This is no ordinary commuter train, he thought, and almost immediately they were moving again.
A balding, middle-aged man had landed next to Voorhees with a grunt. He was clutching a lunch box, which he immediately opened. As the sharp scent of cheese rose from the box, the man unwrapped a hunk of sausage and bit off a sizable mouthful.
“Good morning,” Voorhees said to his seatmate, bowing his head slightly.
“Mmmmmmm,” he replied, rearranging the contents of the tin box.
“Zinnowitz is a beautiful village. Have you lived there long?”
The man looked at him for the first time. “You are new here,” he said, with a heavy Bavarian accent. It was not a question.
“I’m Maurice Voorhees. Pleased to meet you.”
The Bavarian stared at Voorhees’s extended hand but did not take it. Then he turned his attention back to the contents of the lunch box.
Voorhees lowered his hand and turned back toward the window. The train had left the village behind and he caught a glimpse of the Baltic Sea before it disappeared behind a blur of pine trees and sand dunes.
Yes, I am new here, he thought, suddenly feeling very much alone in a train car full of people, every one a stranger. I am new here.
After several minutes, the train slowed again and Voorhees thought that they must be arriving in Peenemünde. Finally. He pressed his face to the glass, trying to get a look forward.
They were approaching something, moving progressively more slowly, and suddenly the apprentice rocket designer felt frozen in place, his excitement turning to confusion. The view was partly obstructed by a twenty-foot-tall fence topped with barbed wire. Within the seemingly endless, fenced-in enclosure stood row after row of squat, unpainted buildings, interspersed with guard towers.
This is Peenemünde? he wondered, feeling a churning deep in his abdomen.
Then, as the train’s deceleration continued, Voorhees saw men in ragged gray clothes, standing in a sandy yard. Or are they statues? But why would anyone put statues here? Why would—
One of the statues locked eyes with him. Save me!
Voorhees flinched as if stung by a wasp, and a part of his mind cried out, Turn away! Now!
But even as the train continued to draw slowly away, the statue man’s eyes did not let him turn away, and they held each other’s gaze, until the last possible second.
“What is this place?” he said to the Bavarian, in a low whisper. The man gave no answer, and made no eye contact. He simply sat silently, looking down at his own folded hands. He had already given the only answer he could: You are new here.
By sundown of that first day, Voorhees was buried deeply enough in his work that he was able to forget that the statue man—and anything else outside his little world of rockets—really existed. This is a good way to be, at this kind of time, he decided. There had been no tour of the facility and no formal introduction to his colleagues, and this, too, was good. Within minutes of stepping off the train, he was brought to the Peenemünde Propulsion Development Laboratory, where he was allowed to bury all of his thoughts in the new rocket engines—which had begun to develop problems, big problems. The reports revealed that the engines were developing an alarming tendency to melt through during flight. A week earlier one of the V-2s had spun out of control, crashing into a Luftwaffe airfield, and although no one was killed, four planes were destroyed and the explosion had left a large hole in the ground. Even more unfortunate was the presence of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, who had come to Peenemünde to watch the test. According to one of his new coworkers, after the explosion Himmler twisted his face into a smile and commented, “Now I can return to Berlin and order the production of close-combat weapons with an easy conscience.”
Maurice Voorhees sat in a deserted corner of the mess hall contemplating the V-2 launch failure. To a passerby, it might have seemed that he was focused, to a strangely intense degree, on a thin crack that ran along the inner rim of his empty coffee cup. But the rocket man’s imagination was actually walking around in his own internal 3-D picture of the engine’s combustion chamber, reenacting its destruction from within the engine itself.
It was a perplexing problem. Recent successes at increasing thrust and fuel efficiency were being mirrored by an as yet untamed increase in temperature—rising quickly above twenty-four times the boiling point of water, and above the melting point of the combustion chamber itself.