He came to stand beside John, pointing in the dim light to the extraordinary beauty of the telescope, its polished wooden segments, its burnished brass fittings. “The telescope was made by Alvan Clark of Massachusetts. In 1886. He was the best America ever produced, a profound astronomer and a better mechanic.”
“If it’s so important,” John asked, “how did it get here?”
“Son, this is the leading observatory in this part of the world. If it were not, I wouldn’t be here.” He touched the telescope lovingly. “Back in those years the university graduated a truly stupid man. I’ve seen his letter of application to study astronomy. Every word misspelled. Astronnimy. He was refused admission, so he went out and [63] earned four million dollars bartering railroad stocks. First thing he did with his money was buy this Alvan Clark, and the building to house it. Used to come here night after night to look at the stars, and couldn’t name one of them.”
Professor Anderssen pressed his hands against the gleaming woodwork and said, “Before you look through a great telescope, you must look with your eyes. What do you see up there in a line between Perseus and Andromeda?”
Through an aperture in the ceiling John studied the cluttered heavens and came slowly to see a slight but fixed . haziness. “Is that it?” he asked.
The professor said, “Now look at it with your binoculars,” and when John did, he saw to his satisfaction that it was a distinct aggregation of something, but precisely what, he could not determine.
“Now you’re ready to see the famous double cluster through an Alvan Clark,” the professor said, and with some difficulty he searched for the pair, uttering pleased grunts when he finally focused upon it.
Stepping back, he invited John to look, and when the boy had adjusted the controls to accommodate his eye, he saw that what had seemed a confused haze was really a balanced pair of magnificent clusters, teeming with stars and vitality and nocturnal beauty. They seemed to be in competition, west against east, a staggering collection of great stars engaged in some kind of combat. Some were grouped tightly, as if locked in struggle, others were far-flung, but all were enchantingly interrelated, as if the torment of the heavens kept them associated against their will. It was the complexity and implied movement that made these clusters so appealing.
“How many stars in each cluster?” Anderssen asked.
“Do all the stars we see belong to the clusters?” John asked.
“An admirable question. No. Some stand between us and the clusters. Some form a distant background. In the left, three hundred individual stars. In the right, four hundred.”
“It seems impossible.”
“And now for the gem. Messier 31. Can you find it without the glasses?”
“Oh yes. I look for the Great Square of Pegasus, project [64] the diagonal toward Cassiopeia, and halfway there, a bit to the west ... I see it now.”
“What do you see in your binoculars?”
“A faint, hazy mass. Very stable. Very big.”
“It’s the most remote object in the heavens that ancient man could see with his unaided eye. Do you know how far away it is?”
“No.”
“About two and a quarter million light-years. That means that if you and I send a message to Andromeda tonight, at the speed of light, and if they understand it and want to reply, we can’t possibly receive their answer for four and a half million years. How far away is that in your calculations?”
“I’d need a pencil.”
“Here’s one.” So John sat at the wooden desk used by the university astronomers, and by a darkened light put down his figures, reciting to the professor as he did: “Two and a quarter million light-years multiplied by about six trillion miles per year.” He did the multiplying and adding of zeros, then reported: “I get something like one followed by nineteen zeroes.”
Professor Anderssen was conducting his own calculations, using precise values, and he said, “Remarkably close. The actual distance seems to be thirteen billion billion miles away from us.”
The two sat silent in contemplation of this stupendous distance, and John looked at the shadowy form with new reverence. “Now see it in the telescope,” Anderssen said, and John moved to the eyepiece, staring across that immense distance to where M-31 glowed majestically in the night.
“See its magnitude,” Anderssen whispered. “Note its shape, exactly like that of our galaxy. See the glowing core at the center, the immense radius of the fiery gases. Can you detect the swirling arms, the wild violence? Can you guess what mysterious control holds it all together?”
For eleven minutes, while the telescope subtly followed the movement of the distant galaxy through the heavens, John Pope stared at its multiple wonders. And then he heard again the quiet voice of the Norwegian professor: “Tonight you’ve been introduced to two wonders. The beautiful and the stupendous. There are, we judge, one hundred [65] billion other galaxies out there. And if we ever lift a telescope above our atmospheric interruption, I’m sure it will reveal an additional hundred billion. For space is limitless. It goes on forever. Always remember, John, that you and I live on a minor planet attached to a minor star, at the far edge of a minor galaxy. We live here briefly, and when we’re gone, we’re forgotten. And one day the galaxies will be gone, too. The only morality that makes sense is to do something useful with the brief time we’re allotted. I would be most pleased if you would report to my class in January.”
Slowly, through the starry night, with much more visible than when he started after supper-for the sky was now dark, allowing the weaker stars to shine through-he walked homeward, his binoculars hanging at his side. In Leyte Gulf it was four in the afternoon of the first day, and Norman Grant was baking in fierce sunlight on his raft, while at Peenemünde the German rocket experts were spending the early daylight hours endeavoring to assess the damage done by the tremendous American bombing.
John Pope knew he had experienced something rare and precious-his first journey into the heavens, the glimpse of perfect beauty in the star Altair, the awakening of love with Penny, and the vision of that galaxy infinitely remote: There can never be another- night like this. My job is to make all nights good within their own limits.
“Damn it all!” his father shouted as he came in the door. “Two-thirty! Just who in hell do you think you are?”
John was startled. He had never before heard his conservative father swear. “I was at the observatory,” he apologized. “They let me use ...”
“John,” his mother called from the foot of the stairs. She was in her nightgown and it was evident that she had been crying. “You should have telephoned.”
“I just stopped at the observatory.”
“You are not to roam the streets like rabble, John Pope,” his father said, jealous of the good reputation that name carried. “And if you do go somewhere like the observatory, have the decency to telephone us. We care deeply what happens to you, son.”
“The professor invited me to attend his college classes. Starting in January.”
[66] “That’s gratifying,” his mother said.
In his bedroom he could not sleep, for the majestic universe seemed to be exploding about him, shattering and illuminating.
An hour before dawn the elder Popes heard their son’s alarm clock, and they stepped into the hallway in time to see him disappearing down the stairs. “Where in hell are you going now?” Dr. Pope swore for a second time.
“I want to see how the night ends.”
“John,” his mother said quietly, “you must put on something more.” When her son hesitated, she added, “We watch your health. Put on a jacket.”
When he reached the yard he saw above him the unequaled panoply of winter constellations: Taurus, Orion, the Twins, the group with great Sirius, and in the east the Lion and the outriders of the Virgin. He stood enraptured, using his glasses on one after another of their splendid stars, but it was not until just after dawn that he saw what he had left his bed to view. It was
the spot where red Arcturus would have been seen had not the risen Sun obscured it. Visualizing the star as it would have appeared, he accepted the fact that his Earth actually did revolve in a twisted path around the Sun. At dusk he had seen Arcturus slip away; at dawn he was seeing it return.
“We do revolve in space,” he whispered to himself. Again he longed to capture this great red star in his binoculars, but again it lay too low for sensible viewing, so he waited, but by the time Arcturus had risen enough to clear the atmosphere, day had come and there were no stars.
At three o’clock on the afternoon of 24 October 1944, when Professor Stanley Mott was investigating the damage done by the rocket that landed in the heart of the financial district of London, and when Admiral Nishimura was placing in his private safe the Sho-Go instructions which required him to take his small fleet on a suicidal foray into Leyte Gulf, Dieter Kolff, a rocket technician of indeterminate rank, was pushing his bicycle onto a small ferry that would carry him from the top-secret town of Peenemünde in the Baltic to the mainland of Germany a short distance to the west.
He was thirty-seven years old, a small, thin, shy man [67] with an ineffectual mustache. He wore heavy glasses which he took off when trying to impress people but replaced rapidly if a document or piece of equipment was handed him. He spoke softly but revealed a fierce willingness to defend his judgments; his inner convictions he shared with absolutely no one, not even Liesl, whom he was leaving the island to visit.
Developments in Nazi Germany had taught him this distrust. As a boy from an impoverished mountain area south of Munich, he had encountered scorn, for he was not from some hereditary warrior family in Prussia, or clever in business like a Ruhr German, or intellectually gifted like a Berliner. He had only one gift: he could look at a piece of machinery and see what was wrong with it. He had been able to do this on his family’s farm and later when he worked in the factory in Munich. But because he was not university educated, or able to express himself well, he gained small profit from his gift.
When drafted into the army he remained a mute private, first on the French front, then on the Russian, and officers with infinitely less ability in keeping their machines of war functioning walked past him a score of times without ever asking for his assistance. But he was clever enough to see, in the spring of 1942, that any German armies which went deeper into Russia were apt to encounter tragedy, and he devoted all his energies to escaping from those gray, forbidding steppes.
His chance came in early 1943 when he was serving with the unlucky General Paul von Kleist in the Caucasus. During a vast retreat Von Kleist’s tanks started to break down, and when the general hastened among his men, goading them to make repairs that were impossible, he spotted one taciturn mechanic who doggedly mended anything that was brought before him, and on the muddy repair field Dieter Kolff was commissioned a lieutenant and placed in charge of overhauling the great tanks.
Two weeks later Hitler dispatched an urgent request to the Wehrmacht, asking it to send him responsible young men with impeccable records to work at a demanding task. That was all that the order said, but discreet inquiries established that men with mechanical ability were needed, preferably not from large cities. Von Kleist pondered this [68] cryptic statement and concluded that what Hitler sought were strong farm boys who had not been contaminated with city radicalism.
His quota was eleven, and after he had nominated nine promising lads his eye fell upon Lieutenant Kolff, the most reliable officer in the headquarters company, and a wily tactic evolved: I’ll send the Fuehrer my best man and maybe ... Just perhaps Hitler would overlook the disasters on the Caucasus front.
“Where were you born?” Von Kleist asked, and when Dieter gave the name of his rural village, the general said, “Your papers say Munich. We don’t want anyone from that trouble spot.”
“I’m from a farm,” Dieter replied, and that evening he was on his way out of Russia, rejoicing with every clackety turn of the train wheels.
He had not worked with the heavy installations at Peenemünde for two weeks before his extraordinary native ability was recognized, and late one afternoon he was brought before a tall, silent man with deep-lined face and funereal voice. “This is General Eugen Breutzl,” an orderly said. “Don’t you salute generals?”
Kolff saluted awkwardly. “They tell me you are very good with machines,” the general said. He was fifty-three that year and obviously harassed by the urgent demands constantly pressed upon him.
“I can fix things,” Kolff said.
“Education?”
“I worked in a factory. Fixing things.”
“Family?”
“Farmers.”
Breutzl frowned, then asked brightly, “Big landowners?”
“No. A little chicken farm.”
“How did you become ... well, an officer?”
“In Russia. I knew how to fix tanks. General von Kleist ... a field commission.”
“You think you can fix the things we’re making?”
“I can.”
“Do you know what they are?”
“The men say they’re rockets. For hitting London.”
“Do you know anything about rockets?”
“From what I’ve seen, I can fix certain things.”
That had been almost two years ago, and now [69] Lieutenant Kolff was one of General Breutzl’s most valuable men. The general, an engineer and not a scientist, was in charge of building the great A-4 rockets which the scientific genius, young Wernher von Braun, had devised, and the job was not an easy one, for whenever General Breutzl had a production line nicely started, Von Braun altered the specifications, requiring a complete reorientation of machines and men.
“Why doesn’t he make up his mind?” Kolff asked one day in desperation.
“Because it’s an entire new world, Dieter. There are no rules to go by.”
Kolff was no longer an officer in the Wehrmacht. He was one of the anomalous breed that infested Peenemünde, men of no stripe but of great ability in grappling with the problems of a coming world. Out of respect, Breutzl was accorded his old title, but he was no longer a general in the military sense; he was a genius at perfecting engineering solutions which enabled rockets to fly, and in the early days when they had failed, twenty-three out of twenty-nine exploding on the pads or shortly after takeoff, it was usually because the scientist had ignored Kolff’s practical advice. Once he said laughingly, “And when I fail it’s because I didn’t listen to Dieter Kolff.”
The little farmer had an almost mystical sense of what an engine could do, or not do, and when the rockets became increasingly complex, he was often the only one who could unravel their mysteries. He was a kind of German Thomas Edison, and both Von Braun and Breutzl knew that they were lucky to have found him. “He is,” said Von Braun, “an untutored genius. How did we get him?”
“Number ten in a detachment of eleven,” Breutzl said. “I wonder how many more we have out there we haven’t identified.”
“We’ll need them all,” Von Braun said.
The rocket program had not gone well in those first years. Again and again the leaders of Germany had come to Peenemünde to ascertain when the A-4s could be launched against London, and repeatedly there had been debacles, with rockets disintegrating in midair, but the three men had plodded on, convinced that what they had envisaged could fly, could carry a massive load of explosive to London and deliver it on target.
[70] Now, as he unlimbered his bicycle at the far end of the ferry, Kolff reflected on how lucky he had been: If I was still a private, without my battlefield commission, Von Braun would never have looked at me. He doesn’t care much for privates. He thinks I come from some important family. But he knows I can fix his rockets. Indeed, the rockets that were now falling on London reached there in large part because of innovations and corrections initiated by Kolff, and the fact that as a mere lieutenant he was permitted to leave Peenemünde at three in the afternoon to visit his girl was proof
of the regard in which Von Braun held him.
When it was recognized that he had valuable skills, he had been removed from the A-4 and assigned to a project of ultimate secrecy, and it would have surprised him to learn that both Moscow and Washington had compiled dossiers on him, for each was determined to capture him when the war ended. Up to now he had been unwilling to concede that Germany might collapse, and the reason for his optimism was that he knew what tremendous weapons he and General Breutzl were about to perfect.
When he was detached from the A-4, he did not move to the next sequence, the A-5 through the A-9, each of which was planned to accomplish some tremendous thing. He was assigned to the A-10, last in line and the mightiest. It represented a concept so dazzling that he was allowed to discuss it only with Von Braun and Breutzl.
The A-10, and it was very close to solution, with production not much more than a year in the future, was a rocket that could be fired from Peenemünde with a colossal head of explosive, and land on Boston, New York or Washington. Dieter was not angry at the citizens of any of those cities, no more than he was angry at the people of London, who were being struck daily by his bombs. He was a technician, a man trained to apply his skills to whatever task loomed, solve its complications and move it to completion. If the aerial bombing of New York was desirable, regardless of motive, he would devise ways by which it could be accomplished. And it was on this task that he now concentrated.
So it was a very important man who mounted his bicycle and pedaled westward as the American bombers prepared to strike a mortal blow at Peenemünde. He was [71] headed for a farm north of the mainland town of Wolgast; it was owned by the family of Liesl Koenig and was conspicuous for only one thing. It stood adjacent to an expensive summer resort with gorgeous water views on three sides: east to the channel separating the mainland from Peenemünde, north into the Baltic Sea, and west into a bay containing a very large island.