Then the tent flap was thrown aside and Illya's intense face thrust inside over the muzzle of his automatic. "What happened?"
"That stopped being harmless tourists," said Napoleon, his breath gradually returning. "One of them is now completely harmless, unless he harbored some loathsome disease."
Suzie appeared next to Illya. She looked down in horror. "Oh, Napoleon!" she said. "Did you have to kill him?"
"Probably not. But the only way to have found out would have involved him killing me if I was wrong. And I consider myself more valuable than he was." He stood up and dusted his coat. "What did you find in the other tent?"
"A German sailor named Kurt Schneider, according to our identification expert here. He seems to be drugged. He's unconscious, at any rate, with no signs of injury."
Napoleon looked down at the surviving Egyptian, and nodded. "You have a lot of explaining to do," he said, and placed the still-warm muzzle of his automatic lightly against the back of the man's head. "We have all afternoon, and a boundless interest in hearing your life story in full detail. Now go ahead. Sing for us, Rameses—sing as if your life depended on it."
Chapter 8: "A Message From Space."
Twenty-five hours later it was almost midnight in Manhattan. A special jet had brought a party of five directly from Sydney, pausing to refuel in Hawaii and Los Angeles. They had slept during the trip, and now were alert and functioning again.
Napoleon and Illya shared their places around the conference table with Suzie, on whom the strain of the recent pace of events was beginning to tell. Alexander Waverly faced them across the round table, and had many things to say.
"Five days ago," he began, touching a button and illuminating a screen on the wall behind him, "a large satellite was observed by the Astronomical Tracking Station at Johannesburg. It appears to be the largest artificial object in orbit; I have been told by people whose business it is to know such things that it probably holds over one hundred men, and could easily carry a large number of nuclear or thermonuclear missiles."
A blurred, grainy photograph appeared on the screen—it showed a wheel-like shape with two opposed spokes and a tall hub against a background of stars. Waverly continued:
"It is approximately two hundred and fifty feet across. The tubular body of the satellite is therefore thirty or forty feet in diameter." He paused.
Napoleon looked puzzled. "I would have thought we would have heard about something that big. I take it that it isn't ours?"
"Not only that, Mr. Solo. Apparently it isn't anyone's. Neither the Russians nor the British nor the French have claimed it. The best guess so far is that it may be a Chinese effort, using Russian equipment, but they have made no statement to that effect so far, and this remains at best a doubtful hypothesis."
"It should have taken some time to build something that large," said Illya thoughtfully. "It would have to have been constructed in orbit—it simply is not structurally capable of standing the stresses of a rocket launching."
Napoleon cleared his throat tentatively. "Ah—has anyone thought that it might not have been launched from the Earth?"
Illya started to say, "Oh, really, Napoleon!" but he was cut off.
"Extraterrestrial origin?" Waverly nodded. "The idea has already been offered. It was under serious consideration, in fact, until the nature of the transmission from the Wheel changed, a day and a half ago."
"Changed? How?"
"Before it had merely been sending coded telemetric signals. Now..." Their superior touched another button, and a concealed speaker came to life. They heard the familiar twittering of telemetry, and then a voice began—definitely a human voice. It was male, baritone, and young.
"Saluton, Tera Komandejo," it said. "Jen Spaci-Stacio Unu, sendante sian unuan raporton reen al la Tero. La sipanaro alvenis sur la transport-sipoj sendifekte, kaj ciuj aparatoj ci tie funkcias bonege."
The voice continued in the same language. Suzie looked puzzled. "That sounds like Italian," she said, "but I don't understand it."
"It's Esperanto," said Illya. "An artificial language—the best-known of many. It's spoken and understood all over the world."
"What's he saying?"
"He started by identifying himself as 'Space-Station One,' and this as the first report to Earth, saying the crew had arrived on the shuttle ships safely, and all systems there were functioning perfectly. Now he's talking about the view. He says they're crossing the dawn line over Nepal, and only the peaks of the Himalayas are touched with the sunlight, so they stand out like signal fires against the darkness that still lies in the valleys..."
Waverly touched another button and the voice stopped. "The Wheel has maintained voice transmission approximately two-thirds of the time since. It has all been recorded, and has been subjected to intensive analysis by Section Four. There has been no indication in any of the material of any specific national origin."
He leaned back and fumbled for his pipe. Napoleon, Illya and Suzie sat erect, staring at the projection of the Monster Wheel. Finally Napoleon spoke:
"Do you think the mysterious rocket launching site we're after could be involved in this problem too?"
"There's an ancient saying in my country," said Illya, "to the effect that when you have two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that will fit nowhere else, they may fit together."
"Ancient saying?"
"Comparatively ancient."
Waverly returned to the conversation, having completed his own project, which was now smoldering between his teeth. He took it out, and replaced it with a statement:
"That monstrous wheel represents possibly the greatest threat to the security of the entire world in history. Whoever controls it can control any spot on the surface of the planet except for a few thousand square miles at the poles. From such a stable platform, every major operation can be studied with relatively simple telescopes, and thermonuclear missiles can be placed with a maximum of accuracy and a minimal expenditure of energy. And as long as we don't know who controls it, we remain unable to strike back."
"Couldn't we send a missile up to the Wheel?" asked Suzie.
"They could track it and destroy it at their leisure—and destroy as well its launching site and the nation that launched it."
The two agents considered this for a while. Illya finally spoke: "That seems to leave us with only one choice."
Napoleon nodded. "Find their launching site."
"Exactly," said Waverly. He glanced at Suzie. "And I'm afraid I must insist you do it alone. I understand your personal involvement in this operation, Miss Danz, but this is a job for professional personnel." He turned back to the two men.
"Section Three has filed an interrogation report on your Egyptian trophy. He stood up quite well as far as we dared go with him—gave only his name and nationality, and insisted that his rights under international law were being violated. He was right, of course—they were. We confronted him with the photos we have of the Monster Wheel, though, and they seemed to catch him off balance.