J. Wheeler - The Krone Experiment

He paused in a rutted intersection and looked again at the crude map Roy M’Botulu had scrawled for him. Roy was wise, witty, urbane. Unbelievable that he came from this place. Rhein tried to ignore it, but the repulsive poverty and ignorance radiated at him from every angle. To subjugate someone like Roy was a crime of monstrous proportions, but was it conceivable that these people could ever be raised from the squalor in which they mired themselves? As a child, he knew in his heart that it was wrong that all the faces at the table should be white, all the hands serving, black. Roy had carefully fanned that flame of disquiet, had shown him the depraved depths of the sin of man against man. He believed those words, had made them his own, and wanted to fight for Roy’s cause, but the quiet passions of a coffeehouse were not reflected in the dim reality surrounding him now. Could these people really rule themselves?

A greater question, could they rule Rhein’s people? Irrationally, his mind filled with an image of his mother in all her refinement banished to one of these hovels, serving some filthy hag with a scrawny child stuck on one teat. Rhein shook his head, banishing such thoughts. If Roy could rise above this, so could others. For the hundredth time he mentally ran through the opening lines of his speech, which were carefully memorized Swahili. According to the map, the small meeting place was just a block away, around the corner. Roy would be there to give him strength.

He peered in the dark and stepped with his left foot over a puddle. As he placed his foot on the other side and leaned forward to design his next step, he felt strangely heavy, and then he was dying.

Something shot from the puddle, shattered the femur of his extended thigh near the pelvic joint, and ripped a hole in his upper leg. Then, because he was leaning, it penetrated again at the bottom of his rib cage, blew a thumb-sized hole in his aorta, and punched out through the base of his neck, nicking his ear.

Rhein collapsed forward heavily, his hips in the puddle, his face in a pile of day-old dog shit. He struggled to turn his nose from the stench and felt the fetid water seep into his trousers. He blinked his eyes open and saw a small, fat-bellied child staring at him from a doorway. A dark circle narrowed his vision until all he could see were the eyes. White eyes. Strangely sideways. Roy’s eyes. I’m dying Roy. Trouble for Roy. I’m sorry. Roy.

Maria Latvin held the hand of the figure that lay with swaddled head against the crisp whiteness of the hospital bed. She could feel the pressure of his hand, was sure he knew she was there.

She looked through a faint mist of tears at the gray, sixtyish man who stood on the other side of the bed. Until the—accident, she had known Ralph Floyd only vaguely as manager of the operations at Paul’s laboratory.

“What are you asking of me?” she asked plaintively. “How can I do this thing?”

“Someone must care for him. You’ve seen that he responds to you. There are many people who depend on him, now we must depend on you.”

“But he needs medical help. I can not do that.”

Floyd looked at the man standing quietly behind Latvin’s chair, stethoscope draped around his neck.

“Dr. Crawford has done all he can for him here at the lab in terms of immediate medical attention. His body is healthy. He is just not in complete control of it. We need someone to look after him, while we seek expert consultation for his remaining—problems.”

“But shouldn’t he be taken somewhere, to a city, to a big hospital?”

“There are many complications, my dear. He is the head of a large complex structure, far more than this lab that has been his recent headquarters. Much of this complex runs on its own without his day to day intervention or control.” Floyd shrugged. “But if he should die, there would be many problems. The situation is even worse in his present state— alive, but not competent to run his affairs. If that news should become general knowledge, the result would be chaos. You must keep him, care for him, while we seek to restore him to full health.”

Maria Latvin looked deeply into the eyes of the older man. She did not know his true motivation. Was he merely trying to maintain order in a difficult situation, or did he have deeper desires for control of this complex of which he spoke? She felt the pressure of the hand in hers again. She owed this man much. Here was a chance to hold to him, and to the life she had come to love so deeply, a bit longer.

Somebody stood up and turned on the room lights. Isaacs jerked his head up from the photograph he had been studying. In his bleariness he had not realized that the bright Sunday afternoon sun had faded. He scanned the accumulated disarray of their four-day marathon and looked out the window of the conference room. He tried for a long moment to figure out what time it must be from the purpling of the evening light. He finally remembered to look at his watch. 8:38. Eastern daylight. God, was he tired.

He thought back to the return of the shuttle, the Cosmos laser satellite. Could that have been three weeks ago? Now April was gone, spring replaced by the summer heat of early May.

The Russians had immediately gone into overdrive to put up another satellite. The laser had been delivered from the development site at Saryshagan to the launch site at Tyuratam four days ago. Isaacs’ Office of Scientific Intelligence had worked around the clock to monitor the transition and the operation at Tyuratam.

Isaacs looked again at the photograph from the K-H 11 Digital Imaging Satellite. He had been trying to discern some clue to the nature of the box of electronics sitting on the gantry next to the rocket. Now he looked at the technician who squatted next to it. From three hundred miles up the photograph only showed a fuzzy image of the top of the man’s head, his back, the tops of his thighs and his right arm extended to a knob on the electronics. I bet that bastard’s tired too, Isaacs thought to himself. Isaacs knew the man well, as well as one ever could by studying the flat two-dimensional creatures that inhabited these photos. They had picked him out from the first photographs taken a month ago at Saryshagan by the un-slavic mop of curly hair that occupied the rear half of his balding head. They had taken to calling him Curly. Isaacs was amused at the odd resentment he had felt when Boswank finally got a make on him, identifying him as plain old Fyodr Rudikov. Fyodr was a subterfuge, an alias. His real name was Curly.

Curly had arrived last Thursday at the launch site at Tyuratam along with the laser components. Since then Curly had been working sixteen-hour days, just like Isaacs’ team. The launch of the new laser could be as soon as next month. Curly was on the front line down there, beating himself and his crew to greater effort. In this room, in the bowels of this building, and in many others, thousands of American intelligence people focused on the same event. When would the launch be? What were the capabilities of this new laser? Could it be stopped? Should it be stopped? Would it strike? Where? Were there defensive measures?

Isaacs shoved his rolled cuffs further up his arms, then raised his arms in a stretch over his head. He looked at the bedraggled group around him. Martinelli sat with one of his aides in a circle of coffee cups and cigarette butts. They were sorting the latest pile of useful photographs culled from the reams that poured in from a host of satellites. Bill Baris huddled with Pat Danielson at the far end of the table. Bill had isolated the crates that housed the laser components from among the bewildering array of associated rocket parts. The task now was to glean every scrap of information they could as the relevant crates were unpacked and their contents incorporated into the rocket.