03.50 hrs., G.M.T. Ballistic vehicle number one-one-seven passed overhead on course 2697/451. Height 400 miles. Speed approx. 17,500 miles per hour...”
The huge bowl outside, which seemed empty and still under its tall superstructure, was all the time alive and full of the reflection of signals. Every vehicle that came over gave out its own call and could be heard approaching from the other side of the globe. There were electronic scanners in the observatory which showed the path of the targets on a cathode-ray screen, while an automatic plotting and range-finding system was coupled by land-line to Thorness.
At Thorness an array of rockets was set up on the cliff-top; a “first throw” as they called it and two reserves. The three pencil-shaped missiles, with tapering noses and finned tails, stood in a row on their launching pads, glinting silver in the cold, grey light. They were surprisingly small, and very slim and rather beautiful. They looked like arrows strung and ready to fly out from all the heavy and complicated harness of firing. Each one, tanked with fuel and crammed with precise equipment, carried a small nuclear charge in its tapered head.
The ground control was operated through the computer, which in turn was directed by Andromeda and her assistants. Target signals from Bouldershaw were fed in through the control room and instantaneously interpreted and passed on to the interceptor. The flight of interception could be directed to a hair’s breadth.
Only Geers and his operational staff were allowed in the control-room at this time. Fleming and Dawnay were given monitoring facilities, as a gesture of courtesy, in another building; Andromeda took over calmly at the computer and Geers fussed anxiously and self-importantly between the launching-site, the computer building and the fire control-room. This was a small operations centre where the mechanics of take-off were supervised. A direct telephone connected him with the Ministry of Defence. Judy was kept busy by Major Quadring, double-checking everyone who came and went.
On the last day of October, Burdett conferred with the Prime Minister, and then picked up a telephone to Geers and Reinhart.
“The next one,” he said.
Reinhart and Harvey stood to for thirty-six hours before they detected a new trace. Then, in the early light, they picked up a very faint signal and the automatic linking system was put into action.
The sleepy crew at Thorness pulled themselves together, and Andromeda, who showed no sign of effort, watched as they checked the information through the computer. The optimum launching time came out at once and was communicated to the fire control-centre, and the count-down began. Very soon a trace of the target could be seen on radar screens. There was a screen in the computer-room for Andromeda, another in fire control for Geers, a third in London in the Ministry of Defence Ops Room, and a master-check at Bouldershaw, watched by Reinhart. At Bouldershaw, too, the signal from the satellite could be heard: a steady blip-blip-blip-blip which was amplified and pushed out through the speakers until it filled the observatory.
At Thorness the speakers were carrying the count-down, and launching teams worked briskly round the bases of the rockets on the cliff-top. At zero the “first throw” was to be fired and, if that failed, the second, and, if necessary, the third, with fresh flight calculations made according to their take-off time. Andromeda had held that there was no need for this but the others were all too conscious of human fallibility. Neither Geers nor any of his superiors could afford a fiasco.
The count-down ran out to single figures and to nought. In the grey morning light of the promontory the take-off rockets of the first flight suddenly bloomed red. The air filled with noise, the earth shook, and the tall thin pencil slipped up into the sky. Within a few seconds it was gone beyond the clouds. In the control-rooms, the operations-room and the observatory, anxious faces watched its trace appear on the cathode screens. Only Andromeda seemed unconcerned and confident.
At Bouldershaw, Reinhart, Harvey and their team watched the two traces of target and interceptor slowly converging and heard the blip-blip-blip of the satellite ringing louder and clearer in their ears as it approached. Then the traces met and at the same moment the noise stopped.
Reinhart swung round to Harvey and thumped him, wildly and uncharacteristically, on the back.
“We’ve done it... !”
“A hit!” Geers picked up his telephone for London. Andromeda turned away from her control-room screen as though something quite unimportant were over. In London, Vandenberg turned to his British colleagues in the ops room.
“Well, what do you know?” he said.
That evening an official statement was made to the press:
“The Ministry of Defence has announced that an orbital missile has been intercepted by a new British rocket three hundred and seventy miles above this country. The remains of the missile, which is of unknown origin, and of the interceptor, were burnt out on re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, but the interception was followed on auto-radar equipment and can, say the Ministry, be verified in minute detail.”
An almost audible collective sigh of relief rose from Whitehall, accompanied by a glow of self-congratulation. The Cabinet held an unusually happy meeting and within a week the Prime Minister was sending again for Burdett.
The Minister of Defence presented himself neat and smiling, in an aura of confidence and after-shave lotion.
“Any new traces?” asked the Prime Minister.
“Not one.”