Von Braun had developed a passion for astronomy as a boy. He had been something of an infant prodigy; even now he remained a gifted classical pianist capable of playing Beethoven and Bach from memory, and a cellist who had had youthful pretentions of pursuing a career in conducting and composing.
However, that part of his past was inextricably intertwined with another, less comfortable history. He would never have survived as the Technical Director of the Army Rocket Center at Peenemunde if he had not been a member of the Nazi Party. Moreover, as the privileged, superbly educated, prodigiously able son of a well off Prussian family he could not plausibly deny that in his younger days — in hindsight — he had been enthused by the German revival under Hitler, albeit without ever being overly ‘political’. He was not, nor had he ever been an anti-Semite and during the war he had been far too busy doing what he construed to be his patriotic duty to notice, let alone worry about the industrial scale atrocities carried out by the SS. Yes, he had joined the SS; by the middle of the war Himmler and the SS had had a stranglehold on the whole Vergeltungswaffen — V-weapons or ‘Vengeance Weapons’ — program so he had had no choice in the matter!
These were mantras from which never departed; the same mantras the kameraden from the old days at Peenemunde who now held all but one of the major technical directorships at the Marshall Space Flight Center clutched close to their hearts along with their immensely precious American passports.
‘To us, Hitler was still only a pompous fool with a Charlie Chaplin moustache!’
It was not true but what was truth in a world turned upside down?
In the Fuhrer’s Reich only an idiot stood on his ‘moral objections’ when a man learned that Heinrich Himmler had personally ‘invited’ one to join the SS!
Von Braun was a tall broad handsome man with a natural presence. There were grey flecks in his hair and worry lines on his face, and always, a strange restlessness as if some inner dynamo was forever trying to compensate for all the wasted years. He might have dreamed of building a Moon rocket since earliest childhood but Hitler had forced him to build the world’s first ballistic missile; subsequently, the Americans had mandated he build a rocket capable of carrying small payloads into low Earth orbit.
And then a little over a fortnight ago it had seemed as if the President had granted him the keys to the kingdom.
“A little over a month before the war I committed this great country to the goal of putting a man — an American — on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth by the end of this decade. As I told Congress in 1961, I believe that no single space project in this period will be more impressive to Mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. I say to you, my fellow Americans, that having passed through the valley of the shadow of death we owe it to the rest of Mankind to think the unthinkable and to fulfil our manifest destiny!”
The dream first dangled before him in the early days of the Kennedy Administration had been suddenly revived. And it seemed, cruelly snatched from his grasp yet again.
This morning he was watching grainy TV pictures of Washington DC burning, of great public buildings shrouded in smoke, of streets littered with bodies and the detritus of war, and the whole massive former Redstone Arsenal complex around him was in the process of being locked down by an ad hoc force of Alabama State National Guards, NASA — National Aerospace and Space Administration — security contractors, local policemen and a small detachment of Marines flown in from Tullahoma, Tennessee.
Those pictures from Washington reminded him of the devastation in Germany in 1945. There was a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as if the wheel of history was turning anew and this time he was going to be on the wrong side of it. If the Moon had seemed a long way away yesterday — a quarter of a million miles — today it might as well be on the other side of the Galaxy.
“This looks bad,” von Braun’s deputy and old friend Eberhard Rees observed quietly. Fifty-five year old Eberhard Friedrich Michael Rees, a balding serious man cut a much less flamboyant figure than his Director. Unlike von Braun he had arrived at Peenemunde in 1939 by a relatively conventional route having studied engineering at the University of Stuttgart, and achieved his masters degree at Dresden University of Technology in 1934. When he was recruited by the Wehrmacht he was the assistant manager of a steel mill in Leipzig; in the middle years of the Second World War he was managing the fabrication and assembly of the V-2 rocket, and by the end of that war he was von Braun’s trusted right hand man. Of all the kameraden brought to America from Germany in October 1945, no two men were so inextricably linked to the Nordhausen V-2 assembly factory and its adjoining concentration camp deep in the Harz Mountains where countless slave labourers had been worked, beaten and starved to death in the spring of 1945, than von Braun and Rees. Although neither had had their own fingerprints on the war crimes committed at Nordhausen, it was incontrovertible that neither man had ever intervened to ameliorate, let alone transform the murderous SS regime at that place. Even eighteen years after the war the two friends knew that one day that stain on the face of humanity might yet come back to haunt them. “Very bad.”
Von Braun glanced at the other man.
He and Rees had run the program to improve the V-2 design at the US Army’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds at White Sands in New Mexico, and then at Fort Bliss. Despite the lack of imagination and tunnel vision of their American hosts they had pioneered two-stage rocketry and honed inertial guidance systems before the Army Ordnance Corps had transferred the whole program to the huge Redstone Arsenal Complex, the site of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. Together they had produced the Jupiter booster and Rees’s team had developed cutting edge ablative heat shield technology, the prerequisite for enabling men sent on manned space missions to return safely to Earth. The ‘Saturn Project’ — named for the giant multi-stage rocket that would be required to launch a ‘moon ship’ — had effectively been placed on hold since the October War. Eighteen days ago they had been given a second green light to ‘go to the Moon’; but now it looked as if that had all been ‘moonshine’.
“Everybody who hasn’t already come inside the complex ought to be called in. Their families, anybody who is in any way connected to any of our programs, Eberhard,” von Braun decided. “I will speak to the security people. As many of us as possible should be armed. If unauthorized personnel penetrate the perimeter we must be ready to defend ourselves.” He sighed. “Like in the old days.”
Chapter 7
Carl Drinkwater knew that the man claiming to be Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Galen Cheney was bad news the moment he opened the door and his visitor had held his badge in front of his face. The former Manager of the Burroughs Corporation Systems Integration (Peterson Air Force Base) Network Implementation Team had always known this visit would come; ever since fate had decreed that he was the duty Burroughs NSCAC — Network Systems Communications Analyst Consultant — that night of the October War. What he had not expected was that the visit would come at two o’clock on the morning after the he had watched — horrified and frightened beyond measure — the grainy pictures, and listened to the panicky, shaken voices of the radio reporters describing the lawlessness, mayhem and casual widespread destruction and desecration of great national icons like the Pentagon, the State Department building, the Smithsonian and scores of other supposedly immutable bulwarks of the American nation and its cultural heritage.