Voyage. Stephen Baxter
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of the worker herd which passed them. The tunnel was like Hell itself, with prisoners made white with dust and laden with rubble, cement bags, girders and boxes, and the corpses of the night being dragged by their feet from the sleep galleries.
Gregory Dana was prized by the supervisors for the capacity of his small hands for skilled work. So he was assigned to lighter, more complex tasks. Gradually he picked up something of the nature of the great machines on which he toiled, and learned of the visions of the Reich’s military planners.
It was well known among the workers within the Mittelwerk that Hitler had ordered the production of no less than twelve thousand of von Braun’s A-2 rockets – or rather, what the Germans now called their V-2: V for Vergeltungswaffe, revenge weapon.
There was a plan to construct an immense dome at the Pas de Calais – sixty thousand tons of concrete – from which rockets would be fired off at England in batches of fourteen at once. And then there were the further schemes: of hurling rockets from submarine craft, of greater rockets which might bombard targets thousands of miles distant, and – the greatest dream of all! – of a huge station orbiting five thousand miles above the Earth and bearing a huge mirror capable of reflecting sunlight, so that cities would flash to smoke and oceans might boil.
Such visions!
… But the V-2 was the daily, extraordinary reality. That great, finned bullet-shape – no less than forty-seven feet long – was capable of carrying a warhead of more than two thousand pounds across two hundred miles! Its four tons of metal contained no less than twenty-two thousand components!
Dana came to love the V-2. It was magnificent, a machine from another world, from a bright future – and the true dream inherent in its lines, the dream of its designers, was obvious to Dana.
Even as it slowly killed him.
One morning, so early that the stars still shone and frost coated the ground, he saw the engineers from the research facility at Peenemunde – Wernher von Braun, Hans Udet, Walter Riedel and the rest, smartly uniformed young men, some not much older than Dana – looking up at the stars, and pointing, and talking softly.
Dana had glanced up, to see where they were looking. There was a star, bright, glowing steadily, with the faintest glimmer of red, like a ruby.
The ‘star’ was, of course, the planet Mars, burning brightly.
Of course: that was the dream which motivated and sustained these young, clever Germans: that one day the disc of Mars would be lit up with cities built by men – men carried there by some unimaginable descendant of the V-2.
At fifteen, Gregory Dana had been able to understand how these young men from Peenemunde were blinded by the dazzling beauty of their V-2 and what it represented. It was not simple callousness: yes, he could understand the duality of it, and he would comfort himself with plans for after the war. Perhaps, he would dream, he himself would pursue a career in building still greater rocket machines, and even father a son who would be the first to travel beyond the air to Mars or Venus.
How he envied the young engineers from Peenemunde, who walked about the Mittelwerk in their smart uniforms; they seemed to find it an easy thing to brush past the stacks of corpses piled up for daily collection, the people gaunt as skeletons toiling around the great metal spaceships! The duality of it crushed Dana. Was such squalor and agony the inevitable price to be paid for the dream of spaceflight?
He tried to imagine how it would have been had he been born to become one of these smart young Germans in their SS uniforms.
When he immersed himself in such dreams, something of his own, daily pain would fall from him.
But then the morning would come again.
In his workshop, in the sunny June of 1970, Gregory Dana labored at his blackboard, immersed in memories, and the resolving dream of spaceflight.
As Dana’s car was pulling away, his father came running from the house. He rested his hands on the Corvette’s window frame. There was chalk smeared across his forehead.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’ve got to get away, Dad,’ Dana said apologetically. ‘I have to be at –’
‘I think it works,’ Gregory said breathlessly. ‘Of course it’s too early to be sure yet, but –’
‘What works?’
‘Venus. Not Jupiter – Venus. Kiss good-bye to Verne – we don’t need those immense nuclear rockets after all!’
‘Dad, I –’
Sylvia linked Gregory’s arm. ‘Good-bye, dear. Drive safely.’
‘I’ll call when I’m home, Mom.’
Dana looked back once, at the end of the block. Sylvia was waving, but his father had already gone back to his shop.
Thursday, July 9, 1970 San Gabriel Mountains, California
It was nearly noon; from a burned-blue sky the sunlight bore down on York’s bare head and shoulders.
Jorge Romero had led them all into a little valley that afforded a good view of the hills. Now he went bounding up to a twisted old ironwood tree. ‘This tree is your LM. You’ve just landed on the Moon. Now I want each of you to come stand over here and describe what you see.’
The three astronauts – Jones, Priest, Bleeker – stared back, all but anonymous in their baseball caps, T-shirts and chromed sunglasses.
Romero’s question wasn’t hard, York knew. This was an interesting area: non-lunar, but with easily visible geologic relations among colorful rock units. But the stances and expressions of the astronauts betrayed a mixture of bafflement, embarrassment and resentment.
Christ, York thought. This trip is going to be a disaster.
But Romero was windmilling his arms at them. ‘Come on! The one thing you’re always short of on the Moon is time. You – Charles. Come over here, and start us off.’
With a kind of lazy grin at Bleeker, Chuck Jones went strolling over to Romero. He leaned against the tree, beside Romero, and began to summarize what he could see.
Romero was maybe fifty now, York supposed, but he was vigorous and supple, apparently still full of energy; his sunburned nose stuck out from under his sunglasses, and a few strands of graying hair licked out from under his floppy hat. York had taken in a graduate lecture of Romero’s some years back. Working out of Flagstaff, Romero was a great field geologist as well as a geochemical analyst. He had immediately struck her as someone who could not fail to inspire the most reluctant of students – such as your average beer-swilling, wise-cracking pilot-astronaut hero, for instance.
So when Ben Priest had told her that Romero had agreed to give the Apollo 14 crews, prime and backup, some geologic training, and Ben had invited her along to help out, she’d been pleased.
‘… No, no, no! What about the layers in that mountainside over there?’
‘Look, Professor –’
‘And you have missed the most important feature of the landscape altogether!’
Jones looked baffled; he was squat, solid, dark, and the thick primate hair on his hands and arms seemed to bristle with anger. ‘What “important feature,” for Christ’s sake?’
‘Look here.’ Romero knelt and picked up a handful of fragments, of a white rock, from the floor of the valley. ‘Can you see? Such rocks are everywhere – are they not? – now that you observe.’
Jones had had enough. ‘This is a goddamn boot camp.’ He kicked at one of Romero’s white rocks. ‘Ben, this is a fucking waste of time. Our program is compressed enough without this crap.’
‘Come