V-S Day: A Novel of Alternate History

INTO THE FUTURE

JUNE 1, 2013

“The news broke even before Lucky Linda got home,” Henry said. “The colonel was right about Skid’s transmitting in the clear. Every ham operator in the country picked up his ground communications, and it didn’t take long for some of them to figure out what was going on.”

“A lot of people saw Skid when he… came in for reentry.” Lloyd accepted another glass of water his nephew had fetched from the kitchen; Henry and Jack waited patiently while he took a drink. “No one had ever heard a sonic boom before, so… when he flew in over New Jersey… it was hardly a secret.”

“Uh-huh.” Jack Cube nodded. “Rudy told me that the last thing he expected was to find a crowd waiting for him. But there were probably a couple of thousand folks on hand when he touched down at Lakehurst Naval Air Station.”

“Wasn’t Linda there?” Doug Walker asked. “His girlfriend, I mean.”

“No, that’s just a legend… one of many, I’m sure you know. That shot of him kissing his girl at Lakehurst wasn’t taken until a couple of days later, when a Life photographer asked him to restage his climbing down from the cockpit.” Jack shrugged. “Like the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, it’s a picture everyone remembers even though it’s not as spontaneous as it seems.”

He stood up to stretch his legs. It was late in the afternoon. Although sunset was still several hours away, the shadows on the den floor had become long. “All the same, Skid was proud of that picture. He autographed copies of it for the rest of his life, and long after he retired from the Air Force and took a job as a civilian consultant, he made a sideline telling his story on the lecture circuit.” He shook his head sadly. “Rudy passed away about fifteen years ago, and I still miss him. He was a great friend.”

“And everyone else?” Doug asked. “I know what happened to the three of you and Dr. Goddard, but the rest of the 390 Group…?”

“Scattered hither and yon.” Jack walked across the den. “Like leaves on the wind.” He found a framed photo on the wall and took it down. “We came back out here again after the war for a little get-together,” he said as he carried the photo to the journalist. “That’s from the reunion.”

Walker studied the black-and-white photo. Everyone who’d belonged to the rocket team was standing at the lodge’s side door, with the notable exception of Goddard and Bliss. “This was the first time I saw this place,” Jack said. “I know the others weren’t crazy about it, but I kinda liked it…”

“Oh, so did we,” Henry said. “Just not after it got cold, that’s all.”

“The government bought the lodge and… gave it to us,” Lloyd said. “Sort of a… goodwill gesture. We’ve kept it… in our families ever since…”

“And held reunions out here every few years or so,” Jack finished. “After a while, it was just about the only time any of us saw each other again.” He shrugged. “And no one knew about what we did, really, except our families.”

“Once Silver Bird was shot down,” Henry said, “there really wasn’t much point in the 390 Group’s staying together. Lucky Linda went into a hangar until it finally got put in the National Air and Space Museum, and Skid became as famous as Lindbergh, but as for the people who designed and built it…?”

“Classified,” Lloyd rasped. “Top secret. Couldn’t talk about… what we did.”

“Except for Bob,” Henry said, nodding. “When the press came searching for answers about who built Lucky Linda, the Army pushed Colonel Bliss and Bob forward as being the masterminds. I don’t think Omar minded very much… especially not after he was promoted to general and, after the war, put in charge of the new U.S. Space Force… but Bob wasn’t crazy about the attention. However…”

His voice trailed off, and he looked down at the floor. “He died only a couple of years later,” Walker said quietly, finishing what he might have said.

“Yes,” Lloyd said. “At the ranch… with Esther by his side.”

“Returning to New England wasn’t good for his health,” Henry said, “and all those cigars didn’t help either. That and the stress he went through did a number on him. He came down with throat cancer. A few months before he passed away, he lost the ability to speak. I went to see him, and all he could do was write notes to me.”

“So he never met Wernher von Braun, did he?” Walker asked.

“No, they never met,” Jack said. “Bob was already on his deathbed by the time von Braun was brought to the United States along with the rest of the German rocket team.” He shook his head in dismay. “I’m not sure the two of them would’ve gotten along, anyway.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Henry looked at him sharply. “I was there when von Braun delivered the dedication speech at the Goddard Space Flight Center. He said that Bob was a lifelong inspiration for him, and that manned space exploration wouldn’t have progressed as quickly as it did if it hadn’t been for him.”

“Don’t forget that he… was arrested and… put in prison,” Lloyd added.

“Yes, that’s right,” Walker said. “As soon as the High Command heard that the Silbervogel had been destroyed, Himmler ordered the S.S. to arrest von Braun on suspicion of sabotage. He spent several weeks in prison and just barely escaped being executed before Speer talked Hitler into releasing him.”

“They let him go only because the Nazis still needed him,” Jack said. “They tried to get the A-4 program going again, but by then it was too late. They’d spent too much time and resources on Silver Bird, and so their long-range-ballistic-missile research suffered as a result. The only thing they ever got off the ground were the buzz bombs, and the Brits soon learned how to shoot them down.”

“Von Braun surrendered to the Allies as soon as he heard that the Third Reich had fallen,” Henry said. “He and Dornberger managed to talk Army intelligence into bringing him and the rest of the Peenemünde scientists to the U.S., where Bliss put them to work for the U.S. Space Force.”

“But you didn’t join them?”

“No.” Henry sighed, shook his head. “By then, I’d gone back to Worcester and found Doris…”

“That’s a great story,” Ellen interrupted, looking over at Walker. “Family legend has it that when Grandpa tracked down Grandma and started to explain what he’d been doing, she just said, ‘Oh, I know. You were building a spaceship.’”

“She wasn’t surprised a bit.” Henry was smiling at the memory. “In fact, I was the one who got taken by surprise when she said she’d be happy to marry me even before I asked.” The smile faded, and his expression darkened. “Anyway, I was like Bob… I didn’t decide to devote my life to space travel just to find new ways of killing people. When it became clear that the Space Force’s priorities were almost entirely military, I dropped out and became a science fiction writer instead.”

“Hey, don’t knock the Space Force.” Jack glared at him. “They got us to the Moon, didn’t they?” He turned to Walker again. “Anyway, everyone in the 390 Group pretty much went his own way after the war. After I went back to school and earned my doctorate, I joined up with the Space Force and was with them all the way through the Ares program, then retired after we got someone on Mars. Taylor went to work for Lockheed and became a systems engineer for their Skunk Works operation. Ham moved to St. Louis and went to work for Monsanto. Harry returned to Caltech. Mike landed a desk job at NASA after it got started and eventually became its Chief Administrator during Bobby Kennedy’s administration…”

“Gerry was the one who went the furthest,” Henry said. “He joined the Space Force, too, but only because that was the quickest way to get into space. Somewhere along the line, he decided that he wasn’t content just to be an engineer… he actually wanted to go out there. So he entered astronaut training, got picked for the space station project, and after that made his way into the lunar exploration program.” He grinned. “I’ve still got a moon rock on my desk that he sent me as a souvenir.”

“We saw each other… from time to time… over the years,” Lloyd said. “Sometimes here, and also at… space conferences and places like that.”

“But no one except our immediate families knew about our involvement in Blue Horizon.” Henry sighed. “It wasn’t fun, knowing that we had a place in history that we couldn’t claim. But the Pentagon wanted to make sure that the Soviets wouldn’t get to us and… I dunno, kidnap us to Russia and force us to build a moonship for them… so the 390 Group wasn’t publicly identified until just a few years ago. By then, no one cared anymore.”

“Well… maybe my book will change all that.” Walker glanced at his watch. He didn’t need to make mention of the time. It was getting late, and the story had come to a close. He let out his breath, then picked up his recorder and switched it off. “Gentlemen, thank you for…”

“There’s one thing you haven’t asked us,” Jack Cube said.

“I’m sorry?” Walker looked up at him again. “What did I forget?”

“Was it worth it?” Jack asked.

Walker blinked. “Umm… well, of course it was. If you hadn’t built Lucky Linda, Silver Bird would’ve bombed New York, and that could have changed the course of the war.”

“Oh, that’s obvious.” J. Jackson Jackson brushed it off. “I mean everything that happened since then… people going into space, landing on the Moon, heading on to Mars, all that. Did Blue Horizon push us into doing all that, or…?”

“Don’t listen to him.” Henry picked up his cane, slowly pushed himself to his feet. “Jack’s been carrying on like that for years, trying to take credit for something he didn’t do. It was inevitable, and he knows it… we would’ve made it to Mars eventually, Blue Horizon or not.”

“Old business,” Lloyd wheezed as his nephew began to push his wheelchair from the room. “Save it for… another time.”

Jack started to object, but Henry ignored him. Instead, he beckoned for his great-grandson. “C’mon, Carl. Let’s take another look at your rocket, see if we can figure out what went wrong.”

“Sure.” As Ellen came forward to help Henry shuffle out of the den, Carl bent over to pick up his iPad. Waking it up, he noticed that the message light was blinking. “Hold on,” he said to his mother. “I think I got something from Dad.”

“All right, go ahead and check it. We’ll be out on the porch.”

Carl nodded, then sat down again. As the adults around him continued to follow one another from the den, he ran his finger across the screen to open the video app. As he’d expected, the menu told him that his father had called just a couple of hours earlier and left a message.

Carl touched the menu again, and his father appeared on the screen. He was seated in what appeared to be a departure lounge; behind him was a ticket counter and a gate, with several other travelers visible in the background. As usual, his father was using a public phone, and there was a rueful look on his face as he addressed the camera.

“Carl, hi, it’s me. Hey, I’m sorry, but it looks like I’m not going to make it to the reunion. My connecting flight from the Moon got delayed and… well, I’m stuck in orbit again. Tell your mother I’m sorry, and give Grandpa Henry my best. Hope you enjoy the weekend. Love you, son… see you later.”

The image froze, the replay arrow transposed over his father’s face. Carl was about to close the app when he noticed something else in the background: the flight schedule on the wallscreen behind the ticket counter. Curious, he used his fingertips to expand the image, and now he was able to read the board clearly:

Smiling to himself, Carl closed his iPad. He had an answer to Jack Cube’s question.