Ark Angel - Anthony Horowitz [62]
Paul shook his head. “It’s really cool!”
“Cool?” Drevin snapped. “I despise this modern teenage slang! You use ghetto language to describe what you can’t even begin to imagine. Cool? Is that all you can say?”
“What about the other rocket?” Alex asked.
He had seen the second gantry from the plane. It was further along the shore, a clear distance from the Atlas. The second rocket, slightly smaller, also seemed to be waiting for blast-off. More people surrounded it, working on the final preparations.
“Mr Payne?” Drevin turned to his head of security.
“We’ve brought forward the launch,” Payne explained in his rasping voice. “We plan to send it up immediately after Gabriel 7.”
“Why?” Alex wondered.
“We are involved in a series of long-term experiments,” Drevin said. “We need to know more about the effects of weightlessness on the human body. The second rocket is a Soyuz-Fregat. It will carry a model of the human system into space.”
“What does that mean?” Alex asked.
“An ape.”
“I didn’t realize you were still allowed to use animals.”
Drevin shrugged. “It’s not ideal. But there’s no other way.”
They drove to the first of the brick buildings. It was the largest in the compound, with three satellite dishes pointing up at the sky. “This is the control centre,” Payne told them. “The other buildings are for storage and construction. We also have sleeping quarters and recreation facilities. There are more than sixty people working on the island.”
They went in, along a corridor and into a large room with slanting windows looking out onto the launch site. Above the windows was a giant screen, blank at the moment but ready to transmit pictures of the launch itself. There were about twenty computers, arranged in two groups, facing each other. One group was marked COMMAND, the other TELEMETRY. To one side Alex noticed a conference table, a dozen chairs and another screen. A huge board with hundreds of light bulbs spelt out various information including LTST – local true solar time – the space equivalent of GMT. There was less to the control centre than Alex had imagined. In many ways it was like an oversized classroom.
A man had stood up as they came in. He was short but thickset, and looked either Chinese or Korean with neat black hair, wire-framed spectacles and a pencil moustache. He was dressed like a businessman in a smart jacket and tie. The clothes couldn’t have been less appropriate on a Caribbean island, but of course the climate in the control room was conditioned. Alex could feel the sterile air blowing cold on his bare arms and legs.
Drevin introduced him. “This is Professor Sing Joo-Chan, the flight director here on Flamingo Bay. We were very lucky to be able to recruit him from the Khrunichev Space Centre.”
“How do you do.” Sing spoke with a cultured English accent. He shook hands with Alex and Paul, but the dark brown eyes behind the glasses showed no interest in them at all. They were children. They had no place here. That was what the eyes seemed to say.
“This is where it all happens,” Drevin went on. “We’ll be controlling both the launch and the docking procedure from here. Of course, most of the procedure is computerized. But we have a camera fitted into Gabriel 7’s nose. Travelling three hundred miles at the speed of light, it takes about 0.001 seconds for the images to be relayed back here. It’s a bit like a giant computer game, except when you press a button here you’re manoeuvring about four tonnes of equipment in outer space. You can’t afford mistakes.”
Sing shook his head. “There will be no mistakes,” he assured them.
“Have we had