With the eyes of the world upon them, four men leave the surface of the earth to conquer space. Only one person among the crowds who watch is endowed with an inward prescience of what will happen. To watch disaster is no one's wish; to be helpless to avert it is worse. But to be caught up in its horrifying aftermath is something to be avoided at all cost...
Release date:
October 27, 2016
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
97
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The summit of the hill made an ideal grandstand. Rising as it did several hundreds of feet above the plain, there was nothing to obstruct their view of the whitely glaring expanse of barren sand which lay like a fitted carpet from the hills to the dim horizon. A dark strip of tarmac road ribboned out across the whiteness from the north, ending in a cluster of concrete buildings, wire fences, KEEP OUT notices, and queer-looking towers and ramps. Coming swiftly from the west, a helicopter wheeled and landed among the buildings, lost to view. But it was none of these things that held the attention of the watchers on the hill-top two miles distant.
Morgan, Hughie Morgan, of the Record, glanced at his watch and grunted. He was a big man in shirtsleeves, dark glasses and white shoes. The hot sun brought a glisten of sweat to his bulging forehead. “Won’t be long now, boys,” he said. “Gee, will I be glad when they send those ships up and let us loose off here!”
The case-hardened newsmen and photographers around him grinned and went on staring. Their eyes were glued to the two golden pencils that reared from the whiteness of the sand down there beyond the cluster of concrete and iron.
“You figure they’ll ever make it?” queried Mozzen, the wiry little scientific representative from the N.Y. Times.
“Two minutes to go,” mumbled someone else. “Whew, but it’s baking hot in this place!”
“You’re jittery, Mike! Relax.”
“They’ll make it all right, you see! Why, with this new fuel the brains developed there ain’t no limit to where we can go in space! I’m telling you, bud! You watch it and see if I’m wrong!”
“I wouldn’t want to be those guys, all the same,” said another man. “Just imagine being cooped up in one of them shells and shooting off the earth. It’s crazy!”
“Them four fellers are okay, son. You’ll see. They pioneered the Moon voyage, didn’t they?”
“Oh, sure, but …”
“Quiet, Bunny. There’s the Walding girl coming over. You wouldn’t want to scare her, would you?”
She was tall and very willowy and just a shade too good to be true, this Walding girl. She was teamed up to marry Malone, one of the four men down there in the little golden ships that were due to sky very shortly now. The newsmen eyed her appreciatively; she was not exactly hard to look at.
“Hello, boys!” she called gaily. “Get some good shots of the take-off, won’t you?”
“Sure, Miss Walding,” they answered. “How about a few pictures of yourself while we’re waiting? Hold it! Fine!”
A loudspeaker in the background, rigged on a jeep truck, crackled and hummed: “Stand by for the take-off, everyone!” it said. “Fifteen seconds from now!”
The men went quiet, forgetting the Walding girl, shutting out everything else from their minds but those two gleaming pencils that reared to the sky from the sandy plain. Even Fionna Burns felt her pulses quicken. She couldn’t stop the take-off now. It was too late; and the four men sealed in those awful shells were finished. She knew it with all the certainty of instinct, with all the positive knowledge that sprang from her fey Celtic prescience. And yet she had to be here, had to take down her impressions for a gullible public who would read all about it at breakfast tomorrow. And the horror of it was that she herself knew what would happen.…
“Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One…”
Way down there on the white glaring plain the two little pencils quivered in the heat haze. Dust rose all round them, enveloping them in a cloud. Flame grew and blossomed at their bases, lifting them vertically, very, very slowly at first, then with a rapid increase in speed.
The watchers on the hill drew a breath. Even these men who were coldly indifferent to murder except from its news value angle felt a tension surrounding them as they stared at the rising ships. Binoculars were glued to sweat-ringed eyes; palms were sticky with heat and nervous excitement. A man muttered something in the sudden stillness, before the dull roar of the take-off rockets reached them.
Fionna could not help watching. Something infinitely stronger than her own innermost feelings kept her eyes on the twin streaks of fire-trailing gold as they rocketed upwards.
She knew the precise instant at which it would happen. Never before had her uncanny foreknowledge of events brought such a sense of helplessness in its wake. She stole a sidelong glance at the Walding girl standing on the fringe of her field of vision. Tall, supremely elegant, the girl’s eyes were alight with barely concealed excitement. Hers must be a soul that thrived on excitement. The thought crossed Fionna’s mind in a flash. It was a flash that was suddenly echoed and reflected up there in the brilliant sky. At one moment the two ships were dwindling rapidly as they rose. And then they were gone, vanished and wiped out in a vivid splash of fire. It was over. Four men and more than ten million dollars’ worth of equipment were gone. It was just as quick as that.
Fionna shut her eyes tightly, closing out the spreading cloud of grey dust up there in the sky.
The tension broke like an overstrained wire, twanging harshly as it parted, breaking into a clamour of voices, wild conjecture, idiotic questions. It surged about the girl in the same way as the dust cloud in the sky surged raggedly around itself, without pattern or reason. And then the men were running clumsily for their cars, their aircraft, for anything that would take them to a telephone with the news. The photographers struggled with cameras, packed up the gear, took last-minute shots of the ominous cloud that hovered over the white sandy plain below. There was no sense of pity for the ones who had died up there in the golden shells, only an eager desire to be first with the news of the disaster. Someone jostled Fionna in his haste, checked and turned. It was Hughie Morgan, sweating, anxious, but ready enough to give a word of advice.
“I wouldn’t hang around if I were you, kid,” he said. “This is big! You want a lift to town?”
She put her shoulders back, staring past him, thanking him mechanically, shaking her head. “No hurry for me,” she muttered. “I can wait.”
He grunted and bustled off, important, urgent, sticky hot and cursing the climate. And then there were only three of them left on the top of the hill, three lonely figures who chose to stay where they were, scraps of humanity stranded when the tide of newsmen ebbed in a race for the city.
“They’d never have listened, anyway,” whispered Fionna. She shuddered. “Oh, to think I knew it would happen!” She tore her gaze from the drifting dust cloud. It was just a cloud of microscopic particles; steel, magnesium, iron, fuel, and … yes, men as well. Four men she had met and spoken with, drunk a toast to, laughed with a few days before. There’d been a reception and cocktails at the research base. She’d liked them a lot. And she’d known they would die; she’d seen it all so clearly that there could have been no mistake. It had happened before. She knew herself well enough to understand, cursed herself for that uncanny gift which her Celtic parents had handed down all unsuspectingly. There was nothing she could do about it.
She looked across at the other two figures a few yards away. One was the Walding girl; the other a man she had never seen before, a middle-aged man with a small pointed beard and rimless glasses. Both were staring at the dust cloud as if it represented everything that had ever mattered in their lives, as perhaps it had.
Mercedes Walding never cried; she wasn’t the type. But there was a pinched look about her mouth that made her suddenly disagreeable, even ugly.
The man stood rigid, only a hot wind stirring his hair.
Fionna moved slowly towards them, prompted by feelings of sympathy for the other girl. She did not know how to say what was in her mind, yet how could she turn away and leave it all unsaid?
It was Mercedes herself who decided the question. She spun round quickly, nervously almost, facing the other girl. Her head was thrown back, defiant, dry-eyed, cynical in the pain that must even now be growing up in her mind. In her own queer way she’d been in love with a man who had vanished before her eyes, vanished so that nothing but disintegrated particles of dust remained.
“This must be marvellous for you,” she said icily. “You want my reactions, of course? I wondered why you hung around when the others left! Naturally, you’re approaching this from the woman’s angle. Well, you’ll get no sob-stuff from me, if that’s what you’re looking for!” Her eyes were cold and blue and chippy as glacial ice; the sneer on her lips was not pretty to watch.
Fionna moistened her lips, biting back at the quick surge of anger that flared within her.
“You have me wrong, Miss Walding,” she said. “I may be a newspaper woman but I’m human as well. I only wanted to say how sorry I am about your fiancé … being killed.”
The elegant woman curled her lip in a smile. “You can quote me as being sort of hurt about it myself,” she said. “I guess Dirk Malone wouldn’t want me shedding tears in public though—not even for the benefit of the great American Press. Now scram and leave me alone!”
Fionna kept her temper with difficulty. “You’re pretty tough, aren’t you?” she said. “I still mean what I told you. I’m sorry. And that’s off the record, too.” On the point of turning her back and making for her car she hesitated. Then: “It doesn’t matter now, and it couldn’t have helped, but I knew this would happen. I just have to tell you, that’s all. I’m sorry.”
The other girl’s eyes were cold and hard. She took a quick step towards Fionna, then checked as the man with the beard and rimless glasses suddenly grasped her wrist as he reached her side.
“Take it easy, Mercy,” he said. “She doesn’t mean any harm. You’re all strung up right now. Let’s go.” He gave Fionna a penetrating stare as he spoke. She felt as if he was trying to get some message across to her, trying to make her understand something he couldn’t say aloud.
Mercedes shrugged and turned on her heel, walking stiffly away, shaking off the man’s restraining hand. He blinked behind his glasses, moved uncertainly a yard or two and came to a halt again, glancing at Fionna. Mercedes was out of earshot.
“What did you mean, you knew it would happen?” he asked. His voice was low, well-modulated, cultured.
She was sorry she’d spoken now. “Just that,” she replied. “I knew they were going to die. I don’t mean there was sabotage or anything of that sort. It was just … well, it had to be, I suppose. Now it’s over.”
He nodded very slightly, glancing at the disappearing form of Mercedes. “She’s worse hit than she makes out,” he said. “Malone meant a lot to Mercy.” He looked at her squarely. “She’s my secretary, you know. I’m Gavin Garland.” His head jerked up towards the dust cloud that was drifting nearer. “There’s a lot of my work up there as well.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, quietly. “It—hurts.”
“A great many things do in this life.” He eyed her shrewdly. “Do you foresee disasters often, Miss . .?”
“Burns. Fionna Burns. No, not often. Sometimes they aren’t disasters. Nice thi. . .
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