Outside the Peenemünde wind-tunnel, Pökler has come to stand at night, next to the great sphere, 40 feet high, listening to the laboring pumps as they evacuate the air from the white sphere, five minutes of growing void—then one terrific gasp: 20 seconds of supersonic flow… then the fall of the shutter, and the pumps starting up again… he has listened, and taken it to imply his own cycle of shuttered love, growing empty over the year for two weeks in August, engineered with the same care. He has smiled, and drunk toasts, and traded barracks humor with Major Weissmann, while all the time, behind the music and the giggling, he could hear the flesh of pieces moved in darkness and winter across the marshes and mountain chains of the board… watched run after run the Halbmodelle results out of the wind tunnel, showing how the net normal force would be distributed over the Rocket’s length, for hundreds of different Mach numbers—seen the true profile of the Rocket warped and travestied, a rocket of wax, humped like a dolphin at around caliber 2, necking down toward the tail which was then stretched up, impossibly, in a high point with a lower shoulder aft of it—and seen how his own face might be plotted, not in light but in net forces acting upon it from the flow of Reich and coercion and love it moved through… and known that it must suffer the same degradation, as death will warp face to skull….

In ’43, because he was away at Zwölfkinder, Pökler missed the British air raid on Peenemünde. Returning to the station, as soon as he came in sight of the “foreign workers’” quarters at Trassenheide razed and smashed, bodies still being dug from the wreckage, a terrible suspicion began, and would not be put down. Weissmann was saving him for something: some unique destiny. Somehow the man had known the British would bomb that night, known even in ’39, and so arranged the tradition of an August furlough, year after year but all toward protecting Pökler from the one bad night. Not quite balanced… a bit paranoid, yes, yes… but the thought purred on in his brain, and he felt himself turning to stone.