Phase Space (27 page)

The mornings were the worst.

Everything was slow here – even dressing was slow – and Slade was hungry by the start of his work, at five a.m. And yet he would receive nothing but his soup, at two in the afternoon.

It was 1946. Slade was sixteen years old.

Slade lay in his rat-chewed blanket as long as he could.

Today was worse than usual. He felt – strange.

As if he shouldn’t
be
here.

He couldn’t stay on his rough pallet.

Soon would come the rush into the smoking mouth of the tunnel into the mountain, with the SS guards lashing out with their sticks and fists at the heads and shoulders of the worker herd which passed them. That tunnel was like Hell itself, with prisoners made white with dust and laden with rubble, cement bags, girders and boxes, and the corpses of the night being dragged by their feet from the sleep galleries –

When he got up he had to hurry. Otherwise he would not witness the hangings, and that was against regulations.

Actually, the hangings seemed wasteful to Slade. A victim would be gagged with a metal bar across the mouth, and the bar tied at the back of the head with wire, drawn in so tightly that the metal gag would bend, and the wire cut into the flesh of the face.

So much metal!

It was well known among the workers within the Mittelwerk that Hitler had ordered the production of no less than twenty thousand of von Braun’s A-4 rockets – or rather, what the Germans now called their V-2: V for
Vergeltungswaffe,
revenge weapon. And then there was the demand for thousands more of the ambitious V-3s, the A-4b design with the nuclear-tipped glider on its nose, capable of skipping across the Atlantic and digging more glowing craters into the eastern seaboard of defeated America.

How could this immense production operation spare so much metal on mere hangings?

But then – thanks to those very rockets of von Braun, which had subdued Europe and Asia and fended off America – Hitler could now exploit the resources of two continents. A little hanging wire was nothing.

Slade performed such calculations, even as he reflected on the fact that at the next roll call it could be
him,
suspended up there like a chicken in a butcher’s shop.

At sixteen, Slade was prized by the supervisors for his ability for skilled work. So he was assigned to lighter, more complex tasks. In the process he was forced to absorb a little German. So, gradually, he picked up something of the nature of the great machines on which he toiled, and learned of the visions of the Reich’s military planners.

They would construct an immense dome at the Pas de Calais – sixty thousand tons of concrete – from which rocket planes would be fired off at America in batches of fourteen at once. And then there were the further schemes: of hurling rockets from submarine craft, of greater rockets like von Braun’s A-9, which might hurl a man into orbit in a glider-like capsule, and – the greatest dream of all! – of a huge station orbiting five thousand miles above the Earth and bearing a huge mirror capable of reflecting sunlight, so that cities would flash to smoke and oceans might boil.

Thus would be secured the future of the Reich for a millennium.

And when that was done, von Braun talked of flights beyond Earth itself, in new generations of his giant rockets, hurled upwards by brute force: even of a nuclear-launched spaceship called
Sun God
which would send Germans to the Moon by 1955, to Mars a mere decade later.

Such visions!

But for Slade the V-2 was the daily, extraordinary reality. That great, finned bullet-shape – no less than forty-seven feet long – was capable of carrying a warhead of more than two thousand pounds across two hundred miles! Its four tons of metal contained no less than twenty-two thousand components! And so on.

Slade came to love the V-2.

It was magnificent, a machine from another world, from a bright future – and the true dream inherent in its lines, the dream of its designers, was obvious to him. Even as it slowly killed him.

One day, in the sleek, curving hide of a rocket ship, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection.

He looked into his own eyes unexpectedly, suddenly fully aware of himself. He had a sense of the here and now – or rather of vividness, as if the casual numbness of his life had been lifted, briefly. He hadn’t seen a mirror in three years, since the Nazis swept through what was left of Britain, and he was separated from his parents and, as an American, rounded up as an enemy alien.

He saw a skinny, half-bald kid, with blood running down his cheek from some wound he hadn’t even noticed.

– and an old man, his face twisted down under a coating of desert gypsum –

– and a gold visor, a glaring landscape reflected there –

– and flames –

Visions. It was probably the hunger. What else could it be?

He subsided to numbness, and dreams.

One morning, so early that the stars still shone and frost coated the ground, he saw the engineers from the research facility at Peenemunde – Wernher von Braun, Walter Riedel and the rest, smartly uniformed young men, some not much older than Slade – looking up at the stars, and pointing, and talking softly.

Slade glanced up, to see where they were looking. It was the crescent Moon, dimmed by the smoky light of some town which burned on the horizon. And
there
was the dream which motivated and sustained these young, clever Germans: that one day the disc of the Moon would be lit up with cities built by men – Germans, carried there by some gigantic descendant of the V-2.

Slade could understand how these young men from Peenemunde were blinded by the dazzling beauty of their V-2 and what it represented. But Slade was no rocket engineer; he was no more than garbage, just one of the thirty thousand French, Russians, Czechs, Poles, British and Americans who toiled inside this carved-out mountain. And in the dormitories at night would come the whispers, schemes of hidden weapons and tools, the uprising to come which would shatter the Reich.

The duality of it crushed Slade. Was such squalor and agony the inevitable price to be paid for the dream of spaceflight?

But perhaps it was. Perhaps only the organization of all of mankind’s resources, under some such system as Hitler’s, was capable of breaking the bonds of gravity. Perhaps it was necessary for von Braun’s beautiful ships to rise from ground soaked by the blood of thousands of slave workers like himself, with expended human souls burning like sparks in the gaping rocket nozzles.

How he envied the young engineers from Peenemunde, who strutted about the Mittelwerk in their smart uniforms;
they
seemed to find it an easy thing to brush past the stacks of corpses piled up for daily collection, the people gaunt as skeletons toiling around the great metal spaceships!

He even imagined how it would have been had he been born to become one of these smart young Germans in their SS uniforms. How he envied them! And a part of him hoped that they could achieve some piece of their huge dreams before the inevitable tide of anger rose up and swept them all to the gallows.

When he immersed himself in such dreams, something of his own, daily pain would fall from him, and he could lift his head to the Moonlight …

…
the Moonlight which washed over the machined surface of my planetesimal. The object was small. But even at a great distance from it, I could detect its artificial nature.

It was a slim cylinder. One end was domed, the other terminated
by a complex encrustation of equipment, including a flaring nozzle. It bore no markings.

It tumbled slowly.

It was extremely old. Sublimation had left its aluminium skin so thin it was, in places, almost transparent. In fact the hull was punctured, after billions of orbits around the sun.

The artefact was fortunate to have survived intact at all.

I approached cautiously. I could see into its interior, through rents and dimples in the hull. There was some form of double chamber in there. There was no sign of activity, of light, of energy.

The cylinder dwarfed my craft.

After circling its exterior, I gathered my courage, and I approached the terminal dome, where an eroded breach afforded me access.

I found myself rising into a cylindrical chamber, up from the cup of the dome. Stars and ruddy sunlight gleamed through hull rents. Far above me, hanging down as if swollen, I saw another dome.

The chamber was all but empty. The walls were lined with small pieces of equipment: spherical casks, ducts, pipes.

I rose through the silent grandeur of the artefact.

I passed through the upper dome, deep into the heart of the artefact. I entered a second chamber, braced with a metal frame. It was much smaller than the first.

There was no sign of occupation, no evidence of life.

I continued my inspection, baffled – at first – as to the purpose of this artefact.

But soon I formed an hypothesis.

My rogue planetesimal was clearly an artefact. But I had misinterpreted its nature.

It was no spaceborne habitat. Those great cylindrical chambers were tanks, which once bore fuel. Liquid fuel.

I came to believe the artefact was a crude rocket. It must have driven itself forward by burning liquid-chemical propellants together, and allowing the expansion of gases through the terminal nozzle. The dimensions of the tanks were consistent with the relative densities of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. These would burn vigorously together, if appropriately controlled.

I elaborated my original hypothesis:

I argued that the creatures of the First World had used chemical rockets like this one to escape from their planet’s gravity well, and to travel to their satellite.

Yes – chemical rockets!

Well, I was mocked, as I might have expected. I concede it seems absurd that such a journey might be attempted with such limited technology.

But it is not impossible!

I argued my case. I was disciplined, for neglecting my primary studies.

So I determined to prove, by dramatic demonstration, how such a flight could have been achieved! I would reconstruct the chemical Moon ships from the dawn of time, and prove it was this way.

That was the start of it. But soon my simulations were going badly.

Perhaps I continued to miscalculate the natures of my subjects.

They were
not
like us.

We must remember the environment in which these bizarre animals evolved: the ferocious gravitational field of their parent world, the blistering outpourings of the nearby sun. They would be stunted, very alien creatures, warped by these enormous forces into miserably malformed, distorted shapes, crushed until they are blind and tiny. We inhabit a favoured realm, drifting far above the range of those immense forces, on our small moon so far from the sun; we should not envy these creatures their short, pain-filled lives.

But they must have been squabbling, water-stuffed, energy-fat, demon-obsessed monsters! If logic would not motivate them, if they were unable to govern themselves and their resources without brutality and waste, I knew I must try illogic.

I reset the parameters of my simulation once again. I would not rest until I had reconstructed the hydrate creatures from so long ago, sailing to the Moon …

…
Sailing to the Moon, Slade was working through a plastic bag of chicken soup. He took a spoonful of the soup, tapped the handle, and the glob of soup floated off, still holding the shape of the spoon. But when he poked the liquid with a fingertip, surface tension hauled it quickly into a perfect, oscillating sphere. Slade leaned over to suck it into his mouth, a little green ball of chicken soup.

It was Slade’s fourth spaceflight, in six years. He’d never yet got bored with the zero-gravity environment.

The two other crew – Lunar Module Pilot Bado, and Command Module Pilot Pond – ate without talking. And that was the way Mission Commander Slade, in his centre couch, preferred it.