V-S Day: A Novel of Alternate History

MORE THAN JUST THE ENGINE

JUNE 1, 2013

“You picked the pilot rather quickly, didn’t you?” Walker asked.

Jackson shrugged. “I knew Skid was the right guy the moment I met him. Sure, we could have interviewed a dozen more flyboys, but we needed to start training our pilot immediately, and Skid… well, he was there and ready to go. Glad we found him, especially considering the way things came out with McPherson.”

“Yeah, Skid was a pistol, all right,” Henry added.

Walker nodded, then looked over at Lloyd to see if he had anything to add. Sometime in the last half hour or so, though, he’d dozed off in his wheelchair, head rocked forward and hands folded together in his lap. Without a word, his nephew reached forward and turned down the old man’s hearing aid. Apparently, everyone was used to his doing this. Walker just hoped that Lloyd was awake again before the story was finished; he wanted to get as much input from all three 390 Group members as possible.

“That was the way we did things,” Henry went on. “They spent months picking the crew for the first moon mission, but we couldn’t afford to do that. Everything had to be as fast as possible because we didn’t know how far along the Germans were. Jack and Omar selected the pilot in one afternoon, and that was it.”

“So you cut corners.”

“No.” Jack shook his head. “No, we did not cut corners. We just didn’t waste time, that’s all.”

“Look,” Henry said, “we had a way of doing things back then that you don’t see too often these days. We didn’t form committees or farm everything out to someone else. The 390 Group operated much the same way Bob’s original team did at Mescalero Ranch… everyone working together, everyone pitching in to solve problems.”

“It’s the same sort of tiger-team approach Lockheed used when they put together their Skunk Works,” Jack said. “In fact, they copied it from us. You get a whole lot of smart guys, put them in a room, give them a problem that needs to be solved, then step out of the way and let them do what needs to be done. Cut the bureaucracy, don’t let the bean counters and micromanagement types anywhere near the project… just give your people whatever they need to do the job.”

“That was Vannevar Bush’s idea,” Henry said. “Once he saw how Bob had done things in New Mexico, he rightfully figured out that this was the key to catching up with the Germans in a hurry. He put Omar in charge because he believed that the colonel could manage this sort of project, and he did pretty well… at least up to a certain point. Having the engine built and tested in New Mexico was a real pain in the…”

Mindful of the women and children in the room, he quickly shut up. “Ass?” Carl asked, grinning as he finished his great-grandfather’s thought.

Several people chuckled as Henry glared at him. “Where did you learn to talk like that?”

“Television,” his mother said, trying not to laugh. “Go on, Grandpa.”

“Hmm… well, that figures. Anyway, the propulsion system was just one of many things we had to figure out. Getting into space isn’t just about engines, y’know.”

“You wouldn’t believe how much stuff we had to work out,” Jack said. “Take the space suit, for instance. One of the reasons why we were in a hurry to select our pilot was that we needed his exact measurements so that we could custom-design pressure gear for him. That and the acceleration couch…”

“The whole cockpit,” Henry added. “I mean, we even had to take into account whether he was right-handed or left-handed, because if he were a southpaw, we’d have to arrange the instrument panel to accommodate that. And that was just for starters. The gyroscope platform, the radar system, the landing gear, the reaction-control rockets…”

“We had a checklist as long as your arm,” Jack said. “Now, some of this stuff we’d already figured out. The gyros, for instance, had already been developed at Mescalero… all we had to do was adapt them for our purposes. Caltech had done most of the research for our solid-rocket boosters, so that was another area where we had a head start.” He smiled. “And then there were Bob’s notebooks.”

“Bob Goddard had been thinking about this stuff for almost thirty years,” Henry said. “He was way ahead of everyone, even the Germans. And everything he thought about went into his notebooks. Whenever we hit a roadblock, Bob would remember something he’d jotted down ten, fifteen, twenty-five, or thirty years ago, and he’d rummage through all those binders he had stockpiled on the lab shelves, and more than half the time he’d find a design or a set of equations that, even if it didn’t completely solve our problem, at least gave us a direction.”

“Once the team got going, we moved pretty quickly,” Jack said. “We’d report to the physics lab bright and early every morning and pick up where we’d left off the day before, and work straight through until lunchtime. An hour or so to get a bite to eat, usually at the school cafeteria or a lunchroom on Main Street… Bob always brown-bagged his… and then we’d come back to the lab and work until late afternoon or early evening. Esther would drive Bob in and pick him up again at the end of the day… Corporal Hillman was staying with them, and the colonel, too, when he was in town… the rest of us would all walk back to the boardinghouse. We’d have dinner, listen to the radio for a while, maybe play a few hands of poker and gin rummy, then it was off to bed. Next day, same thing again.”

“Not always,” Henry said. “I mean, maybe for you guys, sure but…”

“Oh, that’s right. You had Doris.”

“Uh-huh.” Henry looked over at Walker. “I’m talking about my late wife… Carl’s great-grandmother.”

“Yes, you mentioned her earlier,” Walker said.

“Oh, yes… yes, I did, didn’t I?” Henry scowled and shook his head, a silent apology for an old man’s forgetfulness. “Anyway, I was seeing her as often as I could without our babysitters catching on. I didn’t want them to know that I’d met a girl because I was afraid they’d consider her a security risk and tell me to break it off. So I started brown-bagging, too, and at lunchtime I’d go over to the library and meet Doris there. There was a faculty lounge in the basement that wasn’t much used, so we’d go down there and have lunch together.”

“Did she know what you were doing?”

“No, of course not. So far as she was concerned, I was a graduate student in the physics department, that’s all. She didn’t learn the truth until later, when…” He suddenly shook his head again. “Sorry, getting ahead of myself there. Anyway, our routine might sound monotonous, but it really wasn’t. I mean, we were designing a spaceship! Maybe even the world’s first if we managed to beat the Germans…”

“Yeah, well, that was the plan,” Jack said. “We didn’t know it, though, but the Nazis had their own ideas about staying ahead.”