Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘I spent three years of my life trying to work it so that these men got to America and not into an early grave. I know every one of them. I know every record, every black mark and every white. And I certify that they were needed. They’re needed now. And they will be needed in the future. Without them we might have stood naked in space.

  ‘What is more important in the matters that you have been discussing today—the question of their loyalty now and their cleanliness in the past—I also certify these men. I know them better than I know my own son.’

  It was because of testimony like this, often repeated, that Stanley Mott became known throughout the government and the Army as Professor Krauthead. He laughed when his wife told him of the nickname, and admitted that he deserved it: ‘At college—no, even in high school—I was often laughed at because I always had single objectives. I was known as a straight arrow. With some people that’s a term of criticism. Not with me.’

  ‘Where is the arrow pointing now?’ she asked.

  ‘Out there,’ he said, indicating the heavens.

  ‘You think it’s that important?’

  ‘Even more than you can guess.’

  ‘Isn’t it because you were assigned the job of finding these men?’

  ‘It goes much further back than that.’

  ‘You certainly didn’t read science fiction as a boy?’ she asked, amusement echoing in her voice.

  ‘I’ve never read any. But I did study aeronautics, you remember. And what I study, I tend to believe. If it stands inspection.’

  ‘You really believe that aviation and rockets and space are critically important?’

  ‘In our lifetime we’ll leave El Paso at nine in the morning and have late lunch in Paris. I or somebody like me will walk on the Moon.’

  ‘What nonsense.’

  ‘Von Braun doesn’t think so. Nor Stuhlinger. Nor Dieter Kolff.’

  ‘Sit down, Stanley. I want to ask you something very important.’

  They sat near the window, staring out at the row of low buildings that housed the Germans, most of whose men were up at White Sands testing an improved version of the A-4. Of the hundredfold Peenemünde rockets that had been assembled in New Mexico, only five remained; all the rest had been shot into the air northward toward Carrizozo, often exploding, as they had in the Baltic, sometimes performing miraculously.

  Rachel shot her question: ‘Stanley, do you think it prudent to defend the Germans as vigorously as you do? In public, I mean.’

  ‘You told me you’d grown extremely fond of them.’

  ‘I have, and I’ve tried to help them. But how do you know they weren’t all dedicated Nazis? How can you certify their credentials so unhesitatingly?’

  ‘Some of them I refused to certify, and they’re back in Germany.’

  ‘But Von Braun and Kolff, weren’t they Nazis, too? Don’t we have proof that Hitler gave Kolff a medal, personally?’

  ‘We’ve been all through that. Dieter Kolff traveled halfway across Germany to hand me the secret papers. In helping us to avoid simple engineering mistakes, I would judge Kolff to have been worth about three billion dollars to this country.’

  ‘I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about you, making a fool of yourself if this blows up in your face. If they all turn out to have been Nazi criminals.’

  When he started to defend his judgment and his tactics, she cut him short with the one question he could not easily answer: ‘All right, I’ll give you Von Braun and Kolff. But what about General Funkhauser?’

  ‘I thought he was your buddy.’

  ‘He is. I’ve grown to like him very much. But I also suspect he was a Nazi and maybe even a storm trooper.’

  Mott pressed his hands against his temples, a gesture he had acquired in Georgia when test questions were unusually perplexing. ‘I’ve studied every aspect of the Funkhauser problem, and I come up with this. He obeyed but he did not initiate, and at the first opportunity he quit the sorry business.’

  When congressmen pestered him about Funkhauser he reiterated that sentence until he came to accept it as the fundamental judgment regarding all his Germans. Jewish groups had come to Fort Bliss with solid complaints, and he had reasoned the same way with them. And the FBI, extremely careful in such matters, had compiled a rather damaging dossier: ‘These papers prove your man Funkhauser was a Nazi criminal.’

  They do nothing of the sort,’ Mott snapped. ‘Look at what the papers say. He was a reasonably good administrator who bumbled along from one job to the next, altering his colors whenever necessary. Study the record and you’ll conclude that he can be characterized as absolutely anything.’

  ‘How do you characterize him, Professor Mott?’

  ‘As a man whose courage and determination enabled us to get hold of documents we sorely needed for the safety of this nation. If I defend him, it’s because I appreciate the great good he did us.’

  ‘Would you be content if we shipped him back to Germany?’

  ‘I would oppose it with my life. In very risky times, Helmut Funkhauser chose our side. If caught, he would have been shot.’

  ‘A rat deserting a sinking ship.’

  ‘Exactly, but, gentlemen, he brought with him one whopping piece of cheese.’

  The day came when two Army generals and an FBI team appeared at Fort Bliss. As was expected, the Motts were asked to summon the Kolffs, and when the party assembled, a young FBI man said succinctly, ‘We have solid evidence on every stage of Helmut Funkhauser’s life in Germany. We know the date on which he sentenced you to death, Herr Kolff, the date on which he flew you to meet Hitler. We know that he was appointed to supervise the rocket works at Peenemünde, and what he did at the caves of Nordhausen. There is nothing you can tell us, except for the few months that are blank.’ He stopped, and was about to conclude his statement when one of the generals took over.

  ‘The period between when you left Peenemünde and when you met Professor Mott.’ He waited. ‘Tell us what happened in that period.’

  Dieter and Liesl Kolff looked at one another, and finally she spoke, in broken English, and she was so nervous that one of the FBI men said in good German, ‘You may speak German.’

  She looked at him but did not smile appreciatively, as he thought she might. She frowned, for she saw in this young man with the close-cropped hair, the dark blue suit, the highly polished black shoes, America’s version of the perpetual policeman: the SS who knocked on doors at night; the French Sǔreté men she had known while waiting for her boat at Le Havre; the Russians whom she had escaped. They were the same in all nations, essential but to be avoided. If General Funkhauser, regardless of his record, was in trouble with these young men, she had to be on Funkhauser’s side.

  Slowly, and with great care, she told of hiding the papers, of her marriage to Dieter in the little church at Wolgast, of their flight after the bombing and their encounter with Funkhauser. She did not disclose the sentence of death passed in Wittenberge or the emotions she felt when facing the firing squad, but she expounded at some length on the courage shown by Funkhauser in getting them across Germany and his resourcefulness in finding them food and safe passage, and places to sleep at night.

  ‘He was a very brave man,’ she said. ‘Without him we would have been dead.’

  ‘Did you know him to be a Nazi?’

  ‘My father was a Nazi. He had to be or he would get no barley.’

  ‘But wasn’t General Funkhauser a hard-working Nazi?’

  ‘I never knew him at Peenemünde. First time I saw him, he was city commander at Wittenberge. Trying to do a good job. But he gave up that important post to flee with us … to take the secret documents to the Americans.’

  ‘Herr Kolff,’ the FBI man said abruptly. ‘You haven’t answered my questions. Did you and your wife agree that she should do the talking?’

  In English, Dieter said, ‘She always speaks first. She’s a farmer’s daughter.’

  ‘Is what she said accurate?’
The FBI man studied his papers. ‘Were you really married in the church at Wolgast?’

  ‘A woman ought to know where she was married.’

  ‘About Funkhauser. Was he an ardent Nazi?’

  ‘He was. I was present when Hitler promoted him to general.’

  ‘And gave you a medal?’

  ‘Hitler appreciated me for the same reason your people do. I can fix rockets, that’s all.’

  ‘What did you think when General Funkhauser sentenced you to death at Stettin?’

  ‘He was a colonel then. I thought I was dead.’

  ‘Why weren’t you?’

  ‘Because Germany needed rockets. The way the world needs them now.’

  ‘If you were an American official, would you allow General Funkhauser to remain in this country?’

  Before Dieter could reply, his wife did a surprising thing. ‘Pardon me, misters. But you must see what General Funkhauser did for us.’ And she pulled up her skirt, revealing on her left leg above the knee a deep, jagged scar. ‘In a small battle I was shot through this leg, and the general could have grabbed the papers and gone ahead and escaped without us. But he put me on his bicycle and pushed me the last miles, and Professor Mott can say so, too, for he lifted me off the bicycle.’ Looking directly at each of the FBI men in turn, she said, ‘I would give him refuge.’

  It was irrelevant, really, what the Kolffs testified, because the matter of The United States v. Funkhauser was taken out of the hands of the little group in Fort Bliss. On one of his trips to California, General Funkhauser had met with leaders of the aviation and rocket industry that was centered in that state, and he was so impressive in his knowledge of rocketry and its manufacture, so modest in his account of how he had steered Von Braun around seemingly insuperable blockages, that very soon three different companies wanted to hire him.

  California senators tend to be powerful, and when they went to the White House to say that their constituents, five or six of them, wanted to employ this master scientist Funkhauser, he was cleared immediately. The general left Fort Bliss in a private DC-3 and returned some years later in his own Beechcraft. He was a troubleshooter for Allied Aviation, specializing in their rocket and space ventures.

  Liesl Kolff submerged herself in the reassuring routine of El Paso, and one morning she was told, ‘Mrs. Kolff, you may accompany your husband to White Sands today. Something special.’

  She was present, at a goodly distance, when the last complete A-4 in the world was launched with an infinity of recording devices aboard. She saw the enormous flames shoot out and heard the echoing roar. She watched as it climbed perfectly into the high blue of the desert sky, then sped off to the north. How different this treeless desert is, she thought, from the green woods of Peenemünde. What a far way we have traveled, Dieter and I.

  She gave birth to a son, whom she named Magnus, after Von Braun’s younger brother, and surprised everyone at Fort Bliss when she spoke loudly and forthrightly in defense of Wernher von Braun when newspapermen in Washington accused him of having been Hitler’s right-hand man: ‘We are all Americans now, even General Funkhauser, and I want to hear no more about the past. The last A-4 is gone. Now we must occupy ourselves with other matters.’

  She and Dieter remained close to the Motts; she babysat for them whenever needed and refused compensation. She recognized the fair-haired Rachel as à most generous and sensible woman, and of course, both Kolffs looked on Mott as their savior.

  The four were together, veterans of Fort Bliss and completely acclimatized to life in the Texas-Mexican Southwest, when news came that the Army had decided to experiment with rockets in a massive way. Dieter and Mott were delighted, for they saw this as a breakthrough in the field they had elected for their life’s work, but the two women were apprehensive when they learned where the Army intended sending them.

  ‘Alabama,’ the soldier on the phone said. ‘A place called Huntsville, Alabama.’

  ‘Why there?’ Mott asked in amazement.

  ‘Because Senator John Sparkman lives in Huntsville,’ the soldier said. ‘And in Army life that’s a damned good reason.’

  Further investigation showed that a huge arsenal had been activated there during World War II, Redstone it had been named, and it had served well. But with peace breaking out it had been no longer needed; the Huntsville people who had worked there were thrown into the cadres of the unemployed, and it had fallen to Senator Sparkman to find them something to do. He had found them a challenging new job: these Alabama farmers, cotton pickers mostly, would build the machines that would throw men out to the stars. But to accomplish this feat they would need the help and guidance of the Peenemünde men like Dieter Kolff.

  ‘It’s what I dreamed of,’ Kolff said. Like General Funkhauser in decaying Germany, he was prepared to move wherever he was needed, and now he was needed in Alabama.

  In the dark days of the 1946 senatorial campaign, when Fremont’s naval hero Norman Grant was discovering that no mere amateur was going to defeat the practiced old warhorse Ulysses Gantling, he became aware of a rather pretty freshman girl from the university who was working as a volunteer in his headquarters, savagely determined to see the old senator defeated.

  Once when she was stuffing envelopes with obvious fury, he asked her, ‘Why the frown?’ and she replied, ‘I hate that double-crosser.’

  ‘Who?’ he asked, and she snapped: ‘Gantling.’

  ‘I never allow myself to speak of him that way,’ Grant said with a disarming smile, and she snapped again: ‘Well, he hasn’t done to you what he’s done to me.’

  Grant had sat down beside the agitated girl to ask what Senator Gantling, a rather kindly man even though a political enemy, could possibly have done to a pretty college freshman, and the girl explained: ‘He didn’t do it to me. He did it to John Pope, the mealy-mouth.’

  ‘Pope?’

  ‘No. Gantling,’ and she pretended to spit at the corner.

  Grant, after looking carefully at the flushed girl, made a shrewd guess: ‘And you hope to marry this John Pope some day?’

  ‘If he gives me a chance.’

  Grant smiled and reassured her: ‘He will. Who is he? Who are you?’

  The girl drew back, her bright eyes flashing. ‘You don’t know who John Pope is? You’re not ready to be a United States senator.’

  Now Grant laughed. He was losing the primary but not his sense of humor. ‘On my word, I’ve never heard of the young man.’

  ‘Where were you when he was setting all kinds of football records around here?’

  ‘Oh, that John Pope? I was away at war.’

  It was extremely fortunate for the future senator that he said these words, because after Penny Hardesty had introduced herself and wished the hero well, she had a bright idea: ‘If you were the hero people around here say you were, Mr. Grant, you ought to appear before the crowds in uniform. Get their sympathy.’

  ‘I’d never do that. The war’s over.’

  ‘And so are you if you don’t pull out the plug,’ She felt so strongly about the necessity for some dramatic impact in his flagging campaign that she took her concern to the bright young Irishman who seemed to be in charge of strategy, and told him, ‘Finnerty, this campaign is dying on its feet, and you know it. We’ve got to capitalize on the boss’s military heroism, or we’re going to lose.’ She shook her finger in Finnerty’s face. ‘And I don’t want to see that foul-ball Gantling back in Washington.’

  ‘I’m quite sure Norman Grant would never consent to trailing around this state in his naval uniform. That is definitely out.’

  She stood by Finnerty’s desk, biting her nails, obviously agitated by this daily erosion of what should have been a winning position. Then the idea struck her: ‘Finnerty! He doesn’t have to appear in uniform. You do.’ She became excited, and with flashing hands, arranged the imaginary podium: ‘Grant stays over here in whatever he chooses to wear. No, make it something dark blue that might be taken for a uniform. You sta
nd over here. Buy yourself a new uniform if necessary. And you read the two citations that appear in this brochure.’

  She was so enthusiastic about the possibilities that she babbled on, predicting Gantling’s sound defeat, but Finnerty stopped her: ‘What would you think if I could import a tall colored man who lost one foot to the sharks. Very handsome, speaks very well. I mean, in a state like Fremont, would it help or hurt?’

  It took Penny one second to answer that question. She leaped around the desk and kissed Finnerty on the cheek. ‘You should be running against Gantling.’ When he recalled the incident later, it occurred to him that Miss Hardesty never referred to the campaign as a crusade to elect Grant, but always as a vendetta to defeat Gantling, and one day when things were moving handsomely he asked her why. They were in a diner with their candidate, grabbing a hurried meal between stops at factories, and Penny, with her mouth half filled with cheeseburger, said, ‘I despise Gantling because he’s a spineless weasel.’ Finnerty told Grant, ‘We better keep this one away from the press.’ But she continued: ‘For four years Gantling promised John Pope that he would assign him to Annapolis. Did so twice in my hearing. But last year, even though John graduated with all sorts of honors, Gantling could see this campaign looming ahead, and he gave his appointment to the son of that crapper who’s running his campaign in Webster. On a scale often, John Pope is a nine-point-nine, that son-of-a-bitch in Webster is a two-point-three—”

  ‘Penny,’ Norman Grant interrupted. ‘I wish you’d not use profanity. Some newspaper person might hear it.’

  ‘He’s a newspaperman,’ Penny said, pointing to Finnerty.