“The FBI also gave us some trouble with Hamilton Ballou,” Jack said. “Taylor knew him from MIT and recommended him as a liquid-fuel chemist, but when the feds looked into him, they discovered that Ham had once belonged to the Communist Party. Of course, Ham had been a commie just the same way a lot of other kids were in the thirties . . . sort of a liberal fad, before most people learned that Russia wasn’t the workers’ paradise it was cracked up to be. He’d dropped out long before Taylor met him, but he’d signed the petitions that put him on the FBI watch list, and it took a lot of smooth talking by both Bob and Colonel Bliss to get him cleared.”
“The feds weren’t happy with . . . Harry Chung either,” Lloyd said.
“Yeah, Harry was also at GALCIT when the war broke out. A few weeks after Pearl Harbor, though, he and his wife were rounded up and sent to an internment camp.” Jack gave a disgusted snort. “Didn’t matter that he was third-generation Chinese-American or that he’d been born and raised in San Francisco. Anyone with yellow skin was considered suspicious, and the feds really didn’t want a guy like him working on a top secret military project. But Bob knew his work as an aeronautical engineer, so he twisted the FBI’s arm until they surrendered.”
“They weren’t wild about a guy with black skin either, as I recall,” Henry said quietly.
“The FBI didn’t think I was a security risk,” Jack replied, a crooked smile on his face. “They just couldn’t believe a black man would know enough about rockets to make him worth military deferral. And to tell the truth, I wanted to be in the service. After I got out of Tuskegee University with a degree in mechanical engineering, the first thing I did was join the Army Air Corps, so I was in flight school when I got the call. Again, it was a matter of connections. Mike Ferris knew about me because we were both ARS members and had been trading letters back and forth, and we both knew about Gerry Mander because . . .”
“Gerry was the wild card,” Lloyd said.
“Yeah, he was the deuce, all right.” Henry smiled at the thought. “The rest of us were college boys, but Gerry’s formal education stopped at high school. He was a farm boy from Alabama, and his family didn’t have enough money to send him to college. That didn’t stop him, though, once the space bug bit him. He built his own rocket from bits and pieces of scrap metal, going by what he’d read in magazines and library books about Bob’s first rockets. Pretty remarkable, when you stop to think about it.”
“But he didn’t know anything about gyroscopes,” Jack said, “so when he launched it from a cow pasture on his family’s property, it spun out and crashed through the roof of a neighbor’s barn. The kerosene he was using for fuel blew up and set the place on fire, and it burned to the ground before the fire department got there.”
“Had to . . . spring him from jail,” Lloyd said. “Gerry was . . . working on a road crew . . . when Colonel Bliss showed up to . . . offer him a job with us. He said, ‘Sounds like a . . . nice idea. Let me . . . think about it.’”
“I never heard that,” Walker said, laughing along with everyone else in the room. “How did Bob know about him?”
“He didn’t,” Jack said. “Mike and I had both read about Gerry’s experiment in the ARS newsletter, and we thought that any kid with that much gumption belonged on our team. Bob agreed, so we recruited him.”
“Gerry was the last guy to join the team,” Henry said. “He was also the youngest . . . I think he was only nineteen when he showed up . . . but not by much. Most of us were in our early twenties, although Taylor was about thirty, if I remember correctly.”
“I was . . . almost in my thirties, too,” Lloyd added.
“I stand corrected.” Henry shook his head, smiling at the fond memory. “We were all kids, really, kind of a band of misfits. Too smart for our own good, socially awkward, not really fitting in well with anyone around us. I think there’s a name for guys like us . . .” He looked over at his great-grandson. “What’s the word I’m looking for, Carl?”
“Geeks,” Carl said.
“Thank you . . . yeah, that’s what we were. Depression-era rocket geeks.” Henry shrugged. “Probably just as well that Bob got to us before the Army did. Of course, Jack here is probably the only guy a draft board wouldn’t have rejected as 4F . . . but even if they hadn’t, I don’t think any of us would’ve lasted a day in North Africa or Sicily.”
“Not that New England was much better.” Jack looked around the room. “You wouldn’t believe how cold this place gets in the middle of winter. There was one time . . .”
“That brings me to the next thing I’d like to know,” Walker said quickly, not wanting anyone to get ahead of himself and thus lose the chronological thread of the story. “Once the team was selected, why did you go to Worcester? That’s where Blue Horizon got started, of course . . .”
“The R&D work, yes,” Henry said. “Everything else stayed in New Mexico.”
“Right . . . at Alamogordo Army Air Field, once the project was relocated from Mescalero Ranch.”
“Uh-huh, that’s correct. The ranch wasn’t big enough for the job. Besides, everyone in Roswell knew that Bob was building rockets out there, and Colonel Bliss didn’t want anything being done in a place where just about anyone could drive up and see what was going on. So the decision was made to move everything to Alamogordo . . .”
“But not the rocket team. You were sent to Massachusetts. Why?”
“For a couple of reasons,” Jack said. “The first was that the people in the War Department wanted their brain trust as close to them as possible, so they could easily keep tabs on what we were doing. They’d put Omar Bliss in charge of the project, but even he was something of a . . . y’know, a wild card, to use that term again . . .”
“We didn’t know it then, but Omar was something of a geek, too.” Henry grinned. “The only person who didn’t think he was as weird as a three-dollar bill was Vannevar Bush, who’d met him at some Pentagon conference. That’s why Bush put Omar in charge . . . he was the one person in the War Department who didn’t think space travel was something straight out of the funny pages.”
“Anyway,” Jack continued, “some of the big brass weren’t sure they could depend on the colonel to lead something as important as this. As for the rest of us . . .”
“They trusted us . . . even less,” Lloyd said.
“Right,” Henry said. “Worcester was close enough to Washington that the big shots in the Pentagon felt like they had us under control, but far enough away that we’d be out of sight of any German spies who might be lurking around D.C.” His smile faded. “They were wrong, of course, but . . .”
“The other reason was Bob himself,” Jack said. “Bliss was bothered by Bob’s hands-on engineering approach. When the colonel heard that he and the other guys would fuel the Nell rockets themselves and even go out to the launch tower to make last-minute adjustments . . .”
“Like we had a choice,” Henry said. “It was just the five of us. We didn’t have a ground crew.”
“Anyway, Bliss didn’t want to risk having Bob or the rest of us getting blown to kingdom come, so he decided to move us across the country. And again, the logical place to put us was in Worcester.”
“Bob wasn’t happy about that at all,” Henry said. “He and Esther had been living in Roswell for quite a while. They put down roots in the community, and I think they would’ve been happy to stay there for the rest of their lives. Officially, he was still on the Clark faculty and was still drawing a salary as its physics department chairman, but he didn’t go back very often. So moving back to Massachusetts . . .”
“He . . . didn’t want to,” Lloyd rasped. “He fought like crazy to . . . stay in Roswell.”
“Yeah, well . . . he did fight, all right, but this is the U.S. Army we’re talking about, and during wartime . . .” Henry shook his head. “I thought they were wrong, too. I told Bliss he was making a m
istake. But the colonel had his orders, and they came straight from the top. Blue Horizon . . . that was the code name the Army had given the project by then . . . was to be relocated to Worcester, and that was final.”
“And that’s . . . when we all got . . . to meet each other,” Lloyd said.
LAST TRAIN TO WORCESTER
FEBRUARY 9, 1942
J. Jackson Jackson awoke to the screech of railcar brakes, the swaying vibration of the train slowing down. Opening his eyes, he looked out the frost-rimmed window beside him to see the lights of a small city coming into view. The night was overcast, the moon hidden by dark clouds, but in the glow of streetlamps he caught a glimpse of narrow streets blanketed by fresh snow.
“Worcester!” The conductor walked down the aisle, calling out the place where the train was making its next stop. “Worcester, Massachusetts!” He pronounced the name in a nasal Yankee brogue that silenced the “ch” and dragged out the “er.” Woostah, not Wore-chester, the way Jackson had been pronouncing it all along; he made a mental note of this.
Jackson’s fellow passengers stirred from the uncomfortable naps they’d been taking since the previous stop in Hartford. Everyone here was black, including the conductor. Their car was just behind the locomotive, with the baggage car separating it from the rest of the coaches; it was an antique, the seats’ upholstery old and faded, the windows grimed with engine smoke. Since Washington, D.C., where Jackson had transferred from the train that carried him from Alabama, the aisles had steadily collected discarded sandwich wrappers and pop bottles, the refuse of the only meals they’d been able to eat en route; the dining car was off-limits to coloreds. At least the baby girl making the trip in her mother’s arms had finally stopped crying although a lingering fecal stench told him the reason why: With no washrooms in this car, her mother had had to change the child’s diapers in public.
The train lurched again, and Jackson returned his gaze to the window. Union Station was just ahead, its twin towers looming above a Gothic edifice of white limestone. As the train clattered the rest of the way into the station, Jackson reached beneath his seat to pull out the battered cardboard suitcase that held all his clothes. It appeared that nearly everyone in the colored car was traveling on to Boston because only a couple of other people stood up.
The train finally came to a halt, and Jackson joined the disembarking passengers as they shuffled down the aisle to the door. The night was cold, a stiff wind from the northeast spitting fat snowflakes into his face as he stepped out onto the platform. This was the first time J. Jackson Jackson had been anywhere above the Mason-Dixon Line; in that frigid moment of first contact with New England, he imagined that he was somewhere just south of the Arctic Circle. He paused to put down his suitcase, pull up the lapels of his wool overcoat and clamp his fedora more firmly to his head, then he picked up the suitcase again and followed the signs to the station entrance. Someone was supposed to be meeting him there . . .
“Lieutenant Jackson?”
A young white man stood just inside the door, a snapshot photo in his gloved hands. Jackson nodded and the other man put away the picture. “Hillman . . . Corporal Max Hillman,” he said quietly. “Glad to see you made it, sir. How was the trip?”
“All right, I suppose.” Jackson wasn’t surprised to see that Hillman wasn’t in uniform or that he hadn’t saluted him. Apparently he’d received the same orders to dress and behave as a civilian; Jackson had left his uniform in Alabama and instead worn his best suit on the train. He looked around at the handful of other passengers. “Am I the only person you’re picking up?”
“Uh-huh . . . I mean, yes, sir. You’re the last guy in. Everyone else is already here. This way, Lieutenant . . . the car’s out front.”
They walked down a circular staircase to the ticket foyer and passed through another pair of doors leading to the station’s main hall. The Washington train must have been the last one in for the evening; the wooden benches were nearly vacant, the luncheonette and newsstand closed. Jackson took a few moments to find the COLOREDS ONLY restroom; Hillman was waiting for him in the lobby when he came out. Just outside the front door, a Plymouth sedan was parked at the curb. Jackson tossed his suitcase in the backseat while Hillman slid in behind the wheel. The corporal cranked up the cold engine and turned on the windshield wiper, and the Plymouth rumbled away from the station, its tires crunching through the slush in the street.
“We’ve got you staying with the rest of the group, sir,” Hillman said as he switched on the heater. “You’ll be sharing a boardinghouse just a few blocks from the Clark campus.” A quick smile. “I’ll be there, too. My job is to act as your military liaison . . . sort of a go-between for you and . . .”
“I know what a liaison is.” Even on a dark winter night, Jackson could tell that Worcester wasn’t much larger than Memphis, his hometown. The tallest buildings were the clock tower of what he assumed to be City Hall and a couple of church steeples; all the others were low redbrick buildings no more than six stories tall, sparsely illuminated by cast-iron streetlamps. Not a pretty city. “Where’s the colonel?”
“Colonel Bliss? We’ll see him only every so often. He’ll be dividing his time between here and Alamogordo, with occasional visits down to Washington to report in.” A wry chuckle. “If I were him, I’d stay in New Mexico as much as I could. A little warmer down there.”
Jackson nodded, preferring to say as little as he could get away with. If it were up to him, he wouldn’t have been here either, and not just because of the climate. He had been just a few weeks away from earning his wings and joining the 332nd Fighter Group when Colonel Bliss had come to see him at the Tuskegee Army Air Field, along with a nameless FBI agent who’d spoken little but had regarded him with the skeptical eyes of a man who couldn’t believe that a Negro would be interviewed by a member of the War Department’s command staff. Bliss wanted to know about Jackson’s engineering degree and the interest he’d shown in rocket research; he’d said little concerning what this was about except that it involved a classified project being undertaken by Robert H. Goddard. The subsequent offer to join the project wasn’t entirely voluntary; although the colonel didn’t come right out and say so, he had given the young lieutenant the distinct impression that, if he didn’t agree to go on detached duty, he’d spend the rest of the war sweeping hangar floors, not in the cockpit of a P-51 Warhawk.
Working on a military project with Dr. Goddard intrigued Jackson. All things considered, though, he’d rather be flying.
Hillman drove past the town commons, then turned left at City Hall onto Main Street. The stores were all closed; only a few restaurants and bars were open. Almost no traffic except for a trolley making its way up the street, its bars sparking as they touched the electric lines overhead. Leaving the town center, they entered a leafy urban neighborhood of apartment buildings and small houses, until they came upon a collection of ivy-decked buildings clustered along the right-hand side of the street.
“Here’s the Clark campus,” Hillman said, as if it could be anything else. Turning right onto Maywood Street, he slowed down as they came upon a four-story redbrick building close to the sidewalk. “That’s the Science Building, where you’ll be working.”
Jackson noticed that its windows were dark. “I take it we’re not going there right away.”
“No, sir. We’re going straight to the boardinghouse. That’s where everyone else is . . . except Dr. Goddard, of course. I think he and his wife are staying home tonight to unpack.” Hillman gave him a sidelong glance. “Have you ever met either of them? Dr. and Mrs. Goddard, I mean.”
“I haven’t met anyone except the colonel,” Jackson said.
“That so? Well, you’ll meet them soon. Incidentally, you’ll be the only people staying there. We’ve rented the whole place for your group, just to make sure that you’re left alone.”
The Plymouth continued up Maywood, leaving the
Clark University campus and entering a residential neighborhood of narrow streets shaded by oak and maple trees. The snow had lessened by then, yet the streets hadn’t been plowed; Hillman drove slowly to avoid skidding out. A left turn onto Birch Street, then, three blocks down, he pulled up to the sidewalk across from a wood-frame apartment house, three stories tall with a small front porch, indistinguishable from any other New England three-decker they’d already passed.
“Here we are, sir.” Shutting off the motor, Hillman climbed out. “C’mon in . . . I’ll introduce you to the rest of the boys.”
Jackson darted a look at him, but there was no trace of condescension on Hillman’s face; apparently, the kid didn’t know what “boy” meant to a black man. Jackson decided to let it slide as he retrieved his suitcase from the backseat and followed Hillman across the street and up the front steps. The corporal didn’t knock or ring the doorbell but instead walked straight in, holding the door open for Jackson.
They found themselves in a darkened foyer with a row of metal mailboxes on the wall across from a stairway. Straight ahead was a hallway; light gleamed from a half-open door at the end. “Hey, there!” Hillman called out as he stamped his feet on the doormat, shaking off the snow. “Anyone home?”
“Back here,” a voice from the door responded. “C’mon back.”
Still carrying his suitcase, Jackson let Hillman lead him down the hall. “Hey, guys,” the corporal said as he pushed open the door. “Here’s the last member of your group . . . Lieutenant J. Jackson Jackson, U.S. Army Air Corps.”
Jackson walked into a small but cozy parlor. Six men were seated in armchairs, with two sharing a couch near a window; most were reading books or magazines, but a couple were hunched over a checkerboard. A radio in the corner quietly played dance-hall jazz; the room was filled with cigarette and pipe smoke. Through a door on the other side of the room, Jackson spotted the kitchen. Two more men were in there, washing dishes; Jackson guessed that they were cleaning up from dinner.
V-S Day: A Novel of Alternate History Page 11
