Konrad

The tower buzzed with excitement as men crowded the railings. Konrad found himself squashed between von Braun’s massive form and a tall blond SS officer he thought he should probably recognize, but didn’t. They talked over his head, chattering about the man’s newborn baby and ignoring Konrad completely, as he stood hunched between them. He squeezed his shoulders together, trying to make himself as small as possible.

Below them, the test site lay ready. In the center of it all, the rocket stood tall and proud on the launch pad, a bright silver testament to German ingenuity. Rail lines and roads led to it, and tall walls, made of piled sand, surrounded it to shelter the basin from wind and the rest of the base from possible explosions. Men rushed about it like industrious ants in the middle of their hill, the sloped sand walls surrounding them accenting the illusion. A fuel tanker rolled away on the rails, its cargo of ethanol and liquid oxygen delivered.

Konrad squeezed the railing as the sun rose behind them, banishing the last shadows over the rocket. It gleamed, polished to a mirror finish from nose to fin. God, he hoped this would work. Now that he had come to the crucial moment, he wished he hadn’t spent so much time down in the basement, working on his calculating machine. What had he been thinking?

A red phone mounted in the corner of the tower clanged, and Konrad twitched. A stiff-backed junior officer answered it, listening to the voice at the other end of the line and nodding. Konrad glanced from him back down to the launch pad. The men working there thinned, ants retreating into their burrow, until the field was empty. The call had to be from the control room, hidden on the other side of the test pad beneath a mound of concrete.

“They want the final go-ahead!” The officer called out to von Braun.

“Tell them to get on with it, man!” Von Braun laughed. “The war will be over before the test at this rate!” The officer repeated that into the phone with a grin before hanging up. Seconds later, a klaxon sounded and a man’s voice came over the loudspeaker.

“V2 rocket test commencing…All personnel report to designated stations…All personnel to clear the immediate launch area…” The man began a countdown, and the crowd around Konrad shifted in anticipation, pressing against the railings.

Please work, he prayed silently, his knuckles white on the railing. This was an “elephant”, a dud filled with sand to simulate the payload, but it could still kill someone if he’d screwed up the navigation. The fuel, after all, was still plenty explosive.

The count hit zero, and the announcer’s voice vanished in the massive roar that followed. Roiling clouds of smoke billowed out of the base of the rocket, glowing orange with the powerful flames hidden within them. The heavy missile shuddered and rose into the air. By God, he could feel it. The force vibrated the air, shaking him from the soles of his feet to his scalp.

It rose slowly, almost ponderously. Hovering above the firing table, it balanced on a perfect cone of flame, as straight as it had on the solid ground, evincing no desire to topple or turn. Konrad’s heart beat in his throat, pounding. So far, so good, but now came his contribution. If he’d gotten it wrong…He pictured that monstrosity, full of fuel, toppling and exploding.

Von Braun grabbed his shoulder and pointed. Konrad almost leapt off the tower, thinking von Braun had seen some danger, but the man was grinning. He followed the finger, and saw the distant outline of a man perched on the opposite wall.

Konrad’s eyes bulged. The man stood behind a camera, steadily turning the handle of its film reel. Who on earth had authorized that? If anything went wrong, anything at all, the man could be killed! But the fellow took no notice of the growing roar, or of his mortal peril. He kept his eye glued to the lens of the camera, cranking the handle as he tracked that silver form into the air.

As the rocket consumed fuel, it grew lighter, lifting higher and faster. The rocket nozzle cleared the top of the sand wall and it finally began to tilt, drifting towards the beach. Konrad nearly choked; the rocket would pass straight over the man filming. If it worked right, it should be well clear of him, but there was so much that could go wrong! Konrad pictured the gyroscopes whirring in their housings, the electrical current building and discharging, steering the vanes at the base of the rocket to divert the hot flow of gasses just so. Had he got it all right?

The rocket leaned in the air, but did not fall. Konrad’s breath came in ragged gasps. Surely it had tilted too far, surely the engines would cut out at any moment. He saw, in his mind’s eye, the hundred things that could fail. A gyroscope knocked off kilter, or a wire frayed by the fierce vibrations. His gut clenched as hard as his hands on the railing. Slowly, oh so slowly, the thing continued to rise and gain speed, passing right over the cameraman. Still cranking away, the man knelt to tip the apparatus up, tracking the rocket even as the force of its passing whipped the sand around him into a frenzy. Either the man had nerves of steel, or he was completely mad.

The rocket passed over the wall, out towards the beach. It continued to tilt, making a great arch and blasting forward, accelerating through the air. It turned a little more, the arch of its path flattening and then diving for the beach. The camera operator followed it, until at last there was a tremendous crash and “whump!” from beyond the wall. Smoke and fire billowed as sand and whipped high into the air.

The camera operator turned and gave them a thumbs up from his perch, grinning from ear to ear, and the watching crowd erupted into cheers.

…

“Drink up, Konrad.” Von Braun pushed a glass of schnapps across the desk towards him. “And cheer up! That went about as well as we could have hoped.” He slid a second glass to Lusser, who caught it deftly.

Konrad picked his glass up, but did not drink. He didn’t trust himself not to throw the whole shot back in a single gulp. They had retreated to von Braun’s office after the test. Here, wood panels formed the walls instead of plain brick, and clean, split plank flooring lay beneath tasteful, thick carpets. He and Dr. Lusser sat in firm, padded seats on one side of the wide oak desk, across from von Braun, who reclined in his own high-backed leather chair, smiling broadly at them both.

Konrad let his gaze wander around the room. He’d only had occasion to come here a couple of times. Model rockets lined the shelves, each a previous iteration of the one they had just tested. A bookshelf held well-worn copies of engineering manuals and a very battered edition of Oberth’s By Rocket into Interplanetary Space. In the corner by the window sat a telescope that looked like it might be even older than the book.

“So…” Von Braun said, calling Konrad back to the present moment. “We landed about five meters off from the intended target, over a kilometer-long flight. What’s that mean when we scale it up?”

Dr. Lusser spoke up immediately, with perfectly misplaced confidence. “With the current navigation system, the rockets should land within a kilometer and a half radius of the intended target. We’ll continue to refine that, of course.”

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

Konrad started to shake his head before catching himself. Von Braun noticed the gesture, however. “Konrad? You disagree?”

Konrad fidgeted with the glass of schnapps. “I think it will be worse. For a kilometer on the ground, the path the rocket flies through the sky is about three kilometers. But for two kilometers on the ground, it flies more than six. When we estimate inaccuracy, we must consider the full arch traveled through the sky.” He grimaced. He’d predicted an accuracy of a five-kilometer radius, and that was starting to seem optimistic.

Lusser waved a hand, as though the difference between one kilometer and a thousand was a trifle. “That also gives the system more time to correct. And as we refine the navigation device--” he threw a significant scowl at Konrad. “--it will become more precise.”

Von Braun nodded. “What do you need to make that happen? More precise gyroscopes?”

“No, the cheap ones are fine. We actually tried it on a balancing table with the expensive ones,” Lusser admitted, “and it turns out that the extra sensitivity is detrimental to stability, since they pick up all the constant vibrations of the rocket. Using the cheap ones solves that problem.”

“If we used the radio beam guidance system in conjunction with the current internal systems,” Konrad offered, “we could probably get them landing within ten meters of the target, even at extreme ranges.”

Von Braun frowned. “We could…but that leaves the rocket vulnerable to jamming. I’d prefer if it were all self-contained.” He stood from the desk, leaving his empty glass behind. “This weapon could win the whole war, you know.”

Lusser raised an eyebrow at that. “Well, it could certainly have an impact…but we are already winning the war, herr doktor.” Konrad rolled his eyes at the double honorific. Kiss-ass, he thought quietly to himself. It was all pageantry; he didn’t think Lusser really respected anyone other than himself.

Von Braun shook his head, taking one of the model rockets down from its shelf and turning it in his hands. “For now. But the whole world is arrayed against us. We have barely scratched Russia, and the Americans are sending vast quantities of materials to our enemies. If they join the fight on land directly…we may find ourselves fighting to hold ground, rather than take it.” He turned to them, gesturing with the model. “When that happens, if we’re able to accurately strike without, in turn, being struck, our odds will be much better. So, tell me: what can we do to achieve the necessary degree of accuracy? I don’t buy that the problem is too complex, that there are too many variables. In the end, it is still a physics problem, if a very complex one.”

“As it happens,” Lusser said, a small, nasty smirk breaking over his face, “Konrad has some fascinating ideas about how to approach a self-contained system capable of complex calculations.”

Konrad turned towards the other scientist, his heart plummeting. He wasn’t ready for this conversation! He caught the Lusser’s reptilian gaze, and found no sympathy there.

Von Braun replaced the model and took his seat again, looking curious. He steepled his hands in front of him, his elbows on the desk. “Really? What have you got, Konrad?”

Konrad wet his lips. “Ah…I don’t have the report with me, but it’s an idea that I’ve been working on for some time, Fri—Dr. Lusser and I, that is, were discussing it just last night—er, this morning, I suppose…” Across the expanse of the oak desk, von Braun raised a single, bushy eyebrow over his laced fingers. Konrad swallowed; his tongue felt thick as dried leather. Short and to the point. “We keep finding new things to calculate, new variables to consider. They require building a new navigation system from scratch each time. But if we built a computer that could handle any kind of problem, a calculating machine, then-”

Lusser broke in over him, his voice full of false curiosity. “This sounds a lot like the hobby-project you have going down in the basement. Have you made any progress at all on that in the last few months?”

“I’ve made some, it--”

“So is it actually a viable option?” Lusser interrupted him again, his smirk stretching to toad-like proportions.

Konrad fell silent, staring at the polished wood grain of the desk. He squeezed his thigh, just behind the knee, not trusting himself to speak further. His fingers, long and thin, wrapped three quarters of the way around. He wondered if Lusser’s throat would feel anything like his leg.

Von Braun’s voice carried a frown. “Dr. Lusser, if the idea is so flawed in the first place, why did you bring it up? Dr. Hollenbach, let’s hear the rest of it.”

Konrad lifted his head. “It is…complex.” He admitted. “I’ve been using telephone relays, and you’d need something smaller to fit it on the rocket. And we’d need to find a way to get flight information to the system. But if I’m right, it really could solve any mathematical problem. You could use it to navigate a flight, or answer a question that might take weeks to do by hand.” He chanced a glance at the books on the shelf. “Like an orbital path, for example.”

Von Braun’s mouth twitched in a half smile at the ploy. He often joked that the biggest problem with their rockets was that they landed on the wrong planet, and he made no secret of his ambitions to use them to travel through space. That sounded insane to Konrad, but he supposed he didn’t have much room to complain.

“Not really relevant to our current situation though, is it?” Lusser pointed out.

“No,” von Braun sighed, “it’s not.” He looked to Konrad. “He’s right of course. As much as the idea interests me personally, I couldn’t justify putting you to work on it. And do I understand right, that you’ve been working on this in your off hours?”

“A little.” Konrad lied. Only every night, until I can’t keep my eyes open.

Von Braun eyed him. “I see. Well, I think for the time being it would be best if you let it lie. I need all your efforts directed towards the internal systems.”

Konrad tried not to droop. He’d known that this was the likely outcome, but he’d still let himself hope. More the fool, he.

Von Braun sighed, seeing the expression on Konrad’s face. “Win this war, first. Help me give Hitler his superweapons, something that will let us dominate the land, the air, the sea. Once we’ve won, then we’ll all have time to pursue nobler interests.” He glanced at the rockets on the shelf as he said it.

Lusser broke in with his voice full of forced heartiness. “I’m sure that our fine generals have the situation well in hand, but I—we—take your point. We will refocus our efforts. And after all, this was only one test of many. We’ll figure it out.”

Von Braun nodded at that and stood, meeting their eyes again. They rose with him, as smoothly as if tied to him, and he shook their hands in turn. “Thank you, gentlemen.” He said, his voice returning to its normal warmth. “I am certain that you’ll crack it. Can you send the propulsion team in on your way out?”

Lusser assured them that they would. With a final obsequious herr doktor, he led the way out of the room, forcing Konrad to follow at his heel. They walked down the hall, past the two representatives of the propulsion group, who did not wait to be told that von Braun was waiting for them, and out the front door.

Outside, Lusser stretched in the morning sun like a satisfied cat. “I’ll want a strict accounting of how you’re spending your time, Konrad.” He didn’t bother to turn as he said it, or to disguise the contempt in his voice.

“Yes, Dr. Lusser.” Konrad fixed his eyes on the mud underfoot, seething. The title curdled on his tongue. He knew what “strict accounting” meant: an hour-by-hour report of each day for Lusser to chastise him over. Like a child, or an idiot who needs constant supervision. But what else could he do? Eyes still downcast, he listened to Lusser’s fading footsteps as the man left without another word.