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4.
"Ten seconds to launch," said a controller's voice far away at the rocketdrome, echoing faintly over the eavesdropping radio in Hedrock's van.
"Oh my God," Moira said, "what have I done to my fatherland?"
"Relax and enjoy the show," Hedrock said, giving her his seductive, boyish smile. "You are helping me save the world. There must be one Gotha under a new leadership, not East or West, not Moss nor Gruen."
Visibly disgusted with herself, Moira shoved him away. Her unexpected violent motion made him spill hot coffee over his lap, and he jumped up cursing.
No time to humor her now. Too bad if she was unhappy with herself.
He ran a fingertip over the miniature control display bar overhead behind the windshield glass. All the indicators looked green, with the occasional flicker into warning amber but quickly back to green. No red lights at all. The wide array of tiny signals looked good clear across from one side to the other.
Today's abort would put a huge dent in West Gotha's strategic capabilities, Hedrock thought. His handler here, and his coordinators on the other side, had promised him a bloc of time to himself. He did have a special matter to pursue—a woman. She was special, and he actually hoped that he could salvage their damaged relationship.
She too was a professor—a mathematician. Hedrock liked his women attractive and brilliant. Moira came close, but Amy was the ticket. If most women were little more than a brief lyric, Moira was a minuet, but the wealthy, powerful, and intriguing Baroness was a symphony. The fact that she possessed knowledge that could reshape history on this planet was almost not a consideration right now. Hedrock had a different plan for her, a strategy unlike any he had ever considered. He was about to betray both East and West Gotha for her sake. First, though, he must find her and cautiously try to repair the damage he'd caused to their relationship—for Amy, whom he had married in a secret ceremony, his wife under secret laws of neither East nor West, had discovered his liaison with Moira. Amy had become suspicious, spied on them, and caught them in bed together in a mediocre downtown West Gotha hotel—complete with missing T in the pink neon Hotel sign outside the window. He'd almost expected Amy to kill them both, given the rage and pain he saw in her eyes as he and Moira lay frozen with pink neon washing on and off across their naked skin—and perhaps that would have been merciful compared to the rage he'd spotted in her only after glance as she fled from the home he'd briefly started sharing with her in the family castle.
"Three, two, one," said the distant voice.
Moira sat frozen, staring at the red rocket glow starting to warm up the billowing vapor clouds around the nose cone.
"Launch is go, lift sequence engage, full burn all engines go," said a melange of voices blending together in one urgent mix of cryptic words.
Hedrock crossed his fingers and glanced at the head-up display, which showed the microwave outputs were active and beaming, aimed at the transponder and the rocket's brain core from three different locations within West Gotha.
Moira gasped as the cloud grew redder and flashed into a yellow-white sun before instantly dimming into a cold blue glow that died out within choking gray-black roils of burning rubber and machinery.
"Yes!" Hedrock said. "We did it." He laughed as he turned on the engine, put the van in reverse, and started to back away from the stone wall overlooking the promontory.
At that moment, he saw a half dozen West Gotha police cars come streaking toward him. Their overhead light bars twirled in various colors, and their white metallic shapes hurled through the damp air. What? Hedrock stared in disbelief at the undoing of his scheme. In the same instant, he realized that Amy Hedrock wasn't the only one who hated him. He stared at Moira, his lover, and saw the flat, slate rage in her eyes directed at him.
"I couldn't go through with it," she said. "I turned us both in."
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