The Railhead at Kysyl Khoto

By Allen K. Lang

Illustrated by SCHOENHERR

"Kysyl. Railhead. K. E. Ziolkovsky. 5000 meters/second. Luna." That was the entire message. But its meaning made White Sands look pretty trivial, and turned a rocket engineer into a salesman!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Infinity November 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I've been told that during the season of the simoom winds in Morocco, Arab judges let confessed murderers off with a fine. The weather justifies homicide. Washington judges should be as lenient in the summer, I thought, scooting on the contours of my chair to keep the seat of my pants from sweating into the varnish. Ten bucks and costs seemed a fair price to pay society if I killed this Doctor Francis von Munger.

My cigarettes had become limp and brown with the sweat through my shirt. I eased one of these unappetizing noodles out of the pack and lit it. It tasted like burning, damp wool stockings. I picked up an ancient magazine to keep from staring at the blonde receptionist, the only object in the waiting room upon which the eye could rest with comfort.

I'd viewed all the cartoons without smiling and was working my way through the ads when the blonde peeked over my magazine. "Dr. von Munger will see you now, Dr. Huguenard," she said.

"Damn right he will!" I growled, slapping the magazine down and trailing the blonde into the holy of holies. Inside, an efficient young woman sat behind an efficient steel desk. She looked insultingly cool. "How much of von Munger's typewriter pool do I have to work through before I get to see the great man in the flesh?" I demanded of the cool-looking redhead.

"Have a cigar, Dr. Huguenard," the girl said, tipping a cylindrical humidor my way. "And sit down," indicating the chair that squatted beside her desk. "I've got news for you, Huguenard. I'm von Munger. The first name is Frances, with an 'e.' Makes all the difference."

I accepted the cigar, crushed my wool-sock cigarette in the ash-tray, and leaned back silent to indicate my availability for further astonishments.

"I suppose you wonder why you were sent here," she began.

I murmured something about Washington's being delightful to visit in mid-June, whatever the occasion might be. She ignored this subtlety. "We've needed a rocket engineer in Economic Analysis for some time," she said. "Recent developments have made your employment here imperative."

I lit the cigar slowly. "I'd been led to believe that our work at White Sands was important, too," I said through my smoke.

Von Munger looked as put out as though I'd belched during the invocation at an ambassadorial tea party. She took a deep breath—a pretty process, despite the mannish suit she was wearing—and launched into her sales talk. "Dr. Huguenard, our work here in the Commerce Department's Special Bureau of Economic Analysis is the most important work in the world. If a war is fought, we will win it. If that war is prevented, we will have prevented it."

I'd seen this sort of megalomania displayed by chiefs of paperwork before, but never in a more acute form. I smiled. This little redhead obviously saw herself as a sort of benign Lucrezia Borgia, erecting a fortress of filing-cabinets around the American Way.

"I'm glad you smiled, Dr. Huguenard," she said. "I was afraid that your face was all scar-tissue, and just wouldn't bend."

"You're pretty, too," I snarled. The damp heat had leached the last vestiges of chivalry from my soul. "Get on with your pitch, will you? I want to turn your job down and get back to my air-conditioned lab in New Mexico."

"Give me five minutes to persuade you to stay," she said, making a steeple with her fingertips and resting the steeple against her chin.

I checked my wrist watch.

"The S.B.E.A. is responsible for a special type of strategic intelligence," she said. "We are analyzing the economic processes of the USSR."

"I am familiar with the multiplication table," I said. "Otherwise, I don't see how I can be of use to you. My specialty is rocket-fuel injection systems. I'd dearly love to get back to that."

"You're cutting into my three hundred seconds of grace, Doctor Huguenard," she protested.

I sucked bitterly on the cigar she'd given me. "Okay," I sighed through the smoke. "Continue, Professor."

"Money, to a nation, is like blood to a man," she said. "This is true even in Russia's manipulative economy. Were you to trace the movement of blood through the human body, you'd soon know its every tissue. Just so, by tracing the flow of wealth through the USSR, we can discover precisely what's going on over there. We have overt means of observation, such as the Soviet studies published in Industriia, Sovetskaya Metallurgiia, Voprosy Ekonomiki, and other journals; and we have our clandestine sources as well."

"Do you read Russian?" I asked, feeling a little more respect for this miss with the PhD.

"Russian, Polish, German, and French," she said impatiently. "I was born in Gdansk, née Danzig, a community where being a polyglot is simple self-preservation. But I'd best get on. My time is running low."

"Take ten minutes," I said grandly. "Fifteen. But where do I come in?"

She lit a cigarette and went on. "This office is concerned with the economic processes taking place within the Tuvinian Autonomous Region of the RSFSR, an area that makes the Dakota Bad Lands look like Miami Beach. The capital city of this region is Kysyl Khoto. We have a tourist there."

"Tourist?" I asked.