As war drew closer, the game of priorities and politicking grew more earnest, Army vs. Luftwaffe, the Weapons Department vs. the Ministry of Munitions, the SS, given their aspirations, vs. everybody else, and even a simmering discontent that was to grow over the next few years into a palace revolt against von Braun, because of his youth and a number of test failures—though heaven knew, there were always enough of those, they were the raw material of all testing-station politics…. In general, though, the test results grew more and more hopeful. It was impossible not to think of the Rocket without thinking of Schicksal, of growing toward a shape predestined and perhaps a little otherworldly. The crews launched an uncontrolled series of A5s, bringing some of them down by parachute, reaching a height of five miles and nearly to the speed of sound. Though the guidance people had still a long way to go, they had by this point switched over to vanes made of graphite, brought the yaw oscillations down to five degrees or so, and grown measurably happier about the Rocket’s stability.

At some point during the winter, Pökler came to feel that he could handle a meeting with Weissmann. He found the SS man on guard behind eyeglasses like Wagnerian shields, ready for unacceptable maxima—anger, accusation, a moment of office-violence. It was like meeting a stranger. They had not spoken since the days at Kummersdorf, at the old Raketenflugplatz. In this quarter-hour at Peenemünde, Pökler smiled more than he had in the year previous: spoke of his admiration for Poehlmann’s work in devising a cooling system for the propulsion.

“What about the hot spots?” Weissmann asked. It was a reasonable question, but also an intimacy.

It came to Pökler that the man didn’t give a damn about heating problems. This was a game, as Mondaugen had warned—ritualized as jiu-jitsu. “We’ve got heat-flow densities,” Pökler feeling as he usually did when he sang, “on the order of three million kcal/m2h °C. Regenerative cooling is the best interim solution right now, but Poehlmann has a new approach”—showing him with chalk and slate, trying for the professional manner—“he feels that if we use a film of alcohol on the inside of the chamber, we can reduce the heat transfer by a considerable amount.”

“You’ll be injecting it.”

“Correct.”

“How much fuel is that going to reroute? How’s it going to affect the engine efficiency?”

Pökler had the figures. “Right now injection is a plumber’s nightmare, but with the delivery schedules as they are—”

“What about the two-stage combustion process?”

“Gives us more volume, better turbulence, but there’s also a non-isotropic pressure drop, which cuts into our efficiency…. We’re trying any number of approaches. If we could depend on better funding—”