Last and First Contacts (Imaginings) Read Free

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