V-S Day: A Novel of Alternate History (18 page)

“The first American, at least,” Skid added as he shook hands with first Lloyd, then Harry.

“Either way, we’ll make sure you’ll come back alive.” Lloyd gestured to the giant sphere looming above them. “We watched that last test. Very impressive, Lieutenant . . . a good performance, if I may say so.”

Jack coughed in his fist, and Skid had to fight to keep from grinning. “Thanks, but . . . um, I think I can do better.”

“We can talk about this over lunch,” Jack said. “Once Lieutenant Sloman changes out of his flight suit, I’m sure he’d be only too happy to buy you some.”

“Hey, now wait a minute.” Skid glared at him. “You didn’t tell me you were gonna stick me with . . .”

Lloyd was already laughing, and Harry was grinning as well. “Jack, you haven’t changed,” Lloyd said. “Same warm, friendly guy.”

“Was he this way in Worcester?” Skid asked. “I thought it was just me.”

“Naw, Jack’s got a chip on his shoulder for everyone. I mean, the night he showed up . . .”

“Look, you can tell all the lies you want about me once we get some chow.” Jack Cube headed for the door that would take them outside. “Or maybe you’d rather have the nickel tour, first.”

“No,” Harry said. “First food, then tour. We haven’t had a decent meal since we left New England, and I’m definitely not counting the ham and cheese sandwiches they gave us on the plane.”

“Trust me,” Jack said, “the food’s not any better here.”

=====

In only a few months, the Blue Horizon compound at Alamogordo Army Air Field had grown from a small collection of Quonset huts and prefab buildings to a full-fledged military research installation where more than fifteen hundred people lived and worked. Machine shops, assembly sheds, laboratories, test facilities, and warehouses shared room on narrow dirt streets with barracks, cottages, PXs and commissaries, mess halls, clubs for both enlisted men and officers, even a bowling alley. And on the outskirts of the compound, a launchpad was being built. The blockhouse was complete, and now the pad itself and its rollaway gantry tower were under construction.

As they walked to the officers’ club, stepping aside every now and then to let a jeep or truck rumble by, Lloyd and Harry brought Jack and Skid up to speed on recent events in New England. The two lieutenants had already heard about the attempt on Dr. Goddard’s life, but not in any great detail; however, they weren’t surprised by the revelation that the Nazis were probably behind it.

“No one else would have wanted Bob dead,” Jack said.

“Except maybe one of us,” Lloyd added.

What was more unexpected was the news that the rest of the 390 Group—with the exception of Harry and Lloyd themselves—had been relocated to a hunting lodge just across the Massachusetts state line in New Hampshire. Jack Cube had believed that the entire team, Bob and Esther Goddard included, would have been packed aboard a military transport plane and sent to New Mexico, so he was stunned to learn that they were being kept in New England.

“It’s this whole compartmental . . . y’know, whatever . . . the War Department has got us locked into.” Lloyd threw up his hands in frustration. “It’s never made any sense to me, putting the R&D team on the other side of the country from the rest of the project, but you’d think they would’ve learned their lesson by now.”

He glanced at Jack Cube, as if silently begging for an explanation. Jack acknowledged his friend’s bewilderment with a commiserating nod and shrug, but otherwise remained quiet. Criticizing decisions made by the brass wasn’t his style, especially not when it was possible that anything he said might be overheard and make its way up the chain of command.

“It’s not all bad news,” Harry added. “From what I heard, Bliss finally knuckled under and agreed to relocate main-engine assembly and testing to Massachusetts, where the team can get their hands on it.”

“He did?” Jack gave him a sharp look. “Where in Mass?”

“A defense factory just outside Worcester . . . Wyman-Gordon, I think it’s called.”

Jack smiled. It was the same place he’d been begging the colonel to consider since last winter. “That’s good,” he said, quietly deciding not to claim credit for helping change Bliss’s mind. “I’m sure it’ll work out.”

“Yeah, well, it better,” Skid murmured. He still hadn’t changed out of his flight suit, but it didn’t matter. Jack would probably march him straight back to the simulator after lunch. “Hate to say it, but unless someone gives us a rocket that won’t blow up as soon as we light the candle, this whole thing’s gonna be a waste of time . . . and me,” he quietly added.

Everyone knew what he meant. So far, three prototype engines had exploded during static tests. The fact that each engine had run a few seconds longer than the last one was of little comfort to the pilot being trained to ride it in space.

“We’ll get it built.” Harry was confident, as if they were discussing nothing more than a university research project that had developed a few kinks. “Don’t sweat it.”

“Really? Don’t sweat it, huh?” Skid suddenly came to a halt, causing everyone else to stop as well. He raised a hand, crooked a beckoning finger. “C’mere . . . I want to show you something.”

Lloyd stared at the test pilot as he turned to walk away. “I thought we were going to get lunch.”

“We’re still going to eat,” Skid said over his shoulder. “C’mon . . . this will take just a second.” Lloyd and Harry gave Jack Cube a questioning look, but he only shrugged and gestured for them to follow him.

Skid led the other three men back toward a massive hangar they’d just passed. The largest building in the compound, it was built of steel-reinforced concrete and had no windows. Instead, it was cooled by a huge air-conditioning unit in its flat roof. The double doors at the end facing them were closed, but an MP stood guard in front of a smaller side door. Recognizing Skid and Jack Cube, he stepped aside to let them pass, but Skid stopped just before he opened the door.

“You guys have been stuck in a lab all this time, playing with slide rules,” he said to Lloyd and Harry, “so maybe this whole thing has become just a little abstract. Kind of a thought experiment, if you know what I mean.”

“We haven’t forgotten . . .” Lloyd began.

“Yeah, well”—Skid opened the door, walked inside—“lemme show you something anyway.”

The hangar was a cool, well-lit cavern, its concrete floor illuminated by rows of fluorescent fixtures suspended from the steel rafters high above. In the center of the hangar, resting within a mobile cradle and surrounded by scaffolds and catwalks, was what appeared to be an unfinished aircraft, yet one that had never been seen before. Long, swept-back wings, already covered by unpainted steel plates, jutted out from a skeletal frame that would eventually become a fuselage, while at the far end of the room, workmen in welders masks used acetylene torches to assemble a long, sleek nose.

As Lloyd gawked in amazement, Harry whistled just under his breath. “Damn,” he said quietly. “So this is the X-1.”

“That’s what you guys call it, sure.” Hands on his hips, Skid regarded the spacecraft proudly. “Me, I call it the
Lucky Linda
. The day Jack and Colonel Bliss asked me to fly her, I told them I would, so long as I got to name her after my sweetheart. She’s kind of hard to please, so . . . well, never mind.”

He turned to Harry and Lloyd again. “She’s a beauty, my
Lucky Linda
, and I’ve got to hand it to you guys . . . you’re giving me a real sweet flying machine. There’s only one problem . . .”

“No engine,” Lloyd said quietly.

“That’s right . . . she ain’t got no engine. And if
Lucky Linda
ain’t got no engine, she ain’t going nowhere except the junkyard. And worse than that, if she doesn’t fly but the Silver Bird does, there won’t be nothing to stop the Nazis from dropping bombs on New York. Which would really break my heart, because I’m from Brooklyn, and my baby lives there, too.”

As he spoke, Rudy Sloman slowly walked toward them, never raising his voice but not looking away either. Neither Harry nor Lloyd said anything, even as the test pilot stopped just a foot away from Harry and stared him straight in the eye, his gaze cold and unwavering.

“So, yeah, I am going to sweat it,” he said. “And I’d appreciate it if, the next time you talk to your friends in New Hampshire, you’d tell them to sweat it, too, and gimme an engine that won’t blow up under my ass. Okay?”

“Okay,” Harry croaked, his voice barely audible.

“Well, all right then.” A big grin spread across Skid’s face, then he swatted Harry’s arm and Lloyd’s as well. “Let’s go get some chow.”

The two men bobbed their heads nervously, then watched with wide and fearful eyes as Skid turned and walked away. “Oh, man,” Lloyd said softly when he thought Skid was out of earshot, “he’s crazy.”

“Yeah,” Jack muttered as he walked past. “Tell me about it.”

JUNE 1, 2013

Shadows were beginning to lengthen ever so slightly across the living room floor, but the three old men continued to speak. Lloyd had awakened from his nap, and once he’d turned up his hearing aid again, he rejoined the conversation.

“I was glad to . . . go down there,” he said haltingly, pausing to take a glass of water his nephew brought him from the kitchen. “It was a lot warmer in . . . New Mexico than it was here.”

“Yeah, we were pretty envious of you and Jack . . . Harry, too.” Henry had just come back from the bathroom; he lowered himself into his chair, carefully placing his cane where he could reach it. “This place is pretty nice in the fall, but once November rolls around, and it starts getting cold at night . . . well, we had to start taking turns for who would go out to the woodpile and fetch some more firewood.”

“Weren’t you using the porch for most of your work?” Jack asked.

“Uh-huh. The porch table was the only place big enough for us to spread out all our blueprints and notes. It wasn’t so bad during the day, but once the sun went down, and we still had work to do . . .” Henry shivered at the thought. “Yeah, it could get kind of brisk. Especially when the wind was up.”

“But didn’t you have Dr. Goddard’s house to go to?” Douglas Walker asked.

“Sometimes we did, when it got too cold. But their living room was too small for us to all get together at the same time and still lay out our notes, and besides, Esther was . . .” Henry hesitated. “Esther was becoming very protective of Bob.”

“How come?”

“She’d never wanted him to come back from . . . Roswell in the first place,” Lloyd said.

“The weather in this part of the country was bad for him, especially in the fall and winter,” Henry said. “He was a tuberculosis survivor, but he’d never shaken it completely. And the smoking didn’t help. He’d managed to get through that first winter back in Worcester without any serious issues because Esther would drive him straight from home to the lab and back again, but once we moved up here, he’d have to walk from his cabin to the lodge several times a day, then work outside on the porch for hours at a time. All of us came down with colds at one point or another, so you can only imagine what it was like for him.”

“I understand that’s when his health began to decline,” Walker said.

“Yes, it was. We all noticed that he was coughing much more frequently and that he was becoming a little more pale, but . . .” Henry sighed. “It didn’t really seem important to anyone but Esther, but even she couldn’t do much about it. Bob was completely dedicated to this project. Once we got the missile problem licked . . . after I saw those geese, the solution was so obvious we couldn’t believe that we hadn’t figured it out earlier . . . the last big hurdle was devising a main engine big enough to give us the thrust we needed without blowing up.”

“Yeah, I remember that,” Jack said. “We had a spaceship in a hangar that we couldn’t finish building until we had the engine, and when Colonel Bliss moved that part of the program to New England, that put pressure on you guys.”

“We were here for months, all the way to the end of the year.” Henry shook his head at the memory. “Working day in and day out, getting up at the crack of dawn and working straight through the day and into the night. The engine was still just one part of it, you understand. There were about a hundred . . . a thousand . . . other details that needed to be worked out. The stress was unbelievable.”

“How were you communicating with Alamogordo?” Walker asked.

“Every day or so, an Army motorcycle courier would come up from Massachusetts. We’d collect written memos from him and send back memos and reports and blueprint corrections, and he’d put them on a plane and send them to New Mexico. For short queries that had to be answered immediately, we had the radiophone, with one of the FBI guys acting as our communications man. Otherwise, though, we were pretty isolated out here.”

“It wasn’t much fun . . . for us either,” Lloyd said softly.

“Oh, no.” Jack shook his head. “We’d get your material a day or two after you sent it, and sometimes we’d just have to hope that you guys knew what you were doing. Toward the end, there wasn’t enough time to run everything through the wringer. It was build it, test it once or twice to make sure it worked, then stick it in and hope for the best. But the engine was the hard part.”

“Wyman-Gordon started building it in mid-November,” Henry said, “working from specs the courier brought down from New Hampshire. The company was putting it together in an unused warehouse in the back of their yard, and the Army posted a twenty-four-hour watch on the site. Every couple of days or so, someone from our group . . . usually Bob, Taylor, or me . . . would be driven down there by one of the G-men, getting there sometime after dark. We’d supervise the construction and answer any questions the engineers and craftsmen might have, then we’d be driven back to the lodge.”

“We were putting in a lot of hours,” Jack said, “but it never seemed to help. We were in a race against time, and we knew we were losing.”

Hearing this, Walker’s eyes widened. Before he could ask the obvious question, though, Jack went on. “How did we know? Oh, we weren’t completely in the dark about what the Nazis were doing. MI-6’s signal intelligence operation in Bletchley Park was a big help. The breakthrough came in late September, when they used their Enigma machine to crack the message code used by the Luftwaffe rocket-research teams. When that happened, we suddenly had an ear to the ground as to what they were doing . . .”

“And, most importantly, where,” Henry said. “I’d sort of figured out that they’d move Silver Bird’s launch operations to somewhere deep in Germany, but it wasn’t until Bletchley Park was able to read Luftwaffe dispatches that we knew exactly where . . . the
Mittelwerk
facility near Nordhausen. Once that was accomplished, though, we had a window on their operations.”

“More like . . . a peephole.” Lloyd shook his head. “We didn’t know . . . everything that was going on there. The horrible parts . . .”

“No, we didn’t.” Jack’s face was grim. “And if we had . . . I don’t know what difference it would have made, really, except make us even more determined to ensure that we didn’t fail.”

“Didn’t you try to see Grandma then?” Eileen asked.

“The feds still wouldn’t let me get in touch with her,” Henry said. “I tried to hope that Doris loved me enough to believe that I hadn’t dumped her, and was smart enough to figure out that there was a good reason for me leaving without telling her where I was going.” He shrugged. “And then I just got tired of hoping and decided to do something about it.”