“And did he ever discuss with you his ideas for a uranium-powered spacecraft?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t a discussion, it was a lecture. He said that it would be possible to travel all the way to Mars with a propulsion system of that type, if only he could find a way of refining enough uranium-235.”
“A significant problem, yes?” Wolff asked, probing now. He noticed that S?nger, the older rocket man, was suddenly looking uneasy.
“A significant challenge, but it is possible, I think. And others thought so as well.”
“Others?”
“I remember one student, Isaac—” Voorhees trailed off for a moment, then for another. “Asimov. One day he had this idea about giving Urey’s fission rocket an added kick and he was so proud, presenting his ideas to an expert of that caliber. But for some reason Urey became agitated about the whole thing. He began shouting at us that it would never work—shouting at Asimov, mostly. After that, Urey did not mention uranium power again.”
“But you . . . still believe it’s possible?”
“Nuclear propulsion?”
Wolff nodded. “All the way to Mars?”
“It’s possible, but what we’re building these days is completely insufficient to the task. We’ll need to consider rocket design in a whole new way, like converting the enormous heat that develops from a throttle-up into thrust. If we can do that just imagine how far you could go at sixty or even a hundred kilometers per second.”
“You seem to have been imagining quite a lot,” Wolff observed.
Only now did Voorhees appear to notice S?nger’s pained expression.
“I see too much of von Braun in you,” Wolff said. “Don’t you agree, Dr. S?nger?”
The elder rocketeer said nothing. Looking slightly embarrassed, he merely shrugged.
Wolff went on, shifting from a disarmingly calm tone of voice to distain: “Thinking always about the moon and Mars and not enough about our targets.” He continued writing in his log, speaking as he did so. “Well, I think I’ve come up with a way for you to do a bit less dreaming. You will begin serving sentry duty tonight.”
“But I’m needed here,” Voorhees protested, taking a step toward the colonel.
Sergeant Schr?dinger, who was standing immobile, uttered a menacing grunt.
Every German on the base knew it was unwise to cross Schr?dinger. His story was legendary—the first member of the SS to have been captured by the Americans, and then to have escaped from Italy back to Germany. The Aryan giant had been caught trying to blow up a floating supply bridge. He refused to answer any questions, or to provide his name—even after a frustrated American officer punched him full-force in his still-open bullet wound. According to the stories, Schr?dinger neither blinked nor winced, but merely returned the officer a half smile that sent an everlasting shiver through every man present. After his escape, he had walked all the way across the Alps from Italy, with a bullet in him—before removing it himself by making the necessary cuts and stitches, with no anesthetic.
His story had spread to the Allies as well. Their radio chatter was alive with it. “Do you think Hitler has many more like him?”
Maurice Voorhees knew there were more like him. Schr?dinger and the test pilot Hanna Reitsch and more than two million others had been carefully “civilized,” from earliest childhood and with assembly-line efficiency, on the doctrine of racial purity, and in the manifest destiny of the National Socialist Party and a new world order. The Hitler Youth had been spoon-fed, the many hundreds of thousands of them, on the furies of superior arrogance and unceasing anger, sweetened with the intoxicants of sheer sadistic pleasure, and spite for spite’s sake. Schr?dinger was the perfect end product of a meticulous program of indoctrination—a carefully manufactured instrument among millions of others within the Axis nations. He was but a single example of the most horrifying and widespread system of child abuse the world had yet seen.