"Zwei."
The audience freezes in silence,

"Ein."
As time comes to an end,

"Null."
And tension becomes . . .

"Feuer!"
A flame bursts from the tail of the rocket ship, lifting it and its passengers
into the mysterious sky.

The audience watching the silver screen in the Berlin theater did not mind
the deception. They had suspended their disbelief. Rocket ships did not
exist. A trip to the moon was impossible. The counterfeit rocket on the
theater screen swung across a painted sky on its way to an improbable,
imaginary moon. The audience at the premiere of Frau im Mond (The Girl
in the Moon) loved the film.

One man sat sullenly in the darkened theater contemplating the fraudu-
lent rocket ship. It was his own creation, yet he felt a sense of failure. He
was none of the things he longed to be. Hermann Julius Oberth was not a
German, not recognized as a legitimate scientist, and, on that cold and wet
evening in Berlin, he was not a builder of rockets. Although the events that
preceded the movie premiere appeared to argue against it, Oberth would
leave his mark. He was the founding genius of rocket science in Germany;
and he would soon become the teacher of the man who would be most respon-
sible for the expeditions to the moon 40 years later, Wernher von Braun.

Hermann Oberth was a high school mathematics teacher on leave from
his school in Transylvania, a district of Rumania. In 1923, he had published
a small book on his lifelong interest, rockets and space travel. To his surprise
and delight, his book was widely read. Its success catapulted him to the
position of Germany's--and possibly the world's--leading authority in a
field that did not and would not exist for another 30 years: travel by rocket
through space. The rocket had appeared on the screen only because Oberth
had dreamed of it, and he had told the world how it could take men to the
moon; and only Hermann Oberth cared that the flight of the rocket ship they
were watching was just an illusion.

The man who had orchestrated the illusion that thrilled the audience in
the Berlin theater on that October evening was Fritz Lang, arguably Ger-
many's greatest and most successful film director. Although Lang was only
of medium height and build, he was an imposing figure. He had a sharp

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