“Try making me understand, Maurice.”
“In a hundred years, we’ll have known the moon and the planets and I’m sure we’ll be reaching toward the stars and the unexplored deeps of space. Gazing back upon Earth from so far away, it will become all but invisible.”
Lisl shook her head, very slowly. At first Voorhees merely believed she had reached a kind of saturation point on the subject. But there he had underestimated her. “Look around us,” she said. “You, von Braun—you point your eyes at the moon and the stars, but that’s not where your rockets will be aimed. Think about the cities these weapons will hit.” She gazed into the pit forlornly. “Once you finish working out the kinks.”
Voorhees had flinched at the word weapons. “Yes, well, the military will use the rockets at first, against military targets.” Then he whispered, “But who knows how much longer this war can last? And after that—one day rockets will orbit the earth, landing on runways as far away as America and China.”
She uttered a cry of frustration and stood, dusting herself off. “But we are at war with America and China. Have you forgotten that?”
Voorhees had no reply.
Lisl shook her head again and turned from him. “Your far frontiers,” she said, walking away from the crater. “One day you’ll go too far. If you haven’t already.”
Thinking back, Voorhees could not recall how many weeks had passed between his “first date” with Lisl and the afternoon that von Braun let out the words that confirmed Lisl’s worry that he was already in deeper than he understood. He had arrived early to a staff meeting with Dr. von Braun and the members of the Propulsion Lab. As he turned a corner, there in the hallway was the leader of the rocket men, speaking to General Dornberger, the Wehrmacht officer who ran Peenemünde.
“We aim for the moon,” von Braun had said, then giving a shrug, “but sometimes we’ll hit London.”
Voorhees pulled up short, wondering if perhaps he had misunderstood. The two men turned to him as he rounded the corner. Although they said nothing, their expressions told him that he had not misheard or misunderstood anything. Voorhees nodded at them as he passed, wishing he could rewind the last thirty seconds, wishing he could have been a minute late to the meeting rather than a minute early.
During the last night that he saw either von Braun or Lisl, Voorhees was called to a gathering for the famous test pilot Hanna Reitsch. One of Hitler’s die-hard supporters, Reitsch had arrived at Peenemünde earlier that day “to help with the latest V-1 tests.” Voorhees, having heard that Hitler’s pet aviator once crash-landed a glider into a stadium full of crazed Brazilian soccer fans, expected that the meeting might be interesting. (Now, at Nostromo Base, he was sorry that those soccer fans had not torn her to pieces.) He remembered hesitating outside the officer’s mess hall, watching as the moon climbed nearly ten degrees up the sky, before he stepped inside. Voorhees understood, perhaps even more clearly than von Braun, that their great machines were being aimed at the wrong planet.
You know, I never planned to become a test pilot,” Hanna Reitsch had said. Voorhees noted that the famed aviatrix was a shade over five feet tall, slightly built, with close-cropped blond hair. “When I entered medical school,” she continued, “my dream was to become a flying missionary doctor in Africa.”
Several of the men chuckled but others might have been reminded of how the Treaty of Versailles had clipped Germany’s wings in 1919. With her country’s air force dismantled by decree, missionary work and gliders were two of the only ways that a German could ever hope to fly. Now she flew experimental aircraft, including a new class they were calling “jets.”
She had stood in the Hearth Room of the officers’ mess, surrounded by a crowd of approximately twenty mesmerized admirers, engineers and officers mostly. A few, though, stood away from the crowd. They detested this woman, solely because of the heights to which she had risen (literally and figuratively). Heights that they could never hope to attain—even as men.
“Time has a way of rewriting our decided paths,” Reitsch said, “of setting us upon destinies we’d never planned for, or even dreamed of.”