V-S Day: A Novel of Alternate History (11 page)

“A spaceship?” Ham gave him a disbelieving smirk. “You can’t be serious.”

“Well, maybe not
this
spaceship, but still . . .”

“This isn’t a science fiction story. We’ve got to come up with something real.”

“Why not?” Henry passed the pitcher to Taylor. “You heard what Bob said this morning. Even if we manage to build a missile capable of reaching Silver Bird’s altitude, making a direct hit would be a crapshoot . . . unlikely at best. The only way we’re going to get something accurate enough to bring that thing down is to put a pilot aboard. And that means building a manned spacecraft of our own.”

“But putting something into orbit . . .” Ham began.

“It could be done,” Lloyd said. “Henry will tell you . . . down in New Mexico, we’ve built rockets that have broken altitude records.”

“Besides, who’s talking about reaching orbit?” Henry asked. “All we need, really, is a craft capable of making a suborbital jaunt. Launch from New Mexico, intercept over North America, land somewhere on the East Coast. If it can reach an apogee of just forty to fifty miles, then we’ve got it licked.”

“But the thrust we’d need . . .” Ham shook his head. “Besides, we’d have to build a step-rocket for something like this. Two stages, at least.”

“No . . . no step-rockets.” Jack Cube tapped a finger against the table. “A two-stage rocket means we’d have to design, build, and test two different engines. I don’t think we have time for that.”

“You’ve got a point there.” Harry absently leafed through Henry’s magazine. “But I think Ham’s right, too. I doubt a single-stage rocket would do the trick. Besides, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with relying on just one engine. If it cuts out during launch . . .”

“What about solid-fuel rockets?” Gerry asked. “For boosters, I mean.”

Everyone stopped to look at the end of the table where the teenager was seated. “Come again?” Henry asked.

“Umm . . .” Gerry appeared nervous by the attention he’d suddenly drawn. “What I mean is, you build a single-stage rocket with a liquid-fuel engine, then strap on some solid rockets as boosters during launch. When they burn out, you just throw ’em away.” He hesitated. “Oh, maybe that’s a dopey idea.”

“No . . . no, it isn’t.” Taylor looked at the others. “Really, he might have something there.” He glanced down at Gerry. “Nice thinking there, kid,” he added, and Gerry grinned.

“Yeah, Harry and I were working with solid-fuel rockets at Caltech.” Mike played with his beer glass, absently sliding it back and forth across the battered tabletop. “You don’t have much control over them once they’ve ignited . . . you can’t throttle them up or down, or even shut them off . . . but they’re simple to make, and you can get a high impulse-per-second thrust ratio from them.”

“What sort of propellant?” Jack asked.

“Ammonium nitrate would be my guess.”

Harry nodded. “Yeah, we’ve had good results with the ammonium nitrate–black powder compound we tested for our jet-assisted takeoff project. Of course, we’d have to make something a lot bigger than that, but it could work.”

“Which leaves us with the liquid-fuel main engine.” Taylor shook his head. “I don’t even want to think about what a monster that would be.”

“You’re going to have to if we’re going to get anywhere with this.” Henry pulled out a pack of Camels and shook one loose. “Besides, that’s not all that hard to figure. We’ve done pretty well with the turbopump system we’ve developed at Mescalero. All we’d need to do, really, is build much the same thing on a larger scale.”

“Are you listening to what you’re saying?” Ham was incredulous. “You’re talking as if getting something forty or fifty miles into space is simple as”—he pointed to the magazine Harry was still skimming—“as this stupid stuff.”

“Science fiction isn’t stupid.” Henry glared at him, a lit match halfway to his mouth.

“You don’t hear Bob talking about it, do you?”

Henry lit his cigarette, leaned back in his chair, and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. “Ever read Buck Rogers?”

“Sure. Who doesn’t?”

“Ever notice that Dr. Huer . . . y’know, Buck’s pal, the inventor who builds all those rocket ships . . . looks a lot like Bob?” Henry grinned. “It’s not a coincidence. Dr. Huer is based on Bob.” Ham snorted in disbelief. “You think I’m joking,” Henry went on, “but I’m not. You should see Bob’s notebooks sometime. He’s got things in there that make everything in Buck Rogers look like kid stuff. Rockets that use atomic engines and ion-propulsion systems, plans for spaceships that could land like airplanes . . . he was thinking this stuff up years ago.”

“Think he’d let us look at them?” Jack asked. “They might give us a head start on what we need to do.”

“So long as you’re careful how you ask.” Lloyd frowned as he reached for the beer pitcher. “He’s kept this stuff hidden for years. He’s been afraid that, if the wrong people saw it, they’d just call him a crackpot. He caught a lot of flak when he wrote that Smithsonian monograph. As if the newspaper stories weren’t bad enough, he also had other university profs coming up to him to ask when he was going to build a moon rocket.”

“Another reason why he moved to New Mexico,” Henry added. “He got tired of taking crap from idiots. He . . . hey, Harry, what are you doing?”

Unnoticed until then, Harry Chung had pulled out a pencil and begun sketching something on a cocktail napkin. Looking up from his work, he gave Henry a shy smile. “Just an idea.”

“Okay if I see?” Henry asked, and when Harry nodded, he reached across the table to turn the napkin around. On it was a crude drawing of a slender ellipsoid, sharp at one end and blunt at the other, with three smaller cylinders positioned around its blunt end.

“Just an idea,” Harry said with an offhand shrug.

“Umm . . . yeah, okay, but there’s something missing.” Taking the pencil from Harry, Taylor slid the napkin away from Henry and added a pair of long, swept-back wings to either side of the fuselage. “Something like this, for its launch and descent phase.”

“A rocket plane.” Mike leaned over to study the drawing. “Sort of like what the Germans are building.”

“Guys, maybe we shouldn’t be talking about this.” Jack Cube dropped his voice as he glanced over his shoulder at the bartender and waitress. “Not here, at least. You heard what you-know-who said about secrecy.”

“You kidding? They don’t care what we’re saying.” Henry started to reach for the nearest pitcher, then saw that it was empty. They’d gone through the beer pretty quick. “I’ll get the next round.” He twisted around in his chair to raise a hand to the waitress. “Hey, miss? Another . . . oh, hell.”

The door had just opened and someone else had come in: Frank O’Connor. The FBI agent spotted them at once. Not bothering to take off his hat and coat, he walked across the barroom. No one said anything as he stopped at the end of the tables and glared at them, his mood as black as the night outside.

“It figures,” he murmured. “Third bar I check . . .”

“Hello, Frank,” Henry said. “Pull up a chair. I was just about to order another round.”

“Don’t bother. It’s last call so far as you’re concerned.” Pulling out his wallet, he produced a couple of dollars. When the waitress came over, he handed the money to her. “This will cover the tab, I presume.” She nodded and walked away, and he turned to the scientists again. “Get your coats . . .”

“Aw, c’mon, Frankie,” Lloyd said, “you can’t be serious. All we did is . . .”

“If you’d let me know that you just wanted to step out for a drink, I wouldn’t be so upset. I might have even joined you. But this whole business of creeping out of the house . . .” He shook his head in dismay. “Max dropped in, started wondering why you guys were so quiet. That’s why we went upstairs to see what you were doing. When we found your beds were empty . . .”

Gerry couldn’t help it. He sniggered under his breath. He tried to cover it with his hand, but the infection began to spread. Jack Cube choked on a mouthful of beer, and Lloyd was turning blue trying not to laugh; when everyone else saw their faces, the breakdown was inevitable. Within seconds, the group was roaring, tears leaking from their eyes as they slapped the tables with their hands.

“Out!” Agent O’Connor was furious. “Get your butts outta those chairs now!” He grabbed the back of Gerry’s chair, yanked it out beneath him. “You’re not even supposed to be here!” he yelled at the kid as he spilled out onto the floor. “You’re not old enough to drink!”

“What did you say?” Hearing this, the bartender shot up from his stool. “What are you clowns tryin’ to do, make me lose my liquor license?” He jabbed a finger at the door. “Get out!”

“Hey, hey . . .” Mike raised his hands. “Take it easy . . .”

“Out!”
The bartender wasn’t about to be placated. He grabbed a baseball bat from beneath the counter and started to come around the bar. It only made the scene more hysterical. They were out of their chairs, still laughing despite themselves. A pitcher fell over and splashed beer across Henry’s magazine, and Gerry slammed his head against the bottom of the table as he scrambled to his feet.

“And don’t come back!” the bartender roared, as the eight men tumbled through the door and out onto the sidewalk, still pulling on their hats and coats.

Two cars were at the curb, headlights on, fumes drifting from their exhaust pipes. Half the group reluctantly piled into the one where Max Hillman was waiting, the other half joining O’Connor for the ride back to the boardinghouse. The FBI agent put the Plymouth in gear and pulled out into the just-plowed street.

No one said anything for a couple of minutes, then Taylor coughed. “Sorry, Frank,” he said quietly, no longer laughing. “We didn’t know this would piss you off so much.”

“Yeah, what he said.” Mike was just as apologetic. “We weren’t trying to be smart-alecks. Just wanted to get a drink, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well . . .” By then, Frank had calmed down a little. “The colonel doesn’t have to know about this, I don’t reckon. He wants you guys to stay focused on the job.”

Beneath the wan glow of the passing streetlights, Harry Chung gazed at the rumpled napkin he’d managed to snatch up from the table. “Believe me,” he murmured, a wry smile on his face, “we’ve thought of nothing else.”

MARCH 15, 1942

“This is impressive,” Colonel Bliss said, “but do you really think it’s possible?”

Standing at the workbench in the Physics 390 lab, he studied the blueprints spread out before him. Seven pages of preliminary designs for a manned rocket ship, detailing every major feature from the radar array in the nose to the engine bell aft of the twenty-eight-foot wings and the horizontal stabilizer. The craft looked like nothing in the sky. It didn’t even look like anything on the cover of a science fiction magazine; it was more sophisticated than that.

“We’ve been working on this for the last five weeks.” Robert Goddard stood beside him, fondling an unlit cigar. The team had made him promise not to smoke in the lab; his cheroots reeked, and security precautions prohibited them from opening the windows. “There’s still a lot of work to be done, of course, but it’ll give you an idea of where we’re at just now.”

“To answer your question . . . yes, sir, we think it’s possible.” Henry Morse stood on the other side of the bench with the rest of the 390 Group, as the Pentagon had recently started calling Goddard’s rocket team. “We wouldn’t have wasted our time if we didn’t believe that.”

Bliss didn’t respond. He continued to leaf through the blueprints, examining each one for a minute or two before turning to the next one. He hadn’t visited Worcester very often lately; most of the last five weeks had been spent shuttling between Washington, D.C., and New Mexico, along with a brief trip to London for a meeting with the MI-6 office tasked with keeping track of Silver Bird. During his occasional visits, he’d learned from Goddard that the 390 Group was working on a rocket that would be a radical departure from his previous efforts, but this was the first time he’d seen anything in detail.

He finished looking over the blueprints, then returned to the first one, an overview of the as-yet-unnamed craft. “And you think a piloted vehicle is definitely the answer?”

“It’s the only answer,” Goddard said. “You’ll remember that one of the very first things we discussed was the manned option. The more we’ve studied it, the more we’re convinced that a surface-to-air missile won’t do the trick.”

“Making a killing shot that precise from the ground is almost impossible.” Michael Ferris used his unlit briar pipe to point to the calculations written in chalk on the blackboard behind him. “Based on what we’ve learned from the Sanger-Bredt study, Silver Bird’s velocity will probably be about thirteen thousand feet per second by the time it reaches New York. Not to mention a possible altitude of more than forty miles. Even if we surrounded Manhattan with missile batteries and fired them all at once, our chances of hitting it would be about the same as a hunter trying to take down a deer while blindfolded.”

“Which one’s wearing the blindfold?” Gerry Mander asked. “The hunter or the deer?”

Everyone chuckled except the colonel, who scowled at the group’s youngest member. Gerry just grinned back at him, his impudence irritating Bliss even more. Wisecracks had become common, even during the most serious discussions; it was a way of letting off steam that Goddard condoned and even encouraged but Bliss never understood.

“I understand,” the colonel said, ignoring Gerry and returning his attention to Bob, “but putting people in this thing adds a whole new level of complexity.”

“That’s why we make the rest of the vehicle as simple as possible . . . relatively simple, at least.” Goddard opened the blueprints to the second page, a cutaway diagram of the ship. “Look, we’re going to use liquid oxygen, nitrogen, and kerosene for the main-engine fuel mixture even though we’d probably get a better ips ratio from liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Manufacturing and storing liquid hydrogen is difficult, especially if you’re talking about a vehicle that’ll need to be fueled on a minute’s notice. Since that means we’ll have less thrust for escape velocity, the payload mass will have to be stripped down to the essentials.”

“Uh-huh.” Bliss bent closer to the table. “That’s why you’re planning to put only one person aboard. I would’ve thought you’d want a pilot and copilot, maybe even a gunner.”

“No. Just one person, the pilot. He’ll have his work cut out for him, but it will reduce the payload requirement and make life support a lot easier. So . . .”

“I don’t see any armaments. Where are the guns?”

Goddard didn’t respond at once. They all looked at one another. “We’re still working on that, sir,” Jack Cube said at last.

“‘Still working on it’?” Bliss stared at the junior officer. Even out of uniform, neither man forgot his respective rank in the Army. “Lieutenant, I’d think arming this bird would be your first consideration, not the last.”

Jackson looked away, embarrassed. Goddard came to the rescue. “What Jack Cu . . . Lieutenant Jackson means is that we’re studying alternatives to wing guns. This is one area where this craft won’t resemble a normal fighter because firing guns beyond the atmosphere would cause a recoil effect that could alter the craft’s trajectory. We need to come up with something else.”

“Rockets?”

“Yes, sir, that’s a possibility.” Jack Cube had recovered his poise and was once again speaking for himself. “But again, there’s the problem of accuracy. Since Silver Bird and the X-1 . . .”

“That’s what we’re calling the ship for the time being,” Goddard interjected, and Bliss nodded.

“. . . will be traveling at different velocities, hitting the target is going to be very difficult, even if our pilot gets close enough to open fire. That’s why we’re still working on a solution . . . sir.”

“I see.” Bliss seemed to regard Jackson with a little more respect. “Lieutenant, you’ve received flight training, haven’t you?”

“Yes, sir, I have. But I didn’t get my wings before I was reassigned to . . .”

“Have you . . . and by that I mean your team as a whole . . . had any thoughts about what we’ll need to look for when we search for a pilot?”

A wary smile ticked the corners of Jack’s mouth. “Well, sir, I’d volunteer myself were it not for one thing . . . I’m too tall.” He pointed to the cockpit, located about halfway down the fuselage. “Whoever we find is going to need to be five-ten or less if he’s going to fit into the cockpit.”

“Well, that’s a start.” Bliss paused, as if sizing up the young black officer. “Lieutenant, I’d like to speak to you later. I think I have a special job for you.”

Jack Cube nodded, and once again Bliss turned to Goddard. “So this is it? This is definitely what you want to build . . . not a missile, but a manned vehicle?”

“Like Henry said . . . we wouldn’t be wasting time with this if we didn’t think it wasn’t a viable solution.” Goddard looked him straight in the eye. “The Germans are building a spacecraft. Why can’t we?”

“Since you’ve brought that up . . .” Bliss reached down to pick up the briefcase he’d brought with him. He started to open it, then paused to look at the men gathered around him. “What I’m about to show you is classified top secret. You’re not to discuss it outside this room. Understood?”

Everyone nodded, and the colonel pulled out a manila folder holding three photographs. “Although the Allies are still reluctant about mounting an air raid on Peenemünde, they’ve begun sending high-altitude reconnaissance planes over the Baltic coast in an effort to gain intelligence. These pictures were brought back last week by one of those recon missions . . . at great risk, I might add, since the P-38 barely escaped the Luftwaffe fighters dispatched to shoot it down.” He spread the photos out across the table. “Bob, I’d particularly like to get your opinion on what we’re seeing here.”

Adjusting his glasses, Goddard bent forward to study the pictures; the rest of the team crowded in to get a closer look as well. The images were distant but sharp; although they’d been taken from a great altitude, the camera had used a zoom lens to increase the magnification, making objects appear much closer than they’d actually been. It wasn’t difficult to tell what they were looking at: a large collection of buildings of all sizes, separated by paved roads running between them, with a long beach running nearby.

“Looks like a college campus.” Goddard pointed to a small oval on the left side of one of the photos. “There’s even an athletic field. See the running track?”

“That’s not what interests us.” Pushing another photo closer to him, Bliss tapped a finger against an object in the center of the frame. “MI-6 has some ideas of what this is, but we’d like to get your take on it.”

The object was near the beach and appeared to be some sort of tower. One end rose straight up, while a long, horizontal structure jutted out from the other end, making the whole thing look a little like a half-finished suspension bridge. The tower was surrounded by a broad white border, apparently a concrete apron. The nearest building was some distance away, but there appeared to be large trucks on the road leading to the tower.

Goddard examined the photo carefully. “I’ll have you know, Colonel, that I despise air travel. I’ve only been up in a plane once, and it scared the devil out of me. So this is an unusual perspective.” He stood erect, took off his glasses, and cleaned them on the sleeve of his lab coat. “However, I’d say that we’re looking at the test stand for a rocket engine, and quite a large one at that.”

“I agree.” Henry laid a finger on the horizontal structure. “I bet that’s a bridge crane for unloading rockets from trucks, and the tall thing over here is the gantry tower.”

“Besides, look at all this concrete.” Mike ran a finger around it. “They wouldn’t lay down this much for any reason except to provide a blast radius. And putting it next to the beach . . .”

“Uh-huh.” Gerry was leaning across the table, trying to get a good look. “If they launch a rocket, and it goes out of control, it’ll go out over the water, where it won’t hit anything.”

“Like a barn, you mean,” Jack Cube murmured. The others chuckled, and Gerry scowled at his roommate for a moment before managing a sheepish grin. The two had been getting along better lately, once they’d learned to put racial differences aside.

“That’s what MI-6 thinks, too.” Bliss appeared satisfied. “Thanks for confirming our suspicions. However, what’s just as important about these pictures is what we don’t see. There isn’t any sign of a launch track being built.”

No one said anything for a few moments. Everyone knew what the colonel was getting at. Silver Bird’s launch rail was supposed to be two miles long; something that big would be obvious from the air. If it wasn’t on Peenemünde . . .

Goddard cleared his throat. “This could mean one of three things. First, they haven’t yet begun to build any launch facilities for Silver Bird. This is probably a static test stand converted from their old missile program. Second, the facilities, including the track, are under construction, but they’ve been camouflaged to prevent their being spotted from the air. Third, the launch site is somewhere else.”

“I agree with all that, and those explanations have occurred to our intelligence people, too.” Bliss hesitated. “However, we can’t ignore the fourth possibility . . . Silver Bird is an elaborate hoax, something intended to distract us from . . . well, whatever else the Nazis may actually have in the works.”

Goddard stared at him. “You can’t seriously believe that.”

“I’m just telling you what other people have said. Lord Cherwell, the British Defence Ministry’s so-called rocket expert, thinks the whole thing is nothing more than a red herring.”

“Then Lord Cherwell is an idiot. Negligent at best.” Goddard jabbed a finger at the photos. “Look at these facilities, Colonel. Look at that test stand . . . you can even see blast marks around it. That took time to build, not to mention a lot of money and manpower. No one makes an effort like this simply to stage a hoax . . . particularly not a country at war like Germany, where they need every available resource to keep their military machine going.”

“But the Nazis might . . .”

“The Nazis aren’t stupid!”

Everyone stared at Goddard, stunned by the outburst. Most of the time, he was genial, soft-spoken, able to make or take a joke; for some, he was like a favorite uncle, even a father figure. No one except those who’d worked with him for a long time—Henry, Lloyd, and Taylor—even suspected that he had a temper to lose.

Bliss was probably the most startled of all. He regarded the professor as if he were a viper who’d just lunged at him. “Bob . . .”

“Omar . . .” Goddard took a deep breath, closed his eyes, waited ten seconds, then opened his eyes and let out his breath. “Sorry. Please forgive me. It’s just that I have a low tolerance for fools, and one of my definitions of a fool is that he’s someone who ignores the obvious.”

“I don’t believe anyone is ignoring anything,” Bliss said quietly.

Henry spoke up. “Colonel, with all due respect, I disagree. What Lord Whatshisname . . . or anyone else who thinks this is a hoax . . . is overlooking is the Sanger-Bredt report itself. Every person on this team has gone through it over and over again. Everything in it checks out. I mean, we’re actually kind of impressed. No one would go to this much effort just to pull a gag. It makes no sense.”

“Silver Bird is real, sir,” Jack Cube said. “And we’d be making a serious mistake if we came to believe otherwise.”

Bliss slowly nodded. “I think it is, too. There are people in Washington who are unconvinced, too, but I think they’ll listen to me if I tell them that you believe that the threat is real.” He absently stroked his mustache as he contemplated the blueprints. “In the meantime, we need to get to work building this thing . . . the X-1, as you call it.”

“My feelings exactly.” Goddard smiled; he was relaxed again, back to his usual self. “Once we finalize the main-engine specs, we’ll start assembling a scale model for testing . . .”

“I’m sorry, but that’s out of the question.” Bliss shook his head. “One of the reasons why we’ve separated Blue Horizon’s design and test operations is to prevent accidents that would put your group at risk. Fabrication and assembly facilities are already under way in Alamogordo. All you need to do is supply the final blueprints, and our engineering team will . . .”