V-S Day: A Novel of Alternate History

AUTUMN IN NEW ENGLAND

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.”