And then would come the rush into the smoking mouth of the tunnel into the mountain, with the SS guards lashing out with their sticks and fists at the heads and shoulders of the worker herd which passed them. The tunnel was like hell itself, with prisoners made white with dust and laden with rubble, cement bags, girders, and boxes, and the corpses of the night being dragged by their feet from the sleep galleries.

Gregory Dana was prized by the supervisors for the capacity of his small hands for skilled work. So he was assigned to lighter, more complex tasks. Gradually he picked up something of the nature of the great machines on which he toiled and learned of the visions of the Reich’s military planners.

It was well-known among the workers within the Mittelwerk that Hitler had ordered the production of no less than twelve thousand of von Braun’s A-2 rockets — or rather, what the Germans called their V-2: V for Vergeltungswaffe, revenge weapon.

There was a plan to construct an immense dome at the Pas de Calais — sixty thousand tons of concrete — from which rockets would be fired off at England in batches of fourteen at once. And then there were the further schemes: of hurling rockets from submarine craft, of greater rockets which might bombard targets thousands of miles distant, and — the greatest dream of all! — of a huge station orbiting five thousand miles above the Earth and bearing a huge mirror capable of reflecting sunlight, so that cities would flash to smoke and oceans might boil.

Such visions!

…But the V-2 was the daily, extraordinary reality. That great, finned bullet-shape — no less than forty-seven feet long — was capable of carrying a warhead of more than two thousand pounds across two hundred miles! Its four tons of metal contained no less than twenty-two thousand components!

Dana came to love the V-2. It was magnificent, a machine from another world, from a bright future — and the true dream inherent in its lines, the dream of its designers, was obvious to Dana.

Even as it slowly killed him.

One morning, so early that the stars still shone and frost coated the ground, he saw the engineers from the research facility at Peenemьnde — Wernher von Braun, Hans Udet, Walter Riedel, and the rest, smartly uniformed young men, some not much older than Dana — looking up at the stars, and pointing, and talking softly.

Dana had glanced up, to see where they were looking. There was a star, bright, glowing steadily, with the faintest glimmer of red, like a ruby.

The “star” was, of course, the planet Mars, burning brightly.

Of course: that was the dream which motivated and sustained those young, clever Germans: that one day the disk of Mars would be lit up with cities built by men — men carried there by some unimaginable descendant of the V-2.