White Sands, Red Menace

Low gray-green scrub bushes spotted the pale red desert on either side of the road. They drove into a large area where the sand had been rolled smooth and flat.

“There she is,” Dr. Gordon said. He sounded as if the rocket were his own possession, the way he had yesterday when he’d driven home in the new car. He parked in front of a low fence, thin wire strung between posts.

Suze stared. It had to be a joke. It was shaped like a rocket all right—a tall cylinder with a pointed nose, resting on four broad triangular fins, just like the ones in comic books. But those were silver, gleaming metal, shiny and space-looking.

It was painted like a checkerboard, huge black and taxicab-yellow squares. Two fins were black, two were yellow, like Halloween from a cartoon planet.

“High visibility. A few are black and white. The pattern’s so we can tell if it’s spinning or rolling in flight. Come take a look.”

The fence surrounded a slab of concrete the size of a school playground. After the still emptiness of the desert, the launch site was a startling contrast. Jeeps and army-green trucks with big white stars rumbled across the sand. Suze figured there must be a hundred people—all men, about half in uniform, the rest in shirtsleeves and khaki pants, some of them stripped to the waist and sweating in the hot sun—yelling back and forth:

Everywhere she looked was a bustle of activity, with the sounds of metal clanking and motors running. The air smelled like gas and oil and the ozone of hot wiring. Men with short-billed mechanic’s caps swarmed around the base of the rocket, carrying cables and wires, attaching hoses, looking at clipboards, talking into bulky black headsets. The V-2 dwarfed them all.

It was the biggest thing Suze had ever seen close up, higher than any building in New Mexico. “How tall is it?”

“Forty-six feet, give or take an inch. And five feet in diameter.” Dr. Gordon held his arms out wide. “She weighs five tons, empty.”

“It must take a lot of gasoline,” Dewey said, watching a shirtless man in army pants and cap screw a nozzle into the side of a fuel truck.

Dr. Gordon chuckled. “Nope, not a drop. Germany didn’t have much gas during the war, so she runs on moonshine. They made it from potatoes. Eight tons of grain alcohol and liquid oxygen for about a minute of flight.”

“Maybe not. But it’s a start. At the end of that minute, she’ll be sixty miles into space. Three thousand miles an hour, once she gets going.”

“So with enough fuel, it could go from here to New York in—what, forty-five minutes?” Dewey said slowly.

“Someday. For now we just want her to go straight up. First man-made object to ever penetrate the upper atmosphere.”

“First ever.” Dr. Gordon sounded proud again. “The war-time missiles had a horizontal trajectory. They went up, crossed the water, came down.” He made a shallow arc with his arm. “This one’s going into space.”

“Oh, okay.” Suze scuffed her sneaker in the sand and stared up. New Mexico was mostly sky. The land was a flat brown plain, edged with mountains in all directions. Everything else was a vast blue bowl. She wondered what was up there that was so important that they weren’t back home in Berkeley right now. Dad and Mom had argued about that for the last six months. All she saw were huge, motionless white clouds.

“If it’s going that fast,” Dewey said, “it’s going to get tiny pretty quick, and we won’t be able to see it. So how do you measure how high it goes?”

“Telescopes?” Suze said. She moved a step closer to him but only got a smile, no pat.

“You’re partly right,” he said. “The Germans didn’t need that kind of tracking, so we’re using good old American ingenuity—a kind of combination telescope and movie camera called a cinetheodolite. It’s a work in progress—hell, this is all a work in progress—but we’ve got a guy coming out from Harvard this summer who’ll get it up to snuff. Clyde Tombaugh. He’s the best there is.”

Dewey nodded. “I’ll say. He’s the man who discovered Pluto. The planet, not the dog,” she added, looking at Suze.

“Stay here,” said Dr. Gordon, then waved to a man in a white shirt who was gesturing at the base of the rocket. “I gotta go find out what Jim wants.”

Suze pushed her blunt-cut, blonde hair out of her face. “Ouch.” She pulled her hand away. Her forehead was starting to burn, and they’d be out here for hours with no shade. “Dad? Do you have hats for us?”

He turned and snapped his fingers. “Damn. I knew I forgot something. I’ll see if I can borrow a couple from the guys in the blockhouse. They’ll be inside all afternoon.” He jerked his thumb at a windowless concrete structure on the far side of the paved area. Its roof looked like a pyramid with a tower on top.

Suze nodded, watching as half a dozen men scurried up the narrow metal ladders that canted into the side of the rocket. Two stood on a platform midway, opened a panel that was half yellow, half black, and began making adjustments to the tangled nest of wiring inside. A pipe down by the base hissed and vented steam. It looked very complicated.

“Here you go,” Dr. Gordon said five minutes later. He handed Suze a floppy khaki GI hat and gave Dewey a pith helmet. When she put it on, it came down over her ears, covering her face all the way to her nose.

Suze snorted a laugh. “I think we better swap.” She was tall for her age, five-eight, and not yet thirteen; wiry little Dewey barely came up past her shoulder. She put the helmet on. The brim perched just above her eyebrows. She handed Dewey the hat. “Better?”

“Yeah. It’s still too big, but it beats a sunburned nose, that’s for sure.” Dewey tucked her dark curly hair under the cap. “That’ll work.”

Men detached hoses and turned wheels and valves, then the tanker truck rumbled slowly away from the rocket. Now Suze could see that the fins were marked with Roman numerals, II and IV visible from where she stood.

Dr. Gordon looked at his watch. “Right on time. X minus one hour, and they’re done with the oxygen fueling. We’ve got thirty minutes before they clear the launch site. Let me show you around, introduce you to some of the guys.”

The first man frowned at Dr. Gordon. “You brought your girls out here?” He sounded surprised, and like he didn’t approve at all.

More Dewey’s world than mine, Suze thought. Dewey asked everyone a lot of science questions and seemed to think that even hoses and spools of wire were the most interesting stuff in the world.

Suze was wondering if anything exciting would ever happen, when a loudspeaker blared: “All personnel proceed to safety areas. Repeat, all personnel clear the launch site.”