[What Might Have Been 03] Alternate Wars Read online

  Jonathan comes in from the back room, where we have stashed him. After three hours’ sleep we would expect him to be more reasonable or at least less wired, but this is not the case. He is more frantic than ever.

  I’ve been thinking this through, he said. Been talking to a few people.

  That’s good, Richard said. Talk is always good. High communication, that was your original demand, right?

  We have to pull back, Jonathan said, this isn’t going to work. It won’t work with these odds.

  It’s working fine, Richard says. Don’t you think so, Ronald? I shrug. Working okay by me, I say.

  This guy, Jonathan said, this LBJ. He just pulled out, you understand? The war did him in, he did him in. All he wanted in the world was to be the king and they took it away from him and worst of all he had to sink the knife in himself, you dig that?

  I dig that fine, Richard says, it is a satisfying source of pleasure. It is an inspiration. It sends us on our way.

  So this guy lost everything, Jonathan says, Old LBJ, he doesn’t care anymore, don’t you see? The worst that can happen has happened. He won’t be president.

  Still got the Hump, Richard says. He giggled. The Hump will keep the chair mighty warm, also his mouth, don’t you agree?

  You don’t get it at all, Jonathan says, you really don’t get it. He grabs Richard’s wrists. You are dealing with a guy who has already lost everything. He has nothing more to lose, not the Hump, not anything. He doesn’t care, you’re pushing him over the edge. He is leaning over, half-trying to bring Richard up.

  Let go of my wrists, white man, Richard says very quietly. Just release your grip.

  Damn it, Jonathan says, I worked this out. I may be white but I’m not stupid. You’re dealing with a guy who has already lost everything, you’re putting him in a box now, don’t you see?

  See? Richard says. I see everything. I am far-ranging. You are still grasping my wrists. You let them go within the next ten seconds or you see who will lose everything and how.

  He hates New York, Jonathan says, letting him go, crouching beside us. He thinks that everything that beat him came out of New York anyway. Now he’s got the enemy at home, waving nukes. You know what that means?

  I know what it means, I say. It means that we are finally making an impression.

  We’re making an impression, Jonathan says, we’re making a big impression. He’s going to hit us, that’s what’s going to happen. He’ll send in the Strategic Air Command.

  Oh, white boy, Richard says, you have a fertile mind and heart. The Strategic Air Command. He chuckles. You don’t understand who has who by the balls here, he says. You don’t understand the situation.

  I understand the situation, Jonathan says, we are in heavy shit. We are in the heaviest shit. We are dealing with a crazy man by being crazy. You know what happens then?

  I don’t know, Richard says, help me.

  He’s just looking for an excuse, Jonathan says. You’ve given him all the excuse he needs. You’ve brought Vietnam home.

  Time he got to Vietnam, Richard says. Time for sure.

  And he’s got the provocation now. He’ll use the bomb.

  Richard says, Jonathan, you losing your cool. Nuke out a bunch of college kids with a reactor? Shit, what you talking about? We can’t do nothing with that machine, that little bitty old separator. That’s the word from the Chemistry Department. We can rattle the bones, Richard says, but we can’t pull no action.

  LBJ doesn’t know that, Jonathan says. LBJ’s no nuclear scientist. Neither are we, Richard says. He’s figured that out already. But he’s got poor public relations.

  You don’t get it, Jonathan says. He doesn’t know about bitty old separators and radioactivity. Doesn’t care, either. For him, we’ve turned into Viet Cong. He thinks he’s got the Viet Cong right here at home and he’s going to trash us out, that’s what I think.

  Talk to the Chemistry Department, Richard says. Examine their isotopes, see what they got to say.

  LBJ has freaked out, Jonathan says. He’s over the line. He doesn’t care what we can do, he’s got the excuse. I’m telling you, we better back off.

  Richard takes Jonathan by the wrist, hauls himself up, gives him a push. You back off, he says. You back off all your life, in the morning you’re still white. It’s a game for you and now the stakes are a little too high. But you can’t get out. He points to the sociology professor, the professor hiding between four tits over on the carpet, the little coeds stroking his hair.

  You and he are black as us tonight, he says. You going to stay through the end, see this through one time.

  We’ll see it through, Jonathan says. You fool, there’s nowhere to hide. There’s no place to go, you think it’s any safer on Thirty-fifth Street or up in Inwood than it is right here? We can’t get out anywhere, none of us. We’re cooked to a circumference of four hundred and fifty miles. Because we’re the enemy and now he’s got the rationalization he needs.

  It’s throwdown time, Richard says. That honky, he’s not going to throw it down, that’s all.

  You’ll see, Jonathan says. He walks out the open door. It feels as if we have been shouting, but for all the notice our conversation takes, we might have been whispering. Or maybe all the troops, the sociology professor and his companions, they, too, are simply asleep. It is deep night, and in the extinguished spaces now I can barely see Richard.

  White boy, Richard says. Establishment bitch. Just another one all the time.

  What if he’s right? I say.

  What’s that?

  I said, What if he’s right? What if LBJ doesn’t give a shit anymore? What if he just hits us with everything he has? Jonathan’s right, he’s a dead man anyway. He’s out of office. How long is he going to live?

  You’re as crazy as the rest of them, Richard says. Me, I’m going to get a little sleep, be alert at 2:00 A.M. Need my beautify sleep for some serious negotiating.

  He could be right, he says. You just know it.

  You, too, Ronald? Richard says. His eyes are round, maybe amused, hard to tell in the dark. You going to go establishment on me, too?

  I’m not going anywhere.

  That’s good. Because it’s too late, Richard says, you get that? It’s just too goddamned late and we’re going to see it through now. We got the plan and the plan is going to work right through to the end and that’s the end of the plan. He rambles off toward the couch. Crash me back in half an hour, he says. Stand the sentry. Play watch.

  I get up, follow him partway across the room, then lean against the wall to brace myself, feeling unsteady. There is a sudden shift and uneasiness in the room. I can hear the sound of distant humming.

  It would happen so fast, I say to Richard, we wouldn’t even know it had happened.

  He says nothing.

  I have read about these things, I say. It is like a head-on automobile crash. If you know it’s happened, it hasn’t happened. It’s so fast you are dead before you know it.

  I am already asleep, Richard says, I am finding my righteous moments. In the dark, I lean against the wall. The professor is muttering something. Maybe other things are going on outside; the lawn seems suddenly close against me and I can smell the stink of the occupiers. And then there is an amazing light, the light of Calvary.

  I see the light; I know it is happening.

  Which means then according to Richard that if I see it going on it isn’t going on, except it is.

  It is and it is.

  And the screaming, and the fire…

  GODDARD’S PEOPLE

  Allen Steele

  A morning in wartime: May 24, 1944, 5:15 A.M. PST Day is barely breaking over the California coastline; for the crew of the B-24 Liberator Hollywood Babe, it’s the fifth hour of their mission. The bomber has been holding a stationary position since midnight over the ocean southeast of the Baja Peninsula, flying in narrow circles at twenty-five thousand feet. Their classified mission has been simple: Watch the skies.
The vigil is about to end.

  Gazing through the cockpit windows, the captain notices a thin white vapor trail zipping across the dark purple sky. Many miles above and due west of his plane’s position, the streak is hopelessly out of Hollywood Babe’s range, even if the bomber was ordered to intercept the incoming object. Becoming alert, he glances over his shoulder at the civilian in the jump seat behind him.

  “Sir, is that what you’re looking for?” the captain asks.

  The civilian, an agent of the Office of Strategic Services, quickly leans forward and stares at the streak. “Son of a bitch,” he murmurs under his breath. For a moment he can’t believe what he’s seeing. Only yesterday he had been telling someone that MI-6 must be getting shell-shocked, because now they were sending science fiction yarns to the OSS. But, incredible or not, this was exactly what the OSS man had been told to watch for.

  He turns to the radio man in the narrow compartment behind the cockpit. “Sergeant, alert White Sands now!” he yells over the throb of the B-24’s engines. “It’s on its way!”

  Many miles away, warning Klaxons howl at a top-secret U.S. Army facility in the New Mexico desert. Around a spotlighted launch pad, technicians and engineers scurry away from the single-stage, seventy-five-foot winged silver rocket poised on the pad. Cold white oxygen fumes venting from the base of the rocket billow around the steel launch tower. The gantry is towed back along railroad tracks by a locomotive, and fuel trucks race away to a safe distance where the ground crew and several soldiers wait, their eyes fixed on the pad.

  In a concrete blockhouse four hundred yards from the launch pad, more than a dozen men are monitoring the launch. Among them, nine civilian scientists are hunched over control panels, anxiously watching hundreds of dials and meters as they murmur instructions to each other. In the middle of the blockhouse a frail, scholarly man peers through a periscope at the launch pad as the countdown reaches the final sixty seconds.

  For more than two years, these ten men have worked toward this moment; now in the last minute, most of them are scared half to death.

  If the launch is unsuccessful, there will be no second chance. If the rocket blows up, as so many other rockets have before it, the Navy pilot inside the machine will die. But far worse than that, New York City, thousands of miles to the east, will suffer a devastating attack. An eighty-ton incendiary bomb will drop into the middle of Manhattan, and there will be nothing in heaven or on earth to stop it. If the launch is successful, it will be the crowning achievement of American technology; if it fails, it may be the beginning of the end for free society. The stakes are that high.

  “Ten … nine … eight…” an Army officer recites tonelessly. Staring through the periscope, Robert Hutchings Goddard absently wipes his sweaty palms against the rubber grips and silently begins to pray… .

  Forty-seven years ago, in the early morning hours of a summer day in World War II, a huge rocket called the A-9—the Amerika Bomber—hurtled down a horizontal track in Germany and climbed to the highest altitude ever achieved, 156 miles above the earth. Horst Reinhart, a young Luftwaffe lieutenant, became the first man in space. One hour and thirty-six minutes later, the rocket christened the Lucky Linda blasted off from New Mexico, and U.S. Navy pilot Rudy “Skid” Sloman’s triumphant howl was picked up by ham radio operators across the continent as the United States became the world’s second spacefaring nation.

  This much is well known; what has been largely lost to history, though, is the leading role played by a mild, stoop-shouldered physics professor from Worcester. Not because of neglect—Robert H. Goddard’s place in the annals of spaceflight as the father of American rocketry has been assured—but because of enduring cold war suspicions. In the years since his death in 1945, facts about his private life, particularly during the Second World War, have remained hidden, mainly because of national security interests. Goddard was known to have had a vague “consultant” role in Project Blue Horizon, but little more has been discovered by Goddard’s biographers. The official story is that Goddard spent the war teaching at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Not much else is in the public record.

  Yet if that part of Robert Goddard’s biography is opaque, even less is known about the top-secret research group that was once code-named Team 390. Each year, on the anniversary of Lucky Linda’s flight, the seven survivors of the American rocket team gather at a sportsman’s lodge in New Hampshire, on the shore of Lake Monomonock. Once again, in the lodge’s den, the secret tale is told. As the seven old men speak, more than a few times their eyes wander to the framed photo of Goddard that hangs above the mantel.

  They are all that remain of Team 390, but they rarely call themselves by that name. Now as then, they are known among themselves simply as Goddard’s people.

  The affair began on the morning of January 19, 1942, when OSS agent William Casey (later to become the Director of Central Intelligence during the Reagan Administration) arrived in Washington, D.C., from London on a U.S. Army DC-3. An attache case handcuffed to his wrist contained a top-secret Nazi document that British MI-6 agents had discovered on the island of Peenemünde. By noon, the document code-named Black Umbrella, unofficially known as the “Sänger Report”—was on the desk of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  The United States had been directly involved in World War II for only six weeks when the Sänger report was unearthed. Isolationism had crumbled after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and fear was running high in the country that North America itself was the next target of the Axis powers; in Washington itself, antiaircraft guns and air-raid sirens were already being erected on city rooftops. Black Umbrella could not have arrived at a better time to have been taken seriously.

  Peenemünde is on an island off the coast of Germany in the Baltic Sea. Once the site of a seldom-visited fishing village, during the war the island had become the location of secret Nazi rocket research for the German Army. Germans had been vigorously developing liquid-fuel rockets even before Adolf Hitler had become chancellor, and the Nazis had incorporated rocket research into their war plans, recruiting a team of civilian rocket scientists, with Wernher von Braun as its chief scientist. British Intelligence had known that Peenemünde was the site of secret rocket experiments; a large missile called the A-4 was alleged to be in the final phases of R&D. “Silver” and “Gold,” two MI-6 agents working undercover in Peenemünde as janitors, had been monitoring the continuing development of the A-4 rocket, later to be known by the Allies as the V-2.

  However, in recent months more puzzling things had been happening in Peenemünde. Something new was being developed in a warehouse that was kept locked and guarded at all times; rumors around the base had it that an even more ambitious weapon than the A-4 was being built by von Braun’s rocket team. High Command officers such as Hermann Goring, Rudolf Hess, and Heinrich Himmler had been regularly visiting Peenemünde, spending long hours in the warehouse. Yet Silver and Gold had no idea of what was going on, except that it was even more top-secret than the A-4 project.

  Finally, the two agents had a stroke of luck. For a few precious, unguarded moments, a four-hundred-page document stamped “State Secret” had been carelessly left out on von Braun’s desk by his personal secretary. Without reading the report, Silver had used a miniature camera to photograph as many pages as possible. The team then managed to smuggle the microfilm out of Germany, not knowing what information it contained except that it was part of a report that should have been kept under lock and key. The microfilm made its way to Whitehall in London, where MI-6 intelligence analysts had translated the contents. Horrified by what was found in the report, they rushed the transcript to Washington.

  Black Umbrella was a detailed proposal by Dr. Eugen Sänger, an Austrian rocket scientist employed at the Hermann Goring Institute, the Luftwaffe’s research center. Sänger had proposed construction of a one-man, winged rocket plane, an “antipodal bomber” capable not only of orbital flight but also of flying around the world to at
tack the United States. The rocket plane—nicknamed the Amerika Bomber by Sänger— was to be almost a hundred feet long, weigh a hundred tons, and be propelled by a liquid-fuel rocket engine. Carrying an eighty-ton bomb load, it was to be launched on a rocket-propelled sled that would race down a two-mile track to a sharp incline. The rocket plane would disengage from the sled at the end of the track and, now accelerating at 1,640 feet per second, would climb under its own power to suborbital altitude.

  Using the earth’s rotation for a “slingshot” effect, the Amerika Bomber would make a series of dives and climbs along the top of the atmosphere, skipping like a rock on the surface of a pond as it orbited the earth. The skips would not only help preserve fuel but also keep the rocket plane far above the range of conventional aircraft. In this way the bomber could fly over Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Ocean to the United States. Two of its atmospheric skips could carry it across the continent and, after diving to an altitude of forty miles above the East Coast, the ship could drop an eighty-ton bomb on New York City. The Amerika Bomber then could fly across the Atlantic back to Germany, landing like an airplane on a conventional airstrip.

  It would be obviously a tremendous effort by the Nazis to develop and successfully launch the Sänger bomber; New York was not a military target, either. But the sheer terror of the scheme—the vision of a Nazi rocket plane diving from space to drop an eighty-ton incendiary bomb on Times Square—would be worth its value in propaganda alone. And if a squadron of antipodal bombers were built, as Sänger suggested, Germany would be in control of the highest of high grounds: outer space.

  There was little doubt in the White House that the Nazis could pull off Black Umbrella. According to British intelligence, German civilians had been actively engaged in sophisticated rocket research since the 1920s under the aegis of the Verin für Raumschiffarht, commonly referred to as the German Rocket Society. Almost immediately after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, the Gestapo had seized all journals and records of the German Rocket Society, and the German Army had scooped up almost all members of the VfR, including Hermann Oberth, von Braun’s mentor. It was also known that the German Army was diverting enormous amounts of men and materiel to Peenemünde, although it was also suspected that the Nazis had another, more secret missile base somewhere else, deep within the German borders.