Yamane spun around and stumbled toward the exit, nearly tripping over his own feet as he went. Why am I running? he thought, realizing that a part of him actually wanted to remain.
For a moment, the “woodshed” was flooded with light as the outer door swung open, but the sound of a bolt slamming home brought back the darkness, concealing the room and its secrets.
In a far corner, near the ceiling, there was a brief flutter and the black shape was gone.
On the floor of his cell, R. J. MacCready opened his eyes. He blinked several times, in a vain attempt to focus.
“Th-Th-Th-Th-That’s all, folks!” came a voice from the farthest cell. It was followed by muffled laughter.
Mel Blanc? What the hell is he doing here? MacCready thought, just before he slipped back into unconsciousness.
Colonel Gerhardt Wolff did not know much about Dr. Kimura’s bloodstained history, nor did he care. His only concerns were that Kimura’s team had brought with it, first by supply submarine, then overland, the tools necessary for the refinement of biological weapons and (just as important) the components for bombs capable of dispersing these pathogens from S?nger’s Silverbirds.
But Wolff, a trained microbiologist himself, knew from the start that there would be questions—serious questions.
Were the modified strains of anthrax and bubonic plague Kimura had brought with him anything more than psychological weapons? And if not, how many people would the bombs actually kill?
Then there were the rockets themselves and the strange sleds that would launch them along the monorail. Would they even work? And now, thanks to the trigger-happy missile crew, would there be enough time to launch them?
Wolff was still furious that his men had shot down an Allied reconnaissance plane that morning. The woman test pilot, Hanna Reitsch, had been present during the attack, and, initially at least, he suspected that she might have encouraged it. Apparently, though, the entire incident had been an accident—“a glitch in the technology.”
“The missile launched the second we placed it on standby,” the crew chief claimed. “Once the Wasserfall was airborne, we took down the target, rather than have the enemy pinpoint our position.”
Although Wolff had to admit that it was a plausible explanation, he gave no hint of this as the chastened and grim-looking missile crew stood before him. Accident or not, the entire mission had been jeopardized.
“Your actions will of course trigger a larger Allied probe into the region,” Wolff had told them—men he might have imprisoned or even executed had they been standing on German soil.
But they were far from Germany and killing his own men would only have deepened the dread that was already settling over Nostromo Base like a shroud. It was a dread that had little to do with their mission or an accidental missile firing. It was a dread that had everything to do with the mysterious deaths of several of his men, deaths now being referred to as “blood-drainings.”
Something that struck Wolff as particularly odd was the reaction of the local Indians they’d bribed into helping them. He knew that some of his new employees spent their leisure time skinning captives from opposing tribes with their obsidian blades.
But the “hired help” had not killed his men and although they feigned indifference to the blood-draining deaths, Wolff could tell that these residents of Hell’s Gate were not only terrible liars, they were frightened. Badly frightened.
They have seen this before, the Colonel concluded. It’s not just a ghost story to them. I can see it in their eyes.
Wolff was reasonably confident that the rocket men could get the Silverbirds to fly, dropping multiple warheads from the unassailable “high ground” of space. The problem was getting the rockets away before their location was discovered, while assuring that their payloads were sufficiently deadly. Now, however, there was a new problem; the insufferably talkative S?nger had let it slip that his protégé might be losing his focus on the mission at hand.
The colonel headed off angrily to the large, climate-controlled hangar where Eugen S?nger and Maurice Voorhees were working on their rockets.
Colonel Wolff strode into the hangar followed, as always, by Sergeant Schr?dinger, who closed the door, then stood in front of it. Wolff collected himself and approached the younger scientist.
“How long was it that you studied in New York?” he asked in his calmest voice.
“Two years,” replied Voorhees, who was squatting next to an assemblage of steel and wiring.
Wolff moved to his own desk and began writing in his mission log. “And for the record,” he looked up and asked, trying to project a calming smile, “while you were there, did you ever encounter Harold Urey?”
Now the young rocketeer straightened and turned toward the colonel. “I did. He was a visiting professor.”