In Our Hands the Stars Read online

  13

  Elsinore

  “Look at that!” Nils said. “Just look at it.” He had the early edition of Berlingske Tidende propped up against the coffeepot while he sawed away angrily at his breakfast bacon. “I’m just not used to seeing headlines like that in a Danish paper. Shocking. Night watchman killed … foreign minister’s office burglarized … documents missing. It’s like reading the American papers.”

  “I don’t see why you mention the States,” Martha said. “These things happened right here, not in America. There’s no connection.” She took the pot to pour herself some coffee, and his newspaper fell down.

  “I would appreciate it if you would keep my paper out of the preserves, it makes it hard to read.” He picked it up and brushed at the red smears with his napkin. “There is a connection, and you know it. The U.S. papers are always filled with murders, rapes, and beatings because that sort of thing always happens there. What was the figure? There are more murders in the city of Dallas in one year than in all of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales combined. And I’ll bet you could throw in Denmark too.”

  “If you hate Americans so much—why did you ever marry me?” Martha asked, biting into her toast.

  He opened his mouth to answer, found that there was absolutely nothing he could say to this fine bit of female logic, so he growled instead and opened to the soccer scores. Martha nodded as if this was just the kind of answer that she expected.

  “Shouldn’t we get going?” she asked.

  Nils glanced up at the clock over the kitchen door. “A few minutes more. We don’t want to get there before the post office opens at nine.” He put the paper down and reached for his coffee. He was wearing a dark brown suit instead of his uniform.

  “Won’t you be flying any more?” Martha asked.

  “I don’t know. I would like to, but Skou keeps talking about security. I suppose we had all better start listening a little closer to Skou. You better get your coat now. I’ll wait for you in the car.”

  A door led from the utility room into the garage, which made this bit of deception easier. Skou had agreed that the chances were slim that Nils’s home was under surveillance, but one could never be sure. The way Skou talked, he made it seem as though every flight into Denmark had more secret agents than tourists aboard. He might be right at that; there wasn’t a country in the world that didn’t want the Daleth drive. He opened the back door of the big Jaguar and slid in. His knees crunched up, and he realized that he had never sat in the back seat before. Martha came in, looking chic and attractive in the brown suede coat, a bright silk band on her hair—and a lot younger than her twenty-six years. He rolled the window down.

  “Child-bride,” he called out. “You never kissed me goodbye.”

  “I’d cover you with lipstick.” She blew him a kiss. “Now close the window and hunker down before I open the garage door.”

  “Hunker down,” he grunted, forcing his massive frame down on the floor. “American. You learn new words every day. Can you hunker up too?”

  “Be quiet,” she said, getting into the car. “The street looks empty.”

  They pulled out, and all he could see were the treetops along Strandvejen while she closed the door again. When they started up there was just sky and an occasional cloud.

  “Very dull back here.”

  “We’ll be there soon. The train is at nine-twelve, is that right?”

  “On the button. Don’t get there too early, because I don’t feel like standing around the platform.”

  “I’ll go slow through the forest. Will you be home for dinner?”

  “No way to say. I’ll call you as soon as I know.”

  “Not before noon. I’ll do some shopping while I’m in Birkerød. There’s that new little dress shop.”

  “There’s some new little bills.” He sighed dramatically and unsuccessfully tried to shift position.

  It was nine minutes past nine when she pulled into the parking space next to the railroad station, just across the street from the post office.

  “Is there anyone around?” he asked.

  “Somebody going into the post office. And a man locking up his bike. He’s going into the station, now-no one is looking this way.”

  Nils pushed up gratefully and dropped into the seat.

  “A big relief.”

  “You will be all right, won’t you?” she asked, turning about to face him. She had that little worried pucker between her eyes that she used to have when they were first married, before the routine of his flying pushed the concern below the surface.

  “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 them 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 Hillered where they had to change trains. The Helsingør 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 Øresund 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 ARTIKLER 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 Helsingør, then skirted the harbor to the Helsingør 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 fr
ont. 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 Hälsingborg 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, stem, 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. “Vikinge-puden. 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 Birkerød. 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 little 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.

  Even though she had never been completely sure why he had ever picked her. He could have had any girl that he wanted to crook his finger at-he still had to beat them off at parties. And he had chosen her. Romantic love she told herself, whenever she was feeling upswing, something right out of the Ladies’ Home Journal. But when the rain set in for weeks at a time and she was alone she had to go see friends, or buy a hat or something, to get away from the depression. Then she would worry that he had married her because it was that time of life when Danish men got married. And she had been handy. And an American wife has some prestige in Denmark.

  The truth was probably somewhere in between these-or took in parts of both. As she grew up she had discovered that nothing was ever as simple as you hoped it might be. Now she was a long-married woman, a homemaker and on the pill, a little bored at times, though not unhappy.

  Yet she was still an American citizen—and that, perhaps, was where the guilt came in. If she loved Nils, as she was sure she did, why had she never taken the step of becoming a Danish citizen? In all truth she never thought much about it, and whenever her thoughts came near the subject she slithered them away in another direction. It would be easy enough to do. She was driving mechanically and realized suddenly that the rain had gotten heavier, that it was covering the glass, and she slowed and turned on the wipers.

  Why didn’t she do it? Was this a thin lifeline she held to, to her family, her earlier life? A fractional noncommitment that meant she still had some doubt about their marriage? Nonsense! Nils never mentioned it, she couldn’t recall their ever even talking about it. Yet still the guilt. She kept her passport up to date, which made her a foreign resident of Denmark, and once a year a smiling detective at the Criminal Police division stamped an extension into it. Perhaps it was the Criminal Police bit that bothered her? No, that was just a government office, it could have been any office and she knew that she would feel the same. Now the American embassy had some question about a detail in her passport and she was going there. And she had not told Nils about it.

  With the morning rush hour over the traffic was light, and she was at the embassy before ten. There wasn’t a parking place in sight and she finally ended up over two blocks away. The rain had settled down to a steady Danish drizzle, the kind that could last for days. She slipped on her plastic boots—she always kept a pair in the car—and unfolded the umbrella. Too short for a cab ride, too long to walk. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door. The rain drummed on the transparent fabric of the umbrella.

  The lobby, as always, was deserted, and the receptionist behind the big desk looked on with the cold detachment of all receptionists while Martha juggled her closed, dripping umbrella and searched through her purse for the piece of paper.

  “I have an appointment,” she said, unfolding it and shaking out the crumbs of tobacco. “With a Mr. Baxter. It’s for ten o’clock.”

  “Through those doors there, turn left, room number one seve
nteen. It’s down at the end of the hall.”

  “Thank you.”

  She tried to shake all of the water off on the mats, but still trailed a spatter of drops across the marble floor. The door to number 117 was wide open, and a gangling man with thick dark-rimmed glasses was bent over the desk, studying a sheet of paper with fierce concentration.

  “Mr. Baxter?”

  “Yes, please come in. Let me hang up those wet things for you. Quite a day out. I sometimes think that this whole country is ready to float out to sea.” He stood the umbrella in his wastebasket and hung up her coat, then closed the door. “Then you are …?”

  “Martha Hansen.”

  “Of course. I was expecting you. Won’t you sit here, please.”

  “It was about my passport,” she said, sitting and opening her purse on her lap.

  “If I could see it…”

  She handed it over and watched while he turned the pages, frowning as he attempted to read some of the smudged visas and customs stamps. He made a few notes on a yellow legal pad.

  “You sure seem to like traveling, Mrs. Hansen.”

  “It’s my husband, he’s an airline pilot. The tickets are practically free so we do get around a lot.”

  “You’re a lucky woman.” He closed the passport and looked at her, his eyebrows raised above the glasses’ frame. “Say, isn’t your husband Nils Hansen—the Danish pilot? The one we have been reading about.”

  “Yes. Is there anything wrong with the passport?”

  “No, not at all. You really are lucky married to a man like that. Say, is that pendant you’re wearing from the Moon? The one that was in all the papers?”

  “Yes, would you like to see it?” She slipped the chain over her head and handed it to him. It was an ordinary bit of crystalline volcanic rock, chipped and untrimmed, that was held in a silver cage. A stone from another world.

  “I heard that you had been offered five-figure sums for it. You had better take good care.” He handed it back. “I wanted your passport just to check. There has been some difficulty with another passport with almost the same number as yours. We have to be sure, you know. Hope you don’t mind?”