My third mug of beer was taking hold, and I enjoyed the mellow feeling. The leveling drug I had taken before meeting Frank today would keep my blood alcohol at precisely this level, no matter how much more I drank. One of the nice perqs of working at—where I work.
“Them Germans wanted to get into space in the worst way, and they figured that our country, being the victor over theirs and all, was rich enough to afford it. So one day in the fall of 1946, I believe it was, we were sitting and drinking some great German beer in the O-Club on base. We start talking about this idea to find a monkey, shoot it up a hundred miles on top of a V-2, bring it back by a parachute on the nose cone compartment, and then tell the world about it, and get us all excited about sending a man up there, too.” Frank said that the Germans themselves had gotten really excited once back in the 1930s, when their press reported one of their guys had been inside a rocket that went up fifty miles. Turned out to be a hoax, but millions of Germans remembered the excitement. Guenther and Heinz, they wanted to recreate that sensation over here in New Mexico, get Americans just as excited, and get started toward the Moon.
“Heinz, he really wanted to go up on the V-2 himself, right away, but they couldn’t guarantee recovery; German parachutes hadn’t worked all that well, and as much as he wanted to go, he didn’t want to die so soon. So we came up with the idea of borrowing the monkey.”
A retired NCO in the nearby sleepy village of Alamogordo had built a little bar on the main drag, got hold of some exotic animals, and was putting together a small zoo for the patrons. Frank had never seen the connection between alcohol and animals, but the zoo was a-borning. And the star attraction was the monkey. The chimpanzee looked to weigh about seventy-five pounds, when the three went for a visit to the bar, and in that very bar they plotted mankind’s future in space. (I should put in here that I know a chimp isn’t actually a monkey, but you get the picture and I wasn’t about to interrupt Frank, not when I was finally onto the truth.)
“Heinz said that the monkey should be put in a space suit. Paperclip had brought over some high-altitude suits, from their jet-airplane projects and they would cut one down to size.” So, Frank continued, he and the two Germans plotted the kidnapping and the subsequent launching of the chimp in the forward section of a V-2. “The Germans, Andy, they whipped up a kind of pancakeshaped contraption that tit into the base of the nose cone of the V-2, to substitute for the real instrument package. The rest of the pointy section was a parachute to bring it and the monkey back safely. Just slide him down into a slot and tie him in. They just had a couple of inches on each side of him where they were going to put in a lot of mohair padding just in case it was a rough ride.”
It hadn’t worked out quite so simple; then again it never does in the real world, unlike the way those super-techies on TV do it.
“Real early on the morning of the launch, we did grab the monkey just like we planned, out of the cage just after the bar closed in Alamogordo. A little chloroform from the Germans’ dispensary did the trick real good. I drove that little chingaso back to the range with Guenther there to hold him down if he woke up. Back at Launch Area One, Heinz had arranged with the launch director to make a ‘final inspection’ of the V-2 instrument before it was erected. Originally the other scientists were going to do a barometric atmospheric instrumentation drop—letting a package fall out of the V-2 when it reached its peak altitude of about a hundred miles, measuring the air pressure and temperature all the way down. It was the planning for that mission that had given my Germans the idea about the monkey in the first place.
“At the last hour somebody apparently tried to scrub the launch, but Heinz and Guenther went to von Braun and Durrenberger and some other high mucky-mucks and convinced them to go ahead. In those days you didn’t need an act of goddamned Congress to launch a scientific rocket experiment, and it only took a dozen men to set it all up anyhow. Whatever they said must have worked; I never have been sure if it was even an authorized launch, now that I think back on it, but I didn’t concern myself then with that kind of stuff. All I knew, it was working out like we wanted. My Germans even made sure I was going to be part of the set-up ground crew, and that’s why I was allowed in.
“Well, we took our wrapped-up monkey to the tent where Heinz was. And that’s when the trouble started.” Frank swallowed a long draught of beer and wiped his mouth on his forearm. God, but his eyes twinkled, his mouth and those hundreds of dark wrinkles forming up a smile that involved summing the complex topologies of all the muscles of that inscrutable face. “That’s when the trouble started, Andy. God, what a mess!
“That monkey wouldn’t fit into the cut-down space-suit, was the first problem: he was hairy and the suit was rough and they couldn’t get him into it. And, even if he did, they saw that he wasn’t going to fit into the slot in their pancake package. They jabbered something about English and metric units, but whatever it was, they had screwed up pretty bad and were going to have to cut the chimp down to size or re-do their pancake pilot’s compartment, and so either way they would get caught. They had put the trimmed-down altitude helmet on the little guy, and they were trying to put the suit on it when the critter woke up.” He chuckled and that smile continued its way around his whole face, his squinting eyes fairly disappearing behind his upraised cheeks.
“There we were—just a couple of minutes to ‘inspect the instrumentation’—with a wild monkey screeching and screaming, flailing away at the Germans and doing his best to get out of that suit. And no way were they going to be able to stuff him into that tiny torture chamber. We’re inside a little tent barely big enough for three men, that covers us and the V-2 nose cone portion. The tent was for protecting the instruments and things from all the sand and trash that blows around the desert in the early mornings. You know how that is, over on the Range.” Remembering the wind effects vividly, I smiled broadly.
“Anyway, with the wind whipping the tent flaps and the monkey screaming and the two scared Germans yelling at each other for screwing up the chimp pilot’s door, I started laughing out loud. The Germans turned to glare at me, and the monkey calmed down, too. That’s what I said, ‘Hey, Alemans’—that’s Spanish for ‘Germans’—‘Hey, Alemans, why don’t you shave the little chingaso naked,’ and Guenther, he goes to the blockhouse to explain that a barometer recorder or something is on the fritz and will take a couple minutes longer. My idea worked pretty good. Only thing was, the grease we used to pack the naked monkey in, was a kind of instrument grease the Germans had brought over in Paperclip stocks, a gray gooey stuff. We were able to slide the little dude into the suit, and get the instruments hooked up to him.
“Boy, did that poor creature ever look strange; four feet tall, jammed into a too-small suit with a jerry-rigged”—Frank laughed at his unintentional pun—“space helmet on him, and wires dangling all over, hooked into the on-board wire recorders and some radio transmitters. Barometric parameters!”
“So how’d it go,” I asked, “the launch, I mean? And the recovery?”
Frank shrugged. “I went back to my station, one of those little mobile jobs, a single-man kind with the twin telescopes. Tracked that sucker up and over and out of sight, right at dawn. She lit up the sky something fierce, perfect for a couple miles up.” He frowned. “Then something fell off, twisting and turning down and I had to track that piece. My assignment was to record unusual events. Other stations tracked the V-2 itself.”