Racing the Moon

by Alan Armstrong

  The loudspeaker droned on: “Procedure fifty.” Pause. “Check. Procedure fifty-one.”

  Off to the right was a low cinder block box with a few small rectangular openings, each the size of a shoebox. “Flight control,” Chuck whispered.

  Then: “Look, Alex!” A few yards beyond were the big radar dishes they were looking for—the Dopplers.

  “Oh, man,” she sighed, all the air going out of her at once. They were like giant eyes, insect eyes, monster eyes for the towering white wasp.

  A uniformed operator stood to one side of the closest radar dish, his hands resting on the aiming wheel he would use to keep the dish focused on the missile as it rose.

  Alex couldn’t help it. The hat on the stick began weaving and twitching.

  The operator noticed and started yelling.

  “Forward, march!” Chuck bawled.

  They began moving toward the cinder block box, Chuck marching stiff and formal, Alex stumbling to get in step as Chuck roared out the song, Jeep striding alongside, tail up—

  “From the Halls of Montezuma

  To the shores of Tripoli

  We fight our country’s battles

  In the air, on land, and sea …”

  23

  TO THE SHORES OF TRIPOLI

  “Hey! Halt! What are you doing here?”

  They stopped, Alex marching in place with Chuck now, singing with him as loud as she could to drown out her fear:

  “From the Halls of Montezuma …” Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp … “To the shores of Tripoli …”

  A short, bullet-headed man and two others with pistols drawn circled around, blinding them with their flashlights. Alex put on the hat and pulled it down to shield her eyes. Then she reached out to steady Jeep.

  “From the Halls of Montezuma …” Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp …

  “Shut up! Stop moving!”

  Alex stood still.

  “Take off his hat,” Bullet Head ordered.

  The soldier, a private, lifted it off and held it away from himself as if it were a rotten fish.

  “She’s a girl!” he exclaimed. “A kid.”

  “Give it back,” Alex cried. “I borrowed it!”

  Jeep growled as his ruff went up.

  Bullet Head backed away. “You keep a holt of that dog!”

  He turned to Chuck. “Who are you? Whaddya think you doing?”

  Alex was shaking with excitement, but she wasn’t scared now. It was just like they had planned. She felt like she was watching a play, except that she was also acting in the play and had no idea what her next lines were going to be.

  “We-want-to-watch-the-launch,” Chuck declared slowly in a loud, flat voice mocking the loudspeaker.

  The private gave him a close look. “He’s crazy.”

  “Like heck,” said Bullet Head. “Fronts for commie spies. Pat ’em down!”

  “Nothing on either one,” the private said when he finished. “They don’t seem to have a dime between them, Sarge, or anything else.”

  “Old commando trick,” Bullet Head said. “Concealing identity. Take ’em over to the bunker.”

  “Launch procedure sixty-three. Check.”

  Chuck squeezed Alex’s hand. “ ‘Matilda’ this time.”

  As they started moving they began marching and singing again, louder than before—

  “Waltzing Matilda …” Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp. Jeep parading along beside them.

  The flight control bunker was separated from the gantry by the blast shield. It was crowded with men in military uniforms and others in business suits with name tags and binoculars hung around their necks. Men in fatigues sat at control desks against the wall studying monitor screens and instruments.

  As they entered, Jeep balked and looked up at Alex. They both smelled food.

  “Launch procedure sixty-five. Check.”

  “We got intruders here!” Bullet Head yelled as he motioned to the private to push the captives in.

  Everybody turned to stare.

  “Launch procedure seventy. Check.”

  “Halt!”

  As Alex and Chuck marched in place, flakes of caked mud fell onto the floor like they were shedding.

  “Stand still!”

  The captain looked about their father’s age. He had pens and a slide rule stuck in his khaki shirt pocket. There were sweat stains under his arms. Alex took him for an engineer. He got their names, then studied them so closely Alex could feel his heat.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “We want to watch the launch,” Chuck said louder than he needed to. “We want to see the rocket go up and watch the radar working. I’m a student of space.”

  “Me too,” Alex said.

  “Where’re you from?”

  “Silver Spring, Maryland,” Chuck answered.

  “How’d you get here?”

  Chuck kept answering. “Sailed down the Potomac from DC, then out to Tangier. This afternoon we caught the mail boat to Crisfield, hitched a ride to Chincoteague, and, uh, got ourselves over here.”

  “How?”

  “Swam, waded.”

  “Sure. Who brought you over?”

  Chuck shook his head. “Nobody.”

  “So you borrowed or stole a boat,” the captain said, squinting at Chuck as if to understand him better.

  “Launch procedure eighty-three. Check.”

  The captain shook his head like he was trying to clear it.

  “Lieutenant,” he ordered, “radio the Coast Guard to check around the island for the boat these folks used. Then get the FBI to send somebody over to collect ’em.”

  FBI! Alex felt a surge of panic. Will they arrest us like spies in the newspapers? She fought to stay calm.

  The captain turned back to Chuck.

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “And you?” he said to Alex.

  “Twelve.”

  “You in school?”

  Alex stood at attention and nodded like she’d seen prisoners do in the movies. “Sixth grade, sir! Parkside Elementary, sir! Silver Spring, Maryland, sir!”

  The captain puckered back a smile. “Same as my daughter,” he muttered. “And you?” he said to Chuck.

  “I finished high school June a year ago. Blair. I started at Tech but had to leave. I’ve done the National Radio Institute course. I want to work with radar.…”

  “Have you ever done anything like this before?”

  “I’ve been picked up a couple of times for trespassing.”

  “Seems to be your habit,” the captain said. “Where?”

  “Washington. Climbing the WTOP tower, checking the broadcast waves,” Chuck said proudly. “Then trying out an airplane.”

  The captain’s eyebrows went up. “Airwaves to airplanes to rockets. There’s an escalating pattern here. Did you come alone—I mean, you and your sister?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Alex, determined to have a voice in things.

  The lieutenant was talking on his radio nearby. Suddenly he was speaking louder: “Hart, I said. Hart. H-A-R-T. H-Harry, A-Alpha, R-Romeo, T-Tango. I said, see if you can get anything on them. Yeah, we got ’em here in custody. Come get them.”

  Chuck nudged Alex. “From now on,” he whispered, “you’re H-Harry, A-Alpha, R-Romeo, T-Tango.”

  Another officer came over to report to the captain. “Discovered where they got in, sir, and Coast Guard reports finding the boat they must have used. They were out looking for it. Belongs to Mr. Brownlowe on Chincoteague, reported missing a couple of hours ago. Folks saw two kids stealing it from Cousin Marge’s.”

  “OK,” said the captain. “Well, we’re not going to stop the launch on account of two muddy trespassers. But launch or no launch, I want a work detail out there right now securing that fence!”

  “Launch procedure eighty-six. Check.”

  Bullet Head started pushing Alex and Chuck into a corner.

  “Might as well let ’em watch,”
the captain called. “They worked hard enough to get here. And get ’em blankets. Wrap ’em up. Better yet, send ’em to the shower, Sarge. Laundry soap—the strongest you got! They’re filthy! Get ’em to wash the dog too, and give ’em dry clothes.”

  Bullet Head’s face fell. The captain read his mind. “You’ve got time, Sarge. Launch won’t be for another twenty, thirty minutes.”

  When Bullet Head herded his prisoners back in they looked scrubbed and awkward, shuffling in baggy GI gear and boots too big. Jeep rushed around shaking himself dry in frenzied spasms, rubbing up against posts and table legs.

  “Cap’n,” Bullet Head called. “There’s more pairs of those binoculars the contractor folks been passing out? These kids could use them.”

  “Go ask the gent over there,” the captain answered, pointing to a man in a business suit. “He’s been handing ’em out as souvenirs.”

  “Launch procedure one-hundred-fourteen. Check.”

  The food they’d smelled when they came in was set out on a table against the back wall. Jeep went over to it, wagging hard.

  Bullet Head called to the captain again. “Dog’s hungry, sir.”

  “So feed him. You kids hungry too?” the captain asked.

  Alex and Chuck nodded.

  “Launch procedure one-hundred-sixteen. Check.”

  “So eat.”

  The three of them were stuffing down hush puppies, fried oysters, and spicy crab cakes when suddenly Alex stiffened. A big man in coveralls came in with a couple of others. They looked like mechanics. The big one lit a cigarette as the captain joined them.

  “Chuck! It’s him!” Alex whispered. “VB’s here.”

  Chuck squared his shoulders and took a deep breath.

  “Sir!” he bellowed as loud as he could.

  The room hushed. Everyone—including the big man—looked over.

  “Herr Doktor von Braun! Ebbs sent me!”

  24

  MOON GIRL RISING

  Von Braun came over. He stared at Chuck, then Alex, his blue eyes cold, probing.

  “You,” he said, pointing to Alex, “you, I know. You are Louise Hart’s daughter, the one who watches for the weather balloons. You showed me your Moon Station. But who is this other one?”

  “My brother.”

  “Ah. The inventor who does escapades,” VB murmured as he studied Chuck closely. “You do not look related.”

  “We’re not,” Chuck said. “Thank you for the theodolite,” he added.

  Von Braun gave him a sharp look. “Do you use it?”

  “All the time. We ditched the compass like you said.”

  VB nodded a little. “So what do you mean, Ebbs sent you? What do you do here?”

  “She didn’t exactly,” Alex started to explain, but Chuck drowned her out.

  “I’m a student of space,” he said loudly. “I want to see the rocket and the radar. I want to help you. I want to see the launch and watch the Dopplers, see how they work tracking the rocket.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to go up in one of your rockets. Out, I mean. Fly for you. Meanwhile, I want to make radar dishes.”

  VB’s eyes narrowed. “Radar? Why radar?”

  “Because I want to see what’s coming at me.”

  “And Ebbs sent you to break in here and maybe get shot so you can see the radars?”

  “It’s not her fault!” Alex cried. “All she did was get us to Tangier in her sailboat. She said she’d heard they were testing rockets on Wallops and maybe there’d be a launch. We were going to watch from Tangier, but it’s too far away—we wouldn’t see anything—so we came over on our own. Ebbs didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Suddenly the loudspeaker blared, “Holding! Holding! Holding!”

  “Sir!” a mechanic called, rushing up. “The coolant return line—it’s plugged.”

  Von Braun and the others hurried out to the launch platform, Chuck and Alex following so close Bullet Head couldn’t snatch them back.

  A few minutes later von Braun and the engineers were huddled over a drawing of the valve. Alex and Chuck wormed in beside them.

  “It’s like the picture in my science book,” Alex whispered. “It looks like one of the flaps in a person’s heart that keeps pumped blood from flowing back.”

  Von Braun nodded. “So perhaps the valve is stuck shut?” he asked no one in particular.

  The man who had given Alex and Chuck the binoculars stepped forward, the blood gone from his face.

  “We tested and tested, sir, but I’ll call and have another one sent up.”

  “Maybe it’s just jammed,” Chuck whispered. “Let’s cut it out of the line and see. I can free it up if the problem’s what I think—a bit of metal pinning the flap. We can clear it, then thread the repair back in.”

  Von Braun pinched his lips together and nodded. He turned to the captain. “The mechanics and plumbers on the base can cut out the section for us, yes?”

  The captain shifted uncomfortably. “Uh, Doctor, doing that fix on the gantry while the rocket is sitting there live is risky. Even if we do it, if the line fails on ignition there could be an explosion. It would be safer to scrub the launch and replace the whole thing.”

  Von Braun’s eyes were like steel drills. “Captain, I asked if we can do what this boy just described.”

  The captain reddened. “Cut out the valve section and then plumb it back in place? Yes, sir, we can do that.”

  Von Braun looked away. “Tonight we have a good launch window. Tomorrow, not so good … And your part,” he said, turning to the ghastly-looking contractor, “we would get it—when?”

  “We—we’ll fly it right up from Texas,” he stammered. “Have it here tomorrow afternoon, for sure.”

  Chuck locked eyes with von Braun. “What’s to lose trying my fix?” he asked.

  “What’s to lose?” von Braun repeated slowly. “That’s the big American idea, isn’t it? Well, what’s to lose is the explosion the captain is worried about, but that never enters your head any more than what you risked sneaking in here with her and maybe getting both of you killed.”

  Von Braun looked away again, then nodded and turned to the captain. “Do the fix. I take responsibility.”

  He turned to Chuck. “So we try it. Her official name is Boojum, but if our rocket goes up we call her the What’s to Lose.”

  “No, Doctor,” Alex interjected. “She’s the Moon Girl, and she’s gonna fly just fine!”

  It took a while to drain the broken line. Then the plumber began sawing. That didn’t take long at all.

  Von Braun took hold of the cut section as it came clear, held it up to the light, then bent down and tapped an end on the pavement. A sliver of metal fell out.

  It took an hour for the mechanics to thread the four pipe ends and fit on the two connectors. At last, they had the piece threaded back in. The flight controllers slowly restored pressure to the line and tested it against backflow. The valve worked; the repair joints held.

  Von Braun smiled as he gave the signal. “Resume countdown at procedure one-hundred-forty-one.”

  When they cleared procedure 160, they pushed away the rocket’s embracing gantry. She’s on her own now, Alex thought. The official began the final countdown. Folks in the bunker bent over, cowering against the blast to come, but Alex didn’t. When the voice said “Zero,” von Braun pressed the large red IGNITE button. There was a blinding flash, then a shattering rolling roar that seemed to inhabit Alex and then felt like it was swallowing her as searing light blanketed everything. Alex squinted, holding her breath as she watched the rocket. For a long instant it seemed to hang trembling and uncertain above its billowing motors. Then slowly, slowly, then faster and faster it rose in a shocking magnificence of swirling white flame like a bride preceding a long windblown train, Alex screaming and cheering as hard as she could.

  Chuck’s eyes were on the closest radar dish as the operator shielded his eyes from the glare with one hand and spun the aimin
g wheel with the other, pointing the dish as the missile rose like a glowing meteor.

  “On course,” came the voice over the loudspeaker as folks in the bunker applauded von Braun. Weak but exhilarated, Alex was somewhere between laughing and crying. We did it, she sobbed to herself. We did it!

  Minutes later Moon Girl was all done with, the perfect flight over as her glowing hot core plopped into the Atlantic a hundred miles downrange with a burst of steam that must have cooked every jellyfish around.

  It would be hours before there would be flight data for von Braun to study. For the moment he could breathe easy. Except for the matter of Chuck and Alex.

  25

  CHUCK’S GENIUS

  Jeep rested comfortably, stuffed and tired at Alex’s feet, as von Braun questioned the trespassers. “All in one day, with the dog, you two sail from Smith Point in Virginia out to Tangier Island, you meet a friend there and eat, then you stow away on the mail boat to Crisfield, then you hitchhike and eat again and steal a boat, then you run out of fuel and you wade ashore and break in here—our most secure missile base—singing and marching, and you do not get shot, they just give you soap and clothes and feed you again and give you binoculars? Is it possible?”

  “It’s what we did,” Alex said proudly, “and on the way I got seasick and the boom knocked me into the water and I got burned by jellyfish. But it wasn’t Ebbs who sent us here,” she added, looking over at Chuck. “Getting to Wallops was our idea.”

  “Mine mostly,” Chuck said.

  The FBI launch arrived with a roar and a great splashing wake to take the interlopers off the island. It was a sleek mahogany runabout. As it docked, the tied-up navy boats nearby rocked like drab pigeons next to a peacock. The plainclothes agents were armed, certain they were collecting spies. The one in charge was shocked when he saw his prisoners.

  “A pair of strays,” the captain explained, giving the chief a bland smile. “Landed here by accident. Out fishing, ran out of gas, came ashore at the closest place, which is here. No breach of security, nothing criminal, no record. All we need you for is to give ’em a ride back to Chincoteague.”