Projekt Saucer: Inception Part 19

'No. He simply turned up out of the blue, told me he was an aeronautical engineer who had designed airships '

'Airships?'

'Correct.'

'Did he say he did that work in Europe or America?'

'He certainly didn't mention Europe. In fact, I got the impression that he'd never been there in his life.'

'Yet that's where most of the airships have been constructed and flown.'

'That's where the first airships were constructed and flown,' G.o.ddard corrected him. 'The first was built by Henri Giffard of France in 1852; powered by a 350-pound engine, it was successfully flown over the Paris Hippodrome at a speed of six miles an hour. An internal combustion engine fuelled by hydrogen from the airship's bag was then used by the German, Paul Haenlein, for his even more successful flight in 1872. Albert and Gaston Tissandier of France successfully powered an airship with an electric motor in 1883, and the first rigid airship, with an aluminium-sheeting hull, was built in Germany in 1897. And I don't have to tell you that the Germans used a number of large Zeppelin airships to bomb Paris and London throughout the Great War.'

'All European airships,' Bradley reminded him.

'Yes, of course they were the best known. But a few airships were constructed here in the 1920s, and more are being constructed right now so there's nothing remarkable in Wilson's a.s.sertion that he worked on airship designs.'

'Which must have been just before he came to work for you.'

'Probably,' G.o.ddard said.

'What else did he tell you?' Bradley asked.

'He was obsessed with the possibilities of s.p.a.ce flight and therefore with my rocket research. He said he'd been inspired by the fact that I'd managed to launch liquid-fuelled, instrument-carrying rockets, and informed me that he wanted to work with me and learn from me.'

'I'm surprised you let him.'

G.o.ddard didn't smile. 'As he was older than me,' he said, 'I was certainly initially uncomfortable with his suggestion, suspecting him to be someone simply desperate for work. However, he showed me his papers, which proved beyond doubt that he'd attended the MIT between 1888 and 1893 before my time there - then Sibley College at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, where by 1895 he'd obtained his Bachelor of Science in aeronautics. He also proved, both verbally and with various papers he'd written and let me read, that he had an extraordinary and I don't use the word lightly an extraordinary grasp of aeronautics and physics. Naturally, Mr Bradley, after that, I couldn't turn him away.'

'He started working for you immediately?'

'Yes.'

'This was at your Guggenheim-financed experimental station in Roswell, New Mexico?'

'Correct.'

'For how long?'

'Approximately six months.'

'That doesn't seem too long.'

'No, but it was all he needed. During that period he helped me enormously but he also learned everything I'd discovered so far about steering systems, gyroscopic controls, and various kinds of selfcooling combustion chambers. Those were the things he wanted to know about and when he'd found what he needed, he left, with not even a goodbye note.'

'Not exactly showing grat.i.tude,' Bradley said.

G.o.ddard smiled for the second time. 'Wilson wasn't a man for grat.i.tude and I learned as much from him as he did from me, so I can't really complain.'

Whether or not G.o.ddard felt the need to complain, Bradley certainly thought that Wilson's abrupt departure could only be the act of an extraordinarily cold, thoughtless, self-centered man. When he also thought of how casually Wilson had dismissed and left his former mistress, the intriguing Gladys Kinder, he was even more convinced that the man he was trying to picture clearly was not the warmest, most sensitive soul on earth. Certainly he was a man who used people and casually cast them off a man who didn't need love or friends. A man completely alone.

'So what did you think about him as a person?' Bradley asked, desperately hoping to fit a human face to his shadowy quarry.

'I don't know what you mean,' G.o.ddard said with scientific detachment.

Bradley blew a smoke ring, watched it grow larger and thinner before disappearing, and then, realizing what he was doing, felt a little embarra.s.sed. 'Did you become friends in any sense?' he asked.

G.o.ddard shrugged, at least displaying his confusion, which made him more likable. 'I got on well with him,' he said, 'but in an academic way. We both lived for our work, we'd both had bad times with the government, and we agreed that the mind should rule the heart not vice versa, as is commonly believed. Oddly enough, then, though there was little warmth between us, we had much in common.'

Bradley hardly heard the last remark, because his lawyer's instincts, always tuned to the unusual, had honed in on something else.

'Did you say he'd had trouble with our government?' he asked, leaning forward, forgetting the ashtray, but managing to grab it before it fell off his leg.

'Yes,' G.o.ddard said. 'Just like me.'