Six hours earlier, in his lab, Maurice Voorhees had his second encounter with the blut kinder—then decided not to tell anyone about it. Finding Kessler gone, and with no one giving him even the vaguest reason why Wolff had taken the soldier away into the forest, it seemed to Voorhees that the better part of valor would be to keep his mouth shut. Speaking about what he knew of future propulsion systems had already gotten him into trouble. Talking about known unknowns might be even worse. What he did know was that Kessler’s unknown phantoms were not only efficient killers but skilled infiltrators as well.
Independently Wolff had come to suspect the same thing. Before he left, he issued a command that the perimeter patrols were to be pulled inward to the vital nerve centers of Nostromo Base. The most efficient use of manpower, logic dictated, was to reduce the overall surface area of the defensive lines, primarily to the three buildings where the final stages of chemical manufacture, sled and rocket testing, and—soon—payload development were racing toward completion.
As an extra precaution against intrusions by the phantoms, there were now four armed observers on the roof of each shed, keeping watch by aid of the latest copies of MI-5’s infrared binoculars. If these creatures were warm-blooded, as Kimura seemed to be convinced, any possibility of them scrabbling unseen, onto or into the buildings, could be eliminated or at least greatly diminished. The premise seemed to be that the apparent cunning and stealth of the night visitors could be counterbalanced by excessive vigilance. Wolff was evidently betting on the superiority of the human mind.
This should have been a good bet. But on the same morning Schr?dinger woke the American prisoner for a trek to the night stalkers’ lair, Voorhees missed the first breakfast call, having worked through the night and even through his shift break. Then, while his machinists were released for breakfast, and as the predawn fog crept in toward high tide, something else came into the warazu compound—undetected.
For several days, virtually all of Voorhees’s thoughts had been concentrated on increasing the range of the Silverbirds. S?nger’s original designs fell short of the efficiencies necessary to overfly their targets, and the new “bottle rocket” boosters, for all their power, were not quite enough to make up the difference. Now Voorhees had the machinists stripping and scraping away every sacrificeable gram of mass from the two space-planes. By doing so he hoped to further extend their range, thus giving their pilots at least some small chance of not having to eject from their ships or letting them crash unguided into mountains, enemy territory, or even the sea.
Reducing mass meant that the pilots would carry neither food nor water; no life rafts, no survival kits—nothing weightier than whatever could be fit into the cushion at the pilot’s back and neck (which would serve double duty as a life vest). Even the backup parachutes had been eliminated, all in the hope of extending flight range, all in the hope that a skid-crash on a friendly runway, with empty fuel tanks, might save the ships. “The Leonidas Maneuver,” he would call it. Reitsch would love that one. Voorhees removed metric tons by stripping out the landing gear, along with its associated bracing and hydraulics. Still . . . each rocket would have fallen short of its safe haven by at least a thousand kilometers. Adding to the difficulties, they were now completely out of materials with which they could manufacture another batch of solid, aluminum-based propellants. Voorhees, however, discovered that he could make up for the shortfall with a newer and very carefully mixed set of chemicals, set into a cowl of tanks, or pods, paired near the tail of each bird. These hypergolic propellant pods were fueled by two substances that so hated the presence of each other that, when combined, their simultaneous combustion provided almost as much thrust as the bottle rocket boosters.
The real problems lay in the extreme toxicity of the two propellants, and in keeping the pilot from being anywhere near them. The fuel had a power to scorch human flesh with a ferocity that reminded him of mustard gas. And that was the milder half of the formula. The fuel oxidizer, if splashed onto a block of ice, would set the ice itself afire.
Nonetheless, Voorhees and S?nger were confident that both components could be safely contained and pumped into the appropriate thrust chambers by a simple throttle control. And so as Colonel Wolff began mapping a secret expedition to the plateau, and as the mother draculae lost her child in a cloud bank of moths, Maurice Voorhees finished testing the leakproof construction of the final propellant tank. Now S?nger’s rocket bombers would reach their destinations.
Such simplicity, he thought, with a distinctly prideful feeling. I could fly this craft my—
Voorhees realized that he was no longer alone.
At first, there had been an inexplicable sense of calm, but immediately, a part of his mind screamed out to him, that the sudden intensity of a deep, penetrating peace was thoroughly unnatural in a place like this.
GENTLE
His gloved hand relaxed, and slipped down a notch against a helium nozzle that supplied pressure to the test equipment.
Voorhees turned his head; despite what his other senses were detecting, among them the out-of-place scent of gardenias, his eyes were showing him that he still appeared to be alone.