Hell's Gate(25)
Mac gave the stick a skeptical glance then took it. Leaning over the donkey’s hindquarters, he prodded its flesh with the wooden point. “Look at this!” he said, probing a craterlike divot on the back of the donkey’s left thigh.
“That is an awful lot of blood from such a little wound,” Thorne observed. “What coulda—”
“I almost want to say—” MacCready hesitated, using a thumb and index finger to measure the wound. It was about a half-inch long.
“What?”
“Never mind. This bite is all wrong. Too long, too wide, too deep.”
“So what is it?”
“I’m not sure, but something initiated massive systemic hemorrhaging.”
“The bite, maybe?”
“Yeah, maybe, but that’d be a first.” MacCready stood. Having finished his assessment he stepped out of the gore puddle then turned toward his friend. “Fun way to get your ticket punched, huh?”
“Chupacabra,” Thorne muttered. Mac threw him a puzzled look before realizing that Thorne had answered his earlier, half-completed question.
“Yeah, whatever the hell they are. You know, Bob, we could be looking at a new species here. Damn! Maybe a new genus or even a family.”
Thorne saw that his friend had been jacked into zoology overdrive. “You are right, Mac. This is all very wonderful and exciting. So I’m thinking . . . you wanna buy a farm down here? Because coincidentally, mine is now up for sale.”
“What, and give up your great new job with the—”
Just then, a loud rumble—actually more of a prolonged hiss—reached down from the sky. Stepping outside, the friends saw that there were people in the street now—men, women, and children. And they were all looking up.
“Now that is what I call timing,” Thorne said. “Since this is precisely the thunder we keep hearing.”
“You got a phone in this town?”
Thorne answered with a laugh. “Nearest phone or telegraph is in Cuiabá, ’bout fifty miles from here.”
MacCready followed the track of several pointing fingers and saw a long, thin streamer of smoke, trailing up ten miles, maybe more. At its front end he thought he saw a spark of light. The flare of an engine burn? And then it was gone, leaving nothing but a smoky contrail.
No mistaking it. A f*cking rocket. “Shit,” MacCready whispered under his breath. His mission was still a needle in the haystack, but the haystack had just gotten smaller.
Thorne shook his head. “So this is the other reason those local guys snapped their caps when you showed up.” The botanist was deadly serious now, gesturing toward the sky. “And five’ll get ya ten your pal Hendry expects you to sniff out those fireworks.”
MacCready continued to watch the thread of smoke. No bet, he thought.
CHAPTER 7
To Hell’s Gate, Demeter
I will give to anyone his weight in gold who can tell me where to find Eugen S?nger.
—VASILLI STALIN (JOSEPH STALIN’S SON)
As a high school freshman, Maurice Voorhees had once written to a relative, “If the devil could teach me how to reach the moon and the planets, I would gladly become his pupil.”
In the winter of 1942, the devil had come knocking at his door and the twenty-three-year-old propulsion engineer pricked his finger and signed on the dotted line without taking pause to read the small print. Like most of history’s great misadventures, the sojourn of Maurice Voorhees, from Peenemünde on Germany’s Baltic Coast to Brazil, had begun with tragic blindness, and was fated to end with tragic vision.
Presently, Voorhees stood with another man at the bottom of a long, long thread of solid rocket booster smoke. The base of the trail had started out horizontal and, though originally hidden, was convecting up through the surface of the Hell’s Gate “fog lake,” as a kilometer-long stain of muddy, scalding mist. The horizontal exhaust trail followed an ancient paved road, recently refurbished and onto which a wood-cased monorail track had been built.
“Your track won’t take much more of this, Dr. S?nger.”
The older man waved, as if shooing away a fly. “Once the two ships are launched it won’t much matter what happens to the launch rail, will it?”
Voorhees knew that S?nger appreciated the strategic significance of his design simplifications. It seemed like the flight director’s prior worries about using the last of the base’s concrete and rebar before his “Silverbirds” could be launched had gone down proportionally with each of Voorhees’s material-saving improvements.
“Still, I wish we could have launched that last sled with a water-filled, full-scale model,” S?nger lamented, utilizing an annoying and whiny tone that had unfortunately become a trademark.
“Trust me on this,” Voorhees countered. “A fully weighted mock-up is not worth the extra wear-and-tear on the track—not to mention the risk. I can do all the relevant calculations from the launch results of a ‘naked’ sled.”
Voorhees gazed up into the decks of mist as if he could peer straight through them. “The only difference, here, is that the sled left the rail sooner and flew a lot higher.”
He glanced at his stopwatch. “I’m betting it reached thirty kilometers before starting back. Drogue chute will have deployed by now.”