At long last, the time had come to move the ship from its assembly hangar to its just-completed launchpad, where it would undergo final tests before being placed on standby. It was a day for celebration. For the past fifteen months, Lucky Linda had been the object of devotion for all these people who were standing outside its hangar; they clapped and cheered and whistled, making the most of the moment. More than a year of constant effort had led up to this, and everyone wanted to savor it.
“There she is,” Henry said to Goddard. Along with the rest of the 390 Group, they had an honored position in the crowd, right next to the place where the truck would carry the spacecraft. “Our little Linda, having her coming-out party.”
“Our little Nell, you mean.” As the truck approached them, Goddard regarded the nude girl painted on the ship’s nose with tight-faced Yankee disapproval. “If I’d known our pilot was going to do that to her…”
“Say what?” Skid Sloman was standing just behind Goddard. He bent closer and mockingly cupped an ear. “Sorry, Doc, didn’t quite hear you… everyone’s making too much noise!”
Goddard scowled but said nothing. Henry traded a look with Jack Cube, who stood on the other side of the professor. Jack remained stoical as always, his eyes hidden behind his aviator shades, but he shook his head ever so slightly. Skid had rubbed Bob the wrong way the moment they met, when he spit out a wad of chewing gum just as he was stepping forward to shake Goddard’s hand. The gum hit Bob’s shoe, and Skid hadn’t noticed, let alone apologized, and that was it; from that moment on, it was Goddard’s opinion that Lieutenant Rudy Sloman was the wrong man for the job, and never mind the fact that he’d mastered the training exercises so well that he could probably fly Lucky Linda in his sleep.
From the corner of his eye, Henry caught a glimpse of Joe McPherson. The backup pilot stood next to Skid, and there was no mistaking the look of contemptuous envy on his face. From what Jack had told him, it wasn’t until Lucky Linda was nearly completed that McPherson began to really take the mission seriously. Up to that point, the X-1 was just some silly experimental aircraft that would probably never get off the ground. When it became clear that Lucky Linda would indeed fly, though, and the man who piloted it into space would earn far more than just a paycheck, McPherson suddenly became intent on bumping Skid from his place at the front of the line.
Fat chance of that. Over the past eleven months, Jack and Skid had become close friends. Were it not for the fact that Jack was too tall for the cockpit, he would have been Skid’s backup pilot, not Joe. But this hadn’t stopped McPherson from kissing up to Bob Goddard… and when that failed, because Bob liked brown-nosers even less than smart-asses, he’d become obsessive about logging more hours in the simulator and centrifuge than Skid, a vain effort to prove that he was better qualified to be the primary pilot.
Henry looked at the spacecraft again. It had pulled abreast of them by then, its port wing passing over their heads. On impulse, he reached up, standing on tiptoes as he stretched out his hand as far as he could. He was rewarded by feeling the wing’s underside lightly brush his fingertips; it was already warm in the desert sun, and he knew that the ship would be covered by canvas shrouds once its carriage raised it erect within the launchpad’s gantry tower.
“Hey, what’re you trying to prove?” Ham Ballou snapped, pretending to be annoyed. “Get your mitts off my nice clean spaceship!”
“It’s mine, too.” Henry felt a touch of embarrassment as he fell back on his heels. “Keep your shirt on.”
Ham shared a laugh with Taylor and Gerry, and Henry decided to let it pass. Truth was, he didn’t know what had come over him just then. He and the others had spent the last five months crawling all over the Lucky Linda, and he’d never been sentimental about touching the ship before. But then he glanced at Goddard, and to his surprise he saw that Bob had lowered his head just a bit so that he could run his fingers under the rims of his glasses and wipe tears from the corners of his eyes. Apparently, Bob noticed Henry watching him, because he quickly dropped his hand. Yet there was no doubt that the professor had felt the same thing he had. They’d come a long way in such a short time, and it was nothing less than astonishing to see the results of their efforts made real, a dream come true.
The truck moved on, towing Lucky Linda behind it as it headed for the pad. The applause gradually faded as the crowd broke up. No ceremonies, no speeches, no brass bands; everyone still had jobs to do, and the day wasn’t getting any younger. Henry watched as Goddard turned to walk back to the administration building. He thought about joining him, but he had his work cut out for him at the blockhouse, which was still being fitted for the coming mission… whenever that would be.
Henry found a couple of Corps of Engineers electricians who happened to be going the same way and hopped into the back of their jeep. He spent the rest of the morning on the floor of the concrete igloo, crawling around on hands and knees to make sure all the multicolored wires went to the places they were supposed to go, and when he was done, he had the inevitable paperwork that needed to be signed by someone with scrambled eggs on his hat.
So he hiked back to the administration building and paid a visit to Bliss’s office. As usual, the colonel wasn’t around. His secretary informed Henry that the colonel was in a meeting on the other side of the base and probably wouldn’t be back until after lunch, so Henry added the form to the stack already on the colonel’s desk and left. Lunch sounded like a good idea, and Henry had learned to take advantage of the days when he actually had a chance to enjoy one.
On the way out, though, his steps took him past Goddard’s office. The door was ajar, and he heard music—Mozart’s Symphony No. 39, if he wasn’t mistaken—coming from inside. Henry stopped and, gently tapping his knuckles against the door, peered into the office.
“Bob?” he asked.
Goddard was sitting at the utilitarian wooden desk he’d been issued, a clothbound book open in his hands. Even after five months, he hadn’t yet finished unpacking all the boxes that had been shipped down from the New Hampshire hunting lodge; his feet were propped up on a crate marked TECH. JOURNALS, a black cigar smoldering in a brass ashtray at his elbow. The music was coming from the portable phonograph that seemed to follow him wherever he went, and it was just loud enough that he didn’t hear Henry until he said his name. But when Henry looked in, he noticed that Goddard’s attention wasn’t on the book but instead was on the distant launchpad, visible through the window above his desk.
“What…? Oh, yes, hello… come in.” Marking his place with a finger, Goddard half closed the book and sat up a little straighter. “Just reading an old favorite and… well, ruminating a bit.”
“Which book?” Henry asked as he stepped into the office.
Goddard held up the book so that he could see the frayed red dustcover: The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. “I’ve been carrying this around with me ever since I was a boy,” he said, a sly smile beneath his mustache. “Pages are beginning to fall out, print’s barely readable, but… I don’t know, I just can’t bear to toss it away and buy a new copy.”
“That’s the one you read when…?”
“Uh-huh. The day I climbed up that apple tree and decided what I wanted to do with my life.”
Henry knew the story well; all of Bob’s close friends did. This was the first time, though, that he’d ever seen the actual book that had sent Robert H. Goddard down his life’s path. “You’d never want to throw out something like that,” he said, taking a seat in the office’s only other chair. “It means too much to you.”