Patton's Spaceship (The Timeline Wars, 1)

by John Barnes

  What they might have done had they had another year or two is an open question. What they had done here, starting from scratch with miserable equipment, was nothing less than astonishing—they had to hand-build each one, and there were innumerable false starts, but they had produced a whole series of rocket engines.

  The problem was, the kind of people who could do that sort of work were exactly the kind of people who were impossible to guard. Remember what I said about hating to guard kids, except for Porter? Well, creative scientists and engineers are large kids. They want to do everything when they want to do it, and they don’t see why they can’t do it their way, because after all they’re the smartest people in the room.

  I’ve heard the theory, too, that being childlike enhances creativity. I couldn’t say, really, except to note that I was never around adults so childlike—or so creative.

  Goddard had died not long after the Free Zone was established, but Ley was here, and Wernher von Braun had escaped the Nazis to come here (partly sickened by what he saw of slave labor—he’d brought several slave workers with him—and by his own admission also because the V-1 had been such a success that long-range rocket projects had withered on the vine). There were a lot of brainy types from Hughes Aircraft, and Kelly Johnson from Lockheed was in the crowd, and some really odd characters from the Philadelphia Navy Yard who had hitchhiked to LA, missing the departure of the Pacific Fleet by no more than a few days, and then managed to sail clear to Tahiti in a stolen yacht—Bob, who picked me up, was one of that gang, and they were far and away the strangest of all.

  And my job was to keep this silly gaggle of visionaries out of trouble, because they were on the brink of giving us working ICBMs and spy satellites.

  To do this, besides myself, I had about twenty Thai and Malay cops. I got along with them all right.

  My major job most of the time was to back them up when they tried to stop some key person from doing something stupidly dangerous. The attack on Patton and Giap had not been isolated—Japanese agents had tried to get about twenty key personnel that day, and had actually badly wounded Mao Zedong, who was pretty much in retirement these days but still valuable as a symbol for the Chinese resistance. We had given them a short, succinct answer—the Arizona, and the other two submersible battleships USS Tennessee and HMS Resolution, had slipped in close to Honshu on a moonless night, surfaced, and unleashed their big guns on the harbor at Yokohama, setting fire to the dockyards and leaving many ships on fire in the harbor, during a state visit from Himmler. Reportedly dinner had not been a success.

  But the attack meant that once again the Axis was getting ready to move against us, and every such attack was a painful reminder of the fact that the Free Zone had once been almost a fifth of the Earth’s surface, even after the loss of the Americas, and it was still dwindling. We weren’t beaten yet, but we had to depend on new weapons to save us eventually.

  Von Braun actually was the one who finally made it clear to me why the Germans had not closed in to destroy the Free Zone, and why they hadn’t developed their weapons much beyond what they had been at war’s end. “Don’t forget,” he said, “that Hitler may have rallied his armies around being supermen, but he came to power promising the Germans that every German would be rich. They’re still”—he shuddered, and looked down at his plate—“the German translates as ‘digesting.’ They’ve got so much of Eastern Europe where they’ve exterminated whole populations, and then there’s the rump of the Soviet Union to be pressed into service, and they’re already making noises about Anschluss with Canada or the United States—they’re busy giving their citizens the payoff. Once they had the world in hand, that was enough for them, at least for the time being.”

  Six relatively pleasant months went by; Singapore was still a grubby fortress, the scientists and engineers were still loony and helpless as kids, and my assistants got more and more efficient.

  I had gotten a letter or two from Sandy, and written back in a friendly way without much expecting to hear from her again (attractive young women didn’t stay single long in the Free Zone, and my pursuit was at best halfhearted). On Thursday nights I played poker with the Philly Navy Yard crew, on Saturday I did some pistol practice with my guards (the newly copied Black Talon rounds were indeed superior because they spread out in a star shape inside what they hit), and usually on Tuesday I went to one of the twenty-year-old movies at the Ex Sell Lent Theetre, often with Ley and von Braun, who both had a thing for German expressionist sci-fi flicks, of which there were many. In between I stayed in shape, worried about infiltration, looked for holes in fences, and the like, and wrote out at length everything I could remember of the history of my own timeline up to the point where I stepped out of it.

  At first that made me homesick, then it sent me into a period of introspection where I started to come to grips with Marie’s death, and then finally it was just one more chore.

  Once in a great while I’d look at the SHAKK—I had discovered that for some mysterious reason besides the drawer to feed in the powder it had another drawer next to what I was guessing was the firing chamber, but otherwise I had learned nothing more. The translator in my neck continued to work, but it didn’t know the word for either of those drawers; the readout continued to say “Reload before firing again.” I thought it made kind of a nice paperweight.

  My new world wasn’t what I would have chosen to make it, but I was fitting into it, I was useful, and, frankly, I was better adjusted there than I had been at home. And I barely thought about home, anymore.

  13

  What saved us finally, at Singapore, was that my whole guard force for Engineering Fifteen was there. And that only happened because it was first launch day.

  FZSS Human Rights wasn’t what I’d have recognized as a spaceship, but that was what she was.

  Sitting there waiting for launch, anyone would have said she looked like an upside-down pile of airplanes hanging under a dirigible, and they’d have been right. But all four stages of the craft were necessary—miniaturization and cryogenic fuels weren’t very far advanced in this timeline, so the ship had to be big, and it had to use every possible trick to get up there.

  The day was almost windless when the Human Rights was towed out of her hangar by a motley collection of old trucks, was brought around into the wind, and started her engines. I had snagged a spot on the dirigible stage, rank having its privileges, so I was standing there next to von Braun when the ship rolled out.

  Dirigible takeoffs are neat; they just rise, and as long as the props aren’t on the gondola, you barely feel the engines at all. It’s like floating in a dream.

  Singapore looked about as good as it ever had; it was still a giant steel-and-concrete turtle sitting astride the strait, but the jungles and the dim blue mountains beyond them were beautiful.

  We were going up to fifty-five thousand feet, and to make this thing work at all, we had had to decide to use hydrogen—yes, it’s flammable, and it’s why the Hindenburg burned, but on the other hand one cubic foot of hydrogen will lift four times as much as a cubic foot of helium. Moreover, hydrogen is cheap and easy to make, while helium is complicated, tricky stuff, even if you do have it coming out of natural gas wells. If there was time to get another model into the air, most of the engineers wanted to go to helium—but we’d need much better engines before we could do it.

  It took almost an hour to get up to altitude and cruising speed. Singapore sits almost exactly on the equator, which means that if you take off headed east, you get almost a thousand-mile-per-hour extra boost from the Earth’s rotation.

  As we reached cruising altitude, the steadying cables hooked to the eight-engine prop plane below us were released, so that soon we were towing the three-plane combination; General LeMay was on the phone to the crews of the three locked-together craft, and they all seemed ready to go.

  The engines of the big airplane began to turn. “Here, we may begin to get just a little nervous,” von Braun said. “If a
ll her engines do not catch, we will all look very foolish.”

  But they all did; as they came up to speed, the huge airplane moved forward, until it was towing the dirigible. We cut her loose, and General LeMay stepped back and saluted. “God, I’d give anything to have that kid Glenn’s job,” he said, and we all laughed; it broke the tension.

  All of us scrambled, packed close together, up the eighty feet of ladders and stairways through the body of the dirigible to the observation bubble on top. Rank has its privileges, and being one of the least important people present, I was one of the last up the ladder; by the time I got there everyone was already pointing and talking.

  Ahead of us the eight-engine plane soared upward; it could not have left the ground on its own, but its engines were more than adequate for what was to follow. A mile or so above us, and perhaps twenty miles ahead, when it was just a dim dot to the naked eye, it plunged downward over the South China Sea, building up speed. At the bottom of its dive, near the water, it released the remaining two linked-together craft. The twin ramjets of the “third stage” caught, and we saw her soaring up on a stream of flame as the huge mothership swung away and headed back to Singapore. “Let’s stay on this course just a little longer,” von Braun suggested, and LeMay said, “Try to make me stop watching.”

  The twin-ramjet craft had gotten up to about Mach 3, still climbing, and was fifteen miles above us—the merest arrowhead on a great pillar of flame and smoke rising above the blue Pacific—when it released Major Glenn and the orbiter. The powerful rocket engines cut in with a flare we saw from where we waited, and the dirigible’s observation deck echoed with cheers.

  The ramjets of the “third stage” had cut out, and through binoculars we saw her loop over and head back to Singapore in a long fast glide; she would have to land with her tanks empty, for her ramjets would not operate at the low speeds she would need for landing. I didn’t envy the pilot—he’d have no chance to make another pass.

  I swung my binoculars back to the uppermost, space-going stage of Human Rights; it was as big as a modern fighter jet from my timeline, and rode a huge plume of fire and smoke; as I watched, she dropped her first strap-on tank.

  “Go, baby, go!” LeMay yelled, and the bridge echoed with cheers again. “Guess we might as well head for home—we can see about as well from there.”

  The great dirigible swung slowly around, her engines a distant thunder through the body. It took much longer to get downstairs than it had coming up, with everyone stopping to talk and slap each other on the back.

  “Got a message, General,” the radioman said. “I’ll put it up on loudspeaker …”

  “Mama Bear, this is Ocean City.” That was mission control on Singapore. “That crazy kid is all the way up. Says he sees the stars and the curve. And radar from Big Dog confirms. He’s made it!”

  Everyone cheered and clapped some more; LeMay grumbled about being stuck on a “damned hydrogen gasbag” that wouldn’t let him have a cigar to celebrate.

  Glenn was to make ten orbits, experimenting with the attitude controls, photographing German and Japanese strategic areas, and experimenting with radar from space. Then he was to come in for a landing on the hard-packed airfield on the north side of the island, by the Johore Strait, where the twin-ramjet stage had also landed; the eight-engine piston prop stage was a seaplane and would land right in the harbor at Singapore.

  All in all Glenn would be orbiting the earth for fifteen hours; time enough for people to rest, to wait for his return, possibly to catch a plane over to the airstrip to see him come in for his landing.

  It had been a thrilling day so far, and the prospect was for more excitement before it was over.

  If only, somehow, it could have stayed the same sort of excitement.

  We were getting relayed messages from Glenn most of the way back to Singapore, and the news was all good; the ship was handling well, he could see what he needed to see.

  It takes a dirigible a long time to fight up a headwind, so Glenn had completed one orbit just as we made it back to base. LeMay got a private channel with him for the few minutes he was overhead—and then we all saw him grow pale. “You’re sure that’s what you saw,” he said, three times. “Confirm with radar as soon as you can. We’ll be in touch.”

  He turned around and said in a low voice, “Gentlemen, we may be a little late. I will want all those of you with top clearances in my office as soon as we’re on the ground.”

  The big dirigible thumped and hummed as she came in for her landing, and a band was playing, not well but good and loud, loud enough for us to hear it as we approached the mooring mast. LeMay was on the radio a lot, and he didn’t sound pleased, whatever the matter was.

  I’ve said that in that timeline, from up above, Singapore looked like a giant turtle. When you got closer it looked like a giant turtle with a massive skin problem—there were bumps and blisters everywhere, low thick towers and heavy bunkers, any structure that had proved impossible to bomb out. A kind of evolution had happened to them—only the strong had survived—so that there were no tall thin spindly structures of any kind, no steeples, certainly no skyscrapers. Dead ahead of us was the “Cake Pan,” the big stationary radar for this end of the island—and the place where the first V-1 hit.

  There was a great flash, and flames leaped up from the Cake Pan.

  They had fired them in salvos, and they had found ways to jam us; first the radar tower blew up, then the control tower, and then, suddenly, the great fortress was rocked with explosions, everywhere.

  People were shouting, LeMay was trying to get anyone at all on the headset, and the pilot must have decided to try to run for it, though where you could run in a dirigible is beyond me. I don’t think we took a direct hit—had we done so it would have ended in one great fireball—but when I looked outside I saw the skin of the dirigible rupturing and the blue hydrogen flame burning across the surface.

  The loss of pressure sent the great airship drifting slowly toward the ground, as the wind carried it toward the roaring fires that the salvos of V-1s were starting all over the island.

  I grabbed von Braun, merely because he was closer than anyone else, and shouted in his ear “got to get to the outside catwalk.” He nodded, and we started our struggle that way—the floor was too smooth to climb easily and just now the door that had been only steps away moments before was a steep climb on that slick floor. We threw ourselves upward; I got hold of the door handle, he got hold of my belt and climbed up my shirt for a better grip, and we both managed to get ourselves braced above the door.

  The dirigible was still sinking like a brick, and bucking up and down as her gas cells ruptured. Flames were pouring out above us.

  I yanked the door open, and we both slid out onto the catwalk; for one heart-stopping instant I started to slide down the rough corrugated iron, as if to plunge under the railing and out into the sky, to drop three hundred feet onto the concrete runway. But I grabbed a post on the railing, and again von Braun grabbed me, and we fought our way up the railing, climbing hand over hand, once having to make it past a blazing gas cell that seemed to singe our backs through our shirts.

  At last we reached what we were looking for—one of the securing cables that had kept the giant plane steady during takeoff. There was too much noise to talk between the thunder of the burning hydrogen, the wail of sirens and explosions of bombs from below, and the scream of the tormented propellers, for no one had been able to shut off the engines, and as the keel warped and buckled, no longer supported by inflated cells, the propellers were being brought into strange angles with the wind.

  We had just taken a grip on the cable together when one of the engines, with a shriek like a coffee can thrown onto a table saw, ripped loose from its pylon and dove down to the pavement, now just a couple of hundred feet below.

  Relieved of the weight, the airship shot upward for a moment, dragging us sixty or seventy feet higher as we clung to the cable and tried to keep feet braced o
n the catwalk.

  The extra strain must have ruptured other cells, for we found ourselves sinking faster this time, the dirigible now drifting over the end of the airfield and heading down toward the harbor, some of the dragging cables already touching housetops.

  We had little choice; we could stay aloft to avoid being smashed, and thus be burned alive whenever the cell next to us blew. Or we could climb down the cable to get away from the flames, and in all probability be dragged into the wall of a building at ten or twenty miles per hour, two stories up, or scraped off on an electric power line.

  Something about burning does not sit well with the human mind … we couldn’t have discussed it in that terrible din, but we were both immediately climbing down as quickly as we could go, hand over hand, the cable whipping horribly.

  After a few moments I was motion sick; I leaned over my arm and threw up, but I did my damnedest not to get a drop on the cable, which could become slick.

  Something nasty went by my head; I assumed it was von Braun’s lunch.

  I hadn’t wanted to look down, but the news was slightly better—our cable was now trailing down a smashed-up street, and though there were three large rubble piles, there were clear spaces between them. Moreover, we were sinking fast now, and only about fifty feet off the ground.

  Fifty feet is still an awfully long way. I climbed downward as fast as I could, taking a risk I couldn’t have believed I’d be taking less than ten minutes before, for it had been no longer than that. Von Braun’s shoes, swinging to and fro on the cable above me, gave me an incentive to climb all the faster, and the sinking dirigible carried us farther downward.

  I was drenched in sweat, and my best suit was never going to be the same; all around me, now, the smoke of the great fires raging on the face of the old fortress was making it hard to breathe, and I couldn’t see anywhere clearly enough to be sure of exactly where we were or what might happen next. But there was less than twenty feet to go, and I took a calculated risk and burned my hands a little sliding down the rope—at least right at that moment there wasn’t anything too terrible to run into. My feet scraped pavement, but I hung on for an extra second so von Braun could slide down, too. We let go at the same time, but the dirigible didn’t bounce up much; the cables whipped by us like mad pythons, and then we felt rather than heard or saw the great dirigible crashing to the pavement, a block of houses beyond us.