Below Silverbird II, in the shadows, Voorhees saw dawn’s earliest light creeping toward Florida. But none of that was important anymore. He checked his stopwatch again, calculating a course correction that would have stunned Dr. Eugen S?nger, had he been there to observe it.
The mission had called for attacks on the American capital as well as the city of Pittsburgh, the center of the Allied steel industry. After that, the rocket would turn hard to the east, with the last bomb released on a trajectory toward New York City. S?nger had chosen the Empire State Building as a hypothetical ground zero, but all any of the rocket men could really say about the Silverbird’s targeting capability was that “it made sense—in theory.”
Finally, if everything went as planned, the pilot would have a choice of either bailing out or trying to land the rocket, something like a seaplane, minus a seaworthy keel, off the southern coast of Long Island, where a submarine would be waiting to pluck the rocketeer from the Atlantic.
“Or at least, some of his body parts,” Voorhees had joked, upon hearing S?nger’s U-boat rescue plan for the first time. For some reason, his little joke didn’t seem quite so funny anymore. Voorhees knew that if the North Atlantic presented so much as a one-foot swell (and when didn’t it?), the underbelly and the wings would rip the multiton rocket into a thousand pieces. If he survived, the standard U-boat was not equipped to save the plane even if it floated perfectly intact. Either way, land it on water or bail out, his beautiful space-plane would die alone and pilotless, on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean.
But those plans had been drawn up long before Voorhees found himself the only man still alive who could fly the rocket. And not long after that, Maurice Voorhees had devised his own plan.
With limited time to work out the details, Voorhees decided to keep it simple: Kimura’s bombs would be ditched over the Atlantic, where they could harm no one. He would then steer the ship’s nose toward land, Virginia or Washington, D.C., itself, where he hoped to find an airstrip, or at least somewhere flat to set down for a long, long belly-scrape of a landing.
The engineer shook his head. Yes, that’s going to be a bit of a poser. But I would rather ski across flat concrete or through a field of corn than rough water.
If he vented all of his fuel ahead of time, he might survive the landing. The ship’s insides were, after all, mostly insulated, balloon-like tanks, filled with the liquid natural gas they’d collected from the river itself. With the tanks empty, the ship would be as light as a feather, more or less. Voorhees was confident that he could land the Silverbird intact and that, maybe, just maybe, the spacecraft could be saved, or at least replicated from its wreckage. Certainly, the Americans would see, in this ship, the world to come. And hopefully, they would find something better to do with it.
Now, less than a hundred kilometers below, Voorhees could make out roads and towns in the dim, pre-sunrise light, and he could distinguish clouds marching before the winds.
As the rocket-plane continued on its course, a hammerhead of air strengthened around the hull, bringing a sensation of weight back to Voorhees’s feet and snapping him out of sightseeing mode. Voorhees made another course correction, just before the Silverbird II made a perfectly timed skip off the outer atmosphere, like a stone skipping along the surface of a pond.
High above coastal South Carolina, the horizon receded from the pilot—again, and the sky above became blacker as he regained altitude; but alarmingly, the glow outside the ship did not diminish as much as he had anticipated.
There’s more gas outside than there ought to be, he thought, craning his neck to get a better view of the port side of the fuselage. What he saw plunged him into instant despair.
To anyone standing directly below, the fleck of light over North Carolina would have resembled a comet rising against the morning stars: a wisp of vapor nearly a third of a mile across, with a tail streaming tens of miles to the south.
But the apparition over the United States was not a comet—at least not a normal one.
Voorhees settled back into his seat, letting out a deep breath.
“One of the gunshots punctured a fuel tank,” he said to himself, his mind flashing back to the takeoff and the determined hobo, firing his pistol as he ran.
Probably started out as a flesh wound, he reasoned. Until the first “stone-skip.”
At that point, the “blowtorch” effect, as the ship bounced off the atmosphere, would have widened even a small hole into a full-fledged puncture. And now the unwelcome glow was a result of vented gases, excited by solar radiation.
The rocketeer glanced back, hoping that the flare of escaping gas might have ceased or at least gotten smaller.
It hadn’t. The dial from one of the main propellant tanks continued to notch downward.
“Shit!” he said, gauging his position as the northeastern border of North Carolina rose on the port side.