"Well, that's useful," Hargreaves muttered.
"Isn't it? I never even knew of the existence of this Black Shrike of yours. How about putting me in the picture about it? I'm one of those characters who believe that a man should go on learning till the day he dies: this looks like my last chance to collect some fresh information."
He hesitated, then said slowly: "I'm afraid-"
"You're afraid it's all very top secret," I said impatiently. "Sure it's very secret-but not to anyone on this island. Not any longer."
"I suppose not," Hargreaves said doubtfully. He thought for a moment and then smiled. "You will remember the late and bitterly lamented Blue Streak rocket?"
"Our one and only entrant in the inter-continental ballistic missiles stakes?" I nodded. "Sure I remember it. It could do everything a missile should do, except fly. Everyone felt this was very awkward. Considerable heart-burning when the Government dropped it. Much talk about selling out to the Americans, being absolutely dependent for nuclear defence on the Americans, Britain now a very second-rate power, if you could call her a power at all. I remember. The Government was vastly unpopular."
"Yes. And they didn't deserve any of it. They dropped the entire project because one or two of the better military and scientific minds in Britain-we have one or two-kindly pointed out to them that the Blue Streak was a hundred percent unsuitable for its purpose anyway. It was based on American type models, such as the Atlas I.C.B.M., which takes twenty minutes to count down and get under way from the moment of the first alarm, which is all very well for the Americans: with their DEW-lines and advanced radar stations, their infra-red detectors and spies-in-the-skies to detect exhaust trails of launched I.C.B.M.'s, they're counting on getting a half an hour when some maniac presses the wrong button. All the warning we can expect is four minutes." Hargreaves took off his spectacles, polished them carefully and blinked myopically. "Which means that if the Blue Streak had worked, and if the count-down had started the moment the warning had come through it would still have been wiped out of existence by a five megaton Russian ICBM sixteen minutes before it was due to take off."
"I can count," I said. "You don't have to spell it out for me."
"We had to spell it out for the Ministry of Defence," Hargreaves replied. "Took them three or four years to catch on, which is about par for the military mind. Look at the admirals and their battleships. The other great drawback of the Blue Streak, of course, is that it would have required a huge launching installation, all the ramps, gantries, and blockhouses, the enormous trailers of helium and liquid nitrogen to pump in the kerosene and liquid oxygen under pressure, and, finally, the vast size of the rocket itself. This meant a permanent and fixed installation, and with all those hordes of British and American planes flying over Russian territories, Russian planes flying over American and British territories-and for all I know, British and Americans flying over one another's territories-those locations have become so well known that practically every launching base in the U.S. and Russia has a corresponding ICBM from the other country zeroed in on it.
"What was wanted, then, was a rocket that could be fired instantaneously-and a rocket that was completely mobile, completely portable. This was impossible with any known missile fuel. Certainly not with the kerosene-kerosene, in this day and age! — which along with liquid oxygen still powers most of the American rockets. Certainly, either, not with the liquid hydrogen engines the Americans are working on today, the boiling point of -423 °F. makes them ten times as tricky to handle as anything yet known. And they're far too big."
"They were working on cesium and ion fuels," I said.
"They'll be working on them for a long time to come. They've got a dozen separate firms working on those and you know the old saw about too many cooks. And so the mobile rocket ready for instant firing was impossible with any known propellant-until Hargreaves came up with a brilliantly simple idea for solid fuel, twenty times as powerful as used in the American Minuteman. It's so brilliantly simple," Hargreaves admitted, "that I don't know how it works."
Neither did I. But I'd learnt enough from Fairfield to learn how to make it work. But here and now I never would.
"You're sure it really does work?" I asked.
"We're sure, all right. On a small scale, that is. Dr. Fairfield fitted a twenty-eight pound charge to a specially constructed miniature rocket and fired it from an uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. It took off exactly as Fairfield had predicted, very slowly at first, far more slowly than conventional missiles." Hargreaves smiled reminiscently. "And then it started accelerating. We-the radar scanners- lost it about 60,000 feet. It was still accelerating and doing close on 16,000 miles an hour. Then more experiments, scaled down charges, till he got what he wanted. Then we multiplied the weight of the rocket, fuel, simulated warhead and brain by 400. And that's the Black Shrike."
"Maybe multiplying by 400 brings in some fresh factors."
"That's what we've got to find out. That's why we're here."
"The Americans know about this?"
"No." Hargreaves smiled dreamily. "But we hope they will one day. We hope to supply them with it in a year or two, that's why it's been designed far in excess of our own requirements, designed to carry a two-ton hydrogen bomb six thousand miles in fifteen minutes, reaching a maximum speed of 20,000 miles per hour. Sixteen tons compared to the 200 tons of their own ICBM's. 18 feet high compared to a hundred. Can be carried and fired from any merchant ship, coaster, submarine, train or heavy truck. All that and instant firing." He smiled again, and this time the dreaminess was suffused with a certain complacency. "The Yanks are just going to love the Black Shrike."
I looked at him.
"You're not seriously suggesting that Witherspoon and Hewell are working for the Americans, are you?"
"Working for the-" He pulled the spectacles down his nose and peered at me over the thick horn-rims, eyes wide in myopic astonishment. "What on earth do you mean?"
"I just mean that if they aren't I don't see how the Americans are going to have a chance to look at the Shrike, far less love it."
He looked at me, nodded, looked away and said nothing. It seemed a shame to destroy his scientific enthusiasm.
The dawn was in the sky now, even with the lamps still burning inside the quonset we could see the lightening grey patches where the windows lay. My arm felt as if the Doberman were still clinging to it. I remembered the half-finished glass of whisky on the table, reached up for it and said, "Cheers." No one said cheers back to me but I disregarded their unmannerly attitude and downed it all the same. It didn't do me any good that I could feel. Farley, the infra-red guidance expert, gradually recovered his colour, courage and indignation and carried on a long and bitter monologue, in which the two words 'damnable' and 'outrage' were the recurring theme. He didn't say anything about writing his M.P. Nobody else said anything at all. Nobody looked at the dead man on the floor. I wished that someone would give me some more whisky, or even that I knew where Anderson had found the bottle. It seemed all wrong that I should be thinking more about the bottle than the dead man who'd given me my first drink from it. But then everything was wrong that morning, and besides, the past was past, the future-what remained of it-was to come and, while the whisky might help, nothing was surer than that Anderson would never help anyone again.
Hewell returned at the dawn.
He returned at the dawn and he returned alone, and it didn't need the sight of his blood-stained left forearm to tell me why he had returned alone. The three guards by the wire must have been more watchful and more capable than he had imagined, but they hadn't been capable enough. If Hew-ell was worried by his wound, the death of yet another of his men or the murder of three seamen, he hid his worry well. I looked round the faces of the men in the quonset, faces grey and strained and afraid, and I knew I didn't need to spell out for them what had happened. In different circumstances-in very different circumstances-it would have been funny to watch the play of expression on their faces, the utter disbelief that this could be happening to them struggling with the frightening knowledge that it was indeed happening to them. But right there and then it wasn't any strain at all not to laugh.