“The feds weren’t happy with… Harry Chung either,” Lloyd said.
“Yeah, Harry was also at GALCIT when the war broke out. A few weeks after Pearl Harbor, though, he and his wife were rounded up and sent to an internment camp.” Jack gave a disgusted snort. “Didn’t matter that he was third-generation Chinese-American or that he’d been born and raised in San Francisco. Anyone with yellow skin was considered suspicious, and the feds really didn’t want a guy like him working on a top secret military project. But Bob knew his work as an aeronautical engineer, so he twisted the FBI’s arm until they surrendered.”
“They weren’t wild about a guy with black skin either, as I recall,” Henry said quietly.
“The FBI didn’t think I was a security risk,” Jack replied, a crooked smile on his face. “They just couldn’t believe a black man would know enough about rockets to make him worth military deferral. And to tell the truth, I wanted to be in the service. After I got out of Tuskegee University with a degree in mechanical engineering, the first thing I did was join the Army Air Corps, so I was in flight school when I got the call. Again, it was a matter of connections. Mike Ferris knew about me because we were both ARS members and had been trading letters back and forth, and we both knew about Gerry Mander because…”
“Gerry was the wild card,” Lloyd said.
“Yeah, he was the deuce, all right.” Henry smiled at the thought. “The rest of us were college boys, but Gerry’s formal education stopped at high school. He was a farm boy from Alabama, and his family didn’t have enough money to send him to college. That didn’t stop him, though, once the space bug bit him. He built his own rocket from bits and pieces of scrap metal, going by what he’d read in magazines and library books about Bob’s first rockets. Pretty remarkable, when you stop to think about it.”
“But he didn’t know anything about gyroscopes,” Jack said, “so when he launched it from a cow pasture on his family’s property, it spun out and crashed through the roof of a neighbor’s barn. The kerosene he was using for fuel blew up and set the place on fire, and it burned to the ground before the fire department got there.”
“Had to… spring him from jail,” Lloyd said. “Gerry was… working on a road crew… when Colonel Bliss showed up to… offer him a job with us. He said, ‘Sounds like a… nice idea. Let me… think about it.’”
“I never heard that,” Walker said, laughing along with everyone else in the room. “How did Bob know about him?”
“He didn’t,” Jack said. “Mike and I had both read about Gerry’s experiment in the ARS newsletter, and we thought that any kid with that much gumption belonged on our team. Bob agreed, so we recruited him.”
“Gerry was the last guy to join the team,” Henry said. “He was also the youngest… I think he was only nineteen when he showed up… but not by much. Most of us were in our early twenties, although Taylor was about thirty, if I remember correctly.”
“I was… almost in my thirties, too,” Lloyd added.
“I stand corrected.” Henry shook his head, smiling at the fond memory. “We were all kids, really, kind of a band of misfits. Too smart for our own good, socially awkward, not really fitting in well with anyone around us. I think there’s a name for guys like us…” He looked over at his great-grandson. “What’s the word I’m looking for, Carl?”
“Geeks,” Carl said.
“Thank you… yeah, that’s what we were. Depression-era rocket geeks.” Henry shrugged. “Probably just as well that Bob got to us before the Army did. Of course, Jack here is probably the only guy a draft board wouldn’t have rejected as 4F… but even if they hadn’t, I don’t think any of us would’ve lasted a day in North Africa or Sicily.”
“Not that New England was much better.” Jack looked around the room. “You wouldn’t believe how cold this place gets in the middle of winter. There was one time…”
“That brings me to the next thing I’d like to know,” Walker said quickly, not wanting anyone to get ahead of himself and thus lose the chronological thread of the story. “Once the team was selected, why did you go to Worcester? That’s where Blue Horizon got started, of course…”
“The R&D work, yes,” Henry said. “Everything else stayed in New Mexico.”
“Right… at Alamogordo Army Air Field, once the project was relocated from Mescalero Ranch.”
“Uh-huh, that’s correct. The ranch wasn’t big enough for the job. Besides, everyone in Roswell knew that Bob was building rockets out there, and Colonel Bliss didn’t want anything being done in a place where just about anyone could drive up and see what was going on. So the decision was made to move everything to Alamogordo…”
“But not the rocket team. You were sent to Massachusetts. Why?”
“For a couple of reasons,” Jack said. “The first was that the people in the War Department wanted their brain trust as close to them as possible, so they could easily keep tabs on what we were doing. They’d put Omar Bliss in charge of the project, but even he was something of a… y’know, a wild card, to use that term again…”
“We didn’t know it then, but Omar was something of a geek, too.” Henry grinned. “The only person who didn’t think he was as weird as a three-dollar bill was Vannevar Bush, who’d met him at some Pentagon conference. That’s why Bush put Omar in charge… he was the one person in the War Department who didn’t think space travel was something straight out of the funny pages.”
“Anyway,” Jack continued, “some of the big brass weren’t sure they could depend on the colonel to lead something as important as this. As for the rest of us…”
“They trusted us… even less,” Lloyd said.
“Right,” Henry said. “Worcester was close enough to Washington that the big shots in the Pentagon felt like they had us under control, but far enough away that we’d be out of sight of any German spies who might be lurking around D.C.” His smile faded. “They were wrong, of course, but…”
“The other reason was Bob himself,” Jack said. “Bliss was bothered by Bob’s hands-on engineering approach. When the colonel heard that he and the other guys would fuel the Nell rockets themselves and even go out to the launch tower to make last-minute adjustments…”
“Like we had a choice,” Henry said. “It was just the five of us. We didn’t have a ground crew.”
“Anyway, Bliss didn’t want to risk having Bob or the rest of us getting blown to kingdom come, so he decided to move us across the country. And again, the logical place to put us was in Worcester.”
“Bob wasn’t happy about that at all,” Henry said. “He and Esther had been living in Roswell for quite a while. They put down roots in the community, and I think they would’ve been happy to stay there for the rest of their lives. Officially, he was still on the Clark faculty and was still drawing a salary as its physics department chairman, but he didn’t go back very often. So moving back to Massachusetts…”
“He… didn’t want to,” Lloyd rasped. “He fought like crazy to… stay in Roswell.”
“Yeah, well… he did fight, all right, but this is the U.S. Army we’re talking about, and during wartime…” Henry shook his head. “I thought they were wrong, too. I told Bliss he was making a mistake. But the colonel had his orders, and they came straight from the top. Blue Horizon… that was the code name the Army had given the project by then… was to be relocated to Worcester, and that was final.”
“And that’s… when we all got… to meet each other,” Lloyd said.