by Herman Wouk
Outside it was the same old Navy Building, the long dismal “temporary” structure from the last war still disfiguring Constitution Avenue, but inside it had a new air: a hurrying pace, a general buzz, crowds of Waves and callow-looking staff officers in the corridors. Lurid combat paintings that hardly seemed dry hung on the dusty walls: dogfights over carriers, night gun battles, bombardments of tropic islands. During most of Pug’s career, the decor had been mementos of the Spanish-American War, and of Atlantic action in 1918.
Digger Brown looked every bit the king of the hill that he was: tall, massive, healthy, with a thatch of grizzled hair, with a year of battleship command under his belt (Atlantic service, but good enough), and now this top post in BuPers. Digger had flag rank in the bag. Pug wondered how he must seem to Brown. He had never been overawed by his fast-moving old friend, nor was he now. Much passed unspoken as they shook hands and scanned each other’s faces. The fact was, Pug Henry made Captain Brown think of an oak tree in his own back yard, blasted by lightning yet still vigorous, and putting forth green shoots each spring from charred branches.
“That’s hell about Warren,” Brown said.
Henry made an elaborate business of lighting a cigarette. Brown had to get the rest spoken. “And the California, and then the Northampton. Christ!” He gripped Pug’s shoulder in awkward sympathy. “Sit you down.”
Pug said, “Well, sometimes I tell myself I didn’t volunteer to be born, Digger, I got drafted. I’m all right.”
“And Rhoda? How’d you find her?”
“Splendid.”
“What about Byron?”
“Coming back from Gib to new construction, or so I hear.” Pug cocked his head at his old friend, squinting through smoke. “You’re riding high.”
“I’ve yet to hear a gun go off in anger.”
“There’s plenty of war left out there.”
“Pug, it may be a reprehensible sentiment, but I hope you’re right.” Captain Brown put on horn-rimmed glasses, thumbed through dispatches on a clipboard, and handed one to Pug. “You asked me about this, I believe?”
FROM: CINCPAC
TO: BUPERS
DESIRE ASSIGNMENT STAFF DUTY THIS COMMAND VICTOR (NONE) HENRY
CAPTAIN USN SERIAL 4329 EX CO NORTHAMPTON X NIMITZ
Pug nodded.
Brown unwrapped a stick of chewing gum. “I’m supposed to quit smoking. Blood pressure. It’s got me climbing the walls.”
“Come on, Digger, are my orders to Cincpac set?”
“Pug, did you wangle this on the trip home?”
“I didn’t wangle it. Spruance sprang it on me. I was amazed. I thought I’d catch hell for losing my ship.”
“Why? You went down fighting.” Under Pug’s hard inquiring look, Digger Brown chewed and chewed. The big body shifted in the swivel chair. “Pug, you ducked Cincpac staff duty last year, according to Jocko Larkin.”
“That was then.”
“Why do you suppose you were recalled with Class One air priority?”
“You tell me.”
Slowly, with a portentous air, Brown said, “The… Great… White…Father.“ Then more lightly, “Yessir! The boss man himself. You’re supposed to report in to him soonest, in full feathers and war paint.” Brown laughed at his own humor.
“What’s it about?”
“Oh, blast, give me a butt. Thanks.” Brown dragged at the cigarette, his eyes popping. “You know Admiral Standley, I believe. The ambassador to Russia, that is.”
“Sure. I went there with him last year on the Harriman mission.”
“Exactly. He’s back for consultations with the President. Even before the Northampton was lost, Rear Admiral Carton was telephoning us from the White House in a big sweat about you. Standley was inquiring about your availability. Hence the Class One priority.”
Pug said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice, “Nimitz should draw more water around here than Standley does.”
“Pug, I have my instructions. You’re to call Russ Carton for an appointment to see the President.”
“Does Carton know about the Cincpac dispatch?”
“I haven’t told him.”
“Why not?”
“I wasn’t asked.”
“Okay, Digger. I’m asking you to notify Russ Carton about that Cincpac dispatch. Today.”
A brief contest of cold stares. With a deep drag on the cigarette, Digger Brown said, “You’re asking me to get out of line.”
“Why? You’re derelict in not telling the White House Cincpac wants me.”
“Christ on a bicycle, Pug, don’t give me that. When that man up on Pennsylvania Avenue snaps his fingers, we jump around here. Nothing else signifies.”
“But this is just a whim of old Bill Standley’s, you say.”
“I’m not sure. Tell Russ Carton about Cincpac yourself when you see him.”
“N.G. He must get the word from BuPers.”
Captain Brown sullenly avoided his eyes. “Who says he must?”
Victor Henry intoned as in a language drill, “Ich muss, du musst, er muss.“
An unhappy grin curled Brown’s mouth and he picked up the chant, “Wir müssen, ihr müsst, sie müsst.“
“Müssen, Digger.”
“Müssen. I never could hack German, could I?” Brown pulled deeply on the cigarette and abruptly ground it out. “God, that tasted good. Pug, I still think you should find out first what the Great White Father wants.” He hit a buzzer in an annoyed gesture. “But have it your way. I’ll shoot a copy to Russ.”
The house was warmer. Pug heard a man talking in the living room.
“Hello there,” he called, very loud.
“Oh, hi!”, Rhoda’s cheery voice. “Back so soon?”
A deeply tanned young officer was on his feet when Pug walked in. The mustache puzzled him, then he put together the blond hair and the bright new gold half-stripe of a lieutenant commander. “Hello there, Anderson.”
Pouring tea at a table by the fire, Rhoda said, “Sime just stopped by to drop off Maddy’s Christmas present.”
“Something I picked up in Trinidad.” Anderson gestured at the gaily wrapped box on the table.
“What were you doing in Trinidad?”
Rhoda gave the men tea and left, while Anderson was telling Pug about his destroyer duty in the Caribbean. U-boats had been having fat pickings off Venezuela and the Guianas, and in the Gulf of Mexico: oil tankers, bauxite carriers, freighters, and passenger liners. Emboldened by the easy pickings, the German skippers had even taken to surfacing and sinking ships with gunfire, so as to save torpedoes. The American and British navies had now worked up a combined convoy system to control the menace, and Anderson had been out on that convoy duty.
Pug was only vaguely aware of the Caribbean U-boat problem. Anderson’s tale made him think of two large photographs in the Navy Building, showing Eskimos bundled in furs watching the loading of a Catalina flying boat in a snowstorm, and Polynesians naked but for G-strings staring at an identical Catalina moored in a palm-fringed lagoon. This war was a leprosy spreading all over the globe.
“Say, Anderson, weren’t you working with Deak Parsons at BuOrd on the AA proximity fuse, advanced hush-hush stuff?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why the Sam Hill were you shipped off to the Caribbean on an old four-piper?”
“Shortage of deck officers, sir.”
“That fuse is fantastic, Sime.”
The bright blue eyes glowed in the brown face. “Oh, has it gotten out to the fleet?”
“I saw a demonstration off Noumea against drone planes. Sheer slaughter. Three out of three drones splashed in minutes. Downright spooky, those AA bursts opening up right by the planes every time.”
“We worked pretty hard on it.”
“How the devil did Deak Parsons get a whole radio signal set inside an AA shell? And how does it survive a jolt of muzzle velocity, and a spin in trajectory of five hundred times a second?”
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“Well, sir, we figured out the specs. The industry fellows said, ‘Can do,’ and they did it. As a matter of fact, I’m going down to Anacostia now to see Captain Parsons.”
Victor Henry had never liked any of Madeline’s gosling suitors, but this one looked pretty good to him, especially by contrast with Hugh Cleveland. “Any chance you can come and have Christmas dinner with us? Madeline will be here.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you. Mrs. Henry’s been kind enough to invite me.”
“She has? Well! Give Deak my regards. Tell him SoPac’s buzzing about that fuse.”
In the stuffy office of the Naval Research Laboratory, looking out over the mud flats to the river, Captain William Parsons complimented Anderson on his suntan, and nodded without comment at Pug Henry’s message. He was a man in his forties with a wrinkled pale brow and receding hair, run-of-the-mill in appearance but the most hardworking and brilliant man Anderson had ever served under.
“Sime, what do you know about uranium?”
Anderson felt as though he had stepped on a third rail. “I’ve done no work in radioactivity, sir. Nor in neutron bombardment.”
“You do know that there’s something funny going on in uranium.”
“Well, when I did my postgrad work at Cal Tech in 1939, there was a lot of talk about the fission results of the Germans.”
“What sort of talk?”
“Wild talk, Captain, about superbombs, also about atomic-powered propulsion, all very theoretical.”
“D’you suppose we’ve left it at that? Just a theoretical possibility? Just a promising freak of nature? With all the German scientists working around the clock for Hitler?”
“I hope not, sir.”
“Come with me.”
They went outside and hurried with heads down toward the main laboratory building, through a bitter wind blowing from the river. Even at a distance, an eerie hissing and whistling sounded from the lab. Inside, the noise was close to deafening. Steam was escaping from a forest of freestanding slender pipes reaching almost to the very high roof, giving the place the dank warmth of the Caribbean. Men in shirt-sleeves or coveralls were pottering at the pipes or at instrument panels.
“Thermal diffusion,” Parsons shouted, “for separating U-235. Did you know Phil Abelson at Cal Tech?” Parsons pointed to a slender man in shirtsleeves and tie, about Anderson’s age, standing arms akimbo at a wall covered with dials.
“No, but I heard about him.”
“Come and meet him. He’s working with us in a civilian capacity.”
Abelson gave the lieutenant commander a keen look when Parsons explained over the noise that Anderson had worked on the proximity fuse. “We’ve got a chemical engineering problem here,” Abelson said, gesturing around at the pipes. “That your field?”
“Not exactly. Out of uniform I’m a physicist.”
Abelson briefly smiled and turned back to his instrument panel.
“I just wanted you to see this setup,” Parsons said. “Let’s get out of here.”
The air outside seemed arctic. Parsons buttoned his bridge coat to his chin, jammed his hands in his pockets, and strode toward the river, where nests of gray Navy ships rode to anchor.
“Sime, you know the principle of the Clusius tube, don’t you?”
Anderson searched his memory. “That’s the lab tube with the doughnut-shaped cross-section?”
“Yes. That’s what Abelson’s got in there. Two pipes one inside the other, actually. You heat the inside pipe and chill the outside one, and if there’s a liquid in the space between, the molecules of any lighter isotope will move toward the heat. Convection takes them to the top, and you skim them off. Abelson’s put together a lot of giant Clusius tubes, a whole jungle of them in series. The U-235 gradually cooks out. It’s damned slow, but he’s already got measurable enrichment.”
“What’s his liquid?”
“That’s his original achievement. Uranium hexafluoride. He developed the stuff and it’s pretty touchy, but stable enough to work with. Now, this thing is getting pretty hot, and BuOrd wants to station a line officer here. I’ve recommended you. It’s a shore billet again. You young fellows can always get sea duty if you prefer.”
But Sime Anderson had no seafaring ambitions. He had gone to the Academy to get a superior free education. Annapolis had stamped him out in the standard mold, and on the bridge of a destroyer he was just another OOD; but inside this standard replacement part a first-class young physicist was imprisoned, and here was his chance to leap out. The proximity fuse had been an advance in ordnance, but not a thrust into a prime secret of nature. Abelson with his messy array of steam pipes was hunting big game.
At Cal Tech there had been speculation about a U-235 bomb that could wipe out a whole city, and of engines that could drive an ocean liner three times around the world on a few kilograms of uranium. Among Navy men the talk was of the ultimate submarine; power without the combustion that needed air. This was a grand frontier of applied human intelligence. A more mundane inducement occurred to young Anderson. Stationed in Anacostia, he could see a lot more of Madeline Henry than he had been doing. “Sir, if the Bureau considers me qualified, I’ve no objection.”
“Okay. Now what I’m going to tell you next, Anderson, blows away on the wind.” Parsons rested his elbows on an iron railing that fenced off a rocky drop to the river. “As I said, our interest is propulsion, but the Army’s working on a bomb. We’re excluded. Compartmentalized secrecy. Still, we know.” Parsons glanced at the younger man, hurrying his words. “Our first objective and the Army’s are the same, to produce pure U-235. For them the next step is making a weapon. A battery of theoreticians is already working on that. Maybe some fact of nature will prevent it. Nobody can say for sure yet.”
“Does the Army know what we’re doing?”
“Hell, yes. We gave them their uranium hexafluoride to start with. But the Army thinks thermal diffusion is for the birds. Too slow, and the enrichment is too low-grade. Their assignment is to beat Hitler to a bomb. A prudent notion, that. They’re starting from the ground up, with untried designs and new concepts that are supposed to be shortcuts, and they’re doing it on a colossal industrial scale. Nobel Prize heavyweights like Lawrence, Compton, and Fermi have been supplying the ideas. The size of the Army effort really staggers the mind, Anderson. They’re commandeering power, water, land, and strategic materials till hell won’t have it. Meantime we’ve got enriched U-235 in hand. Low enrichment, not bomb material as yet, but a first stage. The Army’s got a lot of big ideas and big holes in the ground. Now if the Army falls on its face it’ll be the biggest scientific and military bust of all time. And then —just conceivably, mind you — then it could be up to the Navy to beat the Germans to atomic bombs, right here in Anacostia.”
“Wow.”
Parsons wryly grinned. “Don’t hold your breath. The Army’s got the President’s ear, and the world’s greatest minds working on it, and they’re outspending us a million dollars to one. They’ll probably make a bomb, if nature was careless enough to leave that possibility open. Meantime well keep our little tinpot operation cooking. Just keep the other remote contingency in your mind, and pick up your orders at BuPers tomorrow.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
By candlelight Rhoda’s face was like a young woman’s. As they ate cherry tarts she had baked for dessert, Pug was telling her, through a fog of fatigue, about his stop in Noumea on his way home. They were on their third bottle of wine, so his description of the somnolent French colony south of the equator, overrun by the carnival of American war-making, was not very coherent. He was trying to describe the comic scene in the officers’ club in an old fusty French hotel, of men in uniform clustering four and five deep around a few Navy nurses and Frenchwomen, captains and commanders up close, junior officers hovering on the outer edges just to stare at the females. Pug was so weary that Rhoda’s face seemed to be blurrily wavering between the candle flames.
“Darl
ing,” she interrupted quietly and hesitantly, “I’m afraid you’re not making very good sense.”
“What? Why not?”
“You just said you and Warren were watching all this, and Warren cracked a joke —”
Pug shuddered. He had indeed been drifting into a doze while he talked, fusing dreams with memory, picturing Warren alive in that jammed smoky Noumea club long after Midway, holding a can of beer in his old way, and saying, “Those gals are forgetting, Dad, that once the uniform comes off, the more stripes, the less action.“ It was pure fantasy; in his lifetime Warren had never come to Noumea.
“I’m sorry.” He vigorously shook his head.
“Let’s skip the coffee” — she looked concerned — “and put you to bed.”
“Hell, no. I want my coffee. And brandy, too. I’m enjoying myself, Rhoda.”
“Probably the fire’s making you sleepy.”
Most of the rooms in this old house had fireplaces. The carved wooden mantelpiece of this large dining room, in the flicker of light and shadow from the log fire, was oppressively elegant. Pug had grown unused to Rhoda’s style of life, which had always been too rich for him. He stood up, feeling the wine in his head and in his knees. “Probably. I’ll take the Chambertin inside. You deploy the coffee.”
“Dear, I’ll bring you the wine, too.”
He dropped in a chair in the living room, by the fireplace heaped with gray ashes. The bright chandelier gave the trimmed Christmas tree a tawdry store-window look. It was warm all through the house now, and there was a smell of hot dusty radiators. She had put up the thermostat with the comment, “I’ve gotten used to a cool house. No wonder the British think we steam ourselves alive like SEAFOOD. But of course you’ve just come from the tropics.”
Pug wondered at his macabre waking vision of Warren. How could his dreaming mind have invented that wisecrack? The voice had been so recognizable, so alive! “Once the uniform comes off, Dad, the more stripes, the less action!” Pure Warren; neither he himself nor Byron would ever have said that.
Rhoda set the bottle and glass at his elbow. “Coffee will be right along, honey.”
Sipping at the wine, he felt he could fall into bed and sleep fourteen hours without moving. But Rhoda had gone to so much trouble, and the dinner had been so good: onion soup, rare roast beef, baked potatoes with sour cream, au gratin cauliflower; her new form-fitting red silk dress was a stunner, her hair was done up as for a dance, her whole manner was loving and willing. Penelope was more than ready for the returned wayfarer, and Pug didn’t want to disappoint or humiliate his wife. Yet whether because he was aging, or weary, or because the Kirby business lay raw and unresolved, he sensed no stir of amorousness for her. None.