“What is all this?” von Braun said.
My grandfather noticed that when von Braun’s eyes strayed across a three-fourths-complete model of the prototype STS, he averted his face with a slight jerk of the head, as if the sight of the space shuttle were painful or loathsome. Von Braun leaned over to take a closer look at the scattered bits of molded plastic. He reached down to pick up an elongated and U-shaped extrusion of gray PVC. There was another beside it, the curve of its U slightly flattened. He fitted the pieces together to form the tapered cylinder of a jet engine’s housing.
“You use commercial model kits?” Von Braun looked back at the two French vehicles on the models table. Like all my grandfather’s hobby work to this point, they had been made, with fine woodworking tools and a Dremel, generally from balsa and maple. Each vane, flap, and fairing was custom-built. “No, surely not.”
“Normally, no,” said my grandfather. “I’m just fooling around; they call it ‘kit bashing.’”
On the way down to the space congress from New York, stopping for gas in Myrtle Beach, my grandfather had spotted a hobby shop. He had stopped to pick up some extra 0000 sandpaper for the STS model, which had been the intended demonstration object until the intervention of fate in the form of a one-night stand, a squash ball, and a coffee cup lid. He had begun the shuttle model shortly after the previous congress. But the turmoil of the past year had taken a toll on his time for model building, along with everything else.
The hobby shop in Myrtle Beach turned out to be having a sale on plastic model kits. Impulsively, thinking I might enjoy them—he was planning to stay at our house in Columbia on his way back to New York City after the congress—he had picked up several kits: a couple of panzers, a Zero, a French Mirage, a Bell Huey, an AMC Matador, and a model of the PT-73 from the old McHale’s Navy television show. He also bought several tubes of Testors glue.
In the hour that had passed since he began his demonstration, he had cut the parts from the sprues of the latticed frames that held them and spread them out—axles, struts, rotors, turret guns, joysticks, the components needed to form the Matador’s bucket seats—to get a sense of them. He had pulled out the pieces needed to build one of the panzers’ hulls and, with the help of an X-Acto knife and glue, configured them into a flattened square structure about the size and shape of a coaster. It was wider by about half an inch than the plastic lid that, having dabbed it with Testors, he now settled onto its smooth upper surface.
“What is it? May I ask?”
My grandfather did not reply. He did not intend to reply. He was relieved to discover, on meeting Wernher von Braun, that his heart was no longer filled with homicide nor his brain with retribution. But he had no desire to converse with the man.
“Some sort of hatch? A launch pad?”
My grandfather heard and recognized—picked up like a beacon—the uncontrollable curiosity that was so often the vice of a solitary dreamer. He fought down the urge to explain his theories of lunar settlement, though the urge to explain was overwhelming in my grandfather, quasi-sexual, a kind of intellectual horniness. Anyway, what did he think his silence could accomplish? In 1945 Von Braun had eluded my grandfather’s grasp and the grasp of justice. He had not simply managed to avoid the violent, sordid, or punitive fates that befell so many of his comrades and superiors—he had risen to a singular pinnacle of fame and lionization. He was, by any measure, the luckiest Nazi motherfucker who ever lived.
“A satellite!” von Braun guessed. “Some kind of solar cell?”
In the end, in classic Nazi style, Wernher von Braun had committed suicide—or anyway his dream had killed itself, a victim of its own success. The Moon had been abandoned. The Apollo program was dead. Thanks to the relentless obsession of von Braun, in a span of five years a lunar voyage had gone, in public opinion, from wondrous and impossible odyssey to short-haul bus run, from national mandate to the greatest waste of dough that human improvidence had ever conceived. At NASA Braun himself had been first sidelined, along with the Saturn Vs, and then shown the door. All the grandiose mission plans that he’d been hawking for decades, in the books he cowrote with Willy Ley, on The Wonderful World of Disney and in the pages of Collier’s and Life, with all those stunning Bonestall paintings of earthrises and Mars landers and farms rotating in low earth orbit, seemed to have been mislaid in some cultural bottom drawer. Nobody talked anymore about orbital wheels at the Lagrange points, about lunar He3 mines or human settlement of Mars. It was the age of the space shuttle, of flying truck drivers. Like the Saturn V, Von Braun was a dinosaur. My grandfather could not help feeling a certain amount of pity.
“Nuclear reactor,” my grandfather said.
“Are you serious?”
“Just the upper portion. Rest of it will be buried.”
“Buried in what?”
“Lunar surface.”
“It’s a moon base?”
“I just started.”
Von Braun lowered himself, grimacing with pain, until he was at eye level with the table. “What is the scale?” he said. He seemed to have forgotten that only two minutes before, my grandfather had caught him pissing into a potted ficus. He was a past master, after all, in the art of expedient forgetting.
“Dunno, 1:66, maybe?”
“Not large, then.”
“Forty kilowatts ought to be enough at first.”
My grandfather picked through the model parts looking for tiny rectangular bits—mirrors, battery covers, gun-port covers—that he could use to complicate and give realistic texture to the model’s surface. This was precisely the technique Trumbull had used for the models in 2001. The pieces were all the various colors of plastic used in the kits they’d been pillaged from, and none the same color as the plastic lid, but once you had spray-painted them the same matte shade of pale gray, the unit would take on a convincing texture.
“Rankine cycle?” von Braun said. “Like the SNAP-10.”
This supposition was lamentably mistaken, and my grandfather was desperate to explain why the simpler mechanics and greater efficiency of a Stirling engine would be infinitely preferable to the turbine of the SNAP models that von Braun and NASA had been pushing a decade earlier. This time he managed to stick to his resolve, and this time von Braun seemed to get the message. Or maybe he was just tired of crouching. He gripped the edges of the table and pulled himself to his feet. He went back over to the models table and reached out with a finger to stroke the smooth-sanded surface of the Véronique, finished in a glossy shade of cream.
“She is really quite beautiful,” he said. He waited to give my grandfather a chance to agree with or dispute this opinion. My grandfather refrained from observing that it wasn’t too surprising the Véronique had caught von Braun’s eye, since it had been engineered in large degree by France’s own cadre of captured Peenemünders. “Still,” von Braun continued, “Frenchmen in space.” He smiled. “You have to admit, there’s comedy in the notion.”
“Yeah?” my grandfather could not prevent himself from saying. “How do you feel about Jews on the Moon?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“I did a little consulting work for the state of Israel,” my grandfather lied wildly. “They’re putting a lot of muscle and money and brainpower into a next-level system, Jericho 2. Lunar orbiters and landers. To build a Jewish settlement on the Moon.”