I took the barstool next to Wally. “Arthur is into spaceships, you know.”
“Spaceships?” asked Wally.
Harry nodded. “Rockets, except with people inside of them.”
“That would hurt coming down.”
“Spaceships don’t come down. Or rather, they come down softly, on their tails, wherever you want them to. There are some engineering details to work out, of course, but the main thing is propulsion.”
Wally looked interested. “Could they come down in America, or Germany, for instance?”
“I think Arthur is more interested in the Moon. But yes, in Germany, if one wanted.”
Wally’s smile flicked off for an instant. “Very interesting,” he said. Then the smile was back on. “You betcha.”
Mr. D turned the light off, then on again, as Wally waddled along the Embankment into the mist. After he was gone, we all re-entered, guarded by the “closed” sign. Should anyone have asked, we were the volunteer cleanup crew; many places depended on such with all the help off on the war effort.
“German,” Mr. D said. “Or I’ve not been doing this for thirty years.”
“He hasn’t been to Minnesota, I should think, John added. “Hamm’s, indeed. That gave him away.”
“I rather thought that was an American beer of that region,” Harry said.
John nodded. “Indeed. And nobody who likes real beer will drink it.”
“What’s he doing in an American uniform? All this talk about pumps and the like,” Harry asked. “We’re building the…”
I put a hand on his arm. “There’s not a little mingling of forces; Yanks in the RAF, RAF chaps flying Yank bombers, and so on. I imagine someone with credible looking papers could get himself involved as an exchange officer, and as such, he could be a little different without being too obvious.”
“He’d be in on the whole bloody thing,” Mr. D said. “We should talk to someone.”
“Or he could be what he says he is,” Fred said.
“An American wouldn’t connect valves with electronics,” Harry said, now quite sober, “and then correct himself so clumsily.”
“An American who likes beer wouldn’t have a good word for Hamm’s,” John added.
“If he is a spy,” Arthur said, “he would need to communicate with his handlers. Perhaps a clandestine radio.”
“I hazard certain parties could pick that up rather quickly,” John said.
Harry nodded. “Yes. And other things. We are being watched.”
Arthur got a faraway look in his eyes. At twenty-seven, his imagination was a little less hindered than ours, and we were a not unimaginative group. “Watched. Hmmm. Yes, well, I imagine such a transmission would have to be a one-shot sort of thing. Send it, then get out if you can.”
I nodded, with a slight feeling of compassion. In all likelihood, we were going to trick Wally into sacrificing his life for the wrong reason. On the other hand, he was going to sacrifice it anyway.
“Perhaps we could get him to use that one shot for something other than my work or whatever else is a-building. I may, inadvertently, have already laid the groundwork. John, you have a fairly large telescope.”
He nodded. Rooted firmly in his garden, John had made a half-scale working model of Herschel’s largest telescope, which he took delight in showing off to the occasional grammar school class.
“It would work in reverse, would it not? If one were to replace the eyepiece with a powerful lamp and place an aircraft-shaped mask at the prime focus…”
A couple of weeks later, we were ready to spring our trap.
Wally came into the bar at his now-usual time and Mr. D. started pouring his now-usual stout. Once he was with beer, he turned to Arthur.
“How fast does your rocket go?” he asked. “As fast as sound?”
“I don’t recall saying that I had a rocket,” Arthur said. “But if I were to design one to travel through space, it would go many times the speed of sound here on Earth. Of course, it would not be proper to say that it went faster than sound in space, where there is no air to carry the sound.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay. It could get to Berlin, or Washington, in a few minutes.”
Arthur stared across the room, saying nothing, which I knew to mean his mind was elsewhere. Then he came back. “At orbital speed, it would be about three minutes to Berlin.”
“Or the Moon in a couple of days,” John said.
“I’d like to see something like that,” Fred said.
“Me too,” Wally added.
“Perhaps something can be arranged,” Harry said, then took a long slow drink of his Pride.
Arthur looked upset. “Really, we shouldn’t be talking about something that could get someone to one of Dr. Luyten’s stars in a lifetime. If someone wanted to weaponize that…”
“Wally’s okay,” Harry said. “The Yanks are on our side, this century.”
Everyone chuckled at that.
“Now, I’ve talked to Mr. Bray at the Met Office…”
“Group Captain Stagg’s aide?” Wally interjected.
“The very man, yes. You do get around, Wally,” Harry said.
“Ike expects his exchange officers to be up on stuff.”
“Ah, quite. Well, Bray thinks conditions should be just about right tomorrow night for, shall we say, an unusual event.”
“Are you sure, Harry?” Fred asked, alarm written on his face.
“I think we can trust Wally to do the right thing.”
Mr. D quickly put a bar rag in front of his mouth and coughed slightly. Wally, with a big grin on his face, appeared not to notice.
I didn’t smirk. Everything had gone smoothly so far, but if we made a mess of this, it could be at best very embarrassing. At worst, lives would be lost.
As expected, there was a dark low cloud deck over clear air that night. We arrived early in Fred’s car on the south side of Albany Road near the end of Bagshot Street, where one could get a relatively unobstructed view over the lake. It was not far from where John lived on Mina Road; though, of course, John had sent his regrets for this expedition. Trouble struck immediately.
“You’re here early, Wally,” Fred remarked.
“Yeah, your British cabs are efficient.”
I had an essential piece of setup to do, that we didn’t want Wally to see. While I was trying to think of a diversion, Fred took charge.
“Quite. Now, Wally, what we are looking for should show up over there,” Fred pointed toward the western side of the lake, “and proceed east, rather rapidly. You see the oaks across the lake? It should pass…”
While Fred had Wally’s attention, I pulled a big box from the boot and lugged it over a few yards right of our vantage point. I came back unobtrusively trailing a wire, attached to a button.
“Look carefully. It will be very subtle,” I said. “There will be a glow, somewhat like a searchlight beam. Something to do with ionizing the air to lower friction, I should think. Mind you, I don’t know anything about this. Nor does anyone else here.”
Wally bobbed his head.
We waited, and waited. Half an hour passed. Conditions were just right now, but might not be in another hour. John was having fun with us, I thought, or maybe playing a psychological trick; information gained too easily might not feel as important to a spy.
“There!” Fred said.
It was very subtle, only a patch of distant searchlit cloud scudding rapidly over the lake. I looked through my binoculars and smiled. A deep black triangle lay in the center of the glowing spot, wavering slightly as the clouds whipped by. And then it was gone. I had almost forgotten my button, which I then pressed, only microseconds after the tardy thought had entered my mind.