Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

He had been an enthusiastic observer of the space race from its beginnings in the late 1950s right through to the lunar landings. After the moon it had been the space stations. There had been an accident on Soyuz II when it had been undocking from Salyut I, the first operational orbital base.

There he had sat, on a warm afternoon in Speer’s garden, a sharp sun lighting up the architect’s folly. That miniature province that the former Minister of Armaments and War Production had built in the prison courtyard. In the fifth year of his confinement Speer had drawn up plans and landscaped the enclosed area. Pathways fanned out from a central axis flanked with elaborate arrangements of topiary and sculpted herbaceous borders. Then he set to work on the monumental rock gardens: squared blocks of stacked brick that formed raised beds in an infantile proportion to his lost triumphalism. Lying on the grass beside them, Speer would gaze up and see the walls and towers of a great city. A miniature vision of the Welthauptstadt , the world capital Germania, his last and unfinished project now realised as an ornamental parterre.

Yet once it had been completed, Speer seldom spent much time within his botanical domain. At exercise time he would walk around it, keeping to the perimeter track, avoiding the forking paths of the enclosure. Like a degenerate angel or forgetful Titan he would absently wander at the edge of his creation. Then he began to imagine journeys and measure their distance as he trod around the yard for hours on end. He first walked to Heidelberg, then on through Europe, eastward in a clockwise loop. Given his nature, it was inevitable that he would conceive a plan to walk the earth. This would be the conquest that could redress the failure of the architect’s most notorious client. To circumnavigate a schematic world with four corners, an oblong Mappa Mundi with its holy subdivisions, its monstrous memories, its hidden Earthly Paradise. He moved through continents at a rate of forty-nine kilometres a week, using guidebooks and friendly guards to provide the details of his journey. By the time of his release in 1966 he had reached Mexico.

Speer’s great rock garden had seen something of a decline, that was for sure: weeded and overgrown, with some of its tiered masonry displaced. But the architect would approve, Hess mused. Speer, with a pompous aesthetic that yearned to make glorious ruins, had imagined himself as Europe’s last classicist. Hess sighed and his mind muttered: a taste for grandeur was always our weakness.

‘These cosmonauts have been in orbit for twenty-four days,’ he had told the American commandant. ‘No one has remained in zero gravity for that long.’

And yet he had been weightless for decades. Ever since his flight. He had never quite landed, never quite made it back to terra firma. His had been a long, slow orbit, a continuous fall. And just as Speer bestrode the earth, he had continued to look to the heavens. Each person has his journey through life; his was across the sky. And so he had developed this hobby, an obsession with the space race. He had corresponded with NASA and they had even sent him some star charts, maps and photographs of the moon. Of course many of their top scientists were old colleagues really, party members some of them. Oh yes, it was the Germans who had conquered space.

He had seen the beginnings of it as he had planned his flight, at the Messerschmitt works in Augsburg. After practice sorties he would relax in the canteen with the test pilots, discussing technical points and modifications he might require for his mission. He enjoyed their company, the sense of a shared temperament. He remembered that extraordinary woman flyer, Hannah Reitsch, who had tested dive-bombers, helicopters, the massive transport gliders, even a missile with a cockpit. Yes, it was she who had told him of the rocket launches at Peenemünde.

Hess had endeavoured to keep up with all the astonishing innovations by scientists working for the Reich. He had set up the Department for Matters of Special Technical Importance. And Willi Messerschmitt, that great inventor, was sympathetic to Hess’s aspirations. Goering had refused to give him a plane but Willi was happy to provide him with one. He showed him the new prototypes at his factory where he had lovingly built sublime vehicles of martial beauty, like the earlier master craftsmen of Augsburg who made the elegantly fluted steel armour for Emperor Maximilian in the imperial workshops there. Willi’s aircraft looked aquiline, fearsome. Hess knew then that he was staring at the future. Such sleek vessels, with turbojets and curious exhaust nozzles, strange fins and gills. Mythical beasts of prey made to soar and swoop. The Me 163 rocket plane with swept-back wings, seeming more like a spacecraft than an aeroplane. The Me 262 jet fighter with its huge turbine engines, its shark-like aspect of rounded nose with flat underside, built for minimum drag and maximum speed. How could they lose with such power?

And this is what he would tell them on his mission of peace: that their aircraft production was unbeatable. It was this that could give them air supremacy but they were aiming for the stars. They could bring an end to the war in the heavens. Once there was peace in the West the true crusade could begin. And he was nearly ready. There were promising reports from secret meetings in Madrid and Lisbon. There were other portents to consider also. The astrological aspect had to be precise. He was waiting for the correct prediction from a new advisor, a woman named Astrid. In the meantime he had received a single card reading from the Tarot: the Chariot. It indicated the desire to progress but also impetuousness, impulsiveness, anxiety. The problem with any single card is that it can have two separate, and often opposite, readings. The Chariot could mean success, recognised merits, great ambitions, the ability to lead; but it could also mean failure, incorrect judgement, the sudden loss of a sure result.

He had to make a decision soon. His aircraft was ready. A twin-engined Me 110 fitted with drop tanks for a long-distance flight. A newly assembled machine that had been approved by the inspectorate and issued with a work number and a radio code. Instead of being delivered to an appropriate operational unit, it was at his disposal. It was freshly painted with a grey-green mackereling on its upper surface, pale-blue sky camouflage on its underside. It looked beautiful. He realised then the significance of the Tarot card. This was his Chariot. He sat in the pilot’s seat and checked the controls. He shifted his position to find a comfortable posture for such a long journey.

‘Of course, re-entry can be the most dangerous stage in a space mission.’ Hess stood up and began to walk. The American commandant followed him along the central path of the garden. ‘And with long periods of weightlessness the body tends to atrophy, the heart works with less energy, blood does not flow properly. Perhaps it was the sudden changes of pressure and gravity as they came back into the atmosphere that proved fatal. Maybe they needed to adjust much as a deep-sea diver does before he can come to the surface. Or perhaps this zero-gravity degeneration needs to be corrected by artificial means.’

The American commandant watched the gaunt figure of the solitary prisoner become animated, gesturing with his bony hands as he described his plans for a revolving platform for the interior of a space station.

‘Anyway,’ said Hess, folding his hands behind his back and striding forward, ‘why not send into space fanatical scientists who are prepared to give their lives to research? Or people who are ill with cancer who could volunteer what is left of their lives to science and the clarification of what period a man can stay weightless in space? The programme must go on of course. It is absolutely necessary to explore space.’