Stephen Baxter: Last and First Contacts

And she saw a man in a striped uniform, hanged, dangling from a crane.

More bombs crashed. Dorothea could hear glass smash, feel the thick-laid concrete floor shudder.

A man hobbled up to them, grinning, in a striped prisoner’s uniform with a red triangle sewn to the breast.

Adam drew his revolver. ‘Get back!’

‘No!’ Dorothea grabbed his arm. ‘I know him.’

‘Hello, Dorothea,’ said Dirk. ‘Follow me. Come, come.’ And he ran off into the dark.

With difficulty they followed him across the crowded hall. Now all the lights were gone, and the only illumination was the moonlight shafting through broken windows. Dirk led them to a stairwell, leading down into the dark. He took the steps two, three at a time on his impossibly scrawny legs. Dorothea and Adam followed as best they could, Adam keeping his revolver drawn, held like a wand before him. Dirk’s feet were bare, Dorothea saw, his soles bloody and scarred.

At the base of the stairs was a short corridor, plaster-walled. Again Dirk led the way, running. Still the building shuddered from the approaching bombs.

They had to squeeze against a wall to get past what Dorothea thought was a pile of blankets, stacked up in the corridor. She found they were bodies, skin and bone, heaped up like firewood. Adam pushed her onwards.

They reached a doorway and tumbled after Dirk into a wide hall, lit by dangling bulbs. This was a kind of dormitory, with bunks like shelves stacked up four deep. There were prisoners jammed in here, every way Dorothea looked. They cowered back at the sight of the SS man with his revolver. The stink was astounding, a smell of rot.

Dorothea wondered if Father Kopleck was safe, wherever he was – if indeed he was still alive. The SS had come for him a week earlier.

‘Here, here.’ Dirk led them to a bottom-shelf bunk. It was just a wooden frame, Dorothea saw, no mattress, no bedding. Here they sat, the three of them, side by side, Dorothea between the two men. In the shadows around them the prisoners moved with rustles of dry flesh. ‘Safe here,’ said Dirk. ‘Not so bad. Like student dorms. You missed dinner. Cabbage soup.’

‘Shut up,’ Adam said routinely.

Dirk looked away. Dorothea saw he had one hand swathed in a filthy bandage.

More bombs fell like monstrous footsteps, and the building shook, the frame of the bed, and plaster fell from the ceiling.

Dorothea felt oppressed by the huge inhuman energies being unleashed all around her. ‘The prisoners will be killed too,’ she said with a stab of outrage. ‘Don’t the English know that?’

Adam grimaced. ‘Serve the little bastards right. Have you heard of their sabotage? They piss on the electronics. Over-tighten screws. Even blow dust into links between the turbo pumps. Stuff that’s impossible to detect before you fly. A rocket is a finely tuned machine; it isn’t hard to foul it up. And they keep on doing it, no matter how many of them we string up. Eh? Eh, you little bastard?’ He jabbed Dirk in the ribs with the muzzle of his revolver. ‘Keep this up and it’ll be the ovens for the whole damn lot of you.’

‘Do you think they’ll hit the comet?’

‘It’s possible. They won’t be aiming for it but some bombs always go astray, or are simply dumped. If they hit it we’ll lose everything. Oh, not the A4. That project will recover. There’s already been talk of moving from here, now that the location is compromised. Von Braun is all for live launches, I mean with munitions, in the middle of Poland.’

She frowned. ‘But there are people there.’

‘Only Poles. Or we might build a plant under a mountain. Von Braun has marvellous dreams, you know. Such as putting one A4 on top of another and building a rocket that could reach New York. How would Roosevelt like that, eh? But he’s been fired up by what we could do with the comet technology.’

‘Make even bigger bombs.’

‘Yes, but beyond that… Think about it, Dorothea. You believe the Alpha Centauri people wanted to send us a message. Well, they have. And that message is – we can reach you! And with ships like this, we can destroy you! For they could, you know. Von Braun and Dornberger did some calculations of the energy, I mean the sheer kinetic energy, that would be locked up in a craft of a few tons travelling at half the speed of light. Why, you wouldn’t need munitions; an impact alone could sterilise a whole planet. So that’s von Braun’s dream. After this war is won, and the next with the Japanese.’

‘A dream to do what?’

‘Why, to build a bigger and better comet, and fire it back at Alpha Centauri. Do to them what they should have done to us, before they missed their chance – and gave us the technology to strike back at them. What an error that was! War is inevitable, between worlds as between nations. We must strike first. Why take a chance?’

Perhaps their baby, she thought, of which Adam was still entirely unaware, would live to see that war. The first interstellar war.

‘Those damn English. One bomb landing in the wrong place tonight – why, the destiny of worlds hangs in the balance, my love. In the very balance…’

She held his hand, and on her other side Dirk’s, as the English bombs stomped across Peenemünde, coming ever closer.

St John Elstead’s cosmological time machine was a hole in the ground.

I was choppered in from LA. We flew maybe sixty kilometres north, skimmed across the Mojave, and descended close to the town of Edwards. From the air Elstead’s facility was a ring of blocky white buildings that might have spanned a couple of kilometres, set out over the desert. The hub of the facility was a huddle of buildings at the rim of the circle towards the south west, like a diamond on a wedding ring.

We landed on a helipad, an uncompromising square of black tarmac. A gaggle of technicians in orange jumpsuits, some of them carrying lightweight cameras and sound gear, stood at the edge of the pad. I climbed down with my backpack. This was the Mojave, in July. I had just flown out from a rainy London, and jet lag and furnace heat made me reel.

A tall, spare figure came striding towards me, smiling. He wore a jumpsuit like the rest, with a nametag on his chest and some kind of mission patch on his arm. His coiffure was expensive, his skin toned, and though I knew he was in his fifties he had the easy physical grace of a man with the time to play squash.

He grabbed my hand. ‘Ms Oram. Susie?’

‘Yes—’

‘Glad you could make it. You know who I am.’

What arrogance! But as Time’s Man of the Year of the previous year, 2023, St John Elstead, founder and life president of Cristal Industries, was unmistakeable. I was tempted to mispronounce his name – ‘Saint John’ rather than the correct ‘Sin-junn’ – but that would have been petty.

He turned on his heel and marched back to his technicians. I hurried to follow, my pack heavy on my sweating back. Over his shoulder he asked me, ‘Do you know why you’re here?’

‘Because you’re paying me half a million euros.’

He laughed. ‘Fair enough. But you don’t know anything else? And it doesn’t bother you?’

I decided to be blunt. ‘I’m just back from covering the efforts of Christian peacekeepers to broker an armistice in the Iraqi civil war. Writing up some businessman’s latest vanity project does not frighten me, no.’

He glanced at me. ‘A bit of spirit. That’s what I detected in your work for the Guardian .’ His accent was the strangulated Bostonian familiar from a hundred ads and a dozen high-profile self-publicising stunts: ballooning, swimming with the sharks, a circumlunar jaunt on a rented Soyuz. ‘Full briefing later. But for now, two words: cosmological exploration. ’ He grinned, but it meant nothing to me.