Stephen Baxter: Last and First Contacts

‘Yes, Doctor von Braun.’

A secretary popped her head around the door. ‘Colonel Dornberger is here for you, sir.’

‘Thank you.’ He turned a dazzling smile on Dorothea. ‘Good luck, Fraulein!’

So began a strange double career for Dorothea. By day she worked with the rest of the clerks and secretaries on the unending task of keeping this establishment of thousands of people, tens of thousands of complex machines, and millions of marks, functioning and flowing. And then when the working day was done, whenever the night was clear, Dorothea would be collected by Father Kopleck and Lieutenant Bergher in an SS staff car and driven off with her telescope and notebooks to the northern coast.

Sometimes Dorothea wondered how she kept it all up. Some mixture of excitement and fear kept her nerves sparking, she suspected. When she did get a chance to sleep, on cloudy or rainy nights, she slept very deeply indeed.

Though when she dreamt, it was often of Lieutenant Adam Bergher.

As the autumn drew in and the winter stars rose, the good seeing nights were spectacular, but bitterly cold in the wind off the Baltic. As compensation, on Sundays, when they were generally free of their routine duties, Adam would drive up to the beach in the afternoon before the light went, and they would eat sandwiches and drink coffee from flasks, and even take a nip of brandy if Adam could get it. Of course Sundays were the hardest days for Father Kopleck to get away from his duties, and so Adam took Dorothea to the coast alone.

Dorothea soon began to spend the whole week in a daze, waiting for Sunday, and her ‘picnics’ with Adam. The priest made no remark, but the stern looks he gave Dorothea spoke volumes. You are evidently a sensible girl. Stay that way.

The coast itself was beautiful. They sat on blankets on a broad sandy beach, before them the steel grey of the Baltic with Sweden and Finland off to the north somewhere, behind them low sandy hills with stands of forest, tall pines and some oak. Sometimes they would walk. There were patches of marshland, and wildlife: red squirrel, rabbits, even deer, and swans, coots, grebes, ducks. This place had been chosen for the research establishment because of its remoteness and wildness; access to the peninsula, across a few bridges, was easily controlled, and the sea offered an immense testing range into which rockets could be fired off with impunity.

Dorothea said, during their fourth or fifth ‘picnic’ alone, ‘It’s odd that the wildlife isn’t scared away by the rockets.’

‘My father was in the first war. In France. He said the birdsong would always start up again as soon as the artillery barrages stopped. Although Doctor von Braun says his maternal grandfather used to come up here to shoot the ducks!’

‘My mother didn’t really approve of me volunteering to come here. Oh, she thought I would be safer than in Munich, with the English bombing. But I’m a city girl, she said. How would I get on with oceans and trees!’

‘A city girl, but you had your eyes on the stars.’

‘That was thanks to my father.’ She stroked her telescope on its stand, a sturdy reflector. ‘I took technical subjects at school, and began a degree in physics at the university. But of course few women become scientists, especially in the war.’

‘Yet you’ve ended up doing science here, after all. Strange that such different paths have led the two of us to the same place. My father was broken after the Kaiser’s war. Wounded, though not badly, but when he came home he was unemployed, and he struggled to manage. Then the Party came along and gave us back some self-respect.’ He glanced down at his black uniform. ‘He would have been proud of me, I think.’

On impulse she grabbed his arm. They had rarely touched before, and he looked startled. ‘I know he would, Adam.’

He gazed into her eyes, and smiled.

But her small alarm clock chimed: time to begin observing.

He looked up into the sky. ‘Five o’clock. Shouldn’t your comet be up there by now?’

The comet’s orbital period was almost exactly ninety minutes. Every observing night she made out tables of its expected positions, and used a navy-issue sextant and stopwatch, courtesy of von Braun, to confirm those positions. She glanced at her tables now, and up into the sky, and pointed to the south. ‘It should be just – there.’ When you knew what to look for it was unmistakeable, the unwinking point of light sliding slowly but steadily across the background of the winter constellations. Today, though there was still some light in the blue-grey sky, the brighter stars were already easily visible.

But there was no sign of the comet.

Dorothea felt an odd panic. She worked her sextant and checked her tables. ‘Have I made some mistake?’

‘You never have before. Don’t be frightened, Dorothea.’ Adam got to his feet, took a pair of expensive-looking Swiss-made binoculars from the staff car, and began to scan the sky.

‘There must be something wrong.’

‘Dorothea.’

‘I do have to put together these tables in a rush—’

‘Dorothea. Hush.’ He was standing still, the binoculars before his face, peering to the west. ‘Look. Just look.’

She turned. And she saw a parachute, a huge one, spread across the sky, made of some silvery fabric, not like the grubby chutes you saw over baled-out flyers during an air raid. And suspended beneath the chute on fine threads, or wires, was a blocky mass, like complex machinery. Her heart pumped, with wonder, astonishment – and, yes, with relief that she hadn’t got something wrong.

‘Well,’ said Adam. ‘Here comes your comet.’

‘The stars, touching the Earth. The whole world is changing, Adam. Think of it! Right here and now! In the middle of this war—’

He grabbed her waist and pulled her to him. She felt the prickle of the coarse cloth of his SS uniform against the bare flesh of her neck. His eyes were wide, his face full of wonder. She drowned in his kiss.

As the winter deepened the pressure of work at the Peenemünde complex only intensified.

Both the army and the air force had research establishments here, though they shared facilities such as the air strip, and a power plant and liquid oxygen factory, huge concrete monuments rising from the pine forest. The army rocket engineers under Dornberger and von Braun worked in complexes to the east of the peninsula, including a line of rocket test stands that ran up the coast towards the sea. In a gigantic assembly facility called Production Hall F 1, a great modernistic slab of glass and concrete set incongruously among the pines, an assembly line for missiles was being prepared. But to the west the air force was developing its own weapons, flying bombs of much shorter range than the A4. Soon testing of those devices too was underway, and the whole peninsula was a hive of activity.

The good news for von Braun and his people, Adam told Dorothea, was that Hitler had already ordered hundreds of the A4 rockets, ultimately to be fired at England. But after years of opposition from various vested interests, now that the work was showing some success, the battles were starting for a piece of Peenemünde. You had the armaments ministry, the military branches and the security agencies all competing for control and credit. The navy had ambitious plans to launch A4s from submarines. Even private companies were pitching in, hoping for lucrative patents and profits. In Hitler’s Germany such internal wars were waged viciously, through spies, informers and denunciations. The place was riddled with distrust and conflict, putting everybody under even more pressure.

Meanwhile, in stolen moments, Dorothea and Adam fell ever more deeply in love.

And in the middle of all this an alien spacecraft had landed.