Last and First Contacts (Imaginings) Read Online Free PDF Page A

sewn to the breast.
    Adam drew his revolver. ‘Get back!’
    ‘No!’ Dorothea grabbed his arm. ‘I know him.’
    ‘Hello, Dorothea,’ said Dirk. ‘Follow me. Come, come.’ And he ran off into the dark.
    With difficulty they followed him across the crowded hall. Now all the lights were gone, and the only illumination was the moonlight shafting through broken windows. Dirk led them to a stairwell, leading down into the dark. He took the steps two, three at a time on his impossibly scrawny legs. Dorothea and Adam followed as best they could, Adam keeping his revolver drawn, held like a wand before him. Dirk’s feet were bare, Dorothea saw, his soles bloody and scarred.
    At the base of the stairs was a short corridor, plaster-walled. Again Dirk led the way, running. Still the building shuddered from the approaching bombs.
    They had to squeeze against a wall to get past what Dorothea thought was a pile of blankets, stacked up in the corridor. She found they were bodies, skin and bone, heaped up like firewood. Adam pushed her onwards.
    They reached a doorway and tumbled after Dirk into a wide hall, lit by dangling bulbs. This was a kind of dormitory, with bunks like shelves stacked up four deep. There were prisoners jammed in here, every way Dorothea looked. They cowered back at the sight of the SS man with his revolver. The stink was astounding, a smell of rot.
    Dorothea wondered if Father Kopleck was safe, wherever he was – if indeed he was still alive. The SS had come for him a week earlier.
    ‘Here, here.’ Dirk led them to a bottom-shelf bunk. It was just a wooden frame, Dorothea saw, no mattress, no bedding. Here they sat, the three of them, side by side, Dorothea between the two men. In the shadows around them the prisoners moved with rustles of dry flesh. ‘Safe here,’ said Dirk. ‘Not so bad. Like student dorms. You missed dinner. Cabbage soup.’
    ‘Shut up,’ Adam said routinely.
    Dirk looked away. Dorothea saw he had one hand swathed in a filthy bandage.
    More bombs fell like monstrous footsteps, and the building shook, the frame of the bed, and plaster fell from the ceiling.
    Dorothea felt oppressed by the huge inhuman energies being unleashed all around her. ‘The prisoners will be killed too,’ she said with a stab of outrage. ‘Don’t the English know that?’
    Adam grimaced. ‘Serve the little bastards right. Have you heard of their sabotage? They piss on the electronics. Over-tighten screws. Even blow dust into links between the turbo pumps. Stuff that’s impossible to detect before you fly. A rocket is a finely tuned machine; it isn’t hard to foul it up. And they keep on doing it, no matter how many of them we string up. Eh? Eh, you little bastard?’ He jabbed Dirk in the ribs with the muzzle of his revolver. ‘Keep this up and it’ll be the ovens for the whole damn lot of you.’
    ‘Do you think they’ll hit the comet?’
    ‘It’s possible. They won’t be aiming for it but some bombs always go astray, or are simply dumped. If they hit it we’ll lose everything. Oh, not the A4. That project will recover. There’s already been talk of moving from here, now that the location is compromised. Von Braun is all for live launches, I mean with munitions, in the middle of Poland.’
    She frowned. ‘But there are people there.’
    ‘Only Poles. Or we might build a plant under a mountain. Von Braun has marvellous dreams, you know. Such as putting one A4 on top of another and building a rocket that could reach New York. How would Roosevelt like that, eh? But he’s been fired up by what we could do with the comet technology.’
    ‘Make even bigger bombs.’
    ‘Yes, but beyond that… Think about it, Dorothea. You believe the Alpha Centauri people wanted to send us a message. Well, they have. And that message is – we can reach you! And with ships like this, we can destroy you! For they could, you know. Von Braun and Dornberger did some calculations of the energy, I mean the sheer