In the winter of 1942, the devil had come knocking at his door and the twenty-three-year-old propulsion engineer pricked his finger and signed on the dotted line without taking pause to read the small print. Like most of history’s great misadventures, the sojourn of Maurice Voorhees, from Peenemünde on Germany’s Baltic Coast to Brazil, had begun with tragic blindness, and was fated to end with tragic vision.
Presently, Voorhees stood with another man at the bottom of a long, long thread of solid rocket booster smoke. The base of the trail had started out horizontal and, though originally hidden, was convecting up through the surface of the Hell’s Gate “fog lake,” as a kilometer-long stain of muddy, scalding mist. The horizontal exhaust trail followed an ancient paved road, recently refurbished and onto which a wood-cased monorail track had been built.
“Your track won’t take much more of this, Dr. S?nger.”
The older man waved, as if shooing away a fly. “Once the two ships are launched it won’t much matter what happens to the launch rail, will it?”
Voorhees knew that S?nger appreciated the strategic significance of his design simplifications. It seemed like the flight director’s prior worries about using the last of the base’s concrete and rebar before his “Silverbirds” could be launched had gone down proportionally with each of Voorhees’s material-saving improvements.
“Still, I wish we could have launched that last sled with a water-filled, full-scale model,” S?nger lamented, utilizing an annoying and whiny tone that had unfortunately become a trademark.
“Trust me on this,” Voorhees countered. “A fully weighted mock-up is not worth the extra wear-and-tear on the track—not to mention the risk. I can do all the relevant calculations from the launch results of a ‘naked’ sled.”
Voorhees gazed up into the decks of mist as if he could peer straight through them. “The only difference, here, is that the sled left the rail sooner and flew a lot higher.”
He glanced at his stopwatch. “I’m betting it reached thirty kilometers before starting back. Drogue chute will have deployed by now.”
“Where’s your aiming point for the return impact?” S?nger asked.
“Right here.”
“Scheisse! Tell me you’re joking.”
“Don’t look so concerned, Dr. S?nger. Your gyros are good, but not that good. We’ll never get a direct hit on the aiming point,” Voorhees said. “And besides, it’s a good test of your guidance systems for the reentry vehicles.”
Not for the first time that day, he found himself grinning at the thought that his logic had prevailed once more. It felt strange to be smiling again; strange to be feeling enthusiastic about anything.
S?nger had reminded Voorhees on several occasions that two officers literally had to drag him from a bomb crater the morning after the RAF had attacked the rocket facility at Peenemünde. “They found you digging on all fours like a dog,” S?nger added, seeming to relish this portion of the tale if only for the pain he knew it would cause.
Up until the night of the bombing raid, Voorhees’s thoughts about Demeter would have been amazement over the engineering foresight that had gone into a submarine nearly half as long as the Hindenburg. But the man who used to dream that one day people would look down from the new oceans of space had stepped from the bomb-blasted pit into a vessel in which he was afraid to dream—and, to one degree or another, even ashamed to dream.
On the long transatlantic voyage, S?nger had arranged for Voorhees to be bunked in a closet of a room that, in accordance with the standard of confined crew spaces aboard submarines, qualified as luxurious officer’s quarters. It was equipped with a pull-down bed, foldout table, and tiny chair. There was no door; only a canvas curtain through which he heard constant activity outside his cabin. Some of the voices were German. Others, though, had spoken Japanese.
Initially, Voorhees had felt like a prisoner. But no one blocked his way when he went outside in search of the nearest toilet—which looked as if it had been wedged into a maze of copper pipes and multicolored valves almost as an afterthought. He received no orders. No one bothered him. Meals were delivered in silence by a Japanese galley assistant—dried fish and rice, mostly. Although the man smiled and bowed each time he entered the cabin, he never spoke, never tried to communicate.
Voorhees liked that about the man.
He barely touched his food.
He tried to avoid sleep.
Voorhees had lost track of the days, when he heard a voice calling his name from the doorway. Eugen S?nger did not wait for a reply.
“We thought you could use some rest,” the unwelcome visitor said. “And in that regard I do hope you are finding the accommodations—”
“Why am I here?” Voorhees asked. He was lying on his back on the fold-down cot.
“You have been through much,” S?nger continued. It appeared that he was trying to sound sympathetic, but even in Voorhees’s post-Peenemünde physical and mental state, he could see through the act: The man might just as well have been commenting on the lumps in someone’s oatmeal.
“You haven’t answered my question,” Voorhees said.