Thirteen. Twelve. The rocket was clear of personnel; it lay alone and shining on the desert floor.

“…The final compound will ignite only under extreme heat, and is not sensitive to static, friction, or impact. It is very safe, you see.”

Six. Five.

“Indeed, a small rocket motor is required to fire inside the casing to ignite the propellant. And once ignited there is no need for pumps, or cryogenic storage; a solid rocket simply burns…”

Yes. And, once lit, it can’t be doused.

Two. One.

White flame lanced from the engine bell in an instant of eerie silence. The flame reached out toward the bland hillside behind the tethered rocket, and to Dana, dazzled, it was as if the desert sunlight had been dimmed, the blue and orange of the landscape leached to gray by comparison with that fire — rocket light, hotter than the surface of stars — which humans had brought to Earth.

And the noise reached him.

At first there was a deep rumbling which seemed to emerge from the depths of the Earth. And then came a fierce crackling, a pulse of high-frequency sound that was like the tearing of an immense sheet of canvas, a sound that flapped his clothes and blew at his hair. He felt the ground shake, as if suffering repeated blows from a great invisible hammer.

Udet leaned over toward him and shouted. “This is the dream, Dr. Dana.” He stared at Dana, his hair mussed and coated with orange dust. “Zero to twenty million horsepower, in less than a second! This is what I wanted you to see; this is what we are working for, you and I; this is what you must always bear in mind, as you make your studies, and file your reports.”

Dana felt overwhelmed by the man’s intensity. Of course, Udet was right. It was indeed a dream, a dream of rocket light, made real in the deserts of the western United States, before the eyes of two battered old men from Europe. The dream of the Mittelwerk.

The flames from the captive rocket continued to plume, and smoke billowed against the hillside, stained orange and gray by desert dust.

February 1979

LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

The room was dark and warm. Several of the trainees around York had their feet up on their desks. One — Bob Gold, a big-eared Texan, a few feet ahead of York — had his head resting on the fold of fat at the back of his shaven neck, and he was snoring in a thin, birdlike cackle.

The instructor at the front fumbled another Vu-graph slide onto the projector. The focus of the projector was out, so the image was blurred at the center. The instructor, an astronaut called Ralph Gershon, picked up his extensible pointer and tapped at the projection screen, making it oscillate and blurring the image further.