Henderson FitzBelmont weighed that. He evidently didn’t find it wanting, for he nodded. “I’m sorry, General Potter. I’ll remember from now on. You must understand, we are doing everything we know how to do to make a uranium bomb. One of the things we’re finding out, unfortunately, is how much we don’t know how to do. When you go through unexplored territory, that happens. I wish it didn’t, but it does.”
He was calm, sensible, rational. Clarence Potter had no doubt that made him a splendid scientist. It didn’t help a country at war, a country fighting for its life, a country whose fight for its life wasn’t going any too well. “How do we go faster?” Potter asked. “Whatever you need, you’ll get. President Featherston has made that very clear.”
“Yes, I certainly can’t complain about the support I’m getting, especially after the…sad events in Pittsburgh,” FitzBelmont said-maybe he did own something resembling discretion after all. But then he went on, “What this project needs most of all is time. If you can give me back all the months when the President believed it a foolish waste of money and effort, we will be better off; I guarantee you that.”
So there, Potter thought. “You’re the physicist,” he said. “If you can undo that…Hell, if you can do that, forget about the uranium bomb.”
“Time travel is for the pulp magazines, I’m afraid,” FitzBelmont said. “No evidence that it’s possible, and plenty that it isn’t. The bomb, on the other hand, is definitely possible-and definitely difficult, too.”
“I remember your saying before that working with uranium hexafluoride was giving you fits,” Potter said. “Are you doing better with that now?”
“Somewhat,” FitzBelmont answered. The physicist didn’t blink when Potter got hexafluoride out without stumbling. He chose to take that as a mild compliment. Henderson FitzBelmont continued, “We’ve come up with some new chemicals-fluorocarbons, we’re calling them-that the uranium hexafluoride doesn’t attack. Nothing else seems to, either. They’ll have all kinds of peacetime uses-I’m sure of it. For now, though, they give us much better control over the UF6.”
UF 6 ? Potter wondered. Then he realized it was another way to say uranium hexafluoride. If he weren’t used to hearing CO2 for carbon dioxide, he would have been baffled. “All right,” he said after a pause he hoped FitzBelmont didn’t notice. “So you’ve got better control over it. What does that mean?”
“It puts fewer people in the hospital. It doesn’t eat through so much lab apparatus. Those are good starting points,” FitzBelmont said, and Potter could hardly tell him he was wrong. “Now we actually have a chance to separate the UF6 with the U-235 from the UF6 with the U-238.”
“You haven’t done that yet?” Potter said in dismay.
“It’s not easy. The two isotopes are chemically identical,” FitzBelmont reminded him. “We can’t add, say, bicarbonate of soda and have it do something with one and not with the other. It won’t work. The difference in weight between the two molecules is just under one percent. That’s what we’ve got to take advantage of-if we can.”
“And?” Potter said.
“So far, we seem to be having the most luck with centrifuges,” Henderson FitzBelmont said. “The degree of enrichment each treatment gives is small, but it’s real. And the centrifuges we’re using now are a lot stronger than the ones we had when we started. They need to be-the old ones aren’t worth much, not for this kind of research.”
“And when you treat the slightly enriched, uh, UF6, you get slightly more enriched UF6? Is that right?” Potter asked.
“It’s exactly right!” By the way FitzBelmont beamed, he’d just got an A on his midterm. “After enough steps, we do expect to achieve some very significant enrichment.”
“How far away from a bomb are you?” Potter asked bluntly.
“Well, I won’t know till we get closer,” Professor FitzBelmont said. Potter made an impatient noise. Hastily, the physicist continued, “If I had to guess, I’d say we’re two years away, assuming everything goes perfectly. Since it won’t-it never does-two and a half years, maybe three, seems a better guess.”
“So we wouldn’t have this till…late 1945, maybe 1946?” Potter shook his head. “We need it sooner than that, Professor. We need it a hell of a lot sooner than that.” All those months Jake Featherston wasted were coming back to haunt the CSA. The damnyankees sure didn’t waste any time when they realized a uranium bomb was possible. Which raised another question…“How soon will the United States get one of these things?”
“You’d do better asking someone in Philadelphia,” FitzBelmont said. Clarence Potter made another wordless noise, this one full of frustration. He was doing his best to spy on the U.S. uranium-bomb project, without much luck. Yankee authorities were holding their cards so close to their chest, they were almost inside their ribs. FitzBelmont added, “You can do something about when the United States get theirs, you know.”
“How’s that again?” Full of his own gloom, Potter listened to FitzBelmont with half an ear. Jake Featherston was going to come down on him like a thousand-pound bomb. Featherston wouldn’t blame himself for stalling the Confederate project. He never blamed himself for anything. But the Confederacy couldn’t afford the late start. The United States had more scientists and more resources. They had enough left over that they could afford mistakes. Everything had to go right to give the CSA a decent chance to win. For a while, it had. For a while…
“You can delay the U.S. bomb, General,” Henderson V. FitzBelmont said. “If you damage or destroy the facility where the Yankees are working on it, you’ll make them deal with what you’ve done instead of going forward on their own work.”
He wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t even slightly wrong. “Son of a bitch,” Potter muttered. The U.S. project was hard for the CSA to reach-way the hell out there in Washington State. Where there’s a will, there’s a lawyer, he thought bemusedly. The Confederates could figure out how to attack it if they needed to badly enough. The way things looked now, they did.
Potter shook his head. He’d seen the race to the uranium bomb as just that: a race. If the United States started out ahead and ran faster anyhow, what would happen? They’d get to the finish line first. And when they did, Richmond would go up in heat like the center of the sun, and that would be the end of that.
But it wasn’t just a race. It was a war. In a race, you’d get disqualified if you tripped the other guy and threw sand in his eyes. In a war, you might buy yourself the time you needed to catch up and go ahead.
This time, Clarence Potter grabbed FitzBelmont’s hand and pumped it up and down. “Professor, I’m damn glad I called you into Richmond,” he said. “Damn glad!”
“Good,” the physicist said. “As for me, I look forward to returning to my work. As long as I’m here, can I ask you send me, oh, five skilled workers? We’re desperately short of them, and it seems next to impossible to pry the kind of people we need out of war plants.”
“You’ll have ’em, by God,” Potter promised. “Can you tell me who told you no? Whoever it is, he’ll be sorry he was ever born.” Grim anticipation filled his voice.
FitzBelmont reached into the inside pocket of his herringbone jacket. “I have a list right here… No, this is a list of some of the things my wife wants me to shop for while I’m in Richmond.” He frowned, then reached into the other inside pocket. “Ah, here we are.” He handed Potter the list he needed.
“I’ll take care of these folks, Professor. They’ll find out what priority means. You can count on that.” Potter carefully put the list in his wallet. He even more carefully refrained from mentioning, or so much as thinking about, how well FitzBelmont played the role of an absentminded professor.
“Thank you, General. Are we finished?” FitzBelmont asked. When Potter nodded, the physicist got to his feet. He looked around at Capitol Square, sighed, and shook his head. He started off, then stopped and looked back. “Uh, freedom!”
“Freedom!” Potter hated the slogan, but tha
t didn’t matter. In Jake Featherston’s CSA, not responding was inconceivable.
Henderson V. FitzBelmont walked north, toward Ford’s Hotel. Under one name or another, the hotel had stood across the street from Capitol Square since before the War of Secession. Watching the physicist go, Clarence Potter sighed. Anne Colleton always stayed at Ford’s when she came up to Richmond. Potter had stayed there himself, too, but his thoughts were on the South Carolina woman he’d…loved?
He nodded. No other word for it, even if it was a cross-grained, jagged kind of love, and one much marred by politics. She’d backed Jake Featherston when the Freedom Party was only a little cloud on the horizon. Potter laughed. He’d never leaned that way himself. He still didn’t, come to that.
But now Anne was dead, killed in a Yankee air raid on Charleston. One of her brothers got gassed by the Yankees in the Great War, and was murdered at the start of the Red Negro uprising. The other went into Pittsburgh. Tom Colleton wasn’t listed as a POW, so he was probably dead. A whole family destroyed by the USA.
“We need that bomb,” Potter murmured. “Jesus, do we ever.”
“Wow!” George Enos said as the Townsend approached San Diego harbor. “The mainland! I wondered if I’d ever see it again.”
“I’ll kiss the pier when we get off the ship,” Fremont Dalby said. The gun chief added, “Too goddamn many times when I didn’t just wonder if I’d see it again-I was fucking sure I wouldn’t.”
He’d been in the Navy since…Well, not quite since steam replaced sail, but one hell of a long time. He could say something like that without worrying that people might think he was yellow. George couldn’t, which didn’t mean the same thought hadn’t gone through his mind.
Dalby nudged him. “You can hop a train, go on back to Boston, see the wife and kiddies. All you need is a couple-three weeks of liberty, right?” He laughed and laughed.
“Funny,” George said. “Funny like a broken leg.” Nobody was going to get liberty like that. The brass might dole out twenty-four- and forty-eight-hour passes, enough to let sailors from the destroyer sample San Diego’s bars and brothels and tattoo parlors and other dockside attractions. George had never been here in his life, but he was sure they’d be the same as the dives in Boston and Honolulu. Sailors were the same here, weren’t they? As long as they were, the attractions would be, too.
“Hey, nobody’s shooting at us for a little bit,” Fritz Gustafson said. “I’ll take that.” From the loader, it was quite a speech.
“For a while, yeah,” Dalby agreed. “Wonder where we’ll go after they fuel us and get us more ammo and all that good shit? Probably down south against the Mexicans and the Confederates, I guess.”
That sounded like nasty, unpleasant, dangerous work to George. He’d seen enough nasty, unpleasant, dangerous work already. “Maybe they’ll send us up off the Canadian coast, so we can keep the Japs from running guns to the Canucks.”
“Dream on,” Dalby said. “Fuck, if they send us up there, they’ll probably send us to whatever the hell the name of that other place is-you know, with the Russians.”
“Alaska,” Gustafson said.
The CPO nodded. “There you go. That’s it. Nothing but emperors for us. We’ve been messing with the Mikado’s boys for too long. Now we can tangle with the Tsar. And the seas up there are worse than the North Atlantic.”
George started to say that was impossible. He knew the North Atlantic well, and knew how bad it could get. But he’d also rounded Cape Horn. That was worse. Maybe the Pacific was godawful up in the polar-bear country, too.
“Russians hardly give a damn about Alaska anyway,” Fritz Gustafson said.
“Well, Jesus, would you?” Dalby said. “It’s more Siberia. They’ve got enough Siberia already. If somebody ever found gold in it or something, you’d have to remember it was there. Till then? Shit, who cares?”
San Diego wasn’t Honolulu. The weather wasn’t quite perfect. It got cooler at night than it did in the Sandwich Islands. It was just very good. To somebody who’d grown up in Boston, that would do fine.
George sent a telegram to Connie, letting her and the boys know he was all right. The clerk at the Western Union office said, “It may take a while to get there, sir. We still don’t have as many lines as we’d like to carry east-west traffic.” The man, who was more than old enough to be George’s father, held up a hand when he saw him start to get mad. “Don’t blame me, sir. I don’t have anything to do with it. I’m just telling you how things are. You got to blame somebody, go and blame Jake Featherston.”
Everybody in the USA had good cause to blame Jake Featherston for something or other. A telegram delayed was small change. Ohio’s being torn to pieces badly enough to delay the telegram was rather larger. George didn’t dwell on Ohio. The telegram ticked him off. Like politics, grievances were personal.
Sure enough, he got a twenty-four-hour liberty. He wished it were forty-eight, but anything was better than nothing. With the rest of the 40mm gun crew, he drank and roistered and got his ashes hauled. He felt bad about that afterwards-what was he doing going to bed with a whore with saggy tits right after sending his wife a wire? He felt bad afterwards, but it felt great while it was happening…and that was what he was doing lying down with the chippy.
He also got a tattoo on his left biceps-a big anchor. That didn’t feel good while it was happening, even though he was drunk. But Fritz Gustafson was getting a naked woman on his right biceps, so George sat still for it. He wasn’t about to flinch in front of his buddy. Only later did he wonder if Fritz took the pricking in silence because he was there getting tattooed, too.
His arm felt worse the next morning. He wasn’t drunk then; he was hungover. All of him felt worse, but his arm especially. “It’ll get easier in a day or two,” Fremont Dalby said. That was rough sympathy, not hardheartedness: Dalby had ornaments on both arms and a small tiger on his right buttock.
He turned out to know what he was talking about. By the time the Townsend sailed a week later, George almost forgot about the tattoo except when he looked down and saw the blue marks under his skin. He also liked Gustafson’s ornament, but Connie would clout him if he came home with a floozy on his arm. Fritz was a bachelor, and could get away with stuff like that.
The Townsend sailed south, toward the not very distant border with the Empire of Mexico. She was part of a flotilla that included three more destroyers, two light cruisers, a heavy cruiser, and two escort carriers. The baby flattops were just like the ones that helped make sure the Japs wouldn’t take the Sandwich Islands away from the USA. They were built on freighter hulls, and had a freighter’s engines inside. Going flat out, they could make eighteen knots. But each one carried thirty airplanes. That gave them ten or twenty times the reach of even the heavy cruiser’s guns.
Although the flotilla stood well out to sea, it wasn’t very long before Y-ranging gear picked up a couple of airplanes outbound from Baja California to look things over. “Goddamn Mexicans,” Dalby said as George ran up to the antiaircraft gun.
“What did you expect, a big kiss?” George asked.
Dalby told him what Francisco Jose could kiss, and why. The CPO might have embroidered on that theme for quite a while, but Fritz Gustafson said, “Next to what the Japs threw at us, this is all chickenshit. Take an even strain.”
Fighters roared east off the flight decks of the Monitor and the Bonhomme Richard. They came back in less than half an hour. A couple of them waggled their wings as they flew over the carriers’ escorts. No Mexican airplanes appeared over the flotilla.
“Score one-I mean two-for the good guys,” George said.
“Yeah.” Fremont Dalby nodded. “But now the greasers will start screaming to the Confederates. Gotta figure we’re in business to yank Jake Featherston’s tail feathers, anyway. So pretty soon we’ll be playing against the first team.”
“Confederates don’t have any carriers in Guaymas,” George said.
“No, but they’ve got
land-based air, and they’ve got subs, and who knows what all shit they do have in the Gulf of California?” Dalby said. “I guess that’s what we’re doing-finding out what kind of shit they’ve got there.”
“Such a thing as finding out the hard way,” George said.
When the flotilla got near the southern end of Baja California, bombers and fighter escorts left the escort carriers’ decks to pummel the Mexican installations at Cabo San Lucas. Scuttlebutt said the installations weren’t just Mexican but also Confederate. George wouldn’t have been surprised. Cabo San Lucas warded the Gulf of California, which led to Confederate Sonora. And the place was isolated enough-which was putting it mildly-to keep word of Confederate soldiers doing Mexicans’ jobs from spreading too far or too fast.
Cabo San Lucas lay at about the same latitude as Honolulu. Even lying well offshore, the Townsend got much hotter weather than she did in the Sandwich Islands. George wondered why. Maybe the North American continent screwed up the winds or something. That was all he could think of.
Then he stopped worrying about the weather. “Now hear this! Now hear this!” the loudspeakers blared. “We have two damaged aircraft returning from the raid on the Mexicans. They will come as far as they can before ditching, and we are going to go out after them. We don’t want to strand anybody if we can help it.”
“Roger that!” George exclaimed. He imagined floating in a life raft, or maybe just in a life jacket, praying somebody would pluck him out of the Pacific before the sharks or the glaring sun did him in. He shuddered. It was worse than going into the drink after your ship sank, because you’d be all alone out there.
The Townsend, two other destroyers, and a light cruiser peeled off and raced toward the Mexican coast. Up there in the sky, the pilots would be nursing everything they could from their shot-up airplanes. Every mile west they made bumped up their chances of getting rescued.
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