Jeff Sutton (8 page)

He
mentally reviewed the scene a hundred times. He would do this and this and that
He rehearsed each step, each operation, each fleeting second in which all the
long years of planning would summate in victory or disaster. He was the X in
the equation in which the Y-scale was represented by the radar altimeter. He
would juggle speed, deceleration, altitude, mass and a dozen other variables,
keeping them in delicate balance. Nor could he forget for one second the
hostile architecture of their destination.

For all practical purposes Arzachel was a
huge hole sunk in the moon—a vast depression undoubtedly broken by rocks,
rills, rough lava outcrops. The task struck him as similar to trying to land a
high-speed jet in a well shaft. Well, almost as bad.

He
tried to anticipate possible contingencies, formulating his responses to each.
He was, he thought, like an actor preparing for his first night. Only this
time there would be no repeat performance. The critics were the gods of chance
in a strictly one-night stand.

Cotch
was the man who had placed him here. But the responsibility was all his. GotchI
All he gave a damn about was the moon—a chunk of real estate scorned by its
Maker. Crag bit his Hp ruefully. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, boy, he
thought. You asked for it—practically begged for it
Now
you've got it

By the end of the second-day the novelty of
space had worn off. Crag and Frochaska routinely checked the myriad of
instruments jammed into the faces of the consoles: Meteorite impact counters,
erosion counters, radiation counters—counters of all kinds. Little numbers on
dials and gauges that told man how he was faring in the wastelands of the
universe. Nagel kept a special watch on the oxygen pressure gauge. Meteorite
damage had been one of Gotch's fears. A
hole
the size
of a pinhead could mean eventual death through oxygen loss, hence Nagel seldom
let a half-hour pass without checking the readings.

Crag
and Frochaska spelled each other in brief catnaps. Larkwell, with no duties to
perform, was restless. At first he had passed long hours at the viewports,
uttering exclamations of surprise and delight from time to time. But sight of
the ebony sky with its fields of strewn jewels had, in the end, tended to make
him moody. He spent most of the second day dozing.

Nagel kept busy prowling through the oxygen
gear, testing connections and making minor adjustments. His seeming concern
with the equipment bothered
Crag,
The narrow escape
with the time bomb had robbed him of his confidence in the crew. He told himself
the bomb could have been planted during the last security shakedown. But a
"sleeper" in security seemed highly unlikely. So did a
"sleeper" in the Aztec.
Everyone
of them, he
knew, had been scanned under the finest security microscope almost from birth
to the moment each had climbed the tall ladder leading to the space cabin.

He
covertly watched Nagel, wondering if his prowling was a form of escape, an
effort to forget his fears. He was beginning to understand the stark reality of
Nagel's terror. It had been rnirrored in his face, a naked, horrible dread,
during the recent emergency.
No .
.
he
wasn't the saboteur type.
Larkwell, maybe.
Perhaps Frochaska.
But not Nagel.
A
saboteur would have iron nerves, a cold, icy fanaticism that never considered
danger. But supposing the man were a consummate actor, his fear a mask to
conceal his purpose?

He
debated the pros and cons. In the end he decided it would not be politic to
forbid Nagel to handle the gear during flight He was, after all, their oxygen
equipment specialist. He contented himself with keeping a sharp watch on
Nagel's activities—a situation Nagel seemed unmindful of. He seemed to have
lost some of his earlier fear. His face was alert, almost cheerful at times;
yet it held the attitude of watchful waiting.

Despite
his liking for Frochaska, Crag couldn't forget that he had failed to find the
time bomb in a panel he had twice searched. Still, the console's complex maze
of wiring and tubes had made an excellent hiding place. He had to admit he was
lucky to have found it himself. He tried to push his suspicions from his mind
without relaxing his vigilance. It was a hard job.

By the third day the enemy missile had become
a prime factor in the things he found to worry about. The intruder rocket had
drawn closer. Alpine warned that the race was neck and neck. It had either
escaped earth, at a higher speed or had continued to accelerate beyond the
escape point. Crag regarded the reason as purely academic. The hard fact was
that it would eventually overtake the still decelerating Aztec Just now it was
a pip on the analog, a pip which before long would loom as large as Drone Able,
perhaps as close. He tried to assess its meaning, vexed that Alpine seemed to
be doing so little to help in the matter.

Later
Larkwell spotted the pip made by the East's rocket on the scope. That let the
cat out of the bag as far as Crag was concerned. Soberly he informed them of
its origin, Larkwell bit his hp thoughtfully. Nagel furrowed his brow,
seemingly lost in contemplation. Prochaska's expression never changed. Crag
assessed each reaction. In fairness, he also assessed his own feeling toward
each of the men. He felt a positive dislike of Nagel and
a
positive liking for Pro-chaska. Larkwell was a neutral. He seemed to be
a
congenial, open-faced man who wore his feelings in plain sight. But
there was
a
quality about him which, try as he
would,
he could not put his finger on.

Nagel,
he told himself, must have plenty oa-the ball After all, he had passed through
a tough selection board. Just because the man's personality conflicted with his
own
was no grounds
for suspicion. But the same
reasoning could apply to the others. The fact remained—at least Gotch seemed
certain— that his crew numbered a ringer among them. He was mulling it over
when the communicator came to life. The message was in moon code.

It came
slowly, widely spaced, as if Gotch realized Crag's limitations in handling the
intricate cipher system evolved especially for this one operation. Learning it
had caused him many a sleepless night He copied the message letter by letter,
his understanding blanked by the effort to decipher it. He finished,
then
quickly read the two scant lines:

"Blank
channel to Alp unless survival need."

He
studied the message for a long moment. Cotch was telling him not to contact
Alpine Base unless it
were
a life or death matter.
-Not that everything connected with the operation wasn't a life or
death matter,
he thought grimly. He decided the message was connected
with the presence of the rocket now riding astern and to one side of the Aztec
and her drone. He guessed the Moon Code had been used to prevent possible
pickup by the intruder rather than any secrecy involving his own crew.

He
quiedy passed the information to Prochaska. The Chief listened, nodding, his
eyes going to the analog.

According
to his computations, the enemy rocket—Prochaska had dubbed it Bandit—would
pass abeam of Drone Able slighdy after they entered the moon's gravitational
field, about 24,000 miles above the planet's surface. Then what? He pursed his
hps vexedly. Bandit was a factor that had to be considered, but just how he
didn't know. One thing was certain. The East knew about the load of uranium in
Crater Arzachel. That, then, was the destination of the other rocket. Among the
many X unknowns he had to solve, a new X had been added; the rocket from behind
the Iron Curtain. Some-thing
,to4d
him this would be
the biggest X of all.

CHAPTER 7

If Colonel
Michael Cotch were worried, he didn't show it
He puffed complacently on his black briar pipe watching and listening to the
leathery-faced man across from him. His visitor was angular, about sixty, with
gray-black hair and hard-squinted eyes. A livid scar bit deep into his
forehead; his mouth was a cold thin slash in his face. He wore the uniform of a
Major General in the United States Air Force. The uniform did not denote the
fact that its wearer was M.I.—Military, Intelligence. His name was Leonard
Telford.

"So
that's Jhe way it looks," General Telford was saying. "The enemy is
out to get Arzachel at all costs. Failing that, they'll act to keep us from
it."

"They wouldn't risk
war," Gotch stated calmly.

"No,
but neither would we. That's the damnable part of it," the General agreed.
"The next war spells total annihilation. But for that very reason they
can engage in sabotage and hostile acts with security of knowledge that we
won't go to war. Look at them now—the missile attack on the Aztec, the time
bomb plant, the way they operate their networks right in our midst.
Pure audacity.
HelL they've even got an agent
en route
to the moon.
On our rocket
at that."

The
Colonel nodded uncomfortably. The presence of a saboteur on the Aztec
represented a bungle in his department. The General was telling him so in a
not too gende way.

"I
seem to recall I was in Astrakhan myself a few years back," he reminded.

"Oh, sure, we build pretty fair networks
ourselves," the General said blandly. He looked at Gotch .and a rare smile
crossed his face. "How did you like the dancing girls in Gorik's, over by
the shore?"

Gotch
looked startled, then grinned.
"Didn't know you'd ever
been that far in, General."

"Uh-huh, same time you
were."

"Well, 111
be
damned," Gotch breathed softly. There was a note of respect in his voice.
The General was silent
for
a moment.

"But the Caspian's hot now."

"Meaning?"

"Warheads—with the name Arzachel writ large across the
nose
cones."
He eyed Gotch obliquely. "If we secure Arzachel first, theyTl
blow it off the face of the moon." They looked at each other silently.
Outside a jet engine roared to life.

The moon filled the sky. It was gigantic,
breath-taking, a monstrous sphere of cratered rock moving in the eternal silence
of space with ghostly-radiance, heedless that a minute
mote
bearing alien life had entered its gravitational field. It
moved in
majesty along its orbit some 2,300 miles
every
hour,
alternately approaching to within 222,000
miles of its
Earth
Mother, retreating to over
252,000 miles measuring its
strides by
some
strange cosmic clock.

The
Apennines, a rugged mountain range jutting
20,000 feet
above
the
planet's surface, was
clearly visible.
It
rose
near the Crater
Eratosthenes,
ru
nnin
g
northwest some 200
miles to form the
southwest boundary of Mare Imbriurn. The
towering
Leibnitz and Dorfel Mountains were visible
near
the edge of the
disc. South along the tenninator, the border
between night
and day,
lay
Ptolemaeus, Alphons, and Ar
zachel.

Crag
and
Prochaska studied its
surface, picking out the
flat areas which
early
astronomers had mistaken for seas
and which still
bore
the names of seas. The giant enclosure Clavius,
the
lagoon-like Plato and ash-strewn Copernicus held their attention. Crag
studied the north-south line along which Arzachel lay, wondering again if they
could seek out such a relatively small area in the jumbled, broken, twisted
land beneath
them.

At
some 210,000 miles from earth the Aztec had
decel
erated
to a little over 300 miles per hour. Shortly
after en
tering
the
moon's gravisphere it
began to accelerate again.
Crag studied
the
enemy rocket riding astem. It would be al
most abreast them in short time, off to one
side of the silver drone. It, too, was accelerating.