V-S Day: A Novel of Alternate History

GODDARD’S 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.