“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:
TWA Translunar Service
Tranquility Station to New York LaGuardia Flight 902
DELAYED New Departure Time 1230 GMT
Shuttle: Robert H. Goddard
Smiling to himself, Carl closed his iPad. He had an answer to Jack Cube’s question.
AFTERWORD
V-S Day is a novel that goes back to the beginning of my career as a science fiction author and is preceded by several different versions.
I came up with the story over twenty-five years ago while I was researching and writing my first novel, Orbital Decay. During that time, I’d moved to Worcester, and it wasn’t long before I discovered that it was the hometown of Robert H. Goddard. That led me to examine Goddard’s life and work—including visiting the site of Goddard’s first rocket launch in nearby Auburn—but it was when I stumbled upon a mention of Eugen Sanger’s antipodal space bomber in an appendix of Willy Ley’s Rockets, Missiles, & Space Travel that I realized all this could be the basis for an alternate-history story. I originally conceived it to be a novel, but once I sold Orbital Decay to Ace, my editor, Ginjer Buchanan, encouraged me to write and publish some short fiction to introduce myself to readers before the book came out. I therefore decided to reduce the novel to a short story, which could be written and sold more quickly.