“I’ll be just fine,” he assured her, reaching out and rubbing the spot on her forehead with his finger. She smiled, not very successfully.
“I never thought that I would wish you were back at flying those planes all over the world. But I do.”
“Don’t worry. Little Nils can take care of himself. And watchdog Skou will be with me.”
He watched the graceful swing of her figure as she crossed the road—then looked at his watch. One more minute. The street was empty now. He climbed out of the car and went to buy a ticket. When he stepped out on the wooden platform the train was just rounding the bend on the outskirts of town, moaning deeply. There were a few other people waiting for the train from Copenhagen, none of theim looking at him. When the coaches squealed to a stop he boarded the first one. Ove Rasmussen looked up from his newspaper and waved. They shook hands and Nils sat down in the empty seat next to him.
“I thought Arnie would be with you,” Nils said. “He’s going up with Skou in some other complicated and secret manner.”
“It’s stopped being a game, hasn’t it?”
“You’re right about that. I wonder if they’ll be able to find the swine who did it?”
“Highly unlikely, Skou told me. Very professional, no clues of any kind. The murdering bastards. Did them no good either. There was nothing about the Daleth drive in the office.”
They were silent after that, all the way to Hillerod where they had to change trains. The Helsingor train was ready to leave, a spur line, one track, and just three cars. It rattled off through the beech and birch forests, skirting the backyards of red-roofed white houses where laundry blew in the fresh wind from the Sound. The woods changed to fields and, at Snekkersten, they saw the ocean for the first time, the leaden waters of the Oresund with the green of Sweden on the far side. This was the last stop before Elsinore and they climbed down to find Skou waiting for them. No one else got off the train at the tiny fishing village. Skou walked away without a word and they followed him. The old houses had high hedges, and the street was empty. Around the first corner a Thames panel truck was waiting, KOBENHAVNS ELEKTRISKE AR-TIKLER painted on the sides, along with some enthusiastic lightning bolts and a fiercely glowing light bulb. He opened the back for them and they climbed in, making themselves as comfortable as they could on the rolls of heavy wire inside. Skou got into the driver’s seat, changed his soft hat for a workman’s peaked cap, and drove off.
Skou took the back roads into Helsingor, then skirted the harbor to the Helsingor Skibsvaerft. The guard at the gate waved him through and he drove into the shipyard. There were the skeletons of two ships on the ways. Riveting machines hammered, and there was the sudden bite of actinic light as the welders bent to their work. The truck went around to the rear of the offices, out of sight of the rest of the yard.
“We have arrived,” Skou announced, throwing wide the back door.
They climbed down and followed Skou into the building and up a flight of stairs. A uniformed policeman saluted them as they came up and opened the door for them. There was the smell of fresh-brewed coffee inside, mixed with rich cigar smoke. Two men were seated with their backs to the door, looking out of the large window that faced onto the shipyard. They stood and turned around when the others entered, Arnie Klein and a tall middle-aged man dressed in a rusty black suit and vest with an old-fashioned gold watch chain across the front. Arnie made the introductions.
“This is Herr Leif Holm, the shipyard manager.” Coffee was produced, which they accepted, and thick, long Jutland cigars, which they refused, although Holm lit one himself and produced an immense cloud of blue smoke that hung below the ceiling.
“There you see it, gentlemen,” Holm said, aiming the cigar, like some deadly weapon, out of the window. “On the central ways. Denmark’s hope and future.”
A rain squall swept across the harbor, first clouding the battlements of Kronborg Slot, Hamlet’s castle, then the squat shape of the Swedish Halsingborg ferry. It threw a misty curtain over the red ribs and plates of the ships under construction before vanishing inland. Watery sunlight took its place. They followed Holm’s directions, looking at the squat, almost ugly ship that was nearing completion. It was oddly shaped, like an inner tube that had been stretched into an oblong. Bow, stern, and sides were fat and rounded; the superstructure, now being assembled on the deck in prefabricated units, was low and streamlined.
“That’s the new hovercraft, isn’t it?” Nils asked. “Vik-ingepuden. Being built for the Esbjerg-to-London run. Supposed to be the biggest in the world.” He wondered to himself what the raft had to do with Denmark’s hope and future.
“You are correct,” Holm said. “Plenty of articles in the papers, publicity, bigger than the British Channel ferries. What they do not mention is that we have been working on her around the clock and that some major changes have been incorporated in her design. And when she is launched she will be christened Galathea, and will sail uncharted seas just like her namesake. If she does not plumb the deepest of the ocean deeps, perhaps she will have a better head for heights.” He laid his finger alongside his nose and winked broadly. “You don’t mean… ?”
“I do indeed. The Moon, the planets, the stars—who knows? I understand that the professors here have been preparing her motive power, while we of the shipbuilding industry have not been idle. Major changes have been made in her plans. Internal bracing, hull, airtight hatches, airlocks—I will not bore you with the details. Suffice to say that in a few short weeks the first true spaceship will be launched. Galathea.”
They looked at her now with a new and eager interest. The rounded hull, impossible in any normal ocean vessel, was the ideal shape for a pressure hull. The lack of clearly marked bow and stern of no importance in space. This rusty, ugly torus was the shape of the future.
“There is another bit of information that you gentlemen should know. All of the operations of the program have been transferred to a new ministry, which will be made public after Galathea is launched. The Ministry of Space. I have the honor of being the acting minister, for the time being. It is therefore my pleasurable duty to ask Captain Hansen if he will request a transfer from the Air Force to the Space Force, with equivalent rank, of course, and no loss in benefits or seniority. If he does, his first assignment will be as commanding officer of this magnificent vessel. What do you say, Captain?”
“Of course,” Nils said, “of course!” without an instant’s hesitation. He did not take his eyes off the ship even when he accepted his friends’ congratulations.
Martha had not been exactly truthful with Nils when she had left him off at the station in Birkerod. She was not going shopping for dresses today but, instead, was keeping an appointment in Copenhagen. It was a small white lie, not telling him about this, one of the very few she had ever told him since they had been married. Seven years, it must be some sort of record. And the foolish part was that there was no reason why she shouldn’t tell Nils. It wasn’t very important at all.
Guilt, that’s all, she thought, stopping for the light, then turning south on Kongevej. Just my own irrational feelings of guilt. Clouds were banking up ahead and the first drops of rain splattered on the windshield. Where would the modern world be without Freud to supply a reason for everything? She had been majoring in psychology at Columbia when she had met Nils for the first time. Visiting her parents here in Copenhagen where her father had been stationed. Dr. Charles W. Greene, epidemiologist, big man with the World Health Organization. Welcoming his daughter for her summer vacation, long-limbed, undergraduate, tweed skirts. Parties and friends. A wonderful summer. And Nils Hansen. Big as a mountain and handsome as Apollo in his SAS uniform. An almost elemental force. Laughing and fun; she had been in bed with him almost before she knew he had been making a pass. There was no time to think or even realize what had happened. The funny part was, in a way, that they had been married afterward. His proposal had come as a real surprise. She liked him well enough, he was practically the first man she had ever been to bed with, because other college students hardly counted. At first it had been a httle strange, even thinking about marrying someone other than an American, another country and another language. But in so many ways Denmark seemed like the States and her parents were there, Nils and all her friends spoke English. And it had been fun, sort of instant jet set, and they had been married.