Rocket Girls

 

 

I. Crossed Orbits

2:25 p.m. Mountain Standard Time
Tuesday, April 16, 1946
San Augustin/Organ Pass between San Andreas and Organ Mountains, 1 mile north of U.S. 70
White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico

Bored to tears and angry that she had probably wasted the day climbing the small peak for nothing, Jane Lane wiped sweat from her face with her right arm, then took another long look to the southeast with her binoculars. Nothing. She checked her watch for the umpteenth time. It was 2:30 in the afternoon. Thank God the temperature was only in the eighties. When were they going to launch that damn thing? What was the holdup? She had been hiding on the rocky ridge for four hours now and had sketched everything in view. Her water was long gone, and—worse—she was almost out of bubble gum. What in the hell was the Army doing down there that was taking so long? When was that skyrocket going to kick off?

She raised the war-surplus binoculars and began one more scan of the desert launch site seven miles away and two thousand feet below her perch. The site was little more than tiny scattered buildings, sandbagged shelters, parked military vehicles, and power lines, all connected by narrow roads on a perfectly flat plain of faded beige. Thanks to the rippling heat waves she could no longer read the word ARMY painted on the roof of the giant pyramid-like blockhouse. The concrete command center was the largest structure present, only a short distance from the rocket and its crane-like tower. The rocket’s curious paint scheme of alternating black-and-yellow rectangles stood out nicely, at least. That alone was interesting, but not for four straight hours.

For lack of anything else to do, Jane followed the dusty two-lane highway that ran below the ridge, past the launch site and off to the northeast toward Alamogordo. No traffic was visible. Frowning, Jane swung the binoculars back down the road to the southwest, toward Las Cruces, where she discovered a roadblock had been set up by military police about a mile away on U.S. 70.

The breath caught in her throat. Were they finally about to light that firecracker? She swung the binoculars back to the launch site. A tanker truck was driving away from the checkered rocket. This might be it. She picked up her sketchbook, found one of her pencils, and began making notes in preparation for drawing the rocket during takeoff. She idly glanced back at the roadblock and noticed a dark blue sedan had pulled off the side of the road near the MPs’ Jeep. Three people got out of the car. The two adults, a man and a woman, began talking with the MPs. The third, a girl in a green top and black skirt, walked away from the group and shaded her eyes with a hand. She appeared to be looking in the direction of the rocket.

I’ve got a better view of the action than you do, kid, even if you are closer. Jane grinned and turned her attention back to the rocket. The other girl was probably some city kid gawking at the scene, wondering what was going on. The blastoff would send her running. Jane’s grin broadened. She had an ugly brown purse, too. Dope.

Jane then noticed orange smoke poured out of the top of the big concrete building. Was there a fire? Was that a warning? Was it blastoff time? She refocused the binoculars and studied the scene. The long high howl of an air-raid siren echoed across the desert. Yes! She swung her view to the rocket. Please let it be now, she prayed, please it be now, please—

Yellow-white flame erupted in all directions from the base of the missile. The rocket sat there as if it had not made up its mind what to do next. A cable connecting the rocket to the thin tower next to it then dropped away, the tower fell back, and the rocket silently lifted away from concrete and steel on a pillar of fire.

“Go! Go!” Jane shrieked in joyous delirium. “Go go go go go go GO!” The rocket obliged as it climbed skyward with increasing speed on a long straight torch of yellow flame. It crossed the distant mountains on the horizon and entered the cloudless blue vault above, rolling and slowly arching to the north. The crackling roar of blastoff assailed her ears at last, followed by the long rumbling thunder of a rocket motor at full power. The rocket grew smaller in the binoculars’ field of vision until it was a glittering star at the top of an immense contrail of white smoke, driving at who knew what speed toward black space itself, and then, oddly, it seemed to change direction, no longer going up... and then...

...the star went out. It was gone, vamoosed, nowhere in view. After a moment, Jane lowered the binoculars and squinted at the sky, her mouth open. The contrail was still there, twisted bizarrely across the heavens. She glanced back at the launch site, where the thick smoke from blastoff was drifting away to the northeast, then raised the glasses again and tried to find the rocket’s pinpoint flame. There was nothing above but smoke.

Where did the rocket go? Did it reach orbit? Was it too far away to be seen? Was this all there was to see today? She stood for a long while until she realized that in standing up she had completely exposed herself to view. Cursing, she dropped to her knees and hastily grabbed for her empty canteen and drawing supplies in case she had to beat feet. After jamming everything into a battered backpack, she slung it over her left shoulder and began making her way down the slope and back into Las Cruces before sundown. The MPs would only chew her out if they caught her. They never did anything worse. It wasn’t often that they caught her anyway.

On impulse, Jane lifted the binoculars once more and looked down from the peak at the roadblock. The two MPs and the family with the dark blue sedan were still there—at least, the adults were, pointing at the contrail. Where was the—

Jane spotted her about thirty yards ahead of the group, standing by herself. She had not run away. The girl had a set of binoculars, too, which had apparently been in the leather case Jane mistook for a purse. The girl was using her binoculars to look up at Jane.

After a long moment, Jane lowered her glasses and stared down at the girl. The girl lowered her field glasses too, and soon she and her family got back in the car and departed for Alamogordo. Jane shook herself from her reverie and went home, pushing open the screen door of Casa Lane just before sundown, sweating and tired and happy.

It was only as she dumped her stuff on her bed in her room that she realized she had forgotten all about sketching the blastoff. With a sigh, she sat down on her bed, got her sketchbook ready, thought for a moment, and began to work.

 

 

II. The Clock Is Running

7:33 a.m. Mountain Standard Time
Monday May 6, 1946
Alamogordo, New Mexico

Two weeks passed. Jane’s dad called early one Monday morning from Alamogordo. The family’s rock-battered de Soto had broken down and he needed a ride back home. Could Jane get the old truck and pick him up at the Chamber of Commerce? He’d been out in the desert shooting pictures of Indian petroglyphs for a magazine back east, but he forgot to put water in the radiator, plus something else happened, so the car was at a gas station getting fixed. Jane downed two cups of heavily sugared coffee and left before 6 a.m. Her mother, a true early bird whenever she was around, was already in the backyard shed working on pottery. None of Jane’s older siblings were around this week, though Penny was expected back from Juarez before long.

The great Tularosa basin was as empty as the surface of the Moon as Jane drove the old Ford flatbed across to get her dad. Nothing to see but miles and miles of miles and miles, lightly decorated with scrub and telephone poles. Her mind was elsewhere. Artie, the Army private who had read too much science fiction and talked too much after he had two beers in him, had let slip that another V-2 launch was coming that Friday. Jane was trying to decide if it was worth trying to get closer to the launch complex. If she could get within range, she could borrow one of her dad’s many cameras and shoot off a roll of film for her burgeoning space scrapbook. Then she’d finally have good images to use for artistic inspiration when it struck her.

She got to the Chamber of Commerce at 7:20 a.m., but her father was nowhere in sight. It figured. He had probably seen something interesting and had wandered off to take pictures of it. He had no attention span at all. She waited and beeped her horn for a few minutes, then drove off to look for him.

Five minutes later she had to stop for a line of cars letting out kids next to a school. She recognized it as the Alamogordo Deutsche Schule for the kids of the German rocket scientists working at White Sands, Alamogordo, or Fort Bliss to the south. The auto immediately ahead of her was an old dark blue Chrysler Airflow with a knock in the engine. She did not recognize the car until the passenger door on the right opened and a small teenager got out, wearing a green blouse and a black shirt that dropped to mid-calf. A man inside the car called something to the girl in German. She did not wave back, only walking straight into the school with her books clutched to her chest. The girl had long auburn hair, high white socks, brown shoes, and odd, round-frame eyeglasses that made Jane think of a comic movie star, Harold Lloyd. That was a bit too weird.

So, the other girl might be a rocket nut, too. It would be good to find a second one. If her dad was one of the chief rocket nuts that made the deal infinitely sweeter.

The car behind Jane’s truck beeped at her. She sighed and set off back into the light morning traffic. She found her father an hour later in the Alameda Zoo, where she had suspected he might be. He liked animals. Magazines liked cute animal photos, too, and might pay for a few good shots. Every little bit helped the family squeak by.

“Can I have a friend over this weekend?” she asked as she drove her dad home.

“Uh, sure,” he said. He was looking over a packet of newly developed prints, trying to decide which to send to what publisher.

“It’s a couple of Army guys,” she said. “Maybe closer to ten or twelve.”

“Uh-huh.” Still looking at the photos.

“They want to take pictures of me dancing with my clothes off.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’ll try to keep the noise down, but it will be difficult.”

“Okay, whatever you want.”

“And I need to borrow either the truck or the car this afternoon to go to Ohio, after it gets fixed at the shop.”

“Uh-huh. Oh, National Geographic might take that one.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

He nodded as he always did after she thanked him. He’d heard not a word she’d said. Jane had once wanted something different from him, but not any longer. She took him back to town later that day and took the now-functional gray de Soto for herself, leaving her dad at the gas station with the keys to the old truck. Then she went looking for the German school again. And found it. She parked the car, got out, and began her wait.

About 3:30 p.m., Jane reluctantly crushed out her cigarette and flicked the butt into the street. The schule would let out any moment. She stood up from the bus stop bench, stretched, and wondered what she would say. It would have to be quick. And the other girl might not speak English, which would screw up everything. She felt for a spare piece of bubble gum in her shirt pocket, found one, and popped it in her mouth.

The sound of a bell ringing drifted from the school. Within a minute, the doors had opened and a crowd of little kids came out with a few teens among them. A line of cars was already present to pick them up. Jane spotted her target and casually moved in.

The smaller girl stood by herself away from the other school kids. She held her books in front of her like a shield, squinting at the world through her huge eyeglasses. It took her only a moment to see Jane coming. She backed up slightly when it became clear she had recognized the taller girl.

“Sprechen sie Americana?” asked Jane in a cheery tone.

The girl did not respond except to hold the books closer to her face. She looked Jane over with great suspicion.

May as well go for it, Jane thought. “I wanted to ask a question about that rocket we saw the other day. Do you mind?”

The smaller girl hesitated. “What question?” she finally said. It sounded like she was trying to hide her German accent, but she wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

“A couple of minutes after it blasted off, I couldn’t see it anymore. Did it go into orbit, or what?”

The smaller girl stared at her. Jane could almost hear the gears turning in the girl’s mind.

“I’m not a spy,” said Jane at last. “I live over in Las Cruces. If you’re into rockets, I thought maybe we could get together. If nothing’s going on, you could come over to my place for a while this weekend.” It was time to seal the deal. Jane reached into her pocket again and brought out a wrapped piece of bubble gum and a scrap of paper on which she had written her parents’ phone number. She handed these to the girl.

The other girl was clearly surprised. With an uncertain look, she took the gifts and looked up. “Thank you,” she said stiffly. “I… my father… works with your Army.”

“That’s keen,” said Jane, trying to conceal her excitement. “If your folks can’t drive you to Las Cruces, I can come over and pick you up Friday night. Whatever you want.”

The girl slowly nodded.

“Oh!” Jane almost smacked herself on the forehead. “My name’s Jane Lane. It rhymes, I know. You can ask anyone about me, everyone’s seen me around here for ages. What’s your name?”

The smaller girl with the auburn hair looked to one side for a moment. A dark-blue sedan was waiting for her on the street, its engine knocking. “My namen is Dora,” the girl said. “Dora Morgan. I… I haff to go.”

“Sure!” said Jane. “Just call me!”

“Okay.” Still looking bewildered, the smaller girl went to her parents’ car, got in, shut the door, and tentatively waved a hand at Jane. Jane waved back with a smile. Fifteen years in this hellhole, and suddenly she had a friend. A friend who liked rockets, she hoped. It was about damn time.

Everything was copacetic except the girl’s name. Jane had never heard of anyone German having a name like Morgan. Maybe the family had shortened it from something that was considered too long and too Teutonic in these postwar days. It made sense. There were a lot of people around who had lost someone dear in the war, and hard feelings still ran deep.

I’m glad I’m different, thought Jane as she drove home. I don’t hold a grudge about anything now. Trent would want me to be that way.

 

 

III. Mission Control

7:45 p.m. Mountain Standard Time
Monday May 6, 1946
Alamogordo, New Mexico

Jane got home an hour and a half later, speeding most of the way. No cops bothered to try to catch her. It wasn’t worth it. They all knew “Jungle Jane” and fondly remembered her next-oldest brother. Her mother was long gone when she arrived. Jane gave the kitchen a light cleaning, made supper for herself, drew a few rockets, and at sundown was enjoying another well-sugared coffee while listening to static-laden jazz from a distant city when the phone rang.

That had better not be Dad wanting me to pick him up again, Jane thought to herself as she walked to the counter, turned down the radio, then picked up the handset. “Lanes,” she said.

There was a moment of silence on the other end, then a young woman said faintly, “Uh… Jane?”

“Dora? Is this Dora?”

“Ja… yes, I am Dora,” the girl said in a cautious monotone. “Hello, Jane.”

“Hi! Good to hear from you. I didn’t mean to surprise you this afternoon. I just haven’t found anyone around here who likes rockets. The boys do, yeah, some of them, but no girls. I’m not into paper dolls and that junk. Do you like that space stuff, too? Or is it just your dad who likes it?”

“Uh… me, too, yes. I like it.” The other girl seemed both intrigued and nervous at the same time. Jane then heard another voice in the background. “Oh,” said Dora, sounding peeved, “my mother would… wants talking with you, if…”

“Sure, put her on.” Probably wants to see if I’m a guy.

After a moment, an older woman came on the line. She had only the slightest trace of an accent. “Hello, this is Mrs. Morgendorffer. Who is this, please?”

Morgendorffer? Then I called it right about shortening the name. Or maybe Dora’s the only one shortening it. Jane explained who she was and gave a vague explanation of how she had “heard that” Dora was big on rocketry. Mrs. Morgendorffer—Helene, she said her name was, and Dora’s father was Jakob—was pleased to hear that Dora had found a friend. “She has not made friends since we came to here in January,” she said. “I think she reads too much.” Jane heard a groan in the background before Mrs. Morgendorffer continued. “Now, I know Las Cruces is quite far away from here, but—”

“Everything is quite far away out here,” said Jane with a sigh.

Mrs. Morgendorffer laughed. “I suppose that is true. This place is very strange for us—nice, I mean, but—so big! It is too far to drive for you here, isn’t it? Our car is not very good, you see. I am always afraid it is about to, how do you say it, break up.”

“Break down. We say ‘break down’ if a car needs to get worked on.”

“Yes, thank you, exactly! Break down!” More laughter.

Jane rolled her eyes. “I can drive up there, then, if that’s okay. I have a permit. It would be so great to finally talk to someone who likes the same things I do!”

“Oh, um, maybe we can do that, but it is still a big way to go. If your parents are certain—”

Uh-oh. “My folks can’t come to the phone right now—” Because they’re not home and I don’t know where they went “—but I can have them call you back. Can I have your phone number?”

After a few more pleasantries, Mrs. Morgendorffer called for Dora to take the phone again. In the halting conversation that followed, Jane learned that Dora was also fifteen, she liked science and math, and she knew almost nothing about anything connected with the local area. Her father was a mechanical engineer who worked on the rockets at White Sands. Jane interpreted that to mean he had probably worked on the rockets at Peenemünde, too, a few years earlier. She had heard all about how hundreds of German scientists had been spirited out of war-ruined Europe by the American Army so they could build rockets for peaceful purposes instead of for war, which was what they had wanted all along. They were good Germans. That was fine with Jane. Not all Germans could possibly be bad, except the ones who ran concentration camps and U-boats.

“The rocket,” said Dora, changing the subject. “You ask the rocket two weeks ago. It fell and crash—um, crashed.”

“Crashed? What happened?”

“It was… um… switch off. Radio turn off motor. It… the rocket—” Dora called something to her father and got an answer back “—went off course, east. Tail fin fell off.”

“Ah, I get it. The rocket came apart, so someone turned off the motor by radio so the rocket wouldn’t crash into a city or something.”

“Yes, that is right. Only eight kilometer high, not a good rocket.” Another pause as Dora answered a question in German from her mother. “I must to do homework, my mother say.”

“That’s okay. We’ll get together soon.”

“What schule is your?”

It was Jane’s turn to hesitate. “I’m not in school right now. I work at home with my parents. I’ll explain it later.”

“Okay.” Dora sounded puzzled but agreeable. “Thank you, Jane, to call me.”

“You’re welcome. Call me anytime you want.”

“Thank you. Goodbye.” The last word was said with unmistakable hope that it was not a goodbye goodbye.

Jane hung up the phone and stared without expression at the countertop for long minutes. At last she said aloud, “Someday, but not now. No school now.” She clicked her fingernails on the wooden counter as she wondered what the German word for dropout was, then walked back to finish her coffee. Instead, she did what she always did when walking through the kitchen: she bypassed the table and went instead to the window over the sink, where she reached out and touched the gold star there. She was three long years past crying for her brother, three years past talking to the air and hoping he could hear her, past hoping his death in the Atlantic had been quick and painless. The only family member who had ever cared about her, Trent had long ago received his little sister’s last goodbye goodbye. She left school after his funeral and never once thought of going back. Until now. But that would be later, much later, if ever.

She finished her coffee and was up until midnight, listening to the radio and doodling on a sketch pad. She wondered if Dora had any siblings, but thought if she had then she or her parents would have mentioned them. She was an only child, then. She wondered what that was like and thought it must be terribly lonely.

Jane’s parents did not get home until Wednesday night. Jane did not know where they had been, she did not ask, and she no longer cared. Life moved on no matter what you really wanted from it.

Then, on Thursday evening, she got an unexpected phone call.

 

 

IV. Space Age

11:30 a.m. Mountain Standard Time
Friday May 10, 1946
White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico

I can’t believe this is happening. This has to be a dream. Jane wondered if she should pinch herself, then settled for running a hand over the warm black metal fin of the V-2 in front of her. She was awake as she could be.

Behind her, Dora stifled a giggle. I bet I look moonstruck, Jane thought. Like I give a damn what I look like. This is the best day of my entire life. She craned her head to look up the length of the five-story-high missile. Its yellow-and-black paint gleamed in the midday sun. The angle of the light also made an incredible number of small dents stand out up and down the metal-skinned vehicle.

She put her hands on her hips and leaned back to take the ache out of her neck. Unlike the previous rocket, this one’s upper third was completely yellow all the way to the nosecone. A gentle breeze ruffled her short black bangs, held back from her face with a red head scarf. A man’s red-checkered shirt with rolled-up sleeves, worn jeans with rolled-up leg cuffs, and walking shoes completed her outfit.

“It looks kinda beaten up,” Jane said at last. “Not at all what I thought it’d look like.”

“All of ‘em are like that,” said a freckled, red-haired Army private standing with them. He had taken his shirt off in the noon heat. “The Germans made ‘em like that in the factories, never got around to hammering them out.”

“How come?”

“Didn’t need to. It’s a combat rocket, doesn’t have to look pretty as long as it holds together.”

“Oh.” After a pause, she added, “Thanks, Artie.”

The soldier grinned. “Anytime,” he said. He wasn’t handsome by any stretch—his face reminded Jane of a turkey and he spoke with an annoying screech—but he was nicely muscled. You took the good with the bad, she reflected.

Dora walked into Jane’s field of vision, crouching down to look up under the rocket at the engine bell. She was wearing yet another version of the forest-green blouse and long black skirt combo, which seemed to be her favorite outfit. She pointed at several objects encircling the bell and gave Artie a questioning gaze. “This is… um, graphit?”

“Yeah,” said Artie. “Graphite, same word. Those are the control vanes.”

Dora nodded. “Ja, control for steer rocket. One fell off last rocket, then fin fell off, then it went—” Dora’s right hand went up, then made a sudden right turn. “Then turn off motor and crashed.”

“Okay,” said Jane, “but don’t these things control the rocket, too?” She tapped a square metal section at the end of the nearest fin. It was held in place by rods and resembled the wing flaps on an airplane.

“Not good like graphite, um, vane. Vanes, sorry. Radio antenna in here, motors turn the, um, vanes.”

“How does the rocket take off?” asked Jane, wondering who would answer first.

“Radio signal again,” Artie cheerily squawked. He took off his green fatigue cap to scratch his forehead. “After they load the alcohol and liquid oxygen, they have to fire this bird pretty fast before everything boils off in the sun. The controllers turn on the turbopump inside there—” He pointed to the top of the tail section “—to let some of the fuel down. We use an electric igniter wire to combust this stuff the second it mixes, but we gotta control the flow rate. The controllers wait a second or two to make sure the fuel’s coming out okay before they put the pedal to the metal and let the sumbitch go. That whole middle section up there will get frosted over when they pump liquid oxygen into it, no matter how hot the day is. They have to put the alcohol in first so nothing freezes up. The alcohol tanks are right over the oxygen tanks, right below the gyros and payload.”

“Payload?” Jane turned to Artie again. “What payload?”

“Man, I dunno, some scientific stuff.” He looked to one side and gasped. “Damn it! Gotta run. Later, alligator!” With that, he ran off toward an angry-looking officer in khakis.

“He…” Dora hesitated. “Is he your, um—”

“No. Oh, God, no, no! He’s just a guy I talk to about rockets sometimes. He’s sweet but way too weird to be my boyfriend. He might be from Mars, who knows.”

Dora gave Jane a sidelong look, one eyebrow raised.

“You’ll understand when you get to know him better,” said Jane, “but with any luck you won’t. Now that he’s gone, what do you know about this thing?”

“Oh!” Dora seemed to come alive, though her face showed little. “My father says payload is, um, Ge-ner-al E—”

“General Electric?”

“Ja, danke. Ge-ner-al E—”

“Just say ‘G.E.’ That’s what we do. ‘G.E.’”

“—G.E. made, um, machines for there. Um, research. Wait.” Looking rather frustrated, Dora waved at her father, who was talking with several Army officers, then she shouted something in German.

“Johns Hopkins!” her father called back in a cheery voice. “They make the cosmic ray detector for this flight! General Electric put all the parts together!”

“Got it,” said Jane. She began to walk around the upright missile on its kitchen-table sized steel-frame launch stand. Dora followed. The fins were painted in alternating colors, black and yellow, and had Roman numerals stenciled on them. She looked up between two of the fins at the rocket’s hull—and gasped in shock.

Someone had carefully painted a cheesy two-foot-high emblem on the rocket. It showed a smiling woman sitting on a tailfin of a V-2, with her bare legs wrapped around the missile’s midsection. The woman wore only a bikini top and a short skirt.

Dora groaned aloud when she saw it. “Men,” she said in disgust.

“I knew someone was going to do something Freudian like that one day,” grumbled Jane. “I just didn’t know it would be now.”

“Vas?”

“Oh, God, now I have to explain it.”

“No, I understand,” said Dora. “Men. You can do nothing.”

“Ja,” Jane said with a grin. She reached up and tapped the missile’s skin. “Hey, maybe she’s a good luck charm. Maybe putting a woman on a rocket is good luck.”

Dora considered the idea, then shrugged. “They hope rocket go one hundred kilometer high. Good luck is good.”

“A hundred… what’s that in miles? Oh, never mind, I’ll look it up later.” Jane shook her head at the woman with her rocket paramour. “I’m sorry they wouldn’t let me have a camera out here. I’d love to get a shot of that.” She turned to Dora. “Say, what kind of food do you like? I mean for fun, when you stay over tonight.”

Dora looked undecided, then finally shrugged for an answer. “Anything,” she said.

“How about hamburgers or patty melts?” said Jane. “There’s a soda shop in town that makes the best… uh, what?” Jane had stopped because Dora was now giving her a strange look. The two girls stared at each other for a long, uncomfortable moment.

“Did I say something wrong?” asked Jane.

“You say Hamburg?” asked Dora with a stricken look on her face.

“No, hamburgers. A beef patty on a bun, you know, like the sandwich.” Jane mimed biting into a hamburger and chewing it. “Hamburgers.”

Dora’s face cleared in relief. “Oh! Sandwich! Oh, sorry!” Shuddering, she turned away and wrapped her arms around abdomen. “Sorry, mistake. Sorry.”

“Sure, forget it.” What’d I say? Is she mad at me or what? What just happened?

The two girls finished their inspection of the V-2 and looked around the area. They still had a couple hours until launch time.

“Do your mom and dad let you watch the blastoffs?” Jane asked, hoping to find a new topic quickly.

“No, this is first. Dad says, Mother not to know, be quiet.” Dora smiled before she cleared her throat. “Jane?”

“What?”

“You… you help me with my English? Please?”

“Oh, sure! Can do! But you’re making a mistake if you think I know more about English than you do.”

Dora smiled at that. It was fragile and brief, but welcome as the sun. They wandered off to listen in on conversations between generals, admirals, technicians, and rocket men. At one point Dora bumped Jane’s arm and nodded toward a group of civilians talking with Army officers. “Herr Doktors von Braun, Theil, Buchhold, Grüne… ah, Hellebrand, Rudolf… Eisenhardt unt Schilling,” she said. “Also your General Stillwell, from China.”

“Wow.”

“That is Meilerwagon, behind doctors. That is trailer for rocket, German made.”

“For the rocket.”

“Oh, for the rocket, danke.” Dora looked up at Jane, her hazel eyes bright behind the round lenses of her ridiculous glasses. “You must… you must tell me right English! You do not, um, uh, hurt me. You must mean.”

“I must be mean to you.”

“Must be mean, yes.”

“Well, okay, it’s your nickel.”

“Vas ist?”

Jane sighed.

As launch time approached, Army soldiers rounded up the onlookers and began moving them toward the Army blockhouse. Jane was annoyed to learn that she would not be able to see the blastoff, though at fifty yards from the pad she would be damn close to it. She got a promise from an Army photographer to get color prints of the rocket and launch, in exchange for giving him a picture of her. It wouldn’t go any further than that, Jane decided, since the guy didn’t have the decency to take off his wedding ring before he asked her for a date.

As fate would have it, Jane and Dora found themselves relegated to the back of the stuffy, ill-lit blockhouse with Dora’s father, pushed into a corner near the main exit and the blockhouse’s sole restroom (for men only, of course). Half the men there were smoking nervously, making the air almost unbreathable. None of them offered Jane a smoke, though she felt she needed one now as she never had before. All the VIPs, the top officers and scientists, packed themselves close to the control area facing the launch site, but even they couldn’t see the launch itself. Only a few men at mounted periscopes got to see everything as it happened. The loudspeakers piped in noises from outside.

“Fuel loading complete, over,” said a radioed voice.

“Roger that. Three minutes.”

Jane suddenly had to pee. Now I can believe this is happening, she thought in annoyance. It never fails. She gritted her teeth and stayed put. Better for her bladder to burst than to miss history in the making.

More radio calls, then a loudspeaker voice said, “One minute to firing. All range personnel take cover immediately. Signal flares are activated. Warning siren—” Most of the rest of what he said was lost in the air-raid klaxon’s unearthly howl. It peaked for a dozen or so seconds, then slowly fell away.

“Twenty seconds. Downrange is clear.”

Jane sensed someone moving closer to her. It was Dora, staring at the men blocking the control area with a bloodless face. Her eyes were big as saucers.

“Ten seconds to firing.”

Jane forgot she had to pee. She was shaking all over from terror and excitement. A cold hand brushed against hers. Without thinking she took and squeezed it. Dora squeezed back hard.

“Five! Turbopump on!” shouted the unseen man. “Ignition! We have ignition on the pad! Two, one, we—”

A crackling roar filled the loudspeakers, then an earthquake hammered through the 12-foot-thick ceiling, the 10-foot-thick steel-reinforced walls, the concrete under Jane’s feet. The earthquake grew deafening in a second, then louder still, then louder and louder until Jane thought her ears would burst. Dust fell from swaying ceiling lights. The roar then became a great BOOM ten times louder than before. The entire building jumped. Jane thought for a terrified second the rocket had blown up—

—then the earthquake began to recede. Over the crackling thundering of rocket flame in the loudspeakers, Jane heard someone yell, “She’s away! Go, baby, go! Go go go go GO!”

Men raised their fists and screamed and threw their hats and tore off their ties. They hugged each other and wept and laughed and danced and leaned breathless and sweating against the blockhouse walls in awe at what they had done. Jane threw back her head and howled with joy. A trembling Dora grabbed her around her waist, Jane hugged her back, and seconds later they both began to cry, still hugging. No one noticed.

They later learned that the V-2 performed perfectly. It almost hit a mile a second at top speed. It reached an altitude of 69 miles, 112 kilometers, before falling back to Earth.

Outer space began at 50 miles.

The American space age was on.

 

 

V. Live Transmissions

11:30 a.m. Mountain Standard Time
Saturday May 11, 1946
Las Cruces, New Mexico

Saturday morning started shortly before noon, when Jane was jerked awake by the clatter of something falling over in her sister Penny’s room next door. “You okay?” she called, rubbing her face.

“Ja, sorry!” Dora called back. “Thing fell down. No problem.”

“What thing?”

“Big thing.”

“That’s okay, it’s probably Penny’s and she’s not here.”

“Okay.” A pause, then: “Jane?”

“Huh?”

“Where is restroom?”

“Ahhh… okay, wait, I’ll show you. Hold on.” Jane crawled out of bed with the greatest reluctance, but she was the only one around who knew how to make the toilet flush. The house’s upkeep had deteriorated greatly since Trent’s death. A half hour later, she and Dora sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the coffeepot to boil while they finished eating peanut-butter-on-toast sandwiches with glasses of water. The radio picked up only church stations and country music in the daytime, so it remained off.

Dora was wearing nicely tailored rust-red pajamas and leather house slippers. She looked different somehow from all the times Jane had seen her before. Still small, still with the odd glasses, but… not the same. “Parents home now?” Dora asked with a yawn.

“No, but they’re probably around somewhere.” Jane, wearing a very large T-shirt over her underwear, tried to fight off a reciprocal yawn but lost spectacularly.

“Ah.” Dora finished her sandwich, picked up the crumbs with her fingers and ate them, then pushed away her plate. She looked around the kitchen with interest. “You alone?”

“Me alone.” Jane covered her mouth for yet another yawn. “Sorry if I kept you up too late last night. I was too excited. Couldn’t sleep.”

“Too much coffee.”

“Yeah, that, too. I shouldn’t have had some before the launch yesterday. Still don’t know why everyone was so mad when we locked them out of the men’s restroom afterward. It’s their own fault they didn’t put a women’s room in the blockhouse.”

Dora nodded and kept looking around at things. She appeared intrigued instead of concerned that a 15-year-old girl was living by herself in a run-down house in a desert town, was not going to school, and was not being made to go to school.

“It’s funny,” said Jane. She ran a hand through her black bangs. “I remember when all those rocket parts came into town last fall. The trains came through every hour, and there were so many tractor-trailers driving in and out of town you couldn’t sleep for the noise. Can’t believe they had to put the rockets together again from scratch.”

“Father said not to tell Mother I was there,” said Dora. “I say that right?”

“Yup. You learn quick. I won’t tell.”

“Danke. No, I mean, thank you. Want stop speaking German.”

“You want to stop speaking German.”

“Yes, uh, I want to stop… speaking German.”

“For good?”

“Vas?”

“That means forever. ‘For good’.”

“Oh. Yes, for good.”

“Why?”

Dora inhaled and seemed on the verge of talking, then let out her breath and shook her head, looking away. The coffeepot whistled shortly thereafter.

“I could show you around town this afternoon, but to be honest there’s not much worth seeing except for the soda shop.” Jane spooned sugar into her cup and stirred. Dora drank her coffee down straight and black. “Oh, by the way,” said Jane, “you know when the next rocket launch is?”

“Um, two weeks, the twenty-nine. Same time yesterday. Schule end the twenty-four, but I not know—”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, uh, I don’t know if Father let me go see.”

“If Father will let me go see it.”

“If Father will let me go see it.”

Jane groaned. “Maybe this would work better if you just picked up the lingo on your own. That would be a time saver. Just listen to how I say things and copy me.”

“Please can we some? Hour, two hours, afternoon? Teach me then?”

“Fine, you win. We’ll do that.”

“Do you miss schule?”

The question caught Jane off-guard. “Uh, no, I guess not. I didn’t get along with people there very well.”

“Problem?”

“Sort of.” Jane turned her head and looked at the kitchen window. “Sort of a problem. How about you? You like school?”

Dora nodded right away. “I like it. I like to learn, to… read, learn, ask questions. Read about space, science, the world.” She tapped a finger against her mug. “You smoke?”

“Huh? Me smoke? Yeah, sometimes. Why?”

To Jane’s infinite surprise, Dora went back to Penny’s room and returned with a half empty pack of Luckies and a box of matches. “Okay to smoke inside?”

“Uh, sure, yeah. My folks aren’t going to care.” She mumbled thanks when Dora offered her a cigarette of her own. “It helps get my brain going,” Jane said. She found a cracked ceramic ashtray in the living room and moved it to the table. Dora lit up, then held out the match for Jane and dropped it in the ashtray.

“Where’d you learn to smoke?” Jane asked, settling into her chair again.

“During the war,” said Dora. “Help my nervous.” She looked peaceful now, relaxed, more open, not the fearful and anxious girl Jane had known to this point. Dora blew a long cloud of smoke to one side, toward the stove.

“Where’d you live? In Germany, I mean.”

“Karlshagen. Town near Peenemünde, where Father work. It is gone, I think.”

“Gone?”

“Bombers.”

“Oh.”

Dora gestured with her hands from place to place on the tabletop. “Bombers come, we move here, we move here, we move here.” She shook her head, then leaned back and tapped her cigarette on the side of the ashtray. “All the same. More bombers.”

Jane swallowed and did not look at Dora.

“Nothing in Germany,” the smaller girl went on. “Nothing left, nothing. Father say, Russians come and kill us. We must go America. So…” Dora shrugged and took another long drag on her cigarette. “Same as everyone. All the same. Nothing left, go America.”

“Go to America even if Americans were… no, sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, I understand.” A shrug and a head shake. “No choice. Only future is here.”

“You know a lot of the scientists around here.”

“Some. Father work with them. Not friends, just—work with them. Go to party, see them maybe.”

“Did you have any friends, back in Germ—” It occurred to Jane too late that the answer to that question was likely to involve bombers. She winced.

Dora only shook her head. Her expression seemed locked into a flat weariness. “No friends. Mother always say me, get friends! Go out! See the people.” She shook her head slowly again for emphasis. “No.”

“You didn’t like people?”

“Didn’t like people, yes. Too many are…” She gestured vaguely. “No brain.”

“Stupid.”

“Yes, thank you. Much stupid.” Dora blew smoke from her nostrils. “Stupid government, stupid army, stupid everything. Much stupid. Now, nothing, nothing, nothing.”

“Didn’t anyone else think the government there was stupid, too?”

“Yes, some. Dead now.”

“Bombers?”

A shake of the head. “Gestapo.”

“Oh.” A short pause. “What did your parents think?”

Dora snorted in amusement. “My parents. There were, um, I not know the word. Like idea, ideal—”

“Idealists.”

“Ja, thank you, idealists. They when students were idealists. Big ideas, much big. Communists.”

Jane’s eyes widened. “They were Communists?”

“Not today, no, but when students, very young. Communists, no jobs in Germany. My parents like to eat, work, spend. No big ideas now.” Her lips twisted into a dark smile. “Now same as everyone.” She held her cigarette over the ashtray and looked around the kitchen again. “Quiet here,” she said. “I like quiet. I like house, your home.”

Jane could not have been more surprised. “I think it’s a dump,” she said.

“Not pretty, like our home in Karlshagen, but… it is safe. Quiet. No bombers.”

“Just rockets.”

Dora smiled at Jane. “Just rockets.” She looked away again, holding her cigarette. “I like not be with my parents. Not bad, my parents, but... they argue everything. Argue to me, argue work, argue other scientists, just argue. Your parents, they argue?”

“No. They’re not home often enough to argue over anything.”

“Ah. Envy you.” Dora put her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and drank from her coffee mug. “In Germany, my family argue all thing. They argue my name.” She laughed for a moment. “My name, they all argue my name!”

“Why’d they do that?”

Dora’s smile faded. “My grandfather, my father father, say my name must be Daria. Grandfather is Ukrainian. Name must be Daria, like his mother. My other grandfather say, no! Daria is Russian name, no Russian name here. German name! Mother and Father argue and argue and argue with grandfathers. When I am born, Mother say, she is Dora. Almost Daria, but German. Theodora, but only Dora, no Theo.” She drained her mug and put it down. “Dora I am, but grandfathers argue anyway. Stupid.”

“I thought I had name problems, but you got me,” said Jane. “Other kids made fun of me because my name rhymed.”

“Your family no argue your name. Lucky you.”

“My parents are never around enough to argue, like I said.”

“You say that, yes, sorry. It is too alone here?”

Jane found herself looking at the kitchen window again, at the gold star. “Yes. Too alone. My older brothers and sisters are gone. Just me here. I like it sometimes, maybe most of the time, but yeah, too alone.” She looked back at Dora. “Too alone for you, too?”

Dora looked at the window, too. She then picked up her cigarette but only stared at the burning end of it. After a moment she crushed the cigarette out. “Okay I take bath?”

“Sure.” Jane crushed out her own cigarette and showed Dora the tricks involved in getting lukewarm water in the bathroom. Two hours later that afternoon they were walking down streets in dusty, windblown Las Cruces, where almost no building was over one story high. Jane pointed out various landmarks: the Laundromat, the diners, the school, the tiny library. Dora wrinkled her nose at the latter two. She was clearly accustomed to larger and better-kept libraries and schools.

They reached the soda shop and studied the menu in a corner booth. Jane offered to treat, but Dora had three dollars of her own.

“Must ask you question,” said Dora in low voice, peering closely at her own menu.

“Fire away.”

“Fire… oh, got it.” Dora lowered the menu. “Please must forgive if I, um, offense you. You have clothes like men. Why?”

Jane looked down at herself, then back at Dora. “I hate dresses. You can’t do anything in them. You can’t climb, can’t crouch down without getting them all dirty, can’t do anything. Pants are always better.”

Dora studied Jane’s shirt. “That is too big, your, um, forgot name,” she said. “The top clothes.”

“My shirt.” Jane looked down at her menu. Don't go there, please. “It’s okay. It fits.”

“It is your brother shirt? One brother?”

After a long pause, Jane pushed her menu away. She was no longer hungry. “Yes.” She swallowed. “He’s dead.”

Dora put down her menu, too. “Gold star in window?” she said in a soft voice.

Jane nodded and covered her mouth.

“What… how did happen?”

Well, this was fun while it lasted, Jane thought. I’ll miss her. “He was in the Merchant Marine,” she said hoarsely. “His ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic three years ago this coming summer. They never found him.”

The silence drew out.

“U-boat,” said Dora.

Jane nodded and swallowed.

Dora pushed her own menu aside. “You and me, much the same,” she whispered.

Jane thought about what Dora had said. She looked up. The smaller girl was staring at the tabletop. “My sister, all my grandparents, my aunts, uncle, cousins, they live in Hamburg. My little sister sent to them three year ago, because far away from Peenemünde bombers. Then bombers came Hamburg, city burn, nothing left. Bombers came again, more burn, more nothing left. Bombers, bombers, bombers, night and day, never stop. War end, not even nothing left now in Hamburg.”

Dora looked up at Jane with haunted eyes. “Mother, Father, me, we are all left my family. My school, my home, my country, all gone. We have nothing, only we.”

She looked down at her menu without seeing it. “I am sorry your brother, Jane,” she whispered. “He was good man?”

Jane nodded. Her eyes squeezed shut for a moment. Tears leaked from the edges.

“He was your family? All your family that love you, not like parents?”

Another nod. Jane wiped her eyes with her fingers, then grabbed a large wad of napkins from a dispenser to blow her nose and clean up her face. She then noticed that Dora was not sitting across from her anymore.

Dora was two blocks down the street before Jane caught up with her.

“I go,” said Dora woodenly.

“No, don’t! Come back with me!”

“I go.”

“No!” shouted Jane in her face. She blocked Dora’s path and forced her to stop. “You will not go back! You will turn around and get your butt back in that soda shop and you will have a goddamn chocolate milkshake, and you will go home when I am goddamn good and ready for you to go home!”

They stared at each other for long seconds before Jane got her second wind. She hated that she could not stop crying. “Trent would want us to do that! He would because he was that kind of a guy. He cared about people. He knew it was a war, he knew it and hated it but he went anyway and he died, but he told me he knew one day it would be over and we would have to get things going and live again! He was ready to do that and I am, too! He wanted that for you and me! You are going back there and you will enjoy yourself and we’ll be friends because Trent wanted it that way!”

Jane had no idea how long they stood there in the street before Dora, looking very small again, turned and went back to the soda shop. They tried chocolate and vanilla milkshakes and compared them. Chocolate won, but it was a close contest.

“Americans like argue, too, yes?” Dora observed when the milkshakes were gone.

“It’s not like there’s a lot else to do in this town,” said Jane, feeling exhausted. “I’d rather not get drunk, and none of the guys are cute enough to hang around with for more than a minute, much less let them get you preggers.”

“Yes, I see.” Dora stared at her empty milkshake glass. After a silence, she said, “Yesterday, when rocket was launch, I cry because all my family not here and see it.”

“Oh,” said Jane. “I was thinking of Trent and how much—” She stopped and again fought down the rush of emotion, surprised that even after three years she could be so undone by its memory. What then did Dora feel, having lost all she had, so much more than Jane? Or had they each lost just as much as the other?

On impulse, they reached across the table at the same time and held hands. They talked about guys after that, and how limited the choices seemed for women who liked rockets and liked having their own say in things.

When they got home, Dora called her parents to let them know she was fine and to ask if Jane could drive her back Sunday afternoon instead of that evening, since her homework was done. She also had a gift prepared at home for her mother for Mother’s Day, which was tomorrow. They pretended Jane’s parents were gardening and couldn’t come to the phone. After a brief argument over attending church, Dora’s parents relented.

“Do you go to church in Alamogordo?” asked Jane when Dora hung up.

“Never,” said Dora. “They like argue anyway. Parents. You can do nothing.”

They went out again and came back only after being yelled at twice for violating after-dark curfew. After talking about everything, it seemed, except rockets, they went to bed.

Jane woke up that night, unsure why anything at all would ruin her sleep, then heard Dora crying in the bedroom next to hers. She listened for as long as she could stand it, which wasn’t long, then got up, turned on the light, and went to see her. Dora pretended to be asleep. Jane made her get up and move into her room. Dora slept on a cot beside Jane’s narrow bed, close enough for them to hold hands before they again fell asleep.

Sunday they got up at ten, examined all the junk Jane’s parents had left in the backyard with the intention of eventually fixing it or selling it, and griped about all the stores being closed. Jane took the old Ford truck and they explored White Sands Proving Ground until the MPs ran them off. On the long drive back to Alamogordo, they did a pinky swear to always be faithful to rockets, each other, and nothing else.

When Jane’s mother got home late that night, Jane was alone in the kitchen, drawing a portrait of Dora with pencils. Her mother said hi and acted as if she had never been gone. Jane said nothing and kept drawing as if her mother had never come back.

 

 

VI. Rocket Summer

The girls kept in touch by phone every evening through the weeks that followed, trading the daily chapters of their lives mixed with any and all rocket-related information they could wheedle out of those in the know. Their victims included female-starved military draftees, naïve Army Ordnance officers, careless civilian employees of General Electric, gullible newspaper photographers willing to share copies of their best shots, and indulgent German and American scientists who thought it amusing that two teenage girls had such an interest in what most people thought of as an exclusively male activity. They became the unofficial mascots of the base until the arrival one year later of Nike, an alcoholic, cigarette-eating burro.

It helped Jane and Dora’s cause greatly when Alamogordo’s Deutsche Schule let out for the summer just before the next V-2 firing. Unfortunately, both girls missed the launch of a purely American-made rocket, the oddly named WAC-Corporal, on May 22nd. The WAC-Corporal, like the V-2 just before it, also broke the space barrier. This was a major intelligence failure that encouraged the girls to redouble their efforts to witness every significant launch possible.

The data-acquisition system they laboriously worked out would have won the approval of Mata Hari. The girls found several ways to get into the proving ground on days when no launches took place, usually by catching rides with Dora’s father. Once a week, Jane would park her truck a short distance from the entrance, hidden in the grassy boondocks, then would appear and be driven the rest of the way when Jakob Morgendorffer arrived for work with Dora in tow. The two got out of the car once it was well past the gate guards, then took off on their own until it was time for Jakob to go home.

With beguiling looks of counterfeit innocence mixed with genuine wide-eyed wonder, they fearlessly wandered the base and chatted up men from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.; the Scientific Advisory Group and the Air Research and Development Command of the United States Army Air Force; the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins; the Palmer Physical Laboratory of Princeton; Boeing and Douglas Aircraft; the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; Bell Laboratories; the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of California, and a curious group named RAND. After each talk, Dora and Jane scribbled down what they had learned, hid the notes in their clothing, and went in search of more unwitting victims. They developed a shorthand code for note-taking that, when anyone else peered at it, seemed to be a list of boys’ first and last names with telephone numbers. They became fair detectives and damn good spies.

And they met many very interesting people. They saw General of the Army “Hap” Arnold, who was pleasant but not much help. They brought coffee and snacks to a elderly, bespectacled astronomer named Dr. Clyde Tombaugh, who had discovered Pluto sixteen years before and was developing a secret—from everyone but the girls—missile-tracking telescope at White Sands. In return, he answered their questions on astronomy. Playing on her status as the child of a “rocket scientist” (though Jakob was merely a technician and a mediocre one at that), Dora began visiting other German rocket experts. In time she befriended Dr. Wernher von Braun, who had directed V-2 research during the war for the Germans, and she got him to expound on his views on the future of space travel. Jane drew a flattering portrait of the mustachioed Lt. Col. Harold Turner, the proving ground’s commander, who had put together the entire base out of nothing just the year before and had even given White Sands Proving Ground its name. In exchange, she was allowed to take pictures on post while in the company of easily manipulated security guards.

More ways of acquiring information presented themselves than the girls had expected. Civilian employees with Project Hermes, the part of the Army’s missile program that was contracted out to G.E., were especially bad at throwing out papers and diagrams that should have been burned. Reports marked SECRET were often left in plain view on desktops for long periods of time without anyone nearby. Even high-ranking military officers thought little of holding conversations on classified subjects while two giggly teenage girls talked about (imaginary) boyfriends a short distance away.

The girls did not understand a tenth of the information they acquired, even if they wrote it down, but complete understanding was not the point. They were rocket fans, not rocket scientists. What they gained as a side benefit of their hobby was a crash course in aeronautical engineering and astronautical science from some of the best minds on the planet. They learned how to boil down technological gobbledygook into easy-to-understand tidbits. They became nearly impossible to bamboozle or misdirect.

By summer’s end, Jane and Dora knew the difference between the Loon, Gargoyle, Wasserfall, Private F, Tiny Tim, Gorgon, Tiamat, Baby WAC, and WAC-Corporal. They knew how heavy a V-2’s payload could be and still crack a 40-mile ceiling. They recognized the various working parts of the V-2 on sight. Without much trouble they could define terms like airburst recovery, apogee, cosmic ray, drag, flight corridor, gantry, servo unit, telemetry, theodolite, trim tabs, umbilical, and Brennschluss. They knew what chuffing and twonk sounded like and what it meant if you heard a rocket make either of those noises. They could go to a map of Europe and point out Peenemünde and Cuxhaven, and find Aberdeen Proving Ground, Wallops Island, Point Mugu, Goldstone Lake, and Inyokern on any map of the USA. They knew a toothpick-maker was a rocket with a fuselage made entirely of wood, not a machine that made toothpicks.

They also began to accumulate actual rocketry hardware from trash piles and crash craters, both as souvenirs and as artist’s models for Jane’s spacecraft drawings, which acquired a startling degree of realism. Transporting these items was always done with Jane’s old Ford truck, a winch, and a lot of tarpaulins. Hiding their treasures was possible because Jane’s home had a dry crawlspace beneath it and an empty attic above it, as well as closets that no one in the family had opened in ages. Dora kept small items at the bottom of her underwear drawer in her bedroom, and larger souvenirs tucked in the box springs of her bed.

As well, their personal lives fleshed out. Dora learned to speak American English and slang. Jane learned to curse in German and began to use revealing “girl clothes” to lure victims into incaution. Dora wore jeans and boots when they went exploring downrange for rocket parts, and outfits with colors other than green or black. They played pinochle and poker with soldiers on break. Dora became very good at cards, as no one could read her face when, as Jane called it, she went “flat.” Jane taught Dora how to cope with the roasting heat of summer afternoons, how to tell direction when deep in the boondocks, how to deal with dust storms, what to do if you saw a rattler or scorpion, and how to handle a guy who became too fresh—especially how to kick him or otherwise disable him so he couldn’t follow you. Luckily, the latter knowledge was never put to actual use.

Best of all, from their perspective, they watched a lot of spectacular rocket launches. Some they experienced from inside the Army blockhouse, and some they watched through binoculars from the foothills around the base. They kept as busy as they could, which kept them from thinking too much about long-lost family members and the hideous boredom of small-town desert life.

Three events from that long summer stood out above the rest.

 

Deviations from the Norm

2:17 p.m. Mountain Standard Time
Wednesday May 29, 1946
Five miles north-northwest of Launch Complex 33 at the foot of the San Andreas Mountains
White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico

“My mother wants meet you,” said Dora, searching in vain for the recently launched V-2. “She asks if you go to our house Saturday. She makes dinner.” She adjusted the focus on the binoculars and continued looking. Wisps of white cirrus crossed the sky. A light breeze ruffled her loose beige shirt and ponytail.

“I knew that would happen,” said Jane. She, too, was searching for the rocket without any luck. Engine cutoff was supposed to have been around the one-minute mark. She took the binoculars from her eyes, dabbed away stinging sweat with a shirt sleeve, then pulled a stopwatch from her shirt pocket with her left hand. It was five minutes and twenty seconds into the flight. The V-2 was probably well on its way back down now. No one knew where it would land. She hoped it would not be on them.

“We’d better start looking for the impact,” Jane muttered. “It’s almost time.”

Dora lowered her binoculars and squinted across the flat desert before them. Creosote bushes and thick clumps of grasses rustled in the wind. Behind her ragged-topped mountains rose thousands of feet above. “We are safe here?” she asked.

“Beats me,” said Jane. She began to scan the desert with her field glasses. “We should be out of the way, though. I mean, what are the chances that—”

A bone-rattling BOOM caused them both to jump. In the next instant, a crackling BANG swept over them, followed by a long descending whistle. The racket echoed continuously from the mountains for a half minute. Dora recovered first and pointed to the north. Jane swung her binoculars that way and saw a faint, high column of smoke rising from the desert near the foot of the mountains, miles away.

Jane cleared her throat. “See?” she said with only a trace of unsteadiness. “Told you we were safe.”

“Which was sonic boom? First or second noise?”

“Uh, lessee, uh…”

“Oh! It was second. Stupid me. First noise was impact, second was sonic boom, because rocket moves faster over sound.”

“Faster than sound.”

“Danke.”

Jane looked south and frowned. “We’d better get out of here before the Army comes a-huntin’ for the crash site and catches us instead. We'll pick up souvenirs tomorrow.”

“So,” said Dora as they walked back to the truck, “you go over Saturday?” Her voice had an odd catch in it.

Jane shrugged. It was free food, after all, even if Helene Morgendorffer grilled her about her family and personal habits. “Ja-wohl, Herr Doktor.”

Dora looked relieved and pleased. “Frau Doktor. Vielen dank.”

“Should I wear a dress or go like this?”

“I do not care,” said Dora, getting into the passenger seat and slamming the door, “but Mother likes dresses.” Dora looked down at her own dusty jeans and made a brief attempt to brush them off, then rolled down the window for some air. “Can you go to us at five?”

“No problem.”

“No problem,” Dora repeated as Jane started the truck. “Cope... um…”

“Copacetic.”

“Copacetic, ja.”

 

5:11 p.m. Mountain Standard Time
Saturday June 1, 1946
Alamogordo, New Mexico

Jane found the Morgendorffers’ home easily enough. Dora’s directions were logical and precise (so very like her), but it wasn’t like Alamogordo had a million people packed in there. It was small but bustling, invigorated by new jobs opening at the USAAF air base down the road and by its still-active connection with atomic-bomb testing and research. A spot of civilized greenery on a windblown desert, it lay nestled against the towering Sacramento Mountains, visible from anywhere in town.

She parked the old truck a block down the street from the Morgendorffers, around a corner so the family wouldn’t see it. (Her absent father had the gray de Soto again.) She checked her face in the rear-view mirror, spat out her wad of Dubble Bubble and wrapped it in a piece of wax paper for later, then got out and left the cab unlocked as she headed for what she hoped would be a low-stress evening of lavish eating. She wore a black polka-dot dress that once belonged to one of her older sisters. The print reminded Jane of stars shining in outer space, so it was her favorite. Walking in heels was awkward and made her calves ache, but it was manageable for a short time.

She went up the walk to the Morgendorffers’ white clapboard house at 1111 Oak Ridge Lane and raised a hand to rap on the front door. The door opened before she gave the first knock. Before her stood a woman in a summery blouse and skirt, wearing what appeared to be a genuine pearl necklace. Her shoulder-length brown hair was done up in long curls, à la Susan Hayward. The thick aroma of baked pasta flowed out into the quiet heat of the afternoon.

“Ahh!” cried the woman with great enthusiasm. “It is Dora’s secret friend! Please come in, come in!” She put out a hand. “I am Dora’s mother, Helene Morgendorffer.”

“I’m Jane Lane, pleased to meet you,” said Jane with a quick handshake. Helene’s accent was less noticeable than earlier. She seemed 90% American and 50% from somewhere else.

“And you remember me, of course!” said Jakob heartily. He wore a gray tie, gray slacks, and a white button-down shirt with so much starch it looked like he was wearing cardboard.

Helene looked at Jakob with narrow eyes. “She does? Where from does she know you?”

Jakob did a panicked double-take. “Oh! Uh, I uh—”

Dora spoke up and saved the evening. “He saw Jane at school, as I tell you already, and he drove me to Jane’s house one time.” She wormed her way between her parents to Jane. Dora wore a dark emerald evening dress, simple but effective. A crystal hung from a gold necklace at her throat, and her long thick hair was combed and bobby-pinned back. She took Jane by an elbow and pulled her away from the front door. “Say goodbye to parents. It is time for house tour.”

“Dora, bring her back soon!” called Helene. “Supper is almost ready!”

The Morgendorffers’ home had the austere look of a place that had only recently become occupied and couldn’t yet say what kind of family lived in it, as they had brought so little with them. The rosy wallpaper was new and only semi-hideous. Two pictures hung from the living room walls, one a painting of the Crucifixion and the other a photo of the American flag snapping in the wind, obviously clipped from a magazine advertisement. The furniture was relatively spotless but mismatched. The coffee table by the sofa had two ashtrays, a book of matches, a snow globe of a man and a woman holding hands while ice skating, and a library volume that was obviously Dora’s (Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere, by Willy Ley), with a pencil used as a bookmark.

Dora pulled Jane past all of this, leading her to a room at the end of a short hallway. Dora shut the door once they were safely inside. “Good to escape parents,” she said, then waved a hand around her with a crooked smile. “This is my bunker. Willkommen.”

They made small talk about the long drive over while Jane studied her friend’s bedroom. It was not a pink and frilly affair like the rooms of girls Jane had known while she was still in school. The windows had only pull-down shades for decoration, not even curtains. One pane was cracked. An old wind-up box phonograph sat on a table in dire need of refinishing. The bed was small with a green bedspread, thin mattress, and box springs, but no posts or headboard. Pushed against the drab walls were a chest of drawers with a wind-up alarm clock atop it, a voluminous wardrobe, and two low bookcases, all obviously purchased used from secondhand stores. The bookcases contained old books and school texts, piles of notebooks and papers, and a dusty AM/shortwave radio.

The only adornment on the walls was a Cola-Cola calendar on the door and several pictures carefully torn from a magazine and taped over the bed. Jane stepped close to the colorful images, her mouth falling open in awe. The pictures were from an issue of Life Magazine two years earlier, breathtaking panoramas of ringed, yellow Saturn as seen from several of its moons. The view of a ghostly Saturn hanging in the blue sky of Titan riveted Jane until Dora nudged her with a smirk.

Jane’s gaze soon came to rest on a small picture frame on a nightstand beside the bed. In the crinkled black-and-white photo, Jane saw the Morgendorffers at an earlier and more pleasant time: Helene and Jakob stiffly posed in formal clothing—white dress, dark gray suit with black tie—before a lily-strewn trellis. Two children stood in front of them: a solemn, unhappy Dora in front of her father, hands behind her back, and a slightly taller girl with long straight hair, bangs, and a white dress, grinning broadly at the camera with her hands clasped in front of her.

What was her sister’s name? Jane swallowed her dark thoughts and turned away. “Nice headquarters,” she said. “Any trapdoors, secret passages, or anything?”

“No,” said Dora, looking glum. “Door lock is broken, too.”

“I could get a deadbolt and put it on there.”

“No good. Mother will take it. She broke the door lock, to go in room anytime.”

“What? Well, that stinks. You need some privacy.”

Dora shook her head. “Privacy went away in the war. Mother is always afraid, always worry too much about me. It is very bothering.”

“Speaking of which,” said Jane, “I don’t want to make your folks mad at me for anything or they might not let us hang out together. Is there anything I should do tonight, or anything I should not do?”

Dora sighed. “The list is too big to say. You must be you and wish for luck.”

“Being me is what I do best.”

A faint smile appeared on Dora’s face. It vanished as she glanced at the old family photograph on her nightstand. “I think to be me is the hardest job on the world,” she said, then looked back at Jane. “Ready to meet Mother and Father again, eat like pigs?”

“I’m ready, Eddie.”

“Ready, Eddie,” Dora repeated under her breath and shook her head in bemusement. They left the room and discovered supper was indeed ready and waiting.

“I bake a special meal,” said Mrs. Morgendorffer, passing a dish of green beans to Jane. “It is a oven-baked pasta almost like lasagna, from Italy. You know about lasagna? No? It is almost like this. We cannot get the big lasagna sheets from New York City, much too expensive, but I use penne from Napoli, you know, shape like the little tunnels, so it is just the same. Pasta is just pasta!” She laughed aloud at that.

Jane glanced at Dora, who eyed the steaming tray in the middle of the table with weary resignation. “Sounds good to me,” said Jane. “Thanks for having me over.”

“I learned to cook in the army, before the war,” said Jakob as he spooned out pasta for his wife. “I should also make this one day, do something new! Oh, did you know the Italians, when they were staying here, cooked snakes for dinner? Those Italians—”

“JAKOB!” interrupted Helene, eyes blazing. Dora’s father jumped and almost spilled his spoonful of pasta as his wife delivered a scorching admonition in German.

“Entschuldigen Sie!” Jakob cried, looking like a spanked puppy.

Dora winced. Jane continued eating. She had heard the story before (it was true: the Italian POWs once kept in the area had cooked rattlesnakes for amusement) and so was well armored against the tale.

“Tell me about your parents, Jane,” said Helene as if nothing had happened. “Jakob, the buns, please.”

“My mom makes pottery,” Jane began as she spooned more “almost lasagna” onto her plate. “There’s a store in Las Cruces that sells her work to tourists. She works in a shed in our backyard most of the time with a potter’s wheel. My dad’s a freelance photographer. He travels a lot. I have two older sisters and a brother, but they don’t come around often. I haven’t heard from them in weeks.”

“Are your parents at home often?”

Uh-oh. “Mom is, and Dad is about half the time. He’s in Sacramento this weekend for something, taking pictures. Mom went with some friends to a kind of art get-together in Albuquerque.”

“And they leave you at home alone?” Helene’s voice rose, as did her eyebrows.

Jane shrugged. “I can take care of myself. We Lanes are pretty independent. It’s an Old West tradition.”

“You are in school, then?”

“Uh, no, not at the moment, but one of these days I’ll go back and finish it. I take care of the house while my folks are gone. I’m kind of on a break from school.”

“A break from school?” Helene looked at Jane in surprise. “But you are too young to leave school, yes?”

“Well, no. The school and my parents agreed it would be better if I was out for a while, until things get better for us financially. We’re kind of poor, you could say. I’m working as my mom and dad’s secretary. I handle the mail, answer phone calls, pay the bills, cut the grass, take out the garbage, all that boring stuff that has to get done.”

“Do you have a job?” said Jakob, digging into his food.

“Not outside the house, no. No one will hire me until I’m at least sixteen. I keep pretty busy, though.”

“Boyfriend?” asked Helene. “You have a boyfriend?” Dora glared and whispered something in German to her mother, who ignored her.

“Oh, no, no boyfriend,” said Jane, trying not to smile. She had dated before, but only enough to realize the local pickings were hopeless. “I can wait. I’d rather see what the big cities are offering instead of looking around here any longer.”

Jake looked puzzled. “Big city, you mean like You-ar-iz?” he said, referring to Juarez. “You look for boyfriends in Mexico?”

“Jakob, shh!” Helene turned to Jane. Her tone was friendly but had an edge. “I should call your mother, I think I want to talk with her. You are such a good friend of Dora, it would be a good thing. Girls talk, mothers talk, you understand. A good thing.”

Jane’s heart skipped a beat at the mention of her mother, who was rarely around, but she knew she could get around that. “That’s fine,” she said. “She comes back on Monday. You can call then.”

“Hmmm. So young and alone at home.” Helene looked over at Dora. “You must finish your pasta before it is cold. It will not bite you.”

“How did you and your husband meet?” Jane asked Mrs. Morgendorffer. To her relief the question derailed further inquiries into her home life. Helene regaled everyone with the telling of how she and Jakob literally bumped into each other at a student political rally in Heidelberg. (Dora’s bored expression indicated she was familiar with the tale.) Helene did not specify the nature of the gathering, which Jane guessed was Communist sponsored. No need to mention that to anyone else, of course. Jane listened and ate and ate and ate until even Dora was staring at her.

After dinner Helene had everyone sit in the living room, where she and Jakob peppered Jane with questions about the local area and its history while Dora looked bored and mildly frustrated. Jane knew a bit about the history, having been born in 1930 in the home she still inhabited. She remembered tales of Apache raiders, Spanish explorers, and infamous outlaws from grade school. On her own she remembered once visiting Elephant Butte Dam to the north, the source of many grade-school jokes; watching the endless river of poor workers heading west to California in search of jobs in the 1930s; WPA workers putting up buildings and fixing roads; and, once the war started, the hatred of many locals toward the few Japanese who lived there. Germans were liked much better. She recalled seeing German and Italian prisoners of war laboring in farm fields, hearing the constant rumble of explosions from the Tularosa basin when it was used as a bombing and gunnery range. She especially remembered being jerked awake one summer morning only a year ago by the flash of the first atomic bomb, then hearing the bomb’s window-rattling thunderclap and thinking it was an earthquake. There was even a story making the rounds that a blind woman had seen the flash, and Jane was inclined to believe it.

She said nothing about the long absences of her parents, her quarrelsome oldest siblings, or of Trent going off to war. Dora’s parents appeared awestruck at Jane’s story, though she did not think she had told it very well. The area was just her home, where she had always lived, and except for the rockets she thought it was pretty boring.

“The rockets are dangerous,” said Helene with a knowing shake of the head. “Very dangerous. You do not go around them, I hope.”

“They stay in their place and I stay in mine,” Jane said agreeably. She failed to add that her place was always with the rockets.

“It is too bad you are not in school,” Helene went on, then motioned to Dora. “My Dora, she should have a better life than we. She should learn to cook, go to church, get married and stay home making grandchildren for us to play with!”

“Dora will do what Dora wants,” a mortified Dora mumbled with a glare.

“Shh! Mind your manners with company.”

Dora looked up. “You have a job,” she told her mother, “and you don’t go to church.”

“That is not important.” Helene turned to Jane. “I translate at the air base, at the J.A.G. It is a service, not so much a job, but the pay is good. And I help a wives’ group for German women who come over with soldiers from the war. You would be surprised how many Germans are here.” She turned back to Dora. “And you should go to church anyway, it does not matter what I do. We want the best for you. And what is wrong with children? You must carry on the family. What is the hurt of listening to good advice?”

Dora made a face and looked away.

Jane took her leave a half-hour later as twilight came on, when it became obvious that Helene wasn’t going to give the girls any further time alone. Jane was waving goodbye from the sidewalk when she heard Helene ask Dora something in German. “Jane?” called Dora, “when is your birthday?”

“It was last month,” said Jane. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Wait!” Dora turned to her mother. “I walk with Jane to the car?”

Helene started to object, then exhaled and relented. “Come right back. It is late.”

Dora ran to Jane’s side and they walked together down the sidewalk.

“You did not tell me when was your birthday,” Dora growled.

“It wasn’t important.”

“It is important.”

“Well, it isn’t that important. I don’t remember when I last had a birthday party.” Jane was lying, though. Trent had always remembered her birthday and had never failed to get her a present. She was instantly sorry she had said what she did. She did not want to think of having a birthday party without Trent around.

“It is important to me!” Dora snapped.

Jane gave up and told her friend her birthday, getting Dora’s in return. “Must look for a late gift,” said Dora in thought. “What to get you, a man or a rocket.”

That got Jane to smile. “I don’t need men that badly.”

“A rocket then. You should have a rocket.” Dora’s voice rose. “We should have a rocket.”

“We should, shouldn't we? Don’t know how we’d ever get one.”

“We should have a rocket.” Dora spoke faster. Her eyes took on a glazed look. “Our rocket, a real one, and it must launch. I will think of how to do this.”

Something in Dora’s tone nagged at Jane, but they reached her truck and had to say their goodbyes. Jane kicked off her heels and drove home in the gathering darkness, full of Helene’s curious lasagna and a strange contentment she did not recall ever feeling except when Trent was around. The sudden memory of Trent pierced her sharply and its sting was deep, yet it felt good now, too. Trent would want her and Dora to be friends. The problem was, she did not want Dora to buy her a present though she knew Dora would, likely a charm in the shape of a rocket or spaceship. She hated herself for wanting that and, worse, expecting it. No one but Trent had ever given her a present for any reason. She might ruin this precious friendship by asking too much of it, she who too often had been given nothing, or less.

I can live by myself, she thought as she watched the road come out of the darkness in the truck’s yellow headlights. I don’t need anyone to care for me. I could live by myself forever if I wanted. I could. It would be easy. I’ve done it ever since—Trent—

Two tears ran down her cheeks. She clenched her hands on the steering wheel and tried to focus on the road. I can live without relying on anyone again. I don’t need it. I could live by myself till death without anyone close to me. I am stronger than that. I am enough. Trent would—

The dam broke. Tears came down in streams. Why couldn’t someone have found Trent’s body and sent him home? Was there any chance he was still alive? Why could nothing close this open wound in her life where he had been? How long would she hate her parents for failing to be there for her as Trent had? She did not want Dora to take Trent’s place; no one could do that. She was just a friend. But letting in a friend ran the risk of letting others in as well. And that—

She pulled over to the side of the road until she had cried herself out. It had been ages since she had wept like that, and it shocked her. Strangely, though, when she was done she felt better. She had no idea why. Everything was such a mess. She had no future, no real life of her own, nothing to care about except rockets. And now Dora. For some reason, she felt now like she could handle all that.

It must be the Trent in me, she thought. She cried a little more, then she put the truck back in gear and continued home. No one was at the house when she got there. She didn’t mind that. She was content. It must be the Trent in me.

 

The Kobold

12:06 p.m. Mountain Standard Time
Friday, July 19, 1946
Shelter 8, 350 yards east of Launch Complex 33, V-2 pad #1
White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico

“LOX fueling is completed,” blared the loudspeakers. The announcement echoed from the buildings scattered across the barren grounds of White Sands, and interrupted the rambling conversation in the heavily sandbagged shelter. “Five minutes to firing. All personnel must clear the rangehead and either report to designated shelters or leave the range immediately. Wind is from the south-southwest at twelve miles per hour, temperature is nine-two, ceiling is eleven thousand feet. Repeat: all personnel must immediately clear the rangehead and report to shelters.”

Jane and Dora sat with their heads just below window level on the side of the sandbagged shelter nearest the launch area, clutching high-powered binoculars and wearing the smallest-sized olive-drab HBT coveralls that could be found on the base. Their hair was bobby-pinned up and tucked well under their soft caps. They appeared to be as dirty and sweat-streaked as the seven young men sitting around them.

A shirtless Private First Class with short red hair tapped a pack of Chesterfields on one arm before removing his third cigarette in the last hour. His fingers trembled as he tucked the pack into a back pocket. “Someone is definitely watching us,” he summed up in a squawky, self-assured voice, “and they’re not from around here. Someone or something else is here on Earth with us. There’s too many foo fighters around to say otherwise.”

“Bullshit,” muttered a burly sergeant with an MP armband, sitting by the shelter exit with his own smoke. “I been listenin’ to you flap your gums about Martians for weeks and you ain’t made no fuckin’ sense yet.”

“Well, maybe Artie’s right,” said an olive-skinned buck private in a soft, slow voice. He, too, was shirtless, but darkly tanned and not freckled. “I mean, we don’t really know—”

“Ah, fuck you, Moreno, you don’t know shit either.”

“Hey, language,” said a Technician 4 with dark curly hair and thick black glasses. His accent had a Brooklyn flavor. He nodded at the girls. “We have ladies present.”

“A couple of live wires, too,” added a civilian engineer in his twenties, wearing neatly pressed work khakis. Over his dark, pomade-slicked comb-back he wore a soft cap with the blue-ball “GE” logo on the front. He gave Jane Lane an especially approving grin.

Jane blushed and tried to suppress her own smile.

“Fuck you, too, Sorenson,” snapped the irritable sergeant to the Tech 4. “Tommy Sherman says what he wants anytime he fuckin’ wants.” He gave a dismissive glance at the two girls. “And ‘ladies’ my ass, Tommy Sherman knows jailbait when he sees it. The chippies wanna sit in the hot spot with the big boys, they can handle the Sherman Tank, too. I ain’t babysittin’ either them or you.”

The civilian contractor and several soldiers groaned while the Tech 4 shook his head and looked apologetically at the girls. Jane shrugged in indifference. The loudmouth MP could have had them thrown off the base as unauthorized personnel, but the other guys in the shelter had collected ten dollars and the bribe had settled him down. Dora watched in silence, her expression betraying nothing.

Pvt. Moreno was unperturbed. “Well,” he continued after a pause, “Artie could be right.”

Sgt. Sherman snorted. “Sure thing, Einstein. Like a wop yardbird would know.”

“Hey!” cried the wounded Moreno.

“Those fireballs might be some kind of secret weapon, but I couldn’t say whose,” said the Chinese Tech 2 sitting next to Sorenson. His diction was perfect, which never failed to impress white folks who didn’t expect nonwhites to speak proper English. Most of those in the shelter were already used to him.

“Probably Krauts,” Sgt. Sherman grunted, getting involved anyway. “Japs ain’t all that clever. Could be spy planes. Probably some ratzis still dug into the Alps, waitin’ to hit us with the last of their rockets and jets. Fuckin’ bastards.”

“They’ve seen flying fireballs over the Pacific, too,” said the Tech 2.

Sherman waved the objection away. “Krauts could get around. They ain’t dumb.”

“Probably leftover fire balloons,” said the Technician 5 stretched out on the floor. His shirt was unbuttoned, his boots were missing, and his fatigue cap was pulled down to cover his eyes. His short kinky hair appeared prematurely gray.

“Fire balloons don’t chase B-29s at five hundred miles an hour, wise guy,” said Artie with a grin.

“Maybe the fire balloons are in a hurry.”

“Four minutes to firing,” they all heard from outside. “All personnel must take cover immediately.”

“Go back to sleep, Luhrman,” said Sorenson.

“Always glad to obey a direct order,” said the prone man in his usual monotone.

“That was a joke, Jughead. Get up and get your shit ready. C’mon.”

“In due time.”

Sgt. Sherman gave Luhrman an unfriendly look, but he turned away to finish his cigarette rather than pull rank and get involved in other people’s squabbles. It was the Tech 2’s show here.

The GE engineer looked at Jane again. “I’m Nathan,” he said. “I just got here from Chicago. I’ve seen you and your friend here around. You got a fella?”

Jane’s blush deepened. “Not really,” she began. “We—”

“Jesus,” interrupted Sherman with a glare at the contractor. “Why don’t you get yourself a real woman with a bush and stop robbin’ cradles?”

Nathan met Sherman’s dark stare with his own. “Why don’t you mind your own business, chum?” he said with a tight face.

The glare disappeared as Sherman's face cleared of emotion. “What was that?” he asked, deceptively calm.

“Whoa, hang on!” said Sorenson, clearly alarmed. “You guys better—”

The backpack radio beside the Chinese Tech crackled before anything else could be said or done. “All units at rangehead report in, over.”

“That’s you, Xiangdong,” said Luhrman, pronouncing it shang-tong.

“Keep it down and knock the shit off!” said the Tech 2 loudly, with a dark look at both Sherman and Nathan. He lifted the phone handset from the radio beside him, flipped a toggle switch, adjusted the volume, then held the handset to his ear. After a long pause punctuated by the garbled sounds of other units reported in, he spoke. “Shelter Eight, all present and accounted for. Standing by, over.” He then hung up the phone and flipped the switch to its old setting.

Nathan caught Jane’s attention again and silently mouthed later. Jane smiled and looked at Dora, who looked back with one eyebrow sharply raised. “Whaaat?” said Jane in feigned innocence.

“I don’t see nobody out there,” said Moreno, peering out of a window-shaped hole in the sandbagged walls.

“I wonder why that is,” said Sorenson in a sarcastic tone. He looked at the girls. “I remember when this stuff had me shaking like a hula dancer. Now I’m almost bored stiff. Almost.”

“Not me,” said Artie, looking at the rocket from another shelter opening. “I’m higher’n a Georgia pine!”

“Same here,” said the Chinese Tech blandly, trying not to grin.

“I’m riveted,” said Luhrman, still prone.

Sorenson frowned and nudged Luhrman in the shoulder with a boot. “Up, Sad Sack,” he snapped. “Quit goofing. I’m not kidding here.”

“Three minutes to firing.”

Luhrman sighed and slowly sat up, then adjusted his soft cap before he scooted rearward to put his bare back against the sandbags. “Is Miss L about to go upstairs?” he asked of no one in particular.

“Just about,” said the MP sergeant. The remains of his cigarette dangled from his lips as he cleaned his fingernails with the point of a long switchblade. He kept the knife within clear view of Nathan.

Nathan got the hint but wasn't fazed. He looked at Jane and Dora again. “How many of these launches have you seen? Tell the truth.”

The girls exchanged glances. “We missed the WAC-Corporal that went up in May,” said Jane, “but we caught all the V-2s after the static firing.”

“No kiddin’? Jeepers, you two get around.”

“Were you on the base or watching from the pass?” asked Artie, still watching the rocket.

“They let us in the blockhouse twice,” said Jane. “The rest of them we saw from… oh, other places.” She did not mention that she and Dora had watched the previous blastoff earlier that July from the roof of the mess hall, unseen by the rest of the base.

“You wouldn’t have happened to be downrange a time or two, would you?” said the contractor with a faint smile.

Jane and Dora again exchanged looks, this time with a surprised and uneasy air, and did not answer.

Sorenson caught on at once. “You’re pulling my leg!” he burst out at the girls. “Do you know how dangerous that is? That whole area north of here was a practice bombing range until two years ago! There’s unexploded ordnance all over!”

“And spiders,” said Luhrman, relaxing against the wall with his eyes closed. “Don’t forget the spiders.”

Sorenson turned to Nathan. “Did you know they were downrange? Did you see them?”

The contractor scowled. “It was just a question, pal,” he said. “Don’t blow your cool.”

“What’s the problem?” said Sgt. Sherman, inspecting his fingernails. “Underage chicks step on a UXB, they get pasted to the sky. I don’t see any problem.”

“I don’t believe this!” Sorenson turned to the girls. “You can’t go out there, anywhere to the north! Hell, we don’t even go out there except on recovery!”

“I didn’t say we went out there!” Jane retorted, turning red in the face.

“All right, all right, you’ve all made your points adequately,” said Luhrman, rousing himself at last. “I think we can—”

“Two minutes,” blared the loudspeakers.

“—let it drop. This isn’t the time.”

The argument subsided. A fragile silence reigned.

“What would you call a rocket gremlin?” asked Artie from the window.

“A what?’ said several guys at once, glad for the change in topic.

“He said a gremlin,” said Sorenson. “You know, like a Yehudi. It’s a little guy that fu—” He cut himself off with a glance at Jane and Dora “—screws up motors and wiring and gizmos, like on airplanes.”

“Yeah, that,” said Artie. “So what would you call a rocket one?”

“I think I’d call him Joe,” said Luhrman.

“Shut up, L-Man,” said Artie. “No, really.”

“Really?” said Xiangdong, fighting back a smile. “You mean, what would we really call an imaginary creature that lived on a rocket?”

Several of the others snickered. Artie gave everyone an annoyed look.

“Der Kobold,” said a soft voice.

The laughter died away. Everyone looked at the speaker—Dora, who until now had said almost nothing. When she realized she was the center of attention, she cleared her throat and continued haltingly. “My father said at Peenemünde, they call it the Kobold. It is a made-up creature, little person in the fairy tales. Stories say you find Kobold around Germany in many places, for many centuries. The Kobold likes jokes, but sometimes very bad jokes, dangerous things for it to scare people. It lives in below ground, in mines, but it likes rockets, too.”

“No shit,” said an astonished Artie.

“It is true,” said Dora. “They said, when the rockets did not work at Peenemünde, they blow up or fall over, you know, or go up but come down very close to the launch place and everybody run, that the Kobold is the blame. He pulls wires, breaks things, makes the rocket dangerous. He is a bad little creature, worse than politicians.”

The last line brought a faint chuckle from the crowd. Sgt. Sherman snapped a cigarette butt from his fingers. “Good bedtime story, Eva Braun,” he said. “You’re good, I gotta hand it to ya.” Several guys and Jane glared at him, but the warning looks were wasted.

“I don’t believe it,” said Sorenson, shaking his head. “There really is such a thing as a rocket gremlin. A German one, too.”

“Well, there hasn’t been hide nor hair of any kobold around here,” said Nathan, lifting his soft cap to set it farther back on his head. “This baby’s number eight in a perfect series. They’ve all been golden so far, not a single—”

“Well, the first V-2 that went up, the one back in April, that was a dud,” Jane interrupted. “The graphite steering vane under fin number four broke off, the trim tab couldn’t handle it so then the whole fin tore away. That’s why it rolled over at three miles and… hey, why is everyone looking at me now?”

“Jesus,” said Nathan in amazement, “how in the hell does a chick like you know so much?”

“One minute!” rang the outside loudspeakers. “All range personnel take shelter immediately—repeat, take shelter immediately!”

Jane and Dora stuck their fingers in their ears moments before the deafening howl of the air-raid sirens killed all conversation. The men in the shelter grimaced and hunched their shoulders until it ended half a minute later.

The moment the siren’s wail fell, everyone except Sgt. Sherman and Luhrman got to their feet and joined Artie and Moreno at the three narrow windows facing the launch pad. Seven pairs of binoculars were raised and adjusted.

“Twenty seconds!”

“Kiss the sky for me, baby,” whispered Artie to the V-2. “Show the foo fighters we’re rollin’ too.”

“What the hell,” said Sherman, getting to his feet. He stamped out the butt he threw away earlier. “I’m gonna watch from outside.”

“Hey!” shouted the Chinese Tech. “You can’t go out there! They’ll rip those stripes right off you!”

“If they see me,” said Sherman. He opened the shelter door and left, closing it behind him.

“That big dumb fuck,” growled Nathan, who then noticed Jane looking at him with amusement. “Oh. Pardon my French.”

Jane laughed. “I didn’t know that was—”

“Ten seconds!”

Jane and Nathan forgot their conversation as they hastily lifted their binoculars and tried to get good viewing spots at a window.

“Seven! Six! Five! Four! Ignition! Two! One—”

Searing white flame blasted away at concrete and steel, kicking up boiling clouds of black smoke four stories high. The V-2 on the pad was eclipsed in moments. Jane held her breath and waited, raising her binoculars to scan for sight of the rocket. When its white nose broke through the top of the smoke column, she squealed in delight. She was hardly aware of the delayed roar that came next, a bone-rattling rumble of air and ground scorched by fast-burning fuel, a massive hammer of air pressure as a full twenty-five tons of thrust was reached and the rocket lifted away, and then the fading crackle as the checkered V-2 rose higher and higher. Its climb was finally blocked from view by the small size of the windows and the steel plates poised to drop over the openings in case of disaster.

“Stay inside!” yelled Sorenson. “Everyone stay inside until it's well away!”

“Go, bitch, go!” Artie screamed out the window. “Haul that sweet ass all the way to space! Yaaa-hooo!”

“That motherfucker was highballin’!” gasped Nathan in a dazed voice. “I never seen anything like that before! Holy shit!” Sweat ran in rivers down his face and soaked into his khaki shirt.

Jane lowered her now-useless binoculars and stuck an arm out at Dora, who solemnly linked her arm with Jane’s at the elbows. At the same moment, the two girls gave each other a thumb’s up and smiled broadly.

“I don’t hear the Sherman Tank screaming,” said Xiangdong, “so I think it’s safe to go outside now.”

“Hey!” cried Sorenson. “You just said they could nail us for that!”

“Everyone else is out,” said Xiangdong, pointing out a window. Indeed, it appeared others were abandoning their shelters across the base to look up at the ascending missile. “Just stay close to the shelter.”

Jane and Dora were outside in moments. They craned their heads back to watch the tiny flame atop a great pillar of gray-black smoke as it approached the cloud cover. Moments later, the rocket went into the clouds and was gone from view.

“Glad you could join me,” said Sgt. Sherman. He had lit another cigarette and was leaning against the back of his MP Jeep by one of the whip aerials.

“I dunno, Tommy,” said Xiangdong, giving the sky a last look. “One of these days you’re going to tempt fate one time too many.”

Sherman laughed and coughed. “Live fast, have fun, stay cool, die young,” he said. “Good enough for Tommy Sherman.”

Jane sighed and let her binoculars dangle free on their neck cord. She caught Nathan giving her an admiring top-to-bottom look.

“You’re not eighteen, are you?” he asked.

“Depends on who’s counting,” said Jane, playing the flirt. “What’s on your mind?”

“Hey,” said Dora. She was still watching the clouds overhead with binoculars. “I think I saw lightning.”

“Saw lightning?” Artie looked up and frowned. “Nah, that’s just a sheet of cumulus, it’s not a rain cloud.”

“I saw it, too,” said Pvt. Moreno, watching the sky without binoculars. He shaded his eyes. “Kinda looked like a flash.”

Everyone looked upward. “I don’t see anything,” said Artie.

The base loudspeakers all clicked on at once. “Attention, all rangehead personnel. Attention, all rangehead personnel. Telemetry with Vehicle Number Eight has been lost. Stand by.”

The nine of them took a moment to digest the news.

“Der Kobold,” Dora whispered. Her face was white.

“I hope not, kid,” said Luhrman, now anxious.

“Sump’in’s wrong,” said Moreno. “I can feel it.”

The loudspeakers erupted. “Attention, all rangehead personnel. Radar is now tracking multiple targets in the vicinity of Vehicle Number Eight. Repeat, radar—”

“Oh, fuckin’ hell,” breathed Artie as he scanned the clouds.

“—is tracking multiple targets in the vicinity—”

A distant rumble of thunder could be heard, then one deep, jarring BOOM that rattled everything on the base for long seconds.

“—of Vehicle Number Eight. All rangehead personnel should stand by.”

“Does anybody see it?” yelled Sorenson. “Does anybody see anything? Does it look like it’s coming back downrange or—”

Dora gasped aloud and cried, “Scheisse!”

Jane did not recall if she said anything when she saw it. Hundreds of spots of flickering yellow light suddenly fell out of the gray cloud ceiling, each leaving a long trail of smoke and flame behind it. The burning debris covered an area thousands of feet in diameter.

“It’s right overhead!” screamed Xiangdong. “Everyone get the fuck out of here!”

 

(to be continued)

 

 

 

Rocket Girls: Bibliography