When Bond had left him after a quarter of an hour’s hard talking, each man knew that he had acquired an ally. Vallance had seized up Bond and knew that Gala Brand would get all Bond’s help and whatever protection she needed. He also respected Bond’s professional approach to the assignment and his absence of departmental rivalry with the Special Branch. As for Bond, he was full of admiration for what he had learned about Vallance’s agent, and he felt that he was no longer naked and that he had Vallance and the whole of Vallance’s department behind him.
Bond had left Scotland Yard with the feeling that he had achieved Clausewitz’s first principle. He had made his base secure.
His visit to the Ministry of Supply had added nothing to his knowledge of the case. He had studied Tallon’s record and his reports. The former was quite straightforward-a lifetime in Army Intelligence and Field Security-and the latter painted a picture of a very lively and well-managed technical establishment-one or two cases of drunkenness, one of petty theft, several personal vendettas leading to fights and mild bloodshed but otherwise a loyal and hardworking team of men.
Then he had had an inadequate half-hour in the Operations Room of the Ministry with Professor Train, a fat, scruffy, undistinguished-looking man who had been runner-up for the Physics Division of the Nobel Prize the year before and who was one of the greatest experts on guided missiles in the world.
Professor Train had walked up to a row of huge wall maps and had pulled down the cord of one of them. Bond was faced with a ten-foot horizontal scale diagram of some thing that looked like a V2 with big fins.
“Now,” said Professor Train, “you know nothing about – rockets so I’m going to put this in simple terms and not fill you up with a lot of stuff about Nozzle Expansion Ratios, Exhaust Velocity, and the Keplerian Ellipse. The Moon-raker, as Drax chooses to call it, is a single-stage rocket. It uses up all its fuel shooting itself into the air and then it homes on to the objective. The V2’s trajectory was more like a shell fired from a gun. At the top of it’s 200-mile flight it had climbed to about 70 miles. It was fuelled with a very combustible mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen which was watered down so as not to burn out the mild steel which was all they were allocated for the engine. There are far more powerful fuels available but until now we hadn’t been able to achieve very much with them for the same reason, their combustion temperature is so high that they would burn out the toughest engine.”
The professor paused and stuck a finger in Bond’s chest. “All you, my dear sir, have to remember about this rocket is that, thanks to Drax’s Columbite, which has a melting point of about 3500 degrees Centigrade, compared with 1300 in the V2 engines, we can use one of the super fuels without burning out the engine. In fact,” he looked at Bond as if Bond should be impressed, “we are using fluorine and hydrogen.”
“Oh, really,” said Bond reverently.
The Professor looked at him sharply. “So we hope to achieve a speed in the neighbourhood of 1500 miles an hour and a vertical range of about 1000 miles. This should produce an operational range of about 4000 miles, bringing every European capital within reach of England. Very useful,” he added drily, “in certain circumstances. But, for the scientists, chiefly desirable as a step towards escape from the earth. Any questions?”
“How does it work?” asked Bond dutifully.
The Professor gestured brusquely towards the diagram. “Let’s start from the nose,” he said. “First comes the warhead. For the practice shoot this will contain upper-atmosphere instruments, radar and suchlike. Then the gyro compasses to make it fly straight-pitch-and-yaw gyro and roll gyro. Then various minor instruments, servo motors, power supply. And then the big fuel tanks-30,000 pounds of the stuff.
“At the stern you get two small tanks to drive the turbine. Four hundred pounds of hydrogen peroxide mixes with forty pounds of potassium permanganate and makes steam which drives the turbines underneath them. These drive a set of centrifugal pumps which force the main fuel into the rocket motor. Under terrific pressure. Do you follow me?” He cocked a dubious eyebrow at Bond.