Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Funkhauser looked in amazement at the man he had been interrogating. ‘You? What would Hitler want with you?’

  Hurriedly, Kolff picked among his scattered belongings, finding bits of clothing proper for a visit to Hitler’s retreat hidden three hundred miles to the east. ‘Have I time to shave?’ he asked, and Funkhauser grumbled, ‘On the plane.’ So the same convoy of motorcycles rushed the two men back to the north end of the island, where Funkhauser’s plane stood ready.

  Once before Dieter Kolff had met his Fuehrer, in the spring of 1944 when Hitler pinned the silver medal on his quivering chest: ‘For valiant services to the Third Reich.’

  Dieter’s performance had been of great merit to the Nazi war effort, for when the precious A-4s continued to blow up while aloft, he went almost directly from the prison cell in Stettin to a watch point on the Baltic coast northeast of that city, and there, in the heart of the area on which the defective rockets fell, he stationed himself with binoculars and camera, awaiting the next test shots.

  For the first time he saw the mighty machine from the recipient’s point of view: a monstrous silver torpedo, beautifully proportioned, leaping through the sky as if impatient to reach its target, silent at first, then with resounding cracks as it broke through the sound barrier, disappearing as quickly and mysteriously as it had come, for it was traveling at a speed of one mile per second. It was therefore nothing like an airplane, and eyes that were adjusted to planes had little chance of even seeing an A-4.

  But it was Dieter’s job to see, and since the rocket slowed perceptibly when it started its erratic dive, bearing in its nose a ton of Trialen, many times more destructive than TNT, it was just possible to watch its performance. And as he did so, he identified the trouble. ‘What seems to happen,’ he told Von Braun, ‘is that when the engine cuts out, enormous pressures accumulate in the chamber, and the sides blow out.’

  ‘What can be done about that?’ the master asked.

  ‘Simple! We wrap a steel band around the rocket at the critical point. Bind it together.’

  ‘Won’t that slow the speed? Aerodynamically?’

  ‘Slightly. Very slightly. But that’s the price you pay for safe delivery.’

  When Kolff’s simple device was installed, eighteen out of nineteen trial runs succeeded, and the A-4 was ready to strike at London. Hitler had been overjoyed, because he had foreseen in a dream that this instrument of destruction was going to win the war for him. First London, and when the English were battered to their knees, fifty even more powerful rockets every day into the heart of Moscow, or whatever other city the Russians held.

  ‘And this is the little fellow who won the war for us?’ Hitler had said when facing Kolff at the Berlin ceremonies. It had been a stupefying period: one day facing death in a Stettin prison; the next receiving a silver medal from the hands of Hitler himself. Now, engaged in traitorous activity against the day of Germany’s defeat, he could not even guess what might lie in wait at Wolf’s Lair.

  The little plane sped eastward, keeping well north of Stettin, then along the very coast which Dieter had guarded, waiting for the next A-4 to explode before his eyes, then south of Danzig, which had once borne the shameful Polish name of Gdańsk but never again, and out into one of the romantic and secret places of Europe, the vast Masurian Lakes, each with a shoreline of radiant beauty and mystery.

  In the heart of this region, not far from the Prussian town of Rastenberg, Adolf Hitler had built the gigantic subterranean center from which he intended to conquer the world. It was called, in German, Wolfschanze and was indeed a lair from which ferocious beasts could prowl, destroying society’s flocks.

  Nothing had been done by accident. Near Wolf’s Lair there was no airfield, nor was there any conspicuous railroad. No big roads were allowed, with the result that Allied scout planes had searched for the hiding place a hundred times without ever identifying it. Yet hidden in the woods was a complete city, constructed of gigantic concrete cubes with steel-reinforced ceilings sixteen and seventeen feet thick. Had the enemy scout planes spotted the place, the following bombers would have done little damage, for not even the famous Tallboys of the RAF could have penetrated those ponderous shelters.

  Colonel Funkhauser’s plane landed at a well-camouflaged airstrip many miles from the Lair, and in a small car he and Kolff were whisked down country roads hidden by trees. When they reached the center of the establishment, a concealed city of some twenty thousand, Kolff recognized the infamous bunker in which, a few months earlier, the dissident generals had tried to assassinate Hitler. He was familiar with the monstrous structure because after the attempt, Colonel Funkhauser had assembled all the workmen at Peenemünde to warn them: ‘Now you’re going to see what happens to traitors who try to take action against the Third Reich.’

  Funkhauser had screened the newsreels made by Goebbels of the conspirators’ trial: a three-man banc of judges, all Nazi stalwarts without legal training, had screamed at the accused, reviling them and castigating them day after day. In the end, all were found guilty and some were hung from rafters like carcasses of mutton, with jagged hooks piercing their necks and brains. The film showed them struggling as the cattle hooks worked their way in. Others were suspended with piano wire about their necks; when they squirmed, the wire cut their heads off. Kolff had been one of the men who had vomited. Now he was at the center of this madness.

  But when Hitler appeared, smallish, thin, dramatic in general appearance, Kolff, like all other Germans present, was eager to assist him. They saw him as a leader in trouble, a man endeavoring to do his best for Germany, and he merited the love of his people. All the monstrous misbehavior of his underlings was forgotten and forgiven when the man himself stood forth, quiet, hesitant, smiling in his weary way, pleading for support.

  ‘Kolff, tell me. What is the future of the A-4?’

  ‘My Fuehrer, you know that with the ones that we’re firing on London from Wassenaar in Holland—’

  ‘I know about that. So do the English.’

  ‘We’re getting twenty-nine out of thirty excellent firings. I do believe the problems that halted us for so long—’

  Hitler, weary of the continual excuses, abruptly ordered that lunch be brought: for the others a rich chicken stew with dumplings; for himself mixed vegetables lightly cooked and a large bottle of Fachingen mineral water. As they ate he asked in a sudden change of subject, ‘Kolff, have you ever been to Nordhausen?’

  ‘Not yet, sir.’

  ‘I want you to go. With Breutzl dead, you know more about production than any of the others. See if they’re on the right track.’ When he rose to stride up and down beneath the protective ceiling, the others rose, too, but he bade them be seated.

  ‘Now, General Funkhauser …’

  ‘General?’

  ‘Yes. You’re now in charge of all A-4 rocketry. Peenemünde, Nordhausen, Wassenaar. We’ve had enough of scientists. Now we need warriors.’

  ‘I’m ready,’ General Funkhauser said in clipped accents that boded much trouble for scientists like Von Braun and his fellows.

  ‘Now tell me honestly, what’s been happening with the A-4,’ Hitler said, resuming his massive oaken chair.

  From his pocket General Funkhauser produced a slip of paper: ‘Excellent news! Five days ago, an A-4 hit a London cinema, 287 dead. Last week an A-4 hit Stepney at marketing hour, 197 dead …’ On and on he went, detailing the chance landings of chance rockets. Taken altogether they did not add up to a thousand deaths, nor to the interruption of one industrial operation. Yet the men in the subterranean center consoled themselves with the fact that the horrible English bombings of Germany were at last being revenged. General Funkhauser’s family in Hamburg had been wiped out in the terrible fire bombings of 24 July 1943, when fifty-five thousand civilians had died, and now with grim satisfaction he recited the retaliation: ‘Two weeks ago an A-4 landed in a small village near London—I had the name but forget it now—and more than ninety people were
killed.’

  Hitler rose from his chair, moved about with obvious delight, and cried, ‘We shall be revenged. Funkhauser, for every German soul that perished in your Hamburg, a thousand Englishmen will die. When we get the rockets flowing, that is.’

  He looked directly at Dieter Kolff and asked, ‘They will keep flowing, won’t they?’

  ‘That’s my job,’ Kolff said.

  ‘See that they keep working at Nordhausen,’ Hitler said, and the conference was over.

  General Funkhauser wanted very much to stop at Peenemünde to inform the insolent scientists that for the rest of the war he would be in charge, but Hitler had been so insistent that Kolff inspect Nordhausen that he deemed it prudent to fly directly to that extraordinary site, and within two and a half hours they were landing at a secret airstrip on the southern rim of the Harz Mountains. Small cars were waiting to carry them to the mouth of the tunnel that led to the underground works.

  It was like descending into hell, Kolff thought, and when he saw the appalling conditions in which the thousands of slave laborers worked—dark cells with no sunlight or ventilation or toilet facilities or food—the grandeur of Adolf Hitler at Wolf’s Lair dimmed. This was hideous, the portrait of a beleaguered nation gone underground, snarling like a pursued animal. The French prisoners who worked here, the Poles, the Dutch, the thousands of Russians, were slaves who would never again know freedom.

  It was remarkable that such an installation, more than a mile deep, with branches running in all directions, cut into the stone by other slaves now dead, could produce the intricate parts needed to make an A-4 fly, but thanks to the dictatorial control of Himmler’s SS men, it did. Slaves who would never again see the light of day forged parts which carried messages to the stars.

  ‘Can our production be maintained?’ Dieter asked, judging it to be prudent for him to show interest.

  Without attempting to answer this question, Funkhauser summoned the local manager, a brutal, scowling man who had once served as a policeman in a rural town: ‘We experience sabotage now and then. Can’t be prevented.’

  ‘How do you handle it?’ Dieter asked.

  ‘We line all the men in the section against that wall and machine-gun them.’

  ‘Don’t you lose skilled labor?’

  ‘These are minimal jobs. We get replacements by the truckload. We can teach them in one afternoon.’ He laughed. ‘They learn or we shoot them.’

  At this moment Kolff chanced to see Funkhauser’s face, and for the first time he realized that the new dictator of the A-4 program did not approve of conditions at Nordhausen, but before either of the visitors could speak, the local man said with obvious pride, ‘Look at the high quality of work we do here,’ and Dieter had to agree that it was miraculous: ‘You wonder how men in such conditions can do such fine work.’

  ‘Discipline,’ the manager said. ‘We wouldn’t dare assign German workmen to a hole like this. And the slaves we do get have to be guarded by SS men. We couldn’t trust anyone else.’

  He was eager for his new commander to see Dora, the camp where the replacement slaves were kept, and when Dieter saw this miasma, this abhorrent place with its rows of shacks, its wall where saboteurs were shot, and its incredibly filthy kitchens, he wondered why the war did not halt tomorrow, but even as he protested inwardly, it occurred to him that the conditions under which German prisoners would in future live under the Russians were apt to be equally bad, and he resolved that if he escaped he would run to the west rather than to the east.

  When the tour ended and he was alone with Funkhauser he was afraid to say what he thought of the infamous things he had just seen, but the general felt no compunction. ‘As soon as we knock out England, places like this must be eliminated. Too much wasted human capacity.’ And still Kolff kept silent, for he was thinking that any sensible observer of this war must know that throwing casual and almost accidental single rockets at London was never going to subdue that city or its allies. Good God, he thought, this is almost November, and only seventy-three rockets have hit London, with twenty-six of them landing in remote suburbs. Really, nothing had been accomplished, or would be. Wernher von Braun was right in thinking, if he did so think, that the major justification of the A-4 would be in its peaceful application, in its offering man the chance to travel outside the limitations of Earth.

  In the meantime, he would return to Peenemünde, no longer the major center of the rocket effort, and do whatever was required to stay alive under General Funkhausern monitoring eye. In his spare time he would continue his experiments on the A-10, which in years to come would be able to bomb New York and Washington, for he shared the emotions of the men at Hitler’s headquarters: Allied bombers had pulverized German cities, so Allied cities must be terror-bombed in return. It was illogical, considering his basic concern about escape, but it was understandable. He, too, wanted revenge.

  These contradictions were eliminated shortly after the turn of the year, for Russian troops moved ever closer to Peenemünde, while the Americans and English applied heavy pressure along the western front. One day Von Braun appeared unannounced at Kolff’s research hut, announcing a meeting of the leading scientists at a time when General Funkhauser would be absent from the island. It was a grim assembly, made more so by their leader’s ominous words: ‘Russian troops will be here soon. It’s inevitable. Our task is simple. Keep our cadre together. Take our papers with us. And move west to be captured by the Americans.’

  One young scientist, terribly frightened, asked, ‘Won’t we run the risk of being shot by Funkhauser?’

  Without flinching, Von Braun turned and smiled at the young fellow. ‘We run four risks of being shot. In the closing days the SS may shoot us to prevent the spread of our knowledge to other countries. Out of sheer hatred the Russians may shoot us when they arrive. The Americans may shoot us if we can’t explain things fast enough when they overrun us. And wherever we move, some damn-fool sentinel may shoot us by accident.’

  ‘But why do you choose the Americans?’ another asked.

  ‘I have never understood how the English do business. They seem to despise anyone who works for them, even their own people. I have no feeling for the French at all. They’d be too stingy to support a real space effort. The Russians? They’re abominable, and those of us who side with them will do poorly. The Americans have the money, and after they see what we’re able to do with the A-4, they’ll be willing to let us spend it in building a real space program.’

  Amazingly, more than a hundred scientists, fully realizing the risks they were taking, agreed that when the distant guns began to echo at Peenemünde, they would put together a cavalcade that would wander the face of war-torn Germany trying to find Americans to whom they could surrender. They could not know, at this painful stage of Germany’s impending defeat, that in France, Professor Stanley Mott, a practical engineer like themselves, had put together his team of experts whose job it would be to scour Germany in search of Wernher von Braun, General Eugen Breutzl and Dieter Kolff, trusting that the Germans would have sense enough to bring their papers with them. Mott had heard rumors that General Breutzl had been killed in the big air raid of 24–25 October, but he hoped that this was not correct, for it was the managerial genius of this man that would be most sorely needed during the first stages of America’s effort to build a rocket.

  When the rolling thunder of Russian artillery barrages could be heard in the south, announcing that Stettin was about to fall, the scientists of Peenemünde made their move. In large convoys of trucks, small cars and anything else that could run, they headed west toward Nordhausen and the underground horror in which their A-4s were stubbornly being fabricated, in the last wild hope that some miracle would enable them to destroy London, or at least Antwerp.

  On the day of departure, with doom darkening the sky and the mind, Dieter Kolff faced a series of difficult decisions. He realized that once aboard one of the trucks leaving Peenemünde’s island, he would have no chance
of disembarking on the mainland side to pick up Liesl. It might be practical to leave the area with the others, then double back to fetch her, but this seemed illogical. Or he could simply ride with his colleagues and forget her, but that he could not do; he loved Liesl and appreciated her heroism in sharing with him the dangers of hiding the papers. Overriding these personal considerations was the fact that whereas the trucks carried tons of documents, to keep them away from the Russians, he better than anyone else, better even than Von Braun, knew that what they carried were the simple equations, the easy solutions that any Russian or American scientist could reconstruct in a few weeks, given a real A-4 to analyze. The knapsack that Liesl had buried on her farm contained the secrets of the A-10, the rocket that could soar four thousand miles across oceans to attack other continents. These papers were irreplaceable, and to leave the area without them would be insane, so when the big trucks rolled away they left Kolff standing alone.

  After Von Braun’s team disappeared in the west, he stuffed a few valued belongings in his knapsack—a slide rule, a drawing compass, an S curve—and went to his bicycle, but before he could leave the island a member of the skeleton SS Troops commandeered him for a painful duty: ‘Himmler says we’re to blow up any remaining A-4s.’ So with great concentrations of Trialen, Dieter had to destroy the majestic engines he had helped create. Those lying partially completed on the ground were easily pulverized, but when the SS men came to the last rocket, standing upright on its pad, they did not know how to handle it, so the job was given to Dieter.

  There it stood, the last A-4 at Peenemünde. It rose sleek and silvery forty-six feet in the air, like some monstrous artillery shell waiting to be loaded. Beautifully proportioned, aerodynamically perfect, it looked as if it longed to be on its way to some distant target, its fins ready to keep it stable as it slashed through the atmosphere. It was magnificent, and it was doomed.