My grandfather pulled on a shirt and trousers and started to put on his shoes. Storch shook his head. They went out into the corridor. They stepped softly, and kept their thighs apart so that a whisper of twill would not betray them. They turned onto another corridor and went along past the doors of other men’s cells to the end. There was a blank brick wall about five feet wide.
Dr. Storch crouched down by the base of the wall. He reached into the waistband of his trousers. It was too dark for my grandfather to see what he had in the waistband, but later he found out that it was two heavy-duty paperclips, unbent up to the last involution so that they made a pair of hooks. Dr. Storch slid these hooks under the bottom edge of the wall about three feet apart. He held his breath and let it out and lifted the bottom of the wall up and outward. It was a hinged wooden panel covered with a layer of bricks cut very thin and applied in a way that matched the course of the genuine wall. Behind it, a rectangular opening of the same dimensions as the panel led into an air duct. My grandfather afterward theorized that at one time there had been a grille over the opening and that some clever prisoner had replaced it with the panel, camouflaged so well that, when installed, it looked as if it belonged.
Dr. Storch sat down and slid his legs through, then poured the rest of himself into the hole. My grandfather heard a creak of metal, a pause, then another creak. Pause, creak, pause: The sound took on the familiar cadence of a man climbing a ladder. My grandfather hesitated. He had already taken too many crazy chances in the past week. He knew that following Storch would be tempting fate. If this exploit went wrong, it would be hard not to look back and say that he was asking to get caught. God knew he had enough on his conscience to justify that view of the matter.
Inside the airduct was a smell like the taste of a new filling. My grandfather grasped the first of the rungs and pulled himself up through the darkness. The rungs had been crafted, no doubt by the same gifted engineer, from the springs of shock absorbers, likely pilfered from the prison motor pool. Whoever the guy was, he had compressed each spring between two heavy blocks of wood, clad with pieces of tire, and then allowed the spring to expand across the duct. Pressure and rubber tread held the rungs in place at the back of the duct, leaving barely enough room for the vertical passage of a man. A little under three minutes after they began the climb, they were standing on the roof. It was a clear night full of stars. A poignant smell of leaf smoke blew in from the backyard of some fortunate free man.
“Which way?” my grandfather said in just above a whisper, having deduced what Dr. Storch had brought him to see.
“Northeast,” Dr. Storch whispered back. “And it ought to be soon. I’ve been listening all night as the reports came in.”
Anticipating that someone—the U.S. or Russia—would manage sooner or later to loft a satellite into orbit, a Harvard astronomer and well-known science fiction fan named Fred Whipple had taken advantage of the publicity around the International Geophysical Year to organize a network of amateurs connected by shortwave radio. Upon news of Sputnik’s launch they had mobilized themselves all over the country, going out every night to watch the sky and report details of time and orientation.
They stood in the cold and the dark. Far away the lights of some town glittered. My grandfather inclined his face to the vast heavens until his neck began to ache.
“I was told there was an explosion,” Storch said.
“Hell of a thing.”
“He was making moonshine?”
“So goes the theory.”
There had been nothing left of the candy bomb in Gorman’s cell, and very little left of the cell and Gorman. There was an attempt at investigation, but the scene had been so heavily contaminated by the first guards to respond to the sound of the blast that no firm conclusions were ever drawn. My grandfather couldn’t figure it out, either, but he was inclined to blame the detonation on some unforeseen interaction between the clockworks in the oatmeal box and the radio in the cigar box.
“My friend,” said the German, his voice thickened by emotion, “was it you?”
“Only very indirectly,” my grandfather said. He told Dr. Storch about the sugar and the KNO3 and explained his theory of the radio’s detonation, which was really not much of a theory, as Dr. Storch pointed out.
“I would be more inclined to blame a discharge of static electricity,” Dr. Storch said. “Perhaps from Gorman’s wool blanket. At this time of the year, the air is so dry. I’m sure you’ve noticed the sparks when your hands pass across the bedclothes in the dark.”
“Interesting,” my grandfather said.
“Here’s something else you may find interesting: I feel I’d like to inform you that I’m not here for practicing dentistry without a license,” Dr. Storch said. “I thought you should know that. I’ve never told anybody else. I certainly never told Hub Gorman.”
My grandfather waited.
“The reason I’m here is that one day I had a little boy in my chair, a very nice, well-mannered twelve-year-old boy named Walter Onderdonk. And for reasons that remain beyond my understanding, I made a mistake with the gas. A big mistake. A terrible mistake.” Dr. Storch started to cry softly. And even though he was a German, and a nudnik, and a pain in the ass, my grandfather put his arm around the poor bastard.
“Oh,” Dr. Storch said.
He pointed to the northeast. My grandfather felt his heart leap. A star had popped loose from its constellation and gone rolling down the sky. It was falling, but it was not a falling star. It did not flare up and wink out and leave a glowing ghost mark on the retinas. It just kept falling, and falling, and falling, until it disappeared behind the curvature of the earth. It was a prisoner of gravity like everything in the universe. Its orbit would degrade. It would spiral inward until it hit the air and then burn up and break apart and leave nothing but vapor and a memory. And then in time the memory itself would fade like vapor. But to my grandfather, watching secretly from the roof of the Wallkill prison, the passage of that chunk of radiant metal seemed to describe an everlasting arc of freedom. “Wow,” he said. “Look at that.”
“Sputnik!” Dr. Storch said with a childish glee.
My grandfather thought about correcting Dr. Storch. It was not Sputnik itself, which was far too small to be seen by the naked human eye. What they had seen was a section of the rocket that had boosted the satellite into orbit, burnished by the rays of the imminent sun. He decided that for now he would let it pass. “Thanks,” he said instead. “Thank you, Storch, for bringing me to see it.”
“Please,” Dr. Storch said. “It’s the least I could do.”
A feather of blue brushed the bottom of the sky like breath on a mirror. It was time to get back to their cells. Neither of them moved. They stood there on the roof in the darkness. I want to see it again, my grandfather thought.
“Well,” Dr. Storch said. “Shall we . . . What shall we do?”
My grandfather was surprised to find that he had an answer ready for this question, and surprised by the answer itself, though he saw now that it had been percolating inside him since the day of the sugar heist in Dr. Wallack’s office.
“How about we make ourselves a rocket?” said my grandfather.
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