THREE
In Scotland Yard’s mortuary Shaw took a closer look at the Pole. There was nothing remarkable about the body except for one thing: the fifth toe on the left foot was missing. There was also an old appendix scar; but there was nothing whatever in the way of moles, war wounds or other distinguishing marks.
But that missing toe could be a big help.…
Shaw asked, “Have you any idea when it was amputated, Doctor?”
The police surgeon shook his head. “That’s quite impossible to say.” He rubbed his chin musingly, then added, “All I can tell you is that it doesn’t really strike me as having been done particularly recently.”
“Could it have happened in the war, say?”
“I don’t know… it could have, yes. Even before that— I’m afraid I really can’t possibly be precise.”
“I see.” Shaw looked down thoughtfully at the thin body on the slab. In life the man had looked anxious — a man whose worries had shown in his face; in death that face was still hauntingly anxious, perhaps because of the unaccomplished mission… Shaw had a strange feeling that he owed it to this dead man, in a personal sense, to see to it that he hadn’t been pierced by that needle-sharp length of steel entirely in vain. The brown eyes — sad eyes in life — stared blankly at nothing. Shaw turned away; there was nothing more to ask here, in this clean, bleak, melancholy room. Already he had taken the body’s measurements and a detailed description, plus a cast, of the teeth, and he had a posthumous photograph of the dead man. He had gone through the corpse’s possessions as found by the police in the pockets; here again there was nothing of interest. There had been the usual clutter from a man’s pockets — tobacco, cigarette-papers, the miniature do-it-yourself outfit, and also a packet of Benson & Hedges, which confirmed Shaw’s original theory that the man’s roll-your-own act was no more than background colour for a new identity. It had been clumsy, to carry around those ready-mades.… There was a Ronson lighter, an expensive one; a handkerchief as innocent of identifying marks as the rest of the clothing — the shirt and underwear, right down to the socks, were all new and were all drip-dries, so wouldn’t have been near a laundry. The pathetic collection was completed by a ball-point pen and a pocket-book containing money but again no identification, no addresses, no letters, the only revelation being the gilt imprint: REAL CALF MADE IN ENGLAND.
Shaw gestured to the attendant, who pulled the sheet over the body; then, as anonymously as he had arrived, he left the Yard.
An Army Records Office somewhere in North London yielded up the medical histories of Poles who had come to Britain to continue the war of liberation after Hitler and then Stalin had overrun their own country back in 1939.
The files were many and dusty and yellowed, and seemed not to have been disturbed for the last two decades or so. Shaw took the officers first. Aware that, despite the dead man’s instant reaction to his question, he could have been quite wrong in his assumptions as to nationality and calling, he searched carefully, minutely, painstakingly for hour after hour.
A taciturn, middle-aged woman, wearing rimless spectacles and the uniform of a staff-sergeant in the WRAC, brought him seemingly endless cups of lukewarm Ministry tea.
With its three occupants Skyprobe IV continued on its interminable orbits, still travelling at 27,000 m.p.h. and now at a height of something over 970 miles. The electrical connections that had fed power from the Titan 6C launching rocket still trailed from its plastics-covered rear. The two Air Force majors sat side by side in their contour seats, making the routine checks and keeping in periodic contact with the earth. Early on there had been a little trouble with the fuel cell, but they had got it operating again quite quickly by means of a cross-feed valve, and now all they needed to do was occasionally to check the fuel cell pressure. Danvers-Marshall sat behind them with little to do at this almost two-thirds-through stage but watch out of his window and observe now and again the dials of the special instruments that had been put into the spacecraft for his own purposes of study. The British-born scientist was a thin, dark man with a perpetually tensed-up look about him and a noticeable twitch below his left eye, a twitch that had grown worse as the long flight progressed and the state of weightlessness had affected him, as it had affected them all. Now and then he made notes on a pad of paper. From quite early in the flight the men had been orbiting in their underwear, discarding the heavy, cumbersome spacesuits whose restrictions would have exhausted them long before the end of their 21-day span had they worn them continually. One by one, time and time again, the tracking stations had come up, friendly voices from a familiar world to keep them in touch and to watch over them and record their progress: the Canaries—
Nigeria — Zanzibar — West Australia — Hawaii — California and back again to mission control at Kennedy… from all these places the disembodied voices had called them.
From Kennedy, soon after the start thirteen days before, the families had spoken to them. Gregory Schuster’s wife Mary had come on the air first, feeling a little foolish and self-conscious, not knowing what to talk about in the hearing of so many eavesdropping ears.
“How do you feel, Greg?” she’d asked.
A laugh came down to her and Gregory Schuster’s voice said cheerfully, “Fine, just fine… all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed! How’s things down there, Mary?”
“Oh,” she said, “fine too… we’re okay, Greg, but missing you a lot. The kids are so dam proud, too… but I guess I want you home, Greg!”
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?”