‘It should be checked. It might be a true report.’
‘It might,’ Bethwig agreed, ‘but it would take three days to stand down and restart. We could all be dead by then.’
The second hand was passing forty. ‘You could be dead in seconds if the pump has failed.’
‘Maybe. But the amount of vibration here suggests both turbines are working properly. We’ll soon find out in any…’
A thunderous roar began to grow as the second hand touched sixty, and white light from twenty-one screaming rocket engines flooded the command centre.
The explosion deafened him, and the monstrous rocket shook him like a mouse in the teeth of a cat. Lights blinked on the board, green to red and red to green again, and he closed his eyes, waiting for extinction. The shaking grew as the bellowing was transmitted through the rocket’s fabric until it had become physical pain. He was being crushed; he could not breathe, and he opened his mouth to scream and realised in that instant that the pressure was gravity crushing him as acceleration mounted. He was blind and deaf, wrapped in a cocoon of his own terror, unintelligible voices in his earphones screaming in defiance of the roaring that was filling his head with pain as he lapsed into unconsciousness.
The noise was greater than anything Memling had ever dreamed possible. He pressed his hands to his ears and bowed forward, mouth open in a soundless scream to ease the pain. The rocket engines roared and bellowed and thundered and screamed in every conceivable register, and slowly, gently, the squat tower began to rise on a white column of flame brighter than a welder’s torch. For an instant he had an impression – one that would remain with him for the rest of his life – of the V-10 balancing on a column of pure flame, screaming like all the banshees of hell, rotating slowly about its axis so that one delta-shaped wing appeared from the darkness, shuddered for the merest instant, and was gone. He blinked at the after-image and tilted his head back, but the rocket was already a point of flame in the night sky fleeing through the cloud rack. He lay back flat on the ground then and stared hungrily as the flame grew longer and longer, tipped towards the south-west, and continued to lengthen, flaring into a widening cone that surprised him until he remembered that the gases would expand as the air thinned.
Memling watched the point of flame until it vanished in the thickening cloud and his own tears.
The silence was blessed. As was the absence of vibration and the sensation of motion. Bethwig lay in the couch, mind drifting aimlessly, body exhausted to the point of collapse. His eyes drifted to the chronometer hand, and he groaned as he saw it sweep inexorably to the point marking second-stage ignition. He tensed as the hand passed across the point, and deep in the bowels of the rocket the vibration began again, sound and fury exploding to press him deep against the couch with a huge, padded, smothering hand. The raving went on and on, but the vibration and the screaming were less severe this time and the acceleration was bearable. As he waited for the trial to end he turned his head with difficulty to the tiny view port.
At first he saw nothing but the window itself, and then a brilliant diamond drifted into view. It was a moment before his mind grasped the implication. He was the first human to see a star without the interfering blanket of earth’s atmosphere.
An endless time later something shot past and a bluish haze filled the port while Bethwig’s mind grappled with too many unexpected inputs. It has to be Earth, he thought, has to be; but it was so different from the way he had always pictured it. Where were the continents, the oceans, the clouds? It was all run together in a sapphire mist. He struggled against the restraints, trying to get closer, to see more, before he remembered the buckles, and that recalled him to his senses. Where in hell was he? What had happened? Was he in orbit? These and a thousand other questions nearly overwhelmed him. He closed his eyes to force his mind blank. When he opened them again, the transmission light was winking and someone, von Braun, was shouting into his earphones. He pressed the chin switch and acknowledged.
Memling stubbed his cigarette and carefully buried it in the sand. Old habits, he thought. He stared once more at the launch area, now curiously empty. Water fountained above the launch stand, and steam rose in rolling clouds to the west. The area was still flooded with light, but it seemed as if the entire island had been abandoned. When he turned to the north, he saw that even the dull reddish glow on the horizon from the burning tank farm had died away.
He slung the machine pistol over his shoulder and hesitated. Mankind had, in the midst of its most destructive war, taken its most civilised step towards the future – he hoped to God. Whether Bethwig survived or not made little difference in the long run. The step had been taken, and it could not be denied. Where one man had gone, others had to follow. He glanced upwards, searching for a tiny pinpoint of flame, but the cloud cover was solid to the west. He started to salute, then laughed at himself, turned, and went down the ridge towards the marshes to the south.
Von Braun walled himself off from the clamouring, cheering people by sitting quietly at his desk and staring at the dials and gauges that registered the condition and progress of the rocket. No one dared intrude; he had become an island of despair in the midst of celebration. Even Magnus was standing quietly to the side, watching his brother, not wanting to infringe on a private grief.
Dawn slid silently, inexorably out of the South China Sea and began to slip across the Indochina landmass. Borneo, a faint mixture of browns and greens, was in view on the horizon, and soon the second (stage would fire a final time before being left behind. Australia could have witnessed the event, Franz thought, if anyone had known to look. He had finished the final computations that would regulate the firing, and had pinned the several sheets to the control panel where he could see them, even though the results were as logical and obvious to him as street signs.
He had been sick for a while, but the Dramamine tablets had helped to settle the nausea, even if they had left him drowsy and content to wait and watch the Earth turn beneath. From six hundred and seventy-three kilometres’ altitude, there was no sign that two-thirds of the globe had been mobilised into competing killing machines of which he had, until lately, been a part. His mind shied away from that thought; he had made a pact with himself not to dwell on such subjects. Instead, he watched the splendour of the blue world beyond the port.
Von Braun’s voice woke him. He acknowledged and laughed at the concern in his friend’s voice.
‘Just resting, Wernher, while I still have a few moments. I’ve set the chronometer alarm, and there are two minutes to engine ignition.’
‘Franz, our calculations show you have three minutes twenty-three seconds on my mark… mark! I suggest you recheck your calculations.’
Bethwig chuckled. ‘Have you ever known me to make an arithmetic mistake? What relative speed do you show?’
Von Braun relayed up the information, and Bethwig acknowledged. ‘You see, Wernher, that is the problem. You give me seventy-eight kilometres more than I have. Fifteen minutes ago I took a series of triangulations to measure my actual relative speed, whereas yours are only estimates. The next time, a chain of radar stations with the capability of detecting a spacecraft at several thousand kilometres would be very helpful… we are coming up to the ignition sequence, Wernher. Pardon me for a moment.’
Von Braun started to protest, then stopped. Even though he was troubled by the dreamy quality of Franz’s voice, he realised that as the pilot Bethwig must be the final authority. From nearly seven hundred kilometres’ altitude he could measure his speed quite accurately with the aid of a sextant.