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Now, those calculations told it to reduce its trim, to increase its inclination to forty-nine degrees. It did so with the flick of a fin, a tiny twist of the rudder. The new bearing proved an easier angle of ascent, allowing it to go faster still. As thousands more pounds of propellant burned off, the rocket’s thrust-to-weight ratio, so adverse at liftoff, grew increasingly favorable. Now that its motor was no longer pushing such a heavy load, it could really let loose, plowing forward at 3,335 miles an hour.

Fifteen miles above sea level, the rocket entered the upper layers of the atmosphere, where combustion engines normally suffocate in the thin air. But it breathed easily because it carried its own supply of liquid oxygen. The negative G forces generated by its sustained acceleration now generated eight times the pull of gravity, compressing its nose and ribs. Soon, its skin began to itch from atmospheric friction, heating in places to 500 degrees. But it felt light as a butterfly: it had dropped 17,000 of its original 27,000 pounds and was moving a mile a second.

Sixty-three seconds into its flight, the rocket ceased being a rocket. At an altitude of seventeen miles, the turbine shut down, cutting off fuel to the combustion chamber. Now the rocket was a projectile, a forty-six-foot-long artillery shell painted in a jagged camouflage scheme of signal white, earth gray, and olive green. Although no longer under power, the rocket still rose, moving at 3,500 miles per hour. The laws of physics that had gotten it this far would see it through the final leg of the journey. It broke the twenty-mile and then the thirty-mile barrier, and continued to climb. Another ten seconds passed, and the rocket reached its apogee of fifty-two miles. It was now brushing against the void of outer space.

Slowly, imperceptibly at first, its tail began to dip. It still hurtled forward at nearly five times the speed of sound, but it was now losing altitude and velocity, and its stabilizer fins had no grip as it tumbled backward toward earth. The tug-of-war between the forces of momentum and gravity had begun.

The time was 6:41 PM, a Friday. In London, fifty miles below and eighty miles to the west, the evening rush hour was just waning. Traffic was not heavy, owing to gasoline rationing, and the city was settling down to supper. Lights flickered from apartment windows and homes; the blackouts that had been in effect during the air raids were no longer rigorously enforced now that the Royal Air Force had repelled the Luftwaffe and claimed control of the skies. In central London, an American radio reporter by the name of Edward R. Murrow prepared his evening broadcast. In Chiswick, in the western suburbs, six-year-old John Clarke was freshening up for dinner in the upstairs bathroom of his family’s brick town house. His three-year-old sister, Rosemary Ann, was playing in her bedroom down the hall. Both children were in good spirits. After all, there was no school tomorrow.

Over the North Sea, the rocket was now in freefall, plunging tailfirst at a rate of 3,400 feet per second. As it descended into the thicker atmosphere, its fins began regaining traction and slowly the rocket righted itself. The aerodynamic friction that permitted its stabilizers to regain their function now began to wreak havoc on its rapidly heating shell. The nose cone glowed faintly as the temperature of the quarterinch-thick sheet metal that encased it rose to 1,100 degrees. The frictional drag increased as the rocket descended into the lower, denser atmosphere and approached the British coastline. It shot over Ipswich and Southend-on-Sea, pivoting slightly, so that the jagged edges of its camouflage pattern twirled in a grayish-green blur. Other than its protective paintwork, and a seven-digit serial number, the rocket bore no identifying markings. To its creator, the brilliant engineering prodigy Wernher von Braun, it was known as the A-4. To the Nazi High Command