Rocket Science (5 page)

The f-panzer was just as crowded as I had thought, looking inside it past Floyd the previous day. There were no vertical surfaces, and the only horizontal area was the floor — everything else sloped like a pup tent. And it was all Nazi gray, hard-edged and sharp. The inside smelled of old metal and sweaty socks. Floyd’s Battle of the Bulge tank story was on my mind, though it didn’t look like anyone had died in there.

I’m not especially tall, but even I had to hunch to get into one of the operator’s seats. The sloped rear armor above them had embedded glass vision blocks that yielded a blurry, dark view of the inside of the barn.

Passing over the control panel for a moment, I swiveled one of the chairs to look over the glass screen console. It looked just like the few American-built cathode ray tubes I’d seen — slightly bulbous with rounded corners, set in a grounded metal frame. There weren’t a lot of uses for such a thing, which confirmed my suspicion that this was a part of a German radar rig. The rack-mounted equipment on the other side was more confusing. It had obviously been hastily installed, apparently as an afterthought to the radar screens.

I studied the racks carefully. Most of the gear was electronic test equipment — a heterodyne tone generator, test probes, similar things I didn’t recognize in detail. Next to the electronics kit there was a set of shockproof braces holding a small metal box. I unlatched the braces and opened the box.

Inside the box was a twisted piece of metal that looked for all the world like flowing quicksilver frozen in place. I knew perfectly well mercury didn’t have a solid state under room-temperature conditions, but the glossy, gritty sheen of the thing was hard to classify. It was about six inches long by half an inch wide, with three prominent buttons. It fit snugly in the palm of my hand, the eye-bending shape as comfortable as if it had been made from a cast of me.

I stepped to the open hatch to get better light and studied the metal piece more carefully with my magnifying glass. It was made of a similar material as the aircraft — another smooth, unclassifiable metal. And the workmanship obviously didn’t match anything else inside the radar truck. I decided to try again to get some history on the aircraft from Floyd. He’d been unhelpful before, but I couldn’t tell if he was being stupid on purpose, catty or just not paying attention.

Then maybe I could know whether it was a good idea to do some laboratory testing.

“Floyd,” I called, climbing with care out of the halftrack. I set the twisted metal piece on the deck just inside the open door. Floyd was still in the rafters, checking bolts. I was prepared to buy the new block-and-tackle we needed with some of my meager savings as I didn’t want to trust our prize to Mr. Bellamy’s aging hardware. It made me nervous enough to have to rely on the beams of the old barn’s roof to support the weight of the aircraft.

“Yeah?”

“We need to discuss this aircraft.”

He looked down at me for a moment, then carefully set down his measuring tape and tools before crawling back to the hayloft. A minute later he was standing in front of me, picking straw out of his hair. “We’ve already been over all this. What’s so important now that I had to climb all the way down here?”

“Where exactly did this thing come from? Germany?”

Floyd scuffed his shoes. “Belgium.”

“No, Floyd.” He was being stupid on purpose, I decided. “You may have found this in Belgium, but this was not built by Belgians. Belgians make French fries and wine and wool, but they do not make precision aircraft. Certainly not during a Nazi occupation.”

“Well, it
is
German.” Floyd looked at me, almost pleading.

That was the nub of the problem. I couldn’t see the angle yet, but this was the finest piece of technology ever produced by the hand of man. Who but the Germans could do it? Besides the United States of America, of course, but it wouldn’t have been sitting around in a Nazi convoy in Belgium if we’d built it. “How do you know that?”

He looked at me like I was crazy. “I found it on a German truck behind German lines.”

“Where was it made, Floyd? Where did it come from?”

“I don’t know. Why does that matter so much?” Floyd was starting to whine, which with him meant he was about to get belligerent. “We want to use it ourselves, not return to sender.”

“Look, I don’t want to know where or how you swiped the thing. We’re past that — I’ve bought into your deal. It’s just that the metalwork in that aircraft is the most unusual stuff I’ve ever seen. I should be able to recognize it. Aircraft materials are my profession.”

“Well...” said Floyd. “There’s a big pouch of documents on the back of the f-panzer’s hatch. If you can read German, they might tell you something.”

This was more like it. “Why didn’t you show me those in the first place?”

Floyd shrugged. “Slipped my mind.”

“Fine, fine. Let me have a look.”

I pulled myself up onto the edge of the truck bed, in the shadow of our mysterious airplane. I really needed to drag a normal chair into the barn, before I hurt my leg even more. Floyd jumped up past me, stepped into the f-panzer for a moment, then brought me a fat manila envelope from inside. I opened it to have a look at my new toy’s pedigree.

The envelope had a cover letter and a large bound report. The whole thing was typed on SS stationery — original ribbon, not carbon, which was interesting. That meant the Nazi officers in charge had intended for very few, if any, copies to be distributed. There were also all kinds of attachments and appendices, charts, graphs and photos, along with a folder full of flimsy carbon copies of what had to be operational orders. All in all, it looked like manuals and field orders for the aircraft. The fact that I even held these documents in my hand at all confirmed that Floyd had pulled an enormous con on the Army — no military intelligence officer who could still draw breath would have left a trove like this loose inside captured enemy equipment.

Despite my college classes, I didn’t read German very well. Lack of practice, for one thing. I knew a few technical words, newspaper terms like
blitzkreig
, but the grammar defeated me, as well as those incredible compound words that just balloon into monstrous collections of meaningless letters. German and English are pretty close in some ways, though, so I could puzzle out words such as
Nordeuropa
and
Arktischer
. By and large the meaning of the documents escaped me. It was apparent that I would need some translation assistance. And just as apparent that I didn’t dare show these papers to anyone.

“Floyd,” I called. “I’m going to the library.”

“Okay,” he shouted from somewhere above me.

“And I am not driving that infernal tractor back into town.”

I could hear him laughing almost all the way back to the parked Willys.

Augusta is like any other rural town with high hopes and a small budget — two- and three-story commercial buildings downtown, railway depot a little bit bigger than it really needed, public school a little bit too small. It was nice to see business booming now that rationing was going away and the boys were home. There had been more weddings in the past few months than in the whole year before. That meant more people spending money at Lungford’s Furniture, that meant the land office kept busy. The war had been kind to Kansas, at least after the fact.

I went by my boarding house and dropped off the Bellamys’ truck for my Hudson. I was tired of the Willys’ shuddering, bouncy ride, and the truck’s balky shifter. Driving downtown, I parked on State Street and headed around the corner for the library. The car wallowed a little bit. I’d have to remember to check the air in the tires.

The public library was about what you might expect in a town like Augusta. It was upstairs from the police and fire stations in the city building, which also held City Hall and the Municipal Court. Three rooms plus an office, brick-walled with oak wainscoting and big oak shelves and some fairly nice Middle Eastern carpets on the floor. Part of the collection had pride of place in glass-doored cabinets near the circulation desk, while a few wingback chairs and set of study carrels stood along the north wall by the tall double-hung windows. Old gas lighting still hung on the ceiling, electric wires wrapped around the fixtures from the flickering bulbs.

The library was stocked with a few magazine subscriptions, an
Encyclopedia Britannica
from the turn of the century, and a couple thousand books in the stacks, mostly classics and general literature. It made me miss the Hale Library at Kansas State, but it really wasn’t a bad little place.

I didn’t have a library card, of course. You had to be a property owner to have a library card in Augusta, and I rented. I guess I could have asked Dad to get me a card, but then he would have expected something in return. That wasn’t worth the trouble. So when I needed to use the library, I just did my reading inside the building.

The small reference section actually had a German-English dictionary. It was printed in 1892, so I didn’t figure on getting much in the way of aeronautical vocabulary. But it might help me puzzle out the sense of what I had. The technical stuff I could probably pick up from cognate words and borrowings — I was well aware that the United States shared an academic and research tradition with Germany.

I grabbed one of the study carrels by the window and spread my papers out. The cover letter from the envelope looked like an ordinary business letter — I could probably translate it without the dictionary. Instead I went to work on the table of contents of the bound report.

The title translated as something like “Report on the Arctic Expedition for Secret Contact.” It was pretty weird. Some of the section headings had titles like “Science and the Supernatural” and “The Hollow Earth.” Puzzling through this stuff in my bad translation was like reading Charles Fort. Backwards. In a mirror.

Taking a break from the dictionary and the headache it was inducing, I looked at the foldout map bound into the main report. It showed a dotted line, which I assumed to be the route of the “Arctic Expedition for Secret Contact.” The path left Tromso, Norway, headed up to Nord Kap, over the frozen seas to Svalbard, an ice-locked island in the Arctic Ocean, then described a circular path across the Arctic ice cap before returning to Svalbard. There were circles with citation numbers marking two points on the ice cap and a spot on the north coast of Svalbard. Dates and times noted along the path indicated that the expedition had taken place in the spring and early summer of 1943.

I flipped through the report, looking at photographs and diagrams. I had an uncomfortable suspicion about what I was going to find. First, there were smiling men in Arctic survival gear waving at the camera. Then there was a picture of a convoy of half-tracks and dog sleds, obviously the expedition’s main body, with a zeppelin hanging distant in the bright sky. There were several pictures of camp sites. There were pictures of bone fragments being dug out of the ice, with a whole chapter devoted to discussing them. I kept looking.

The kicker was the first picture I found of the aircraft, my aircraft. It was in the ice, at the bottom of a freshly-dug hole. Part of the machine was still embedded in the ice beneath it, surrounded by a dark stain. Two smiling Germans leaned against the side of the aircraft, waving at the camera. It looked like nothing so much as a rounded-off flying wing, something the Germans had been developing since the 1930s. I’d seen pictures in a Dutch aviation magazine called
Vliegwereld
.

How long would it take for an airplane to become embedded in ice, I wondered? If you landed a DC-3 on the Greenland ice cap and just walked away, how many years before it lay ten or fifteen feet below the surface? Ten years? A hundred? A thousand? I got queasy just asking myself the question. I was afraid of how the answer would make me feel.

Something that old was impossible.

Inhuman.

Impossible.

Trying to put that
last
thought out of my mind, I walked back into the reference section, wondering where I was going to find information about the rate of deposition of ice caps in the Arctic region. I might have to call a friend from my time at Kansas State who now did graduate meteorology work back East. I didn’t know what I would say when Freddie asked me why I was interested in such a strange topic.

The assistant librarian, Marion Weeks according to the nameplate I had seen on her desk when I first came in, approached me. “Mr. Dunham?” she whispered. She was young, but not pretty. “Are you Vernon Dunham?”

I froze, skin prickling. How had she known my name? The library didn’t have a sign-in policy.

“Yes,” I whispered back after that brief moment of panic. “Why are we whispering?”

She gave me a look that would freeze diesel fuel. “It’s a
library
Mr. Dunham.” Even in low and quiet, her voice was finicky, the words over-enunciated. “People
whisper
in libraries.”

I felt foolish, so I smiled at her. I was no Floyd, but I could be charming enough when the need arose. “Sorry. I was trying to be funny.”

“Yes, well,” she sniffed. “You have a telephone call.” Her look made it clear to me that this was most irregular. I thought it was too — outside of work, I didn’t get three or four telephone calls a year. Mrs. Swenson charged her boarders a dime a call, which tended to discourage conversation.

I followed her through the oak door with the frosted glass panel into the office behind the circulation desk. It was cramped, with no pictures on the brick walls, and oddly, no books either. It looked more like the examining room of a doctor who had fallen on hard times — just the desk, one chair behind it, and a hat stand. Another, vaguely familiar older woman in a natty muslin dress was installed at the desk behind a nameplate reading “Mrs. Sigurdsen: Chief Librarian.” She held the black telephone handset as if it were a snake that might bite her. “Are you Vern Dunham?” she snapped. No whispering in here.

It was just like being on the carpet in Principal Miller’s office back in junior high. “Yes, ma’am,” I said in my politest voice. Who would think to call me at the library? It would have taken a lot of trouble to track me down here. Only Floyd knew where I was, and he would hardly bother me at the library even if his parents had a telephone in the first place.