Suddenly the rocket lurched to one side as if struck by the fist of an invisible giant. It began to wobble, and a cloud of white vapor spurted from it. Immediately the monstrous missile reversed and with a rapidly swelling howl it plunged to earth.
Instinctively he sought refuge behind the protective parapet. Within seconds the rocket struck, crashing into the forest less than half a mile away. The explosion rattled the building on which he crouched.
He was shaken. Grim and gray-faced, the observers stared toward the column of smoke rising over the pines in the distance.
Colonel Dornberger was the first to collect himself. “We shall try again,” he said quietly.
He sighed. The rocket had crashed — but they had proved their point. The V-2 would fly.
It had been the guidance system that failed. And it was then that the realization had struck him: a faultless guidance system was all-important. You can have the most powerful weapon, the most sophisticated space probe — they would be useless unless they could reach their targets; unless they were controlled by a perfect guidance system. Power and guidance: the two must work in perfect coaction. He had never forgotten…
With von Braun and the other rocket scientists he had been evacuated to Oberammergau in Bavaria by the SS during the final weeks of the war, there to await the disposition of the Führer. They had been under guard. He'd had no illusions as to what the “disposition” would be if the Führer feared they and their special knowledge would fall into the hands of the advancing Americans. He knew that SS Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler had direct orders from Hitler to use his SS troops at nearby Innsbruck to kill them all. With a cold feeling he still vividly remembered the abortive escape attempt he and Willi Krebbs had made. Ever since, he'd had that often painful trouble with his right kidney. The memory of that night dominated his occasional nightmares. The burn scars on his chest had long healed — but not the one branded on his mind. He would always carry with him the bitter knowledge that he had been willing to say and do anything to avoid the pain inflicted on him by the young Gestapo officer. He never did go near a beach or swimming pool. He was ashamed of his mutilated chest. Somehow he felt that anyone seeing it would also see his weakness. But the scars were there — a constant reminder of something he would rather forget.
Willi had gotten away. He himself had not. He sometimes wondered what had become of his friend and colleague. He'd had no word from him — or about him — since.
Their SS guards had disappeared soon after learning of the suicide of Adolf Hitler. With his colleagues he had surrendered to the Americans in the little resort town of Garmisch-Parten-kirchen in the Bavarian Alps. He had agreed wholeheartedly with von Braun, who had said: “It is our obligation to mankind to place our rocket knowledge in the right hands.” There had been little doubt where that would be.
In September he had arrived with the others in Boston, and had at once been sent to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in the state of Maryland. His only regret was that Wilhelm could not have been among the scientists selected by the Americans.
His job at Aberdeen had been the beginning of a long-lasting and fruitful collaboration, leading to his position at Vandenberg — and his scheduled meeting with General Clifford Ryan at Edwards Air Force Base later in the day.
The labor of his life could be divided into two diametrically opposed eras, he mused wryly. The time spent developing the science of rocketry for his native country, for the Third Reich… and the time spent in his adopted country working with his fellow scientists there.
Time is not an hourglass, he thought. You cannot reverse its flow.
But — you can replace the sand…
2
Dr. Marcus stood looking out the open window in the office of the Flight Test Commander, General Clifford Ryan. The General had been delayed and Marcus was alone. Below him lay the huge Air Force installation. The late-afternoon sun cast long ocher shadows, the air coming in through the window was warm and dry.
Edwards Air Force Base occupied over 300,000 acres of desert and dry lakes, including the great Rogers Dry Lake, east of Mojave. A military camp since 1933, it was not until World War II that the unique possibilities of the area as an aircraft testing site were recognized. From the window Marcus could see the vast expanse of Rogers Dry Lake, the forty-four-square-mile heart of the Flight Test Center.
Nature had provided man with the perfect, self-maintaining test-flight landing field, usable a full ten months of the year. Cracked into a crazy-quilt pattern when dry, the surface of the lake was like fine talcum powder, a mixture of clay and silt that, when baked by the sun, was able to support the landings of even the heaviest aircraft. Every year the entire lake was resurfaced — by nature. During the couple of months in the winter when it rained, a few inches of water collected on the lake bed. The winds, blowing the water back and forth, smoothed out the lake surface, and when it dried in the sun, the landing site had been efficiently resurfaced. It was an ideal situation, Marcus thought. Where else but in California could you get such service from nature? A thirteen-mile runway — so perfectly flat that measurements revealed only an eighteen-inch curvature in 30,000 feet.
Marcus was thoroughly familiar with the history of the Base. In 1942, the year that he had been working with von Braun and Willi Krebbs testing Hitler's V-2 rocket at Peenemünde, the north end of Rogers Dry Lake had been selected as the testing ground of the U.S. Air Force's first jet airplane, the super-secret XP-59A.
The south end of the lake was used for bombing practice, and here a realistic 650-foot model of a Japanese Navy heavy cruiser had been built. Named the Muroc-Maru, it was used for strafing and skip-bombing practice. From far away the shimmering heat waves across the sunburned, dry lake bed made it look as if a real battleship were afloat in the middle of the desert. Many a passing motorist had been hard pressed trying to explain that one.
Eight years later the Base, until then known as “Muroc,” was renamed Edwards Air Force Base in honor of Captain Glen W. Edwards of Lincoln, California, who had been killed in the crash of an experimental Flying Wing aircraft during a fest flight. Since then nearly all of the Air Force's new aircraft had been tested at Edwards. And in 1947 Captain Chuck Yeager, piloting the Bell X-1, broke the once-feared sound barrier for the first time.
The door to the office opened and General Ryan walked in.
“Sorry to have kept you waiting, Marcus,” he said. He walked straight to his desk. “Sit down.” He looked at the scientist. “I suppose you can guess why you're here.”
Marcus nodded. “The XM-9?”
“Right. Tomorrow.”
Marcus looked startled. “Tomorrow!”
Ryan nodded. “0800.” He gave the scientist a little smile. “Sorry you weren't notified sooner. The old need-to-know crap.”
Marcus returned the smile. “Even my own baby,” he observed ruefully. But he was well aware of the secrecy and security that surrounded the project — and of his own protection.
“We're mounting a test flight of the F-15. Iron out a few bugs in the latest modifications. Classified. Major Darby will be the pilot.”
Marcus brightened. “Darby. Excellent. I know him.”