Last and First Contacts (Imaginings) Read Free Page A

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.
    It had come down in a clearing in the woods, away from more obvious landing sites such as the airfield. The parachute did not seem to have been seen, save by Dorothea and Adam; the military spotters, looking for RAF Lancasters over the Baltic, had been blind to an emissary from the stars. And so von Braun had it to himself. The ship was a tangle of components over twelve feet tall, estimated to weigh several tons, small for an interstellar spacecraft perhaps, but difficult to move. Von Braun, siphoning off what resources he dared, ordered the construction of a chamber around the craft.
    The first time Adam took Dorothea to the