As they filed down the long curve of the stairway, their figures grotesquely reflected back at them by the mirror of the rocket’s chromium skin, Bond almost felt the man-in the-street’s affection for the man whom, only a few hours previously, he had been dissecting without pity, almost with loathing.
When they reached the steel-plated floor of the shaft, Drax paused and looked up. Bond followed his eyes. Seen from that angle it seemed as if they were gazing up a thin straight shaft of light into the blazing heaven of the arcs, a shaft of light that was not pure white but a shot mother-of-pearl satin. There were shimmers of red in it picked up from the crimson canisters of a giant foam fire-extinguisher that stood near them, a man in an asbestos suit beside it aiming its nozzle at the base of the rocket. There was a streak of violet whose origin was a violet bulb on the board of an instrument panel in the wall, which controlled the steel cover over the exhaust pit. And there was a whisper of emerald green from the shaded light over a plain deal table at which a man sat and wrote down figures as they were called to him from the group gathered directly beneath the Moonraker’s tail.
Gazing up this pastel column, so incredibly slim and graceful, it seemed unthinkable that anything so delicate could withstand the pressures which it had been designed to meet on Friday-the howling stream of the most powerful controlled explosion that had ever been attempted; the impact of the sound barrier; the unknown pressures of the atmosphere at 15,000 miles an hour; the terrible shock as it plunged back from a thousand miles up and hit the atmospheric envelope of the earth.
Drax seemed to read his thoughts. He turned to Bond. “It will be like committing murder,” he said. Then surprisingly, he burst into a braying laugh. “Walter,” he called to the group of men. “Come here.” Walter detached himself and came over. “Walter, I was saying to our friend the Commander that when we fire the Moonraker it will be like committing murder.”
Bond was not surprised to see a look of puzzled incredulity come over the Doctor’s face.
Drax said irritably, “Child murder. Murder of our child,” he gestured at the rocket. “Wake up. Wake up. What’s the matter with you?”
Walter’s face cleared. Frostily he beamed his appreciation of the simile. “Murder. Yes, that is good. Ha! ha! And now,
Sir Hugo. The graphite slats in the exhaust vent. The Ministry is quite happy about their melting-point? They do not feel that…” Still talking, Walter led Drax under the tail of the rocket. Bond followed.
The faces of the ten men were turned towards them as they came up. Drax introduced him with a wave of the hand. “Commander Bond, our new security officer,” he said briefly.
The group eyed Bond in silence. There was no move to greet him and the ten pairs of eyes were incurious.
“Now then, what’s all this fuss about the graphite?…” The group closed round Drax and Walter. Bond was left standing alone.
He was not surprised by the coolness of his reception. He would have regarded the intrusion of an amateur into the secrets of his own department with much the same indifference mixed with resentment. And he sympathized with these hand-picked technicians who had lived for months among the highest realms of astronautics, and were now on the threshold of the final arbitration. And yet, he reminded himself, the innocent among them must know that Bond had his own duty to perform, his own vital part in this project. Supposing one pair of those uncommunicative eyes concealed a man within a man, an enemy, perhaps at this very moment exulting in his knowledge that the graphite which Walter seemed to mistrust was indeed under-strength. It was true that they had the look of a well-knit team, almost of a brotherhood, as they stood round Drax and Walter, hanging on their words, their eyes intent on the mouths of the two men. But was part of one brain moving within the privacy of some secret orbit, ticking off its hidden calculus like the stealthy mechanism of an infernal machine?