Read Ebook: The railhead at Kysyl Khoto by Lang Allen Kim Schoenherr John Illustrator

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Ebook has 82 lines and 7947 words, and 2 pages

Release date: October 5, 2023

Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1957

The Railhead at Kysyl Khoto

Illustrated by SCHOENHERR

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."

"Do you read Russian?" I asked, feeling a little more respect for this miss with the PhD.

"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?"

"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.

"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.

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.

"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.

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