Hell's Gate(53)

“That’s a unique way to take your coffee.”

“Yes . . . I mean, no. I . . . I was working.”

“I see,” she said brightly. “I’m Lisl.”

“The pleasure is mine,” he said, automatically extending his hand to shake hers, before remembering his buttered finger.

She handed him a napkin.

“Thank you, Lisl,” he said, wiping his hand. “But how did you know my name?”

“Why, everyone knows who you are,” the woman said. “Don’t they?”

Voorhees sat up a bit straighter. Hadn’t he recently overheard a colleague at the university refer to him as “the next von Braun”?

“Well I—”

The girl started to laugh, and seeing this, Voorhees made an uneasy transition from boastful to puzzled.

“What?”

“It’s written on your lab coat, you silly duck.”

Voorhees looked down at the neatly stamped signature on his pocket protector, then hid his face in his hands.

“You’re new here, aren’t you?” Lisl asked. It was the second time that day he’d been reminded of this fact, but this time, he responded with a laugh.

Early the next morning, he took Lisl Mueller on their first date. It started out well enough. Lisl had clearly impressed Voorhees with her lifelong dream to become a physician, and she had further impressed him with her feat of having talked her way into her current job of medical assistant. Yes, it had all been going so clearly well, until he suggested that they take a walk through a nearby field. “I want you to see something special,” he had said.

Unfortunately, though, among the adjectives Lisl might have used to describe sitting beside a hole in the ground, special was not on the list. The crater, Voorhees explained, had been formed by yet another failed rocket launch. Her feet dangled over the crater rim as she watched Voorhees crawling through clumps of dirt and twisted metal in the bottom of the pit.

“You sure know how to show a girl a good time,” she said, checking her watch, for what he would have noticed, had he been paying attention, was the tenth time. Finally, she picked up a pebble and bounced it off the back of his head.

“Ouch!” he cried, and stood up. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he squinted up toward where she was sitting. “Why did you do that?”

“Sorry. The ground’s a bit shaky up here. I think this whole thing could let go at any second.”

“That’s impossible,” he called back. “These crater walls aren’t steep. I’d say the whole thing is completely stable.”

“Well, maybe it’s not the crater that’s getting unstable.”

“But look at this,” he said, standing up excitedly. He held up a jagged piece of dark green–painted metal, about the size of a dessert dish.

“That’s really nice, Maurice, but I think I just saw a wild dog.”

“It’s part of the V-2’s thrust director assembly.”

“The what?”

“Wait a moment, I’ll bring it up.”

“Please Maurice, don’t—” Lisl stopped. Voorhees had already scrambled halfway up the wall of the crater and a few seconds later he’d hauled himself over the rim.

“—bother.”

“It’s no bother, really. Just look at this!” he said, presenting the metallic scrap to her as if it were a Fabergé egg. He was covered with dirt and smelled as if he had spent the whole morning rolling around in a campfire pit.

“That’s . . . really interesting,” she said, but he knew, all these months later, that she had probably thought of saying, That’s a jagged piece of shrapnel.

“You can touch it if you want,” he offered.

Lisl frowned at him.

“Go ahead. Please—touch it.”

Afterward, her diary had recorded, “Definitely weird, but still cute.”

She pressed an index finger to the cold metal, then forced a smile. “And getting more weird by the moment,” she had written.

“You’re touching something that was almost out there,” he tried to explain.

Lisl sighed. “You’re already out there, Maurice.”

“No, wait. We take metal and silicon out of the earth and evolve it into something more than it was. We give it a part of our consciousness—the soul in the new machine, bound for the new wilderness. Do you understand what this means?”

“Try making me understand, Maurice.”

“In a hundred years, we’ll have known the moon and the planets and I’m sure we’ll be reaching toward the stars and the unexplored deeps of space. Gazing back upon Earth from so far away, it will become all but invisible.”

Lisl shook her head, very slowly. At first Voorhees merely believed she had reached a kind of saturation point on the subject. But there he had underestimated her. “Look around us,” she said. “You, von Braun—you point your eyes at the moon and the stars, but that’s not where your rockets will be aimed. Think about the cities these weapons will hit.” She gazed into the pit forlornly. “Once you finish working out the kinks.”

Voorhees had flinched at the word weapons. “Yes, well, the military will use the rockets at first, against military targets.” Then he whispered, “But who knows how much longer this war can last? And after that—one day rockets will orbit the earth, landing on runways as far away as America and China.”