Pillar to the Sky (3 page)

Dennison had been an easy audience to reach. She had started out as a high school teacher of math, but—frustrated with the restraints of the education bureaucracy—she went on to do graduate work in engineering. Rather than return to the classroom, she came to the fundamental conclusion that if there was one thing Congress lacked, it was some members with a knowledge of the hard sciences. So she set out on a political career path with single-minded determination, first by getting elected to Congress and then moving on to a seat in the Senate. She played a critical role in preparing and protecting the nation’s electronic infrastructure against the destructive potential of solar storms; pushed through support for the first maglev trains (the bill disappeared in another committee); and was at times all but a lone voice in the Senate to keep an ever-dwindling NASA alive as the nation struggled to somehow rein in its crippling debt load.

After hours of reviewing the Morgans’ plans that night, she sat back and exclaimed, “Good heavens, I think your mad scheme will actually work. I’ll see that you at least get some money for continued research; not much, but enough to keep you two—soon to be three—alive.”

Naively he had assumed that all was a done deal, and within the year work—real work—on building a tower would actually begin.

That was sixteen and a half years ago. Over those years the clock had ticked on and the climate continued to shift; whether due to man-made causes, a natural cycle, or a combination of both, the impacts were becoming more catastrophic. The debt had taken the nation to near bankruptcy. Conflict had escalated in the Middle East as energy production peaked, then began to dwindle as the world went to ever greater lengths to squeeze out an extra barrel amid escalating costs. A malaise seemed to be setting in as Americans began to feel that the days of their greatness had passed and would not come again.

And today Gary and Eva’s plan for addressing these problems had come to an end.

“How is he doing by the way?”

Gary looked at Eva and they both smiled.

“Professor Rothenberg?” Gary paused. “Still going strong at ninety-two, but … he is ninety-two.”

“That old character will outlast us all,” Mary said with an understanding smile.

“And who knows?” she added, lowering her voice as if imparting a secret, “There might still be a surprise in the wings. He’s famous for that, you know. My first visit to Goddard as a member of Congress…”

She sighed.

“We were still flying the Shuttle back then.” She shook her head. “He was the one who showed me around. The old guy had me absolutely charmed even then. He’s not one to give up, even now.”

“What do you mean ‘a surprise in the wings’?” Eva asked.

Mary shrugged, looking around as if to be certain no one was hiding in a corner of the room. Years of experience had taught her well that one never knew where an eavesdropper might lurk, recorder or just an iPhone in hand to catch every whispered word.

“Well, one never knows, and besides, even if I did not—and I am not saying I do—it is way outside my control now.”

“Outside of your control…?” Eva asked.

“Oh, call it classified for the moment,” Mary replied. “And just know that, even though it looks like you lost the war today, there is no denying what happened here.”

She looked back disdainfully at the empty chairs of the committee.

“NASA is still in for some hard times, and you two dear friends are out of work with that beloved agency in a few more weeks, your project tossed aside like so many other opportunities we’ve tossed aside in recent decades. But I predict it ain’t over yet by a long shot. Just know that I’ll be behind the scenes, even though your program has been cut.”

“Thank you, Senator,” Gary said.

“Come on, we’re out of formal session: it’s Mary.”

She squeezed his shoulder and then looked at him with concern.

“How is your health?”

“Just fine, no problems.”

She said nothing in reply, then looked around and smiled.

“That daughter of yours, she’s a fighter. I like that.”

He looked back to where his daughter waited patiently by the doorway.

“It’s her world I want to help shape,” he said. “We’ve pretty well had our game and not done so well by it.”

“We can still try, so go out and do it.”

“With what?”

“We’ll see, and God be with you.” She kissed Eva on the cheek and at the door stopped to pause for a momentary chat with Victoria, shaking her hand and then hugging her with a compliment about her fighting spirit and congratulations on her early acceptance to college. Then she left the room.

“Proud of you, Victoria,” Gary said with a grin. It was obvious that after her confrontation with Senator Proxley, Victoria was a bit shaken, afraid that she had gone too far. Mary’s warm compliment had reassured her and she had looked at her parents for approval.

“At least you didn’t kick him in the shins,” Gary said, sweeping his girl into an embrace.

“I wanted to.”

“So did I, and a lot more,” Eva said in Ukrainian with a smile.

“Come on you two fighters. Let’s go to Goddard and break the news.”

*   *   *

For Gary, clearing the security gate at the Goddard Space Flight Center lifted a weight from his weary shoulders. It was like coming home: he always had a flashback of the happiest summer of his life, an internship that set out the paths not just of his career but his personal happiness as well. It was here that he and Eva both came under the spell of Erich Rothenberg.

He and Eva had, of course, missed the high glory days of the 1960s—that was half a century ago now—but at least they had been in the space program when there was still talk of returning to the moon—plans for Mars, even—and, of course, all the other less glorious but just as important research paths. Many of the old veterans of those times still walked the corridors, and Erich was one of them. But cutback after cutback had left Goddard something of a ghost town, remembering past glories, still hoping that the day would come when society again believed in positive dreams for the future and was willing to throw its backing behind it. It was like a monastery preserving dreams and knowledge in the hope of a renewed renaissance.

There was no problem finding a parking space, and their old mentor, Erich Rothenberg, was at the door of the small office complex that housed his once burgeoning domain, as if waiting for them. He came out and, in classic European fashion, took Eva’s hand and kissed it lightly, then grasped Gary’s hand, looking straight into his eyes.

“How the hell are you?”

“How am I?” Gary sighed. “I think you know how I am.”

“Yeah, I was listening to it on the Internet. That Proxley really cut our throats.”

When Erich got angry, his German accent really came through. He was perhaps the last of the legendary breed of famed German scientists who had shaped America’s space program back in the fifties and sixties. In his office hung fading photos of him with Wernher von Braun himself, the two posing alongside an early model of a lunar landing module. But there was one big difference: Erich had been on the opposite side from Von Braun during the war that had bred the legendary team of German scientists who had led America to the moon.

Erich was on the other side in that conflict because he was Jewish. His family had managed to get out when the Nazis took power in 1933. Erich’s father saw the future clearly enough, packed what they could take, and fled with his family to friends in Holland. Erich was a university student in physics in Amsterdam when the war came crashing into Holland. His father, a highly decorated officer of the First World War, still had friends and old comrades in the German Army, who pulled up to their home in Amsterdam, shouting that the SS was right behind them with arrest orders, and helped smuggle them down to the Spanish border once France surrendered. Some months later he was in Palestine, eagerly recruited by the British Army as a commando, given that he could speak perfect Berliner German.

It was indeed a strange mix when, in the mid-1950s, Rothenberg came to the States and was tossed in with Von Braun and all the others. The bond of a dream of reaching to space transcended any past differences, which in reality were few, the German scientists were as appalled as the rest of the world when the full truth of the dark psychotic madness behind Hitler and his followers was finally revealed to the world. Together, they believed in the future of space, and that America must lead the way.

Now Erich was the last of them. Amazingly the old man still stood sharply erect, as if a British drill sergeant just might be lurking around a corner, ready to pounce. Holding an emeritus chair in aerospace engineering, he still came in to the office at Goddard every day to check up on his “ladies and lads,” as he called them, with decidedly dated Old World charm. In a field dominated by men, it had been Eva who refused to be addressed as one of “Erich’s lads,” and he had finally broken under her determined will.

The affection between them was genuine, as he offered and she accepted the traditional kiss on both cheeks and Victoria smiled as she received the same courtesy.

Erich patted Victoria affectionately on the shoulder then hugged her.

“You nailed him right between the eyes, young lady!” he cried, grinning like a proud grandfather at his newest prodigy. “I might have added a few more choice words in Yiddish and let him try to figure it out later, but, of course, that would have been improper.”

“Oh, I had a lot more to say,” Victoria responded, her features reddening because this old man, who was indeed like a beloved grandfather, had praised her.

Erich laughed.

“Remind me to teach you a few,” he said with a grin.

“She knows too many such words in Ukrainian as is,” Gary replied, and Erich, laughing, nodded.

“I knew you were coming. I already have tea made, and for you, Gary, I think you need something a bit stronger.”

The corridor was all but empty as Erich led them past office doors that were closed, with no light coming from within: empty. He once held sway over an entire suite with a staff of fifty or more, but now? At least the powers that be still graced the old man with the dignity of an emeritus position and, out of respect for nearly sixty years’ service, kept him on as a reminder of the glory days. His office was small and cramped, the bookshelves sagging in the middle, piled high with bound and unbound papers, yellowed at the edges. His desk was still the same: not government issue, an indulgence to his eccentricities; the heavy oak table was still kept clean except for two pictures, one of his departed wife. The other picture was of him in British commando uniform, Sten submachine gun in hand. His unit had been dropped in to occupy what was left of the German labs at Peenemünde at the end of the war, a secret mission sent in the day before the Russians overran the facility to snatch up anything that could help England’s postwar missile program. The hangar behind him had several V-2 rockets. Everyone knew he deliberately kept that portrait very visible to needle his German friends.

It was at that place where Erich’s future had been decided. Gazing in wonder at just how dangerously ahead the Germans were in 1945, after accompanying crate loads of plans for what was being called the “New York Rocket,” he was discharged from service. He went back to university to study not aeronautical engineering but something new called aerospace engineering, a field that he had helped to define with his dissertation on what would be necessary to actually get to the moon and establish a base there.

Gary smiled at the sight of the photo of Erich in uniform while Eva and Victoria graciously accepted the offer of tea. What happened next was strictly against all regulations as Erich pulled his favorite Scotch, hidden in a filing cabinet, and poured a larger one for himself and for Gary.

“Well, do we drink a toast against all those like Proxley,” he asked, “or our traditional one instead?”

“The traditional one,” Eva replied softly, and there was actually a catch in her voice.

“To our journey to the stars,” Erich whispered, choking up a bit as well.

“To the stars,” Gary whispered, and as he took a sip, tears were in his eyes, too, because being there, at what seemed to be the end of his dream, only served to remind him of the day that dream had first begun to form …

1

Eighteen Years Earlier

Goddard Space Flight Center

“Dr. Rothenberg?”

Erich Rothenberg, director of the division of advanced propulsion designs, and who oversaw interns assigned to the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, looked up over the top of his wire-framed glasses. There was no welcoming smile, just a cool gaze as Gary Morgan stood nervously in the doorway.

“So you are one of my new interns for the summer?” Erich asked. “I already told them there is no need for interns here—at least, those who want a solid future. May I suggest you just go back to the personnel office and ask for a different assignment.”

Gary didn’t move. He had been warned by “veterans” who had served as interns with Dr. Rothenberg that this was his typical greeting, the first winnowing-out process in which more than one graduate student had taken him at his word and fled.

He stood his ground.

“I volunteered for this division, sir. It is why I came to Goddard for the summer and asked to be assigned to you.”

“Oh? Pray tell why.” Still there was no welcoming gesture to take a seat.

“I’ve read most of your papers, sir, at least the unclassified ones: your prediction that Apollo would turn into a political dead end after the first landing, objections to the space station rather than an effort on advance propulsion systems and setting Mars as the next goal…”

“I sail against the wind,” Erich said gruffly. “Not a good path for career advancement.”

Gary didn’t move.

“Oh, damn it, come on in and sit down,” Erich sighed. Gary was smart enough not to show any emotion; he had at least passed the first test. He was, at least, literally through the door and into the office. Very few ever made it that far.