Code to Zero by Follett Ken Read Free Book Online

he do if he caught the guy—torture him?
    Then it was too late. Three passers-by had stopped to watch the fracas and were now standing at a safe distance, staring at Luke. After a moment, he walked away, heading in the direction opposite to that taken by his two shadows.
    He felt worse than ever, shaky after his violent outburst and sick with disappointment at the result. He had met two people who probably knew who he was, and he had got no information.
    “Great job, Luke,” he said to himself. “You achieved precisely nothing.”
    And he was alone again.

8 A.M.
    The Jupiter C missile has four stages. The largest part is a high-performance version of the Redstone ballistic missile. This is the booster, or first stage, an enormously powerful engine that has the gargantuan task of freeing the missile from the mighty pull of earth’s gravity.
     
    Dr. Billie Josephson was running late.
    She had got her mother up, helped her into a quilted bathrobe, made her put on her hearing aid, and sat her in the kitchen with coffee. She had woken her seven-year-old, Larry, praised him for not wetting the bed, and told him he had to shower just the same. Then she returned to the kitchen.
    Her mother, a small, plump woman of seventy known as Becky-Ma, had the radio on loud. Perry Como was singing “Catch a Falling Star.” Billie put sliced bread in the toaster, then laid the table with butter and grape jelly for Becky-Ma. For Larry she poured cornflakes into a bowl, sliced a banana over the cereal, and filled a jug with milk.
    She made a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and put it in Larry’s lunch box with an apple, a Hershey bar, and a small bottle of orange juice. She put the lunch box in his school bag and added his home reading book and his baseball glove, a present from his father.
    On the radio, a reporter was interviewing sightseers on the beach near Cape Canaveral who were hoping to see a rocket launch.
    Larry came into the kitchen with his shoelaces untied and his shirtbuttons done up awry. She straightened him out, got him started on his cornflakes, and began to scramble eggs.
    It was eight-fifteen, and she was almost caught up. She loved her son and her mother, but a secret part of her resented the drudgery of taking care of them.
    The radio reporter was now interviewing an Army spokesman. “Aren’t these rubberneckers in danger? What if the rocket goes off course and crash-lands right here on the beach?”
    “There’s no danger of that, sir,” came the reply. “Every rocket has a self-destruct mechanism. If it veers off course, it will be blown up in mid-air.”
    “But how can you blow it up after it’s already taken off?”
    “The explosive device is triggered by a radio signal sent by the range safety officer.”
    “That sounds dangerous in itself. Some radio ham fooling around might accidentally set it off.”
    “The mechanism responds only to a complex signal, like a code. These rockets are expensive, we don’t take any risks.”
    Larry said, “I have to make a space rocket today. Can I take the yoghurt pot to school?”
    “No, you can’t, it’s half full,” she told him.
    “But I have to take some containers! Miss Page will be mad if I don’t.” He was near to tears with the suddenness of a seven-year-old.
    “What do you need containers for?”
    “To make a space rocket! She told us last week.”
    Billie sighed. “Larry, if you had told me last week, I would have saved a whole bunch of stuff for you. How many times must I ask you not to leave things until the last minute?”
    “Well, what am I gonna do?”
    “I’ll find you something. We’ll put the yoghurt in a bowl, and . . . what kind of containers do you want?”
    “Rocket shape.”
    Billie wondered if schoolteachers ever thought about the amount of work they created for busy mothers when they blithely instructedchildren to bring things from home. She put buttered toast on three plates and served the scrambled eggs, but she did not