The Railhead at Kysyl Khoto

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."