'Take a good look," LeClerc said. "That's all you're here for-to take a good look."
I took a good look. The outer hardened steel casing of the rocket was just that and no more-an outer case. Inside was another casing and the gap between the two was at least five inches.
Directly opposite me, welded on to the inner casing, were two flat steel boxes, about six niches apart and each six inches square. The one to the left, green-painted, bore the legend 'Propellant' and below that the words 'On-Off: the one to the right was a bright pillar-box red in colour, with the words 'Safe' and 'Armed' stencilled in white on the left and right side of the box respectively. On both boxes, just below the top, was a knob-handled switch.
From the foot of both boxes issued flexible armoured cables, with plastic sheathing below the armour-a measure almost certainly designed to protect the underlying electric cables from the tremendous heat which would be generated in flight. The cable to the left, coming from the box marked 'Propellant,' was almost an inch and a half in diameter: the other was half an inch in diameter. The former ran down the inner casing and, about three feet away from the box, split into seven separate cables, each one covered in the same plastic and armour: the latter crossed the gap to the outer casing and disappeared upwards out of sight.
There were two other cables. One, a small half-inch cable, joined the two boxes: the second, two inches in diameter, bridged the gap between the 'Propellant' box and a third box, larger than either of the other two, which was fitted to the inside of the outer wall. This third box had a hinged door facing me, secured by a couple of butterfly nuts: no other electric cables led either to or from it
And that was all that was to be seen. I saw it all in ten seconds. LeClerc looked at me and said: "Got it?" I nodded and said nothing.
"The photographic memory," he murmured cryptically. He closed the door, locked it, pressed the lift button and we hummed upwards again for about six feet. Once more the routine with the key, the opening of a door-much smaller this time, barely two feet in height, the invitation to inspect.
This time there was even less to see. A circular gap in the inner casing, a view beyond the gap of what appeared to be fifteen or twenty round pipes narrowing towards their tips and, in the centre of those pipes, the top of some cylindrical object, about six inches in diameter, which vanished down among the tubes. In the centre of the top of this cylinder was a small hole, less than half an inch across. Attached to the outer casing was an armoured cable of the same dimensions as the one which had issued from the box marked 'Safe' and 'Armed', and it seemed a pretty fair guess that it was the same cable. The end of this cable, which was tipped with a solid copper plug, bent right over and hung slackly downwards in the gap between the outer and inner casings. It seemed logical to suppose that this copper plug was intended to fit into the hole in the central cylinder but here, it would seem, logic would have been in error: the hole in the cylinder was at least four times the size of the narrow copper plug.
LeClerc closed the door, pressed the button, and the lift dropped down to the foot of the gantry. Another door, another key and this time a view of the very base of the rocket, a foot below where the last of the pipes in the inner casing ended. There was no impression of a confusion of pipes here as there had been at the top: everything was mathematically neat and completely' symmetrical, nineteen cylinders all of which seemed to be sealed with a heavy plastic compound, each cylinder about seven inches in diameter, eighteen of them arranged in two concentric circles about an inner core. The cylinders, which completely filled the inner casing, were not entirely smoothsided: at various distances above their lower ends they were smoothly indented in their sides, and those indentations, it was no trick at all to guess, were for the purpose of introducing the leads which hung in an untidy bunch between the two casings. I counted the leads, nineteen in all, breaking out from the seven armoured cables leading from the 'Propellant' box above: a pair of leads from each of three cables, three leads from each of the other three cables and four leads from the remaining cable.
"You have it all, Bentall?" LeClerc asked.
"I have it all," I nodded. It seemed simple enough.
"Good." He closed the door, led the way towards the hangar entrance. "Now to have a look at Fairfield's notebooks, codes and references. At least we were able to save those."
I raised an eyebrow-it was one of the few muscular exercises I could perform without causing myself pain.
"There were some things you couldn't save?"
"The complete set of blue-prints for the rocket. I must confess we did not think that the British would have had the intelligence to take such precautions. They were in the lower half of a sealed metal box-a standard war-tune device, much faster and more foolproof than burning-the top half of which was a glass tank of concentrated hydrochloric with a metal plunger. The plunger was depressed, the glass broken and the acid released before we realised what was happening."
I remembered the captain's bleeding and battered face.
"Good old Captain Griffiths. So now you're completely dependent on having a working model of the rocket, eh?"
"That's so." If LeClerc was worried, he didn't show it. "Don't forget we still have the scientists."
He led me to a hut just beyond the armoury, a hut rather primitively fitted out as an office, with filing cabinets, a typewriter and a plain wooden desk. LeClerc opened the cabinet, pulled out the top drawer and dumped a pile of papers on the table.
"I understand that those are Fairfield's papers, all of them. I'll come back in an hour."
"Two hours at least: probably more."
"I said an hour."
"All right." I rose from the chair where I'd just seated myself and pushed the papers to one side. "Get someone else to work the damn thing out."
He looked at me for a long moment, the slaty milky eyes without expression, then said evenly: "You take very many chances, Bentall."
"Don't talk rubbish." If I couldn't do anything else I could at least sneer at him. "When a man takes chances he can either win or lose. I can't possibly win anything now, and God knows I've nothing to lose."
"You're wrong, you know," he said pleasantly. "There is something you can lose. I can take your life away from you."
"Have it and welcome." I tried to ease the burning pain in my shoulder and arm. "The way I feel right now I'm just about finished with it anyway."
"You have a remarkable sense of humour," he said acidly. Then he was gone, banging the door shut behind him. He didn't forget to turn the key in the lock.
Half an hour passed before I even bothered looking at Fairfield's papers, I'd more important things to think about than those. It was not the most pleasant half-hour of my life. The evidence was all before me now, Bentall with the bunkers off-at last-and I knew the truth, also at last. Counterespionage, I thought bitterly, they should never have let me out of the kindergarten, the wicked world and its wicked ways were far too much for Bentall, if he could put one foot in front of the other without breaking an ankle in the process that was all you could reasonably expect of him. On flat ground, of course. By the time I'd finished thinking, my morale and self-respect had shrunk so much you'd have required an electronic microscope to find them, so I reviewed all that had happened in the hope of discovering one instance where I had been right, but no, I'd a perfect and completely unmarred record, one hundred per cent wrong all along the line. It was a feat that not many people could have matched.