V-S Day: A Novel of Alternate History (8 page)

“Aw, c’mon, Esther . . . you know that’s not entirely true.” Lloyd polished off the last of his enchilada and wiped his mouth with a napkin. A small, gnomish man with curly black hair, he peered at her over the top of his glasses. “Bob’s intent all along has been to build something that will take him into outer space. And not just to the Moon, either. He wants to go to Mars.”

“Mars?” Bliss was incredulous.

Henry winced. Lloyd might just well have said that Mescalero Ranch was in the business of weaving magic carpets. “It’s Bob’s dream to construct a vehicle that one day”—he carefully emphasized this—“might be capable of transporting people to another planet. He’s had this ambition his entire life, ever since he read
The War of the Worlds
as a kid. But that’s not what we’re doing here, Colonel. We’re just taking the first steps.”

“Anyway, if the press wasn’t bad enough, there was also . . . well, the accidents.” Ice chuckled in Esther’s glass as she poured herself some more lemonade. “The big one in particular. One of those rockets went off course and crashed, starting a small fire that the Auburn fire department had to put out. When the local papers heard about it, they claimed that it was a giant moon rocket and that it had blown up.”

“Yeah, that was a good one.” A bit on the chubby side, Taylor Brickell had a round and pleasant face that made him look more like a stock clerk than an aeronautical engineer. “I liked that almost as much as the
New York Times
saying that Bob’s a crackpot because everyone knows rockets wouldn’t be able to work in space because . . .”

“There’s no air for them to push against.” Bliss smiled. “I know . . . I read that story in his intelligence file.”

Esther shot him a surprised glance. “Army intelligence has a file on Bob?”

“You didn’t think we’d completely forgotten about him, do you?” The colonel shook his head. “Granted, we sort of lost track of him after he stopped using Camp Devens as a test area . . . why did he do that, anyway? It’s a perfectly good place to launch rockets.”

“Are you kidding?” Henry almost laughed out loud. “Sorry, Colonel. I know the Army was trying to be generous, letting him use that place . . . but it was a marsh, for God’s sake. Mud, mosquitoes, briar patches . . .”

“The Army meant well,” Esther said, cutting him off, “but it was unsuitable for our purposes. Besides, with Bob’s now spending so much time outdoors, we felt we needed to leave Massachusetts. Auburn passed ordinances prohibiting rocket launches in town limits, and Clark University wasn’t keen on his working with explosive materials on campus, so we started looking elsewhere.”

“And that’s how we landed here.” Lloyd leaned back in his chair, cradling his head in his hands behind his neck. “Thanks to Harry Guggenheim. He bought the land we’re on and writes the checks.”

“Yes, I understand that’s where your funds have been coming from,” Bliss said. “Him and Charles Lindbergh.”

“My . . . you have been keeping tabs on us, haven’t you?” Esther’s eyes were as sharp as tacks.

“As I said, we’ve been keeping an eye on him . . . somewhat.” Bliss hesitated. “Matter of fact, Mrs. Goddard, I’m a big fan of your husband’s work. I studied his work when I was an engineering student at MIT.”

“You’re an MIT grad?” Taylor asked, obviously surprised to find a fellow alumnus at the table.

Bliss smiled and raised his left hand to show off his class ring, turned around on his finger so that the beaver etched upon its face has its paddlelike tail pointed toward the person looking at it:
kiss my tail
, as the in-joke went. “That’s why the Army sent me,” he said. “If Dr. Goddard agrees to help us . . .”

“Then I’d be working for you, is that it?”

Unnoticed until just then, Goddard had quietly walked into the dining room, the thick folder cradled under his arm. Everyone looked around as he came to the table. “Is there any lunch left, dear,” he asked his wife, “or did you eat everything?”

“No, there’s some enchiladas left.” Esther reached for the pan that Taylor had been eying hungrily. “Sit down and . . .”

“That’s all right. I’m not sure I have an appetite left.” Goddard took the vacant seat at the end of the table, carefully placing the folder between him and Bliss. He let out his breath as a long sigh as he turned to the colonel. “This is . . . one hell of a thing you’ve brought me. One hell of a thing.”

“Isn’t it, though?” Bliss solemnly nodded. “It startled me, too, when I read it.”

Henry started to pick up the report, but Hillman reached forward to stop him. “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s . . .”

“Go ahead and let him see it, Corporal.” Bliss shook his head. “I’ll trust them to abide by their agreement with Dr. Goddard. Besides, if he agrees to work for us, he’ll probably want to pick his own men, and Mr. Morse here will undoubtedly be one of them.” He glanced at Goddard. “Isn’t that right, sir?”

Goddard didn’t reply but instead opened the folder and ruffled the report’s pages. Henry caught a glimpse of single-spaced type, equations, diagrams. “I’d love to know how you came about getting your hands on this, but I imagine that’s a long story.”

“It is. For now, let’s just say that a couple of men probably gave up their lives in order for us to see this, and be grateful for their sacrifice.” A quiet gasp from Esther, and the colonel looked in her direction. “Yes, ma’am, it’s that important.”

“What is it, Bob?” Lloyd asked. “Are the Germans building rockets, too?”

“Worse than that. They’re working on something that goes beyond anything we’ve done here.” Goddard absently ran a hand across the hairless top of his head, almost as if he’d come down with a sudden fever. “I’ve known that they’ve been doing rocket research for quite some time, ever since their man Oberth wrote to me and requested that I send him the technical details of my own work . . .”

“You didn’t, did you?” Bliss stared at him in horror.

“Oh, of course not. Besides the fact that I have my patents to protect, I had little doubt that they hadn’t overlooked the military implications. And when Hitler took over . . .” He shook his head. “No, whatever progress they’ve made, they’ve achieved it without my assistance. But I’d never suspected that they’d moved so fast, so quickly. Oberth . . .”

“We don’t think Hermann Oberth is directly involved with this. The Nazis have found other people instead . . . a fellow by name of Wernher von Braun, and another chap named Eugen Sanger. Heard of either of them?”

“Von Braun, yes . . . he’s Oberth’s protégé. A very talented young man. Sanger, though, I don’t know.” Goddard tapped a finger against the report. “And you say this is his proposal?”

“It’s Sanger’s work, yes, but von Braun appears to be the man the Nazis put in charge of actually implementing it.” Bliss paused. “Do you think it’s possible, sir? I mean, it’s not just some pipe dream but something the Nazis could actually pull off?”

Goddard drummed his fingers against the table for a few moments as he regarded the report Henry still hadn’t picked up. “If they have enough money and people to throw at it,” he said at last, “yes, I think they could. There’s nothing there that isn’t possible.”

“I see.” Bliss hesitated. “And do you think you could find a way to defeat it . . . that is, if you had enough money and people of your own?”

As an answer, Goddard pushed back his chair. “Come with me, Colonel,” he said, standing up. “I’d like to show you something.”

Colonel Bliss rose from the table to follow Goddard. Everyone else fell in behind them as they walked through the house to the back door.

=====

The shed located out back wasn’t much to look at, a T-shaped wood-frame workshop about sixty feet in length, with windows running along its sides. Goddard led everyone through one of the two doors set side by side at the short end of the shed; past a row of offices and storerooms was a large laboratory with a bare wooden floor, the ceiling’s rafters supported by slender beams. The lab was filled with machine tools of all kinds—metal lathes, drills, acetylene torches—and its walls were lined with shelves and workbenches, with canvas aprons hanging from hooks near the door.

In the middle of the room, lying atop a long assembly table, was a rocket. About thirty feet long, it looked like an enormous silver pencil made of duralumin. Panels had been removed from its sides to expose its interior: three cylindrical fuel tanks, with insulated pipes and compact fuel pumps leading from one another, everything feeding into the combustion chamber at the aft end. The nose cone had been closed—it would eventually be reopened so that the rocket’s recording instruments and parachute could be fitted into it—and the four guidance fins were stacked against the wall, waiting to be attached.

“This is Nell,” Goddard said, fondly laying a hand upon the rocket’s side.

“Nell 21, to be exact,” Henry added. “They’ve all had the same name.”

Bliss gave him a questioning look, and Esther laughed. “We started naming the rockets Nell after the crash at Aunt Effie’s farm. There were so many mistakes in the newspaper that it reminded us of a line from a Broadway musical: ‘They ain’t done right by our Nell.’”

“Cute,” Hillman murmured, then turned red as he caught an angry glance from Esther. “No offense, ma’am, but . . . sorry, I never would’ve thought of giving a rocket a girl’s name.”

Esther said nothing, but Henry knew that the corporal had touched a sore spot. The Goddards never had children, nor would they ever. Bob’s doctors didn’t want Esther to even kiss her husband, for fear that she might contract tuberculosis; raising a family was out of the question. Esther was nineteen years younger than Bob, and surely the thought of having children with him had crossed her mind, but so far as Henry could tell, their relationship had always been more cerebral than physical. Theirs was a love affair of the mind, and Nell was their spiritual daughter.

“Yes, well . . .” Goddard made an uncomfortable grunt. “As Henry says, this is the twenty-first rocket we’ve built since we’ve been in New Mexico, and so far we’ve had a pretty good success rate. Three years ago, one of Nell’s sisters set the altitude record for an unmanned aircraft . . . 6,565 feet at sea level, although from here the actual altitude was 3,294 from ground level.” He paused, then added, “Of course, the Germans may well have exceeded this, but we’ll never know.”

Bliss strolled down the length of the table, bending down now and then to closely inspect features of the half-finished rocket. “Very impressive . . . and you’ve had how many people working on this?”

“Just the five of us,” Taylor said, arms folded proudly across his chest.

“And how much does Mr. Guggenheim give you each year for your research?”

“Our annual budget is $10,000,” Esther replied.

“I see.” Bliss looked up from the rocket. “Dr. Goddard, your Uncle Sam is willing to write you a blank check and give you as many men as you need to complete your research, provided that you deliver us a rocket capable of shooting down whatever the Nazis put up. But I don’t think I have to tell you what the challenges are. You’ve reached an altitude of almost seven thousand feet . . .”

“I know.” Goddard’s expression was stoical. “And you need something that can reach forty-three miles, at least.”

“What?” Henry couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. He stared at the colonel. “Are you kidding?”

“I wish I was, but I’m not.” Bliss calmly gazed back at him. “And we need to do this as soon as possible, or else . . .”

“A lot of people will die,” Goddard finished, “and it’s possible that Germany will win the war. You’ll see what he’s talking about when you read the report.” He looked at Bliss again. “All right, Colonel, you’ve got me. Consider me your man.”

“Glad to hear it, sir.” Bliss smiled and nodded. “So . . . what’s the first thing you need to get started?”

“People. I need people . . . the right people.”

JUNE 1, 2013

“That’s where we come in,” Jack Cube said.

By then, everyone in the living room had settled in for a long story. Douglas Walker was surprised that so many people had gathered here; surely, they’d heard the tale so often that they could probably recite it themselves. Perhaps they were only being polite to the three old men sitting near the fireplace, or maybe it was a ritual part of these get-togethers, yet he suspected it was something different. This was something they never got tired of hearing; it had become the folklore of their extended family, a story retold again and again because it brought meaning to the reunions.

In any case, even the children had become quiet as J. Jackson Jackson, Henry Morse, and Lloyd Kapman took turns recounting the events leading up to this historic day seventy years ago. Through the door leading to the adjacent kitchen could be heard the sounds of wives and mothers cleaning up from the picnic. Otherwise, everyone’s attention was focused on the surviving members of the 390 Group.

“See, here’s a part most people don’t know.” Henry took a sip from the beer he’d been nursing. “Even when they’ve heard of Operation Blue Horizon, they think the guys who worked on it just materialized from nowhere. Bob snapped his fingers and, abracadabra, there we were. What they don’t realize is that it’s almost a miracle that we were able to come together on such short notice.”

“Bob knew some . . . of us already,” Lloyd said, speaking haltingly in between breaths. He had a beer as well, although he’d barely touched it. “Henry and I . . . and Taylor, too . . . were already at the ranch when . . . Bliss showed up. We had been working with . . . Bob and Esther . . . since after they’d moved from Worcester. Bob recruited us . . . to help him build the rockets he made . . . once he left Massachusetts.”

“The ones he built after the Clark University rockets that he launched from his aunt’s farm,” Walker said.

“Right,” said Henry, “so we were already on tap. Bob had found Taylor, Lloyd, and me after reading papers we’d published in various technical journals, but he knew that, for something like this, he’d need more than just the three of us and Esther. He had to find more guys with practical knowledge of liquid-fuel rockets, and in 1942 there were damn few people who had that kind of know-how.” He chuckled. “In America, anyway. We knew several more, but they were all in Germany.”

“Couldn’t really . . . ask them,” Lloyd wheezed, and several people laughed.

Jack Cube stretched out his legs. “The fortunate thing is, because there were so few people like that, most of us already either knew each other, or at least knew about each other,” he said. “The main organization for this sort of thing was the American Rocket Society, which started off as sort of an amateur club but had begun doing research of its own before the war. They’d asked Bob if he wanted to join as sort of a senior advisor, but he declined because he didn’t want to share any proprietary information . . .”

“Bob was very protective of his patents,” Henry added. “People thought he was shy, and he was, but the main reason why he was so reclusive was because he didn’t want to share the details of his research before he found a way to make money from it.”

“Yes, right, of course.” Jack Cube waved an impatient hand. “But even though he wasn’t involved with the ARS, he knew a lot of people who were, and he knew which ones were serious engineers and not just science fiction fans . . .”

“Don’t knock science fiction fans,” Henry said, interrupting him again. “That’s how we found Mike Ferris. He used to write letters to
Astounding Science Fiction
, which both Taylor and I read . . .”

“Weren’t you . . . trying to get stuff published in . . . that magazine at the time?” Lloyd asked.

“You remember that?” Henry grinned. “Yeah, I had a typewriter set up in my room at the ranch, and whenever I had spare time, I’d bang out a story or two. So did Bob, as a matter of fact, but for him it was just a hobby. He never seriously tried to get anything published.” He shrugs. “I eventually sold a few stories, but that wasn’t until after the war, and no one remembers them anymore. Anyway, that’s how Taylor and I found Mike, who was studying aeronautical engineering at Caltech at the time.”

“Mike Ferris and Harry Chung were the only guys we recruited from Caltech,” Jack Cube said. “It had the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, but Bob didn’t trust GALCIT even though Harry Guggenheim was funding them as well. The whole patent-protection thing. Mike only got in because he knew a lot about solid-fuel propulsion, and . . . well, we didn’t want the other guy they had.”

“John Whiteside Parsons.” Henry scowled. “Brilliant, but . . . ah, rather unstable.”

“Creepy,” Lloyd agreed, shaking his head.

“When the FBI did a background check on him,” Henry continued, “they discovered that he had an unhealthy interest in the occult. He was pen pals with Aleister Crowley and belonged to the California branch of the Church of Satan, and . . . anyway, when the feds found that out, they considered him to be too much of a security risk. Which was too bad, because we could’ve used him. But Mike had worked with Parsons, so he knew almost as much as he did, so . . .”

“The FBI also gave us some trouble with Hamilton Ballou,” Jack said. “Taylor knew him from MIT and recommended him as a liquid-fuel chemist, but when the feds looked into him, they discovered that Ham had once belonged to the Communist Party. Of course, Ham had been a commie just the same way a lot of other kids were in the thirties . . . sort of a liberal fad, before most people learned that Russia wasn’t the workers’ paradise it was cracked up to be. He’d dropped out long before Taylor met him, but he’d signed the petitions that put him on the FBI watch list, and it took a lot of smooth talking by both Bob and Colonel Bliss to get him cleared.”

“The feds weren’t happy with . . . Harry Chung either,” Lloyd said.

“Yeah, Harry was also at GALCIT when the war broke out. A few weeks after Pearl Harbor, though, he and his wife were rounded up and sent to an internment camp.” Jack gave a disgusted snort. “Didn’t matter that he was third-generation Chinese-American or that he’d been born and raised in San Francisco. Anyone with yellow skin was considered suspicious, and the feds really didn’t want a guy like him working on a top secret military project. But Bob knew his work as an aeronautical engineer, so he twisted the FBI’s arm until they surrendered.”

“They weren’t wild about a guy with black skin either, as I recall,” Henry said quietly.

“The FBI didn’t think I was a security risk,” Jack replied, a crooked smile on his face. “They just couldn’t believe a black man would know enough about rockets to make him worth military deferral. And to tell the truth, I wanted to be in the service. After I got out of Tuskegee University with a degree in mechanical engineering, the first thing I did was join the Army Air Corps, so I was in flight school when I got the call. Again, it was a matter of connections. Mike Ferris knew about me because we were both ARS members and had been trading letters back and forth, and we both knew about Gerry Mander because . . .”

“Gerry was the wild card,” Lloyd said.

“Yeah, he was the deuce, all right.” Henry smiled at the thought. “The rest of us were college boys, but Gerry’s formal education stopped at high school. He was a farm boy from Alabama, and his family didn’t have enough money to send him to college. That didn’t stop him, though, once the space bug bit him. He built his own rocket from bits and pieces of scrap metal, going by what he’d read in magazines and library books about Bob’s first rockets. Pretty remarkable, when you stop to think about it.”

“But he didn’t know anything about gyroscopes,” Jack said, “so when he launched it from a cow pasture on his family’s property, it spun out and crashed through the roof of a neighbor’s barn. The kerosene he was using for fuel blew up and set the place on fire, and it burned to the ground before the fire department got there.”

“Had to . . . spring him from jail,” Lloyd said. “Gerry was . . . working on a road crew . . . when Colonel Bliss showed up to . . . offer him a job with us. He said, ‘Sounds like a . . . nice idea. Let me . . . think about it.’”

“I never heard that,” Walker said, laughing along with everyone else in the room. “How did Bob know about him?”

“He didn’t,” Jack said. “Mike and I had both read about Gerry’s experiment in the ARS newsletter, and we thought that any kid with that much gumption belonged on our team. Bob agreed, so we recruited him.”

“Gerry was the last guy to join the team,” Henry said. “He was also the youngest . . . I think he was only nineteen when he showed up . . . but not by much. Most of us were in our early twenties, although Taylor was about thirty, if I remember correctly.”

“I was . . . almost in my thirties, too,” Lloyd added.

“I stand corrected.” Henry shook his head, smiling at the fond memory. “We were all kids, really, kind of a band of misfits. Too smart for our own good, socially awkward, not really fitting in well with anyone around us. I think there’s a name for guys like us . . .” He looked over at his great-grandson. “What’s the word I’m looking for, Carl?”

“Geeks,” Carl said.

“Thank you . . . yeah, that’s what we were. Depression-era rocket geeks.” Henry shrugged. “Probably just as well that Bob got to us before the Army did. Of course, Jack here is probably the only guy a draft board wouldn’t have rejected as 4F . . . but even if they hadn’t, I don’t think any of us would’ve lasted a day in North Africa or Sicily.”

“Not that New England was much better.” Jack looked around the room. “You wouldn’t believe how cold this place gets in the middle of winter. There was one time . . .”

“That brings me to the next thing I’d like to know,” Walker said quickly, not wanting anyone to get ahead of himself and thus lose the chronological thread of the story. “Once the team was selected, why did you go to Worcester? That’s where Blue Horizon got started, of course . . .”

“The R&D work, yes,” Henry said. “Everything else stayed in New Mexico.”

“Right . . . at Alamogordo Army Air Field, once the project was relocated from Mescalero Ranch.”

“Uh-huh, that’s correct. The ranch wasn’t big enough for the job. Besides, everyone in Roswell knew that Bob was building rockets out there, and Colonel Bliss didn’t want anything being done in a place where just about anyone could drive up and see what was going on. So the decision was made to move everything to Alamogordo . . .”

“But not the rocket team. You were sent to Massachusetts. Why?”

“For a couple of reasons,” Jack said. “The first was that the people in the War Department wanted their brain trust as close to them as possible, so they could easily keep tabs on what we were doing. They’d put Omar Bliss in charge of the project, but even he was something of a . . . y’know, a wild card, to use that term again . . .”

“We didn’t know it then, but Omar was something of a geek, too.” Henry grinned. “The only person who didn’t think he was as weird as a three-dollar bill was Vannevar Bush, who’d met him at some Pentagon conference. That’s why Bush put Omar in charge . . . he was the one person in the War Department who didn’t think space travel was something straight out of the funny pages.”

“Anyway,” Jack continued, “some of the big brass weren’t sure they could depend on the colonel to lead something as important as this. As for the rest of us . . .”

“They trusted us . . . even less,” Lloyd said.

“Right,” Henry said. “Worcester was close enough to Washington that the big shots in the Pentagon felt like they had us under control, but far enough away that we’d be out of sight of any German spies who might be lurking around D.C.” His smile faded. “They were wrong, of course, but . . .”

“The other reason was Bob himself,” Jack said. “Bliss was bothered by Bob’s hands-on engineering approach. When the colonel heard that he and the other guys would fuel the Nell rockets themselves and even go out to the launch tower to make last-minute adjustments . . .”

“Like we had a choice,” Henry said. “It was just the five of us. We didn’t have a ground crew.”

“Anyway, Bliss didn’t want to risk having Bob or the rest of us getting blown to kingdom come, so he decided to move us across the country. And again, the logical place to put us was in Worcester.”

“Bob wasn’t happy about that at all,” Henry said. “He and Esther had been living in Roswell for quite a while. They put down roots in the community, and I think they would’ve been happy to stay there for the rest of their lives. Officially, he was still on the Clark faculty and was still drawing a salary as its physics department chairman, but he didn’t go back very often. So moving back to Massachusetts . . .”

“He . . . didn’t want to,” Lloyd rasped. “He fought like crazy to . . . stay in Roswell.”

“Yeah, well . . . he did fight, all right, but this is the U.S. Army we’re talking about, and during wartime . . .” Henry shook his head. “I thought they were wrong, too. I told Bliss he was making a mistake. But the colonel had his orders, and they came straight from the top. Blue Horizon . . . that was the code name the Army had given the project by then . . . was to be relocated to Worcester, and that was final.”

“And that’s . . . when we all got . . . to meet each other,” Lloyd said.