Home from the plunder, the author spends his year and a half in the desert making Americans of the men he shipped, and closes the German business by walking it across a bridge in its best suits. Note 4 supplies the dates of the bridge, which are not his; readers of this bundle will be used to that. —Ed.
The Southern Pacific put me down at El Paso into hard winter sunlight and a wind off Mexico with grit in it. The town was a garrison and a railhead in a brown valley, mountains like slag heaps at the street ends, the river a trickle between concrete banks, and Juárez across it close enough to smell the charcoal. The Army had put its Germans not on the post proper but in the annex of the Beaumont hospital a mile out: rows of single-story wards, a water tower, and a wire fence with one gate, guarded on the sound principle that nobody could say for certain which way the wire faced.1
Purcell met me at the gate, a major still, browner and drier than Frankfurt had left him. "A hundred and eighteen," he said, walking me down the duckboards. "War Department Special Employees, on contract, renewed as Washington pleases, six dollars a day and found, and they don't pass that gate without an escort. They call themselves prisoners of peace and think it very funny. I fire rockets at White Sands three days a week and run a kindergarten the other four, and Washington sends me you."
"What am I?"
"Whatever they need that the Army doesn't issue. You found them, Klipspringer. You can keep them."
Inside the wire the brains of the Reich were keeping house. They had built armchairs out of rocket crates, planted a garden that died gamely in the caliche, and mounted on the mess-hall roof a telescope aimed at the moon they still regarded as merchandise in transit. The professor came across the compound at his gathering pace, arm long out of plaster, brown as saddle leather, and shook my hand as though I had endowed a university. "Mr. Klipspringer. Excellent. You will want the list." There was always a list. That first one ran: a piano; a second bus; lighter beer; softer bread, the Army loaf being a construction material; and a hundred and eighteen Christmas trees, in the desert, by the twentieth of December. I got him everything but the bread. The trees came off a dealer in Cleveland with a boxcar and a cousin, and I let the cousin owe me too.
That was the trade, and I took to it like a duck to crumbs. My office was a ward room with a swamp cooler; I unwrapped a certain grey sock and stood the eagle-stamped article on the desk, the climate being as a gentleman in Berlin had recommended, and went into business as the man who finds things. The piano came out of a Juárez parlor house; the bus came off a district superintendent whose gratitude ran to ten per cent; there was a dentist who did not chat, a druggist who knew that Herr Doktor's sleeping powders were nobody's news, and names, always names, mine said gratefully in rooms I never sat in. By the second summer my Germans wore ten-gallon hats to the post barbecue and said howdy in the commissary, and there was not a National Socialist among them and never had been; you could sooner have found a virgin in Juárez, and her certificate came cheaper.
In December the families arrived by special train, and I stood on the platform at Union Depot while wives in grey coats cut for Baltic weather stepped down into a Texas Christmas week, and children went flat still at the size of the sky. The line of men behind the rope broke all at once, and the guards themselves were grinning, the same guards who read the mail. With the wives came the need of an interpreter, somebody to run the ladies to the commissary and sit with them at the school. Purcell's adjutant put it to me across a hiring table, and in the line that morning stood a neat, spare, forgettable man of no age in particular, his German and English both correct and neither with much country in it, name of Brandt. "Brandt will do," I said; once, by mouth. The adjutant hired him and the vetting office did whatever the vetting office did. It cost me nothing: no paper, no date, nothing that would ever answer to my hand. He gave quiet service and drove carefully, and I thought about him rather less than I thought about the dentist.
In December also the Army resolved to show its Germans to the press, on the theory that a secret exhibited on your own terms stops being dug at on somebody else's; I have billed for it under several administrations since. I drilled the mess hall for two days like a road company. Short answers. You were technicians; the war was the war; you are for the moon and against nobody. The professor needed no drilling. When a wire man asked why he had surrendered to the Americans and nobody else, he gave the room the big open smile and said, "We despise the French, we are mortally afraid of the Russians, and we did not believe the British could afford us. That left you." They wrote it down laughing, and thirty column inches of menace died on the spot.
One of them wasn't laughing. A leathery item from a wire service, whom I will call Prewitt, had got a combustion man I will call Vogel into a corner, and I arrived to hear him asking, friendly as a process server, for the doctor's Party number. Vogel's English, good enough for thermodynamics, deserted him entirely, which was an answer in itself, and Prewitt's notebook was out. "And the doctor's institute, the way I hear it, drew its workers from a place called—"
"The Mittelwerk was another shop and another man," I said. "The doctor was in Bavaria from '43; you're thinking of somebody the Russians have. Papers out of that zone say whatever they're printed to say." I said it smooth as a bank manager declining a loan, and then I bought him: a seat at Thursday's firing, up the road, inside the wire. He looked at Vogel a long second and at me a longer one, and took Thursday. They always take Thursday.2
The firings were up at White Sands, in the next state, where all that year the salvaged V-2s went up off a concrete table, some of them even in the direction intended. Then one May evening a rocket left the table, thought better of the north, and went south with my winter's work riding under it, down into a graveyard on the edge of Juárez, where it dug a crater fifty feet across among the only residents of that city with no complaint to make. Nobody was scratched. By morning the souvenir men had blankets spread at the crater lip, fragments of the loose Nazi rocket fetching better than anything I ever moved in Berlin, and I went across with a colonel to apologize, my third call on the consul, a patient Virginian whose whiskey deserved calmer company.3
Which brings me to the outing, and every word of it is true. All that year my merchandise had carried one flaw nobody official cared to name: the Germans were illegal. Not irregular; illegal. They had come in under Army guard, no visas, no inspection, no quota numbers, guests of a government whose statutes were written to keep such men out, and one columnist with a bad week could have made a very loud noise. Washington's remedy was the sweetest piece of ceremony I ever helped stage. You cannot make a lawful immigrant of a man who is already in; the law wants him walking in fresh off foreign soil with a visa in his fist, like your grandfather. And the nearest foreign soil was a trolley ride from the middle of town.
So on a bright morning a chartered bus, my bus, the superintendent's bus, rolled off the post with a cargo of rocketeers in their best suits, hats on their knees like a confirmation class, and took them over the Santa Fe Street bridge into Mexico, where for one afternoon they were emigrants by the Republic of Mexico's lights and tourists by every other. At the consulate the patient Virginian, primed and squared, issued immigration visas at a production-line clip to applicants whose forms gave their previous employment with a fine economy of detail. There was lunch with beer; two of the guidance men were photographed in sombreros, and I later bought the negative and burned it on principle. In the afternoon we walked them back over, and a United States immigration inspector admitted, one at a time, under the German quota, a busload of men who had been shelling London three years before. He passed the Reich's finest in under the hour, said welcome to the United States forty-odd times with the stamp falling on the beat, and went back to the evening's regular work of turning Mexicans out of the river.
There was one bad minute, and it was Vogel again, whose form gave a birthplace that had since removed to Poland. "Says here Gleiwitz," the inspector said. "What country would that be now?" Vogel began, God help us, to explain the Treaty of Versailles. My hands had gone cold in ninety-four degrees and I caught myself staring at the stamp pad as at a snake; then the escorting captain leaned in with the roster, and I heard my own voice, easy as Sunday, say that the town had been Germany when the doctor was born in it, and the neighborhood had moved since, not the man. The inspector looked at Vogel the way the Soviet lieutenant at Marienborn had looked at me, at a point a little behind the head, and stamped. I held coats that day and carried nothing: the consul signed, the captain signed, the inspector stamped, and the record of the most delicate operation I ever ran shows a crowd of respectable signatures, mine nowhere among them.4 I pass the trade free to whatever young rascal inherits these pages: the front man's whole art is to be the reason a thing happens and never the record of it; supply everything, sign nothing, keep every man owing you a favor just too small to mention.
On the walk back the professor stopped at the boundary plaque and looked down at the brown river. "The first time I entered America," he said, "your Army carried me, like luggage. This time I walk, with papers. In Germany they would have required the truth of us, and then where would anybody be?" He laughed and was over the line asking the inspector about baseball before I had an answer up, which spared me agreeing with him out loud on an international bridge.
Bunny's letters came on Tuesdays through all of it, three lines: the weather off the lake, her father's health, yours, Bunny. I was nearer now by an ocean, and the lines did not lengthen. I wrote back the trains and the weather and the fine work Daddy's subsidiary was doing for the country, and my board of directors, one leather chair in Lake Forest, never got a line from me that could be checked from the club. I have known marriages do worse on more paper.
It was Sennett who ended Texas, by telephone, in the grey unhurried voice that never asked a question it hadn't already had answered. "Seen the Philadelphia business? A machine at the university there: thirty tons, eighteen thousand radio tubes, fills a ballroom, and it worked a shell's trajectory faster than the shell flies. The papers have called it an electronic brain since a February you spent counting Germans. The two men who built it have quarreled with the university over the patents and gone into trade, and the Census Bureau stands first in line. Halsted money is curious, and the professor's people say the rockets will want such machines worse than the Census. Go and be near it."
"I don't know arithmetic from Adam."
"You didn't know rockets," Sennett said, and rang off.5
At dinner I asked the professor what a man should know about electronic calculation and got the big smile. "Everything, Klipspringer. Learn it all. One day a machine like that will steer my rocket, and you will sell it to me at a profit." On the Sunday I wrapped the eagle back in its sock against the Philadelphia damp, and on the Monday Purcell walked me to the gate himself. "What do you know about calculating machines?" he said.
"Nothing whatever."
"You didn't know rockets either." Everybody was saying it that week, and everybody was right, and it had never once mattered. The train went east out of the desert, toward a machine the size of a ballroom that did sums with lightning and two men already quarreling over whose it was. I have never yet come late to a christening.
The German rocket group at Fort Bliss, Texas, numbered one hundred and eighteen through 1946, quartered in the converted annex of the William Beaumont General Hospital north of the post: ward barracks, a mess, and a single guarded gate. They were held as War Department Special Employees on renewable contracts with a per diem the Army itself described as modest, permitted into El Paso only under escort, their letters home passing through review; the phrase prisoners of peace was their own coinage and appears in their correspondence. The first dependents arrived from Germany in December 1946, and the establishment stood, gardens, quartet, telescope and all, until the group's removal to Huntsville, Alabama, in 1950. —Ed.
The Army presented the group to the El Paso press at Fort Bliss in the first days of December 1946, after a year in which their presence had been acknowledged in general and shown to nobody. The professor's account of choosing his captors, that the French were despised, the Russians feared, and the British unable to afford the purchase, is on the record in substantially the form given, though the record has him polishing it from 1945 onward. The coverage that followed was friendly; the handouts of the period from the post's civilian liaison show one styling hand throughout and carry no name anywhere. —Ed.
The first of the reassembled V-2s rose from the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, in the spring of 1946, the German group supplying the tutelage. On the evening of May 29, 1947, a modified round left the range southward instead of northward and struck beside the Tepeyac cemetery south of Ciudad Juárez, opening a crater some fifty feet across and killing no one; the souvenir trade at the crater lip is attested in the next morning's papers on both sides of the river. The board of inquiry traced the reversal to the guidance gyroscope. The author kept a gyroscope of that family on his desk through these months, by his own account and on a Berlin acquaintance's advice; the editor notes the coincidence and nothing further. —Ed.
The group had entered the United States in military custody, without visas or inspection, outside the immigration statutes then in force. The remedy worked out among the War, State, and Justice Departments was the one the author stages: exit to Mexico, an immigrant visa issued at the United States consulate in Ciudad Juárez, and lawful admission at the El Paso port of entry, the alien now on the books as arriving from foreign soil in good order. The recorded re-entries run from 1948 into the early fifties; the professor's own admission at El Paso is dated in the November of 1949. The author's bus accordingly runs a year or more ahead of any the record shows. Nothing at the consulate or the port carries his name, which the reader will know better than to count against his presence. —Ed.
The machine was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, built at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, and shown to the press in February 1946, when the phrase electronic brain had its first run; thirty tons, some eighteen thousand tubes, and a shell trajectory computed faster than the shell flew. Its designers, Eckert and Mauchly, resigned from the university that March in a dispute over patent rights and set up in trade for themselves, and the Census Bureau was indeed early in the line of customers. Sennett's telephone summary is accurate to the tube count, which, in a man with no printed function, is itself information. The next number finds the author beside the machine. —Ed.