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Title: The railhead at Kysyl Khoto
Author: Allen Kim Lang
Release date: October 5, 2023 [eBook #71814]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1957
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RAILHEAD AT KYSYL KHOTO ***
The Railhead at Kysyl Khoto
By Allen K. Lang
Illustrated by SCHOENHERR
_"Kysyl. Railhead. K. E. Ziolkovsky.
5000 meters/second. Luna." That was the
entire message. But its meaning made
White Sands look pretty trivial, and
turned a rocket engineer into a salesman!_
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity November 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I've been told that during the season of the simoom winds in Morocco,
Arab judges let confessed murderers off with a fine. The weather
justifies homicide. Washington judges should be as lenient in the
summer, I thought, scooting on the contours of my chair to keep the
seat of my pants from sweating into the varnish. Ten bucks and costs
seemed a fair price to pay society if I killed this Doctor Francis von
Munger.
My cigarettes had become limp and brown with the sweat through my
shirt. I eased one of these unappetizing noodles out of the pack and
lit it. It tasted like burning, damp wool stockings. I picked up an
ancient magazine to keep from staring at the blonde receptionist, the
only object in the waiting room upon which the eye could rest with
comfort.
I'd viewed all the cartoons without smiling and was working my way
through the ads when the blonde peeked over my magazine. "Dr. von
Munger will see you now, Dr. Huguenard," she said.
"Damn right he will!" I growled, slapping the magazine down and
trailing the blonde into the holy of holies. Inside, an efficient young
woman sat behind an efficient steel desk. She looked insultingly cool.
"How much of von Munger's typewriter pool do I have to work through
before I get to see the great man in the flesh?" I demanded of the
cool-looking redhead.
"Have a cigar, Dr. Huguenard," the girl said, tipping a cylindrical
humidor my way. "And sit down," indicating the chair that squatted
beside her desk. "I've got news for you, Huguenard. I'm von Munger. The
first name is Frances, with an 'e.' Makes all the difference."
I accepted the cigar, crushed my wool-sock cigarette in the ash-tray,
and leaned back silent to indicate my availability for further
astonishments.
"I suppose you wonder why you were sent here," she began.
I murmured something about Washington's being delightful to visit in
mid-June, whatever the occasion might be. She ignored this subtlety.
"We've needed a rocket engineer in Economic Analysis for some time,"
she said. "Recent developments have made your employment here
imperative."
I lit the cigar slowly. "I'd been led to believe that our work at White
Sands was important, too," I said through my smoke.
Von Munger looked as put out as though I'd belched during the
invocation at an ambassadorial tea party. She took a deep breath--a
pretty process, despite the mannish suit she was wearing--and launched
into her sales talk. "Dr. Huguenard, our work here in the Commerce
Department's Special Bureau of Economic Analysis is the most important
work in the world. If a war is fought, we will win it. If that war is
prevented, we will have prevented it."
I'd seen this sort of megalomania displayed by chiefs of paperwork
before, but never in a more acute form. I smiled. This little redhead
obviously saw herself as a sort of benign Lucrezia Borgia, erecting a
fortress of filing-cabinets around the American Way.
"I'm glad you smiled, Dr. Huguenard," she said. "I was afraid that your
face was all scar-tissue, and just wouldn't bend."
"You're pretty, too," I snarled. The damp heat had leached the last
vestiges of chivalry from my soul. "Get on with your pitch, will you?
I want to turn your job down and get back to my air-conditioned lab in
New Mexico."
"Give me five minutes to persuade you to stay," she said, making a
steeple with her fingertips and resting the steeple against her chin.
I checked my wrist watch.
"The S.B.E.A. is responsible for a special type of strategic
intelligence," she said. "We are analyzing the economic processes of
the USSR."
"I am familiar with the multiplication table," I said. "Otherwise,
I don't see how I can be of use to you. My specialty is rocket-fuel
injection systems. I'd dearly love to get back to that."
"You're cutting into my three hundred seconds of grace, Doctor
Huguenard," she protested.
I sucked bitterly on the cigar she'd given me. "Okay," I sighed through
the smoke. "Continue, Professor."
"Money, to a nation, is like blood to a man," she said. "This is
true even in Russia's manipulative economy. Were you to trace the
movement of blood through the human body, you'd soon know its every
tissue. Just so, by tracing the flow of wealth through the USSR, we
can discover precisely what's going on over there. We have overt means
of observation, such as the Soviet studies published in _Industriia_,
_Sovetskaya Metallurgiia_, _Voprosy Ekonomiki_, and other journals; and
we have our clandestine sources as well."
"Do you read Russian?" I asked, feeling a little more respect for this
miss with the PhD.
"Russian, Polish, German, and French," she said impatiently. "I was
born in Gdansk, _née_ Danzig, a community where being a polyglot is
simple self-preservation. But I'd best get on. My time is running low."
"Take ten minutes," I said grandly. "Fifteen. But where do I come in?"
* * * * *
She lit a cigarette and went on. "This office is concerned with the
economic processes taking place within the Tuvinian Autonomous Region
of the RSFSR, an area that makes the Dakota Bad Lands look like Miami
Beach. The capital city of this region is Kysyl Khoto. We have a
tourist there."
"Tourist?" I asked.
"A covert source of information," Dr. von Munger explained. "If I keep
giving you secrets, you'll have to stay here."
"I know all about this cloak-and-dagger stuff," I told her. "I read
'The Gold Bug' when I was twelve."
"Our informant recently transmitted this message," she said, handing
me a sheet of paper. On it were typewritten six Russian words and a
number. I'd remembered enough from my Conversational Russian 101 to
coax this Cyrillic puzzle into English. "Kysyl," I read aloud. "That
must be a proper name. Railhead. K. E. Ziolkovsky. 5000 meters/second.
Luna." I handed the paper back to the good-looking Dr. von Munger. "The
boy who sent this note takes the brass cup for brevity. What's it all
mean?"
"_Luna_ is in Russian what it was in Latin," she explained, just in
case I'd missed that point. "Do you know who Ziolkovsky was?"
"Sure," I said. "Konstantin Edouardovitch Ziolkovsky hatched the notion
of spaceships, back about 1900. The Reds must be naming their bird in
his honor. Dr. von Munger, you're beginning to get through to me." I
took the paper back from her to check it. "Five thousand meters per
second. If that's delivered exhaust-velocity, the mass-ratio would
be twenty-six lifted for one delivered. They must be using ozone to
get that. If they're using ozone, they've got an inhibiter to hold it
stable. If this all means what it seems to, they can make the moon in
two steps. And it's about time someone did."
Dr. von Munger shook her head. "I'm happy that you derive so great
a pleasure from the notion of a flight to the moon," she said, "but
you're forgetting that this rocket belongs to the Russians. They won't
be inviting any of us Yankees to join them in admiring the view from
the rim of Copernicus. We'll be looking up, Dr. Huguenard. They'll
be looking down at us, on a five-to-one power gradient. That'll put
your Intercontinental Ballistic Missile out in the woodshed behind the
washboard, won't it?"
"Have you reported to the boys in blue?" I asked.
"Not yet," she said. "My chief agrees that we need a rocket specialist
to evaluate what we have. That's where you came in from New Mexico,
dragging your feet every inch of the way. The chief has given us
two weeks to prepare a dossier on the _Konstantin Edouardovitch
Ziolkovsky_. Two weeks from now, Dr. Huguenard, you're to have the
plans for that ship ready for the Joint Chiefs of Staff."
"I couldn't blueprint a row-boat in that short a time," I said. "Not if
I had to work on guesses."
"They're intelligent guesses, Doctor," she reminded me. "I've got
figures for every ton of rail freight shipped from Krasnoyarsk to
Abakan, figures sweated out of official Soviet publications. All you've
got to do is take the information I give you and use it to build a
paper rocket. Okay?"
I nodded doubtfully. "With information like this, it shouldn't be
hard to get the JCS flapping their shoulder-boards like taxiing
gooney-birds. This should scare 'em good. It scares me."
"With good reason, Dr. Huguenard," she said.
Pretty girl, I thought. Huguenard, you're a hot-tempered, couthless
dog to come in bullying this chick the way you did. "Since we're on
the same job now," I said in my best oil-on-the-waters tone, "you may
as well call me Frank. Saves syllables. And while we're chumming it
up, Dr. von Munger, how's about having dinner with me this evening? We
should be able to find an air-conditioned restaurant in this swamptown."
"Thank you, Frank," she said. "You may call me Frances. And I'll have
dinner with you, thank you. In the cafeteria downstairs. We'll be
working late every evening for the next two weeks." She nodded, pressed
the button that popped the blonde in from the reception room, and
smiled in a way that suggested that she'd next smile when my complete
report lay on her desk.
The blonde took me in tow to a desk equipped with a file-drawer full of
Russian-language clippings, folders marked SECRET, and my own
little safe to keep these goodies in. I had a shelf of Russian-English
dictionaries and an adding machine to help me bring chosmos out of
chaos. The files looked like a well-stirred newspaper morgue. In
Russian, yet. After the blonde had left I noticed that my desk, too,
had a button mounted to one side. I pushed it experimentally. The
blonde reappeared. I waved my hand at the clippings on my desk. "Will I
have any help in translating this stuff?" I asked her. "My Russian is
of the 'Hands up! Me American!' variety."
"I'm to help you with that," the blonde told me. "Just call for
me--Joyce--when you've got something you can't make out. I used to be a
UN interpreter." She smiled and left me to my sorrows.
I felt like a dirty cigar-smoking male illiterate. Probably half
the stenos here had been engineers at Peenemunde. I needed a dumb
girl-friend, I decided, just to protect me from the acute inferiority
feelings these distaff Einsteins were giving me. I soothed my ego by
going to work.
I began with the journal-clippings. Most of these had little tags
attached, giving in English translation abstracts of material dealing
with the Tuvinian Autonomous Region. There was a detail map of Kysyl
Khoto, complete with the names of the bars the engineers drank their
vodka in. I had notes on how many pounds of Turkish tobacco (1,250) had
been used there in 1955, and how many bathtubs shipped there that year
(714). I wondered how many of those bathtubs they'd have aboard the
_Konstantin Edouardovitch Ziolkovsky_. Let 'em take showers, I decided.
* * * * *
By the end of the week I'd sifted the information I thought pertinent
to the _KEZ_ from the incidental chaff of Tuvinian life, like those
bathtubs. This whole business was like juggling invisible balls.
The very fact that Kysyl Khoto had been reached by a spur track of
the Yuzsib Railroad had been lifted from only two lines in _Stal's_
midsummer issue, supported, of course, by the laconic note of Dr. von
Munger's mysterious Central Asian correspondent.
A two-step rocket was the thing to build, that was evident from
the reported exhaust-velocity. That lozone--liquid ozone, one and
two-thirds as much fuel per cubic foot as garden variety liquid
oxygen--was the oxidizer seemed a good bet. What was the fuel? Hydrogen
could give 5000 mps, but would be almost impossibly tricky to use with
ozone. Hydrazine seemed a better bet. There were memos on several tons
of nitric acid being shipped from Krasnoyarsk to Abakan to Kysyl Khoto,
together with a batch of nitrate fertilizers ostensibly bound for the
"Golden Fleece" Kolkhoz at Kara-buluk. I wondered what they raised on
that collective farm. The sort of crops that grow best at White Sands,
I imagined. With a lot of ammonia and a passel of electricity, they
could simmer out hydrazine where they were going to use it.
I designed the fuel tanks necessary to pay the way to the moon in
hydrazine and lozone, then sketched a ship around them. Two stages, as
I'd decided. Here a serious discrepancy came in. I had more steel, more
wolfram, more of everything than the _KEZ_ could possibly need. I took
the problem to my pretty boss, glad for the chance to visit.
"It would seem," Frances said, looking over my notes, "that they've
shipped enough material to Kysyl Khoto to build three ships. Let's
assume that they're doing just this. It's one way to get home from the
moon, I should think. They'll send three ships there, each carrying
enough extra fuel to drive one of them back to Earth after they've
planted the flag and geigered around a bit. Or possibly they intend
setting up a permanent station there."
"It seems to me that we're whistling up a lot of smoke from this little
fire," I protested. "We don't know the material they're using to keep
the rocket-throats from melting. The notes on rail-shipments from
Krasnoyarsk mention ceramics. I don't think that's detailed enough to
work into a bogeyman to scare the JCS." I reached over her desk to
swipe a cigar from her cylinder, remarking, "It's nice of you to keep
these on hand, seeing as you smoke Kools."
"Got to keep the staff happy," Frances smiled.
"Let's be making more of an effort," I suggested. "How's about that
dinner tonight? It's Saturday, you know."
"All right, Frank." She jotted her address on a corner of an empty
CONFIDENTIAL coversheet and handed it to me. "Eight o'clock,"
she said.
I went back to work refreshed by the prospect of an extramural session
with the shapely Dr. Frances von Munger.
* * * * *
It proved an interesting evening. Despite her polyglot propensities
and monumental economic erudition, Frances von Munger had never drunk
a negroni cocktail, never cracked a lobster. Later I discovered that
she danced as though she'd heard of the art, but had never practiced
it before. So mostly we sat and talked. We swapped genealogies and
reminisced over our school days. Frances had been the only girl in
a class of boy engineers at a fresh-water college in Indiana, I
discovered. She'd got her B. S. in Mechanical before she'd gone to
Chicago to study economics. I grinned sheepishly at this, remembering
the times I'd explained my simple math procedures to her as though
she'd been a dewy-eyed home-economics girl. "But why did you drop
engineering?" I wanted to know.
"It wasn't going anywhere," she said. A cryptic statement, but I left
it alone.
Well, I took the boss home and kissed her goodnight; and hummed Verdi
overtures in the taxi all the way home. In the morning, of course,
she'd be the same schoolmarmish dame she'd always been, the government
girl in the gray flannel suit. Decorative, but distant.
* * * * *
Back at my cluttered desk the next morning, facing the medley of
newspaper clippings and half-baked hypotheses that represented my
contribution to Economic Analysis (spaceship division), I felt a cold
wave of panic. In six days I'd have to stand at a table decked by
admirals and generals, and expose this flimsy structure of Sunday work
to their merited contempt.
I tugged out my file marked _Propulsion System_ and leafed through
it. I was as clever as that Dutch paleontologist who'd reconstructed
the greater blue-eyed auk from a single petrified tail-feather. I'd
shuffled a mess of inferences taken from the journals of a nation not
too celebrated for guilelessness, dropped them in a hat, and pulled out
a spaceship by the ears. For all I knew, really knew, the Reds could
be propelling the _KEZ_ with twisted rubber bands.
I was supposed to be building the ship the way I'd build it--if I had
the gear delivered by that overworked railhead at Kysyl Khoto, if I
were a Russian-trained engineer, if I had my ear at the Kremlin's
keyhole and my hand in its till, and if our intelligence wasn't a
fiction born of paperwork. OK. Back into the desk went the _Propulsion_
file while my keen engineering mind relaxed by considering the
dimensions of Dr. Frances von Munger. After a while I got out the old
copy of _Das Marsprojekt_ and finagled its statistics to make them fit
a mere hop to the moon. Since my presentation wasn't intended to be
operational, I'd decided, it might as well be artistic.
My half-hour with the JCS was a day away when I came down with acute
cold feet up to the knees. I went to see Frances for encouragement and
to scrounge a cigar. "Let's not kid ourselves," I told her. "Those
brass hats are clever. Why don't we just turn over the facts to them,
let their Intelligence take over? I'd like to stay with the _KEZ_
research, but I'd also like more and tighter facts. What are the
throats of the rockets made of? What fuel are they using, for sure? If
they've decided on ozone, how do they keep it from exploding every
time a commissar sneezes? Frances, let's just hand my scrapbooks to the
Air Force and let it fill in the blank pages. I hate to present this
comic book continuity I've got as a serious extrapolation from known
facts."
"Sit down, Franklin," she said, handing me the cigar I'd come for.
"You're a babe in the woods so far as Intelligence is concerned--that's
with a capital 'I', Frank."
"Thank you, teacher."
"I want the military to take this Ziolkovsky thing and shake it till it
falls into shape. But they won't, Frank. Not unless we persuade them
that it's important. That's what you're doing, window-dressing to make
the big brass buy this and stamp it high-priority. If they had what
we've worked from, it would get a 'D' rating. They'd set to work on it
once the definitive study of Kirghiz folk-dancing was done. They'd give
it to a second Lieutenant to play with Wednesday afternoons and forget
it."
"But you think your opinion that the Russians have a spaceship
squatting somewhere in the Altais is justification for your twisting a
haggle of admirals around your pretty finger?"
"I have a feeling for Intelligence work," she said. "This is hot,
Frank. Get back to your desk and plan a drawing of the _KEZ_. Better
yet, sketch a model of the beast. We'll have one built for you to
stand on the table as you talk tomorrow. It will give you confidence."
"Now I'm a confidence man."
"In good cause, Frank. Tomorrow, after you've made your presentation
to the JCS, we'll have dinner together to celebrate. At my place."
At this last prospect, I went back to work with spirits refreshed as no
five-cent drink can refresh them.
* * * * *
I was a minor event on the schedule of JCS interviews. Half an hour,
from twelve till twelve-thirty, they'd given me. I hoped I'd spoil
their appetites for lunch. My model of the _Konstantin Edouardovitch
Ziolkovsky_, its lacquer still a little tacky, bulged my briefcase.
I had to persuade a Marine lieutenant that it wasn't a bomb I was
carrying before he'd let me into the conference room.
There were maps on the walls, covered with gray dustsheets as though
even the face of Mother Earth was being protected as an American
secret. The High Air Force were smoking cigars; the High Navy ran
more to pipes; while the Army's big wheels burned nervous yards of
cigarettes. Two Waves sat at opposite corners of the big table, their
fingers poised for slow dances over their Stenotype key-boards. The
brass regarded me, as craggy-faced as though I were suspected of giving
Uncle Nikita the keys to Fort Knox. I opened my briefcase, set the
model on the floor, and launched into my story.
"You've doubtless heard echoes through channels of recent activity in
the Tuvinian Division of the Commerce Department's Special Bureau of
Economic Analysis," I began.
"Until three weeks ago I was employed at White Sands as an engineer on
Project Gargantua. I was transferred to TD/SBEA/DC to make evaluation
of information which may make Project Gargantua obsolete." I knew I had
my audience when an Air Force general dropped his cigar.
"As you know, the highest peak of the Altai Mountains is 15,000 feet
tall, high enough to be of help in rocket research. The capital city
of the Tuvinian Autonomous Region is Kysyl Khoto. This city has only
recently become involved in industrial activity.
"Analysis of the materials being shipped to Kysyl Khoto, together with
specific information furnished from covert sources, leads us to believe
that this activity is concerned with rocket research.
"Our tentative conclusion is that the Soviets have several large rocket
ships in construction there. One of these, named the _Konstantin
Edouardovitch Ziolkovsky_, is intended to reach the moon. The reported
exhaust-velocity makes it very likely that they will succeed within
the next three years." I lifted the model of the _KEZ_ and set it on
the table so that the big red star on its middle was conspicuous. "Our
time has been too short and our information too slight to allow me to
give you details. Nevertheless, the Russians undoubtedly are building a
spaceship."
General Turner, USAF, who'd been a _Time_ cover boy several times,
tamped a cigarette on the table. "Exactly how much of this model is
guesswork, Dr. Huguenard?" he demanded.
"Ninety-five percent," I said. "There's a lot of room for worry in that
five percent that's left, though. I hardly think the Russians can have
been so devious as to have planted false leads in several hundred of
their own journals."
The Chairman nodded. "That will be all, Dr. Huguenard," he said. "I
expect we'll be calling upon you later."
That parting note had an ominous ring, I thought, carrying my toy
spaceship past the Marine guard. Would they bring handcuffs along next
time?
* * * * *
My desk at the office had been emptied. I leaned on the button to buzz
Joyce, my blonde interpreter. "We were given an order by the Secretary
of Commerce," she reported. "He told us to turn over everything on the
_KEZ_ to Air Force Intelligence. A squadron of Air Police packed all
your papers and took off with them half an hour ago."
I went in to see Frances. She stood at the window, looking at the cars
passing on the avenue. Her hands were together, the knuckles white
with strain. "You did it, Frances," I said. "All the big guns of USAF
Intelligence are being zeroed on a little town in Central Asia. If
they find our guesses were true, we'll start building a moonship, too.
That's what you really want, isn't it?"
"Yes, Frank," she said, turning to me. "I want our people to get to the
moon. This seems a shoddy way to start, though."
"You're right," I admitted. "An armament race isn't an edifying
spectacle. But the discovery of America was inspired more by
money-grubbers than by idealists, Frances." I pried her hands apart and
took them in mine. "Let's go, Frances. There's no work here today. Do
you have the drinks at your place to celebrate our victory?"
She burst into tears. I held her close till she'd sobbed herself calm,
ignoring the telephone buzzing on her desk. No one could have business
with Frances von Munger more important than mine.
* * * * *
By some quiddity of feminine logic, Frances stored her Scotch in the
refrigerator. I broke it out and poured two stiff shots into water
glasses. I carried them into the living room, where she was sitting
stiff and straight on the sofa, like a frightened little girl. "Have
some anodyne, Frances. Forget the Department of Commerce and the Altai
Mountains. We've done all we can. We've tossed the ball."
She took the drink and set it untasted on the arm of the sofa. "That's
not it, Frank. You know the message from our tourist in Tuva?"
"That note that put the seal of approval on your project? You wrote
that yourself, didn't you? The railhead, the spaceship--they all exist
only under that golden hair of yours, right?"
Frances stared at me as though she expected me to whip out an Army .45
and cover her with it. "Frank! How do you know?"
"Until I met you, Frances, I thought dreams of space were male dreams.
Then I found a girl who'd become an engineer, who'd then given up
engineering to go into intelligence work. Curious. Then the business of
the secret message from the USSR: instead of turning it over to the Air
Force for immediate evaluation, you chose to elaborate on it by means
of a technical study, and even got your boss to push through a priority
call for me. Curiouser yet."
"If you found out, they can," she said dully.
"I had the advantage of being in love with you, Frances. I've watched
you closely, very closely. We'll have a few weeks or months before they
discover that you phonied information to goad our men into space. We've
got time enough for a honeymoon, Frances."
The phone rang. Damn Alexander Graham Bell! I thought. I picked the
monster up and barked hello. It was the Secretary of Commerce. I
introduced myself. He deigned to relay his message through me. "Please
inform Dr. von Munger that her department has been transferred to the
Department of Air Force at White Sands, New Mexico," the Secretary
said. "She and you are to report there immediately."
I thanked the man nicely and hung up. Frances was standing now. "We're
going to White Sands," I told her. "We're going to help see that the
man in the moon is American."
Frances took the drink out of my hand and set it on the bookcase to
free my arms for holding her. "Maybe, Frank," she said, "the first man
on Mars will be Huguenard. I'll be proud to assist you in that project."
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