As he spoke, Henry walked over to Esther. “Is that from who I think it’s from?” he whispered. She silently nodded but folded the letter before he could read it.
Hillman returned to the car, came back with an attaché case. Using a key to open it, he pulled out a thick manila folder. As the corporal handed it to Goddard, Bliss said, “I’d prefer it if you’d read this by yourself and not discuss it with anyone.”
“I’ll read it alone,” Goddard said, “but I won’t make any promises about the second condition.” He nodded toward Esther and Henry. “My wife and Mr. Morse here are two of my closest assistants, as are the two other men who are my employees. Anything I may agree to do for you, I’ll need their help. Keeping this a secret from them is out of the question.”
Bliss hesitated. “All right, have it your way. But we’ll need to have them sign security agreements… and the FBI will probably want to check their backgrounds, too.”
“Uh-oh,” Esther said, giving Henry a sly wink. “You’re in trouble now.”
Bliss looked at her sharply. “Why? Is there something we should know about?”
“Henry has suspicious political affiliations.”
The colonel’s eyes narrowed as he turned to Henry. “You’re a Communist?”
“Worse than that… he’s a Republican.” Goddard had already opened the folder and was peering at the document inside. “I wouldn’t worry about my associates, Colonel. They’ve all signed confidentiality agreements with me. Esther, please take our guests inside and give them some lunch. Henry, ask Lloyd and Taylor if they’ll come in, too. I’ll be in my office.”
“Okay, Doctor G,” she said, but he’d already turned away and begun walking back up the stairs, tripping slightly on the first riser. “Colonel, Corporal…”
The two Army men nodded and followed her. Henry watched them go, then headed for the assembly shed behind the main house. He still hadn’t any idea what this was about, but if the president’s signature was on the letter Bliss had presented Bob, then it was a good bet this couldn’t be about shoulder-fired missiles.
Lunch was enchiladas with fried potatoes, served at the battered pinewood table that took up most of the dining room. Taylor Brickell and Lloyd Kapman were there as well, both of them just as oil-stained and filthy as Bob. The rocket men cleaned themselves up before coming to the table, but Colonel Bliss wrinkled his nose a bit when he saw them. Henry couldn’t blame him; except for Esther, everyone at Mescalero Ranch looked like an automobile mechanic.
Bob didn’t join them for lunch. From his office at the back of the house, they could hear Bach playing on the old windup Victrola he and Esther had brought with them from Worcester. At one point, Henry got up to visit the bathroom. On the way there, he passed Bob’s office. The door was half-open, and through it he saw Goddard leaning back in his armchair with his feet propped up on the desk, intently studying the report while smoking one of his foul black cigars. Bob didn’t look up even though Henry’s footsteps caused the floorboards to creak, and Henry knew that his former professor was completely riveted by what he was reading.
Conversation at the lunch table was light. Inevitably, the subject turned to why the Goddards had moved from Worcester, Massachusetts, to this remote corner of New Mexico almost twelve years ago even though Bob continued to serve as the chairman of Clark University’s physics department. The most obvious reason, of course, was Bob’s health. The New England climate had never been kind to the tuberculosis Goddard had suffered since childhood. Indeed, it had very nearly killed him when he was a teenager; at one point, his doctors had given him only a couple of weeks to live (“He got better,” Esther said, an understatement if there ever was one). The dry Southwestern air allowed him to breathe freely for the first time in his life; nonetheless, he still smoked, a habit that he’d picked up from his father.
The main reason, though, was the nature of his research. The first rockets Robert Goddard built—including the world’s first liquid-fuel rocket, launched on March 16, 1926—were sent up from his Aunt Effie’s hilltop farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, just south of Worcester. Goddard kept them secret for quite a long time because he wanted to protect his designs from imitators—particularly Hermann Oberth, the German scientist whom Bob knew was pursuing the same line of research—yet public discovery was inevitable once he was awarded patents and published his work as a Smithsonian Institution monograph.
“When that happened, the newspapers were all over him,” Esther said. “Before he knew it, every reporter in America wanted to do an interview with him. And they all wanted to know when he was going to build that rocket to the Moon.”
“A moon rocket?” Hillman still hadn’t been able to take his eyes off Esther. Henry couldn’t blame him. With her sun hat gone and her soft blond hair cascading down around her shoulders, she was as lovely as a desert rose. “Why would they think he’s building something like that?”
“At the end of the paper, Bob speculated that it might be possible to fire a rocket to the Moon with an explosive charge aboard, to blow up when it crashes there so that astronomers could see it and know that it had arrived.” Esther reached for the lemonade pitcher. “Of course, it was just idle speculation on his part…”
“Aw, c’mon, Esther… you know that’s not entirely true.” Lloyd polished off the last of his enchilada and wiped his mouth with a napkin. A small, gnomish man with curly black hair, he peered at her over the top of his glasses. “Bob’s intent all along has been to build something that will take him into outer space. And not just to the Moon, either. He wants to go to Mars.”
“Mars?” Bliss was incredulous.
Henry winced. Lloyd might just well have said that Mescalero Ranch was in the business of weaving magic carpets. “It’s Bob’s dream to construct a vehicle that one day”—he carefully emphasized this—“might be capable of transporting people to another planet. He’s had this ambition his entire life, ever since he read The War of the Worlds as a kid. But that’s not what we’re doing here, Colonel. We’re just taking the first steps.”
“Anyway, if the press wasn’t bad enough, there was also… well, the accidents.” Ice chuckled in Esther’s glass as she poured herself some more lemonade. “The big one in particular. One of those rockets went off course and crashed, starting a small fire that the Auburn fire department had to put out. When the local papers heard about it, they claimed that it was a giant moon rocket and that it had blown up.”
“Yeah, that was a good one.” A bit on the chubby side, Taylor Brickell had a round and pleasant face that made him look more like a stock clerk than an aeronautical engineer. “I liked that almost as much as the New York Times saying that Bob’s a crackpot because everyone knows rockets wouldn’t be able to work in space because…”
“There’s no air for them to push against.” Bliss smiled. “I know… I read that story in his intelligence file.”
Esther shot him a surprised glance. “Army intelligence has a file on Bob?”
“You didn’t think we’d completely forgotten about him, do you?” The colonel shook his head. “Granted, we sort of lost track of him after he stopped using Camp Devens as a test area… why did he do that, anyway? It’s a perfectly good place to launch rockets.”
“Are you kidding?” Henry almost laughed out loud. “Sorry, Colonel. I know the Army was trying to be generous, letting him use that place… but it was a marsh, for God’s sake. Mud, mosquitoes, briar patches…”
“The Army meant well,” Esther said, cutting him off, “but it was unsuitable for our purposes. Besides, with Bob’s now spending so much time outdoors, we felt we needed to leave Massachusetts. Auburn passed ordinances prohibiting rocket launches in town limits, and Clark University wasn’t keen on his working with explosive materials on campus, so we started looking elsewhere.”