by War
Warning articles had long since appeared in scientific journals, and even in Time and Life But people could not grasp that this futuristic horror was upon them.
Yet it was.
Uranium had been disintegrating harmlessly through aeons. Human awareness of radioactivity was not fifty years old. For about forty years it had seemed a minor freak of nature. Then in 1932, the year before Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler had simultaneously come to power, an Englishman had discovered the neutron, the uncharged particle in atoms, and after only seven years of further unsettling discoveries in Italy, France, Germany, and America-seven years, a micro-second of historical time-the Germans had shown that neutron bombardment could split uranium atoms and release vast primordial energies.
In 1939, Kirby had attended a physicists' convention where chilling news had started as a whisper and swelled to an uproar.
Columbia University scientists, following up on the German experiments, had proved that a splitting uranium atom emitted, on the average, more than one neutron. This answered the key theoretical question: was a chain reaction in uranium possible? Ominous answer:yes. A new golden age of available power was thus opening.
There was, however, another, and very horrible, aspect. An isotope discovered only four years earlier, called U-235 or actinouranium, could conceivably fire off in a self-sustaining explosion of incalculable magnitude. But could any country produce enough pure U-235 to make bombs for use in this war?
Or would some blessed fact of nature crop up, in dealing with large lumps instead of tiny laboratory quantities, that would render the whole doomsday project a harmless failure, a physical impossibility?
Nobody on earth yet knew these things for sure.
So the race was on to isolate enough of the fearsome isotope to try to make bombs. On all the evidence of Palmer Kirby's senses, and of the information available to him, Adolf Hitler's scientists were going to win this race hands down.
They had a formidable lead. British science and industry were already too strained for an all-out atomic bomb effort. Unless the United States could overtake the Germans, the superb Nazi war plants were likely to furnish the lunatic Fuhrer with enough U-235 bombs to wipe out the world's capitals one by one, until all governments grovelled to him.
Such was Palmer Kirby's view of the actinouranium picture. If the future really held that shape, what other military plans or operations mattered? What human relationships mattered?
In a black cloth coat with a silver fox collar, a tilted little gray hat, and gray gloves, Rhoda Henry was pacing back and forth at the train gate well before its arrival time. She was taking a chance on being seen meeting him; but he had been away almost a month, and this reunion was bound to be pivotal. Kirby did not yet know that she had written Pug to ask for a divorce'that the Pearl. Harbor attack had intervened and that she was now vaguely craw-fishing. All these disclosures now lay before her.
The letter to Pug had been a desperate thing. Several bad developments ' had made Rhoda spring like a frightened cat.
For'one thing, his letter from Moscow about the California had arrived; andthough that was fine news, she had feared that next he might ask her to come to Hawaii. Palmer Kirby, a much less bited man than Pug, had wakened late blooming lusts in her. She dreaded giving him up. She loved Washington, and detested life on Navy bases overseas. Kirby was right here in Washington, doing his hush-hush work, whatever it was. She had never asked; his presence was what mattered.
But at the time Pug's letter came, her relationship with Kirby had been getting shaky. His work had taken him off on long trips- The anniversary of his wife's death had dejected him. He had once again begun muttering about feeling guilty, and about breaking off.
Thoroughly scared by a long lugubrious talk over dinner in a restaurant, she had gone with him one evening to his apartment, instead of bringing him to her house. By rotten luck they had run straight into Madge and Jerry Knudsen in the lobb. Madge had a big mouth, and the Navy wives' grapevine was the fastest communication network in the world. A nasty story might well be winging to Pug in Hawaii!
Pushed into this corner, in a spell of three straight days of sleet and rain, alone in the twelve-room Foxhall Road house, with Kirby off on another trip, and not telephoning her, Rhoda had sprung. Now that the children were grown, she had decided, only five or eight tolerable years were left to her before she shrivelled into an old dry crone.
Life with Pug had run down. Kirby was a vigorous lover, a self-made wealthy man. He was mad about her, as Pug had not seemed for many years. Perhaps the collapse of the marriage was her own fault and she was not a very good person (some of this had crept into what she wrote to her husband), but it was now or never.
Divorces among four-stripers were common, after all, as Navy families grew up and apart, and the long separations took their toll.
Come to that, she knew a tangy tale or two about Madge Knudsen!
So off the letter had gone. Hard upon it, by the most appalling mischance, the Japanese had attacked, and blown all Rhoda's little calculations to smithereens. Rhoda's reactions to the bombing of Pearl Harbor had been not admirable, perhaps, but human. After the shock, her first thought had been that the start of a war spelled a quick sharp rise in the prospects of naval officers. Commanding a battleship in the Pacific, Pug Henry was poised now for a brilliant recovery to-who could say? Certainly to flag rank; perhaps to-Chief of Naval Operations! In asking for the divorce just now, had she blundered like the Wall Street man who held an oil stock for twenty years, and then sold out a week before the corporation struck a new field?
With this practical concern went genuine regret at having hit her husband at a bad time. She still loved him, somewhat as she loved her grown children. He was part of her life. So she had fired off the repentant cable, and the short agitated letter which he read aboard the Northampton, withdrawing her divorce request. His reply to the request had filled her with remorse, pride, and relief; remorse at the pain traced in each sentence, pride and relief that Pug could still want her.
So Pug knew the worst, and she still had him. But what about Kirby? One look at him, hurrying up the train platform with those long legs, coatless and hatless in the billowing vapor, told Rhoda that she still had this man too. He-r risky spring was turning out well. You never knew! She stood there waiting, gray-gloved hands outstretched, eyes wide and shining. They did not kiss; they never did in public.
"Palmer, no coat? It's chilly outside."
"I put on long johns in Chicago."
"She darted him a mischievous intimate glance. "Long johns!
Shades of President McKinley, dear."
Side by side they left the thronged terminal, clamorous with train announcements and with Bing Crosby blaring.
Kirby peered through whirling snow as they walked out into the lamplit night. "Well, well! The Capitol dome's dark.
There must be a war on."
"Oh, there's all kinds of a war on. The shortages are starting already. And the prices!" She hugged his arm, her motions elastic and happy. "I'm one of these awful unpatriotic hoarders, dear. Do you LOATHE me? I bought two dozen pairs of silk stodkings yesterday. Paid double what they cost three weeks ago. Cleaned out two stores of my size! Silk's all going into parachutes, they say, and soon we'll be lucky to get even nylon stockings. Ugh! Nylon! It bags around the ankles, and it is SO CLAMmy."
"Heard again from Pug?"
"Nary another word."
"Rhoda, on the West Coast they're saying we lost all the battleships at Pearl Harbor, the California included."
"I've heard that, too. Pug's letter sort of did sound like it.
Real low. But if it's true, he'll get some other big job. it's inevitable now."
Kirby slung his suitcase into Rhoda's car in the dark parking area. Once inside the car they kissed, whispering endearments, his hands straying under her coat. But not for long. Rhoda sat up, switched on the lights, and started the motor. "Oh, say, MAdeline's here, dear
."
"Madeline? Really? Since when?"
"She fell in on me this afternoon."
"Staying long?"
"Who knows? She's muttering about becoming a Navy nurse's aide."
"What about her broadcasting job?"
"I guess she's quitting-oh, BET YOU, YOU IMBECILE!" A red Buick pulled out from the curb ahead of her, forcing her to brake, skid, and wrestle with the wheel. "I swear, the MORONS who have the money to buy cars nowadays! It's so AGGRAVATING."
This kind of irascible snap was normal for Rhoda. Her husband would not even have noticed. But it was new to Palmer Kirby, and it grated on him. "Well, in wartime prosperity does seep down, Rhoda.
"That's one of the few good things that happens."
"Possibly. All I know is, Washington's becoming UNLIVABLE." Her tone stayed shrill and hard. "Just boiling with dirty pushy strangers."
Kirby let it pass, weighing the news of Madeline's presence in the house. Would Rhoda consent to come to his apartment? She didn't like doing that, she knew too many people in the building. So the reunion looked to be a fiasco, at least for tonight. His inamorata had a family, and he had to put up with it.
In point of fact, Rhoda was counting on Madeline's surprise visit to help her through a difficult evening. Madeline's presence luckily postponed certain tactical and moral questions; such as, whether she should sleep with Palmer, after having written to Pug that she wanted to preserve their mamage. In a quandary Rhoda's rule was "If possible, do nothing." With her daughter in the house, doing nothing would be simple. Her casual announcement of Madeline's presence had masked great tension about how Kirby would take the news, and this lay under her little outburst at the Buick. Her natural crabbiness had hitherto been unthinkable with Kirby; in irritated moments she had bitten her tongue, choked down her bile, and kept her face smiling and her voice honeyed. It amused and relieved her to note that he reacted like Pug; after one admonishing remark, he did not speak again. He too was manageable.
They were driving past the darkened White House, on the side where the Christmas tree stood on the lawn, amid crowds of galkers. "I suppose you know that Churchill's in there," she said gaily, sensing that the silence was getting long.
"Churchill himself. What a time we're living in, love!"
"What a time, indeed," he replied with deep moroseness.
Like most pretty girls, Madeline Henry had a doormat suitor. She had briefly fallen in love with Midshipman Simon Anderson at her first Academy dance because his white uniform fitted so well and he could rhumba so smoothly. He too had fallen in love, mooning and carrying on about the beautiful Henry girl, and sending her atrocious poems; and upon graduation he had wrecklessly proposed to her. She was barely seventeen. Enchanted with this very early bloody, scalp on her belt, Madeline of course had turned him down.
Scalped or not, Simon Anderson was a dogged customer.
Five years later he still pursued Madeline Henry. He was with her tonight. On her telephoning him from New York that afternoon, he had made himself free for her. A prize-winning physics student at the Academy, Lieutenant Anderson was now working at the Bureau Of Ordnance, on a secret radical advance in antiaircraft fuses. But to Madeline Sime remained the doormat: good for filling an evening on short notice, and for pumping up her ego when it lost pressure. Anderson accepted this status, tolerated her treading on him, and bided his time.
Rhoda and Dr. Kirby found them drinking by a log fire in the spacious living room of the Foxhall Road house. Rhoda went off to the kitchen. Kirby accepted a highball and stretched his legs, chilled despite the long johns, before the blaze. He was struck by Madeline's almost blatant allure. Her red wool dress was cut low, her crossed silk-clad legs showed to the knee, and she had a roguish buoyant sparkle to her.
"Oh, Dr. Kirby. The very man I want to talk to."
"Delighted. What about?"
Madeline did not dream, of course, that there was anything between her mother and Kirby but elderly friendship.
Rhoda's church activities and her prim manners and speech had in no way changed. Kirby seemed a nice old gentleman, with a hint in his eye of relish, for women, which decades ago might have been beguig.
"Well, we've been having the maddest conversation! My head's spinning. Sime says that it's become possible to make radioactive bombs that may blow up the world."
Anderson spoke crisply. "I said conceivable."
Kirby gave Anderson a cautious glance. This blond middle-sized lieutenant looked like any other junior naval officer: young, clean-cut, commonplace. "Are you a physicist, Lieutenant?"
"That was my major, sir. I did postgrad work at call Tech..
I'm a regular officer of the line."
"Whe are you stationed?"
Erect on his chair, Anderson rapped out his words like answers to an oral examination. "BuOrd Proving Ground, sir."
"I have an E.E. from call Tech. How would ypu go about making this frightful bomb?"
"Well, sir-" he glanced at Madeline-"it requires a new technology.
You of course know that. All I said was that Germany might be well along toward it. Their technology is outstanding. They made the first discoveries, and they have high military motivation."
"Why, I'd be petrified," Madeline exclaimed, "if I could believe any of that. Imagine! Ffitier drops one of those things on the north pole, just to show his power, and it melts half the polar cap and lights up the night sky, clear to the equator.
Then what happens?"
"Good question," Kirby replied mournfully. "I wouldn't know. How long will you be in Washington, Madeline?" may just stay here."
Kirby saw surprised gladness on Anderson's face. "Oh?
You're giving up your radio work?" As he said this, Rhoda came in wearing a frilly apron over her gray silk dress.
"I'm not sure. It's getting hard to take-same idiotic cheerfulness, same grubby commercials, war or no war. Just phony patriotic stuff. Why, we had a songwriter on the show last night, singing his brand-new war ditty, "I'm Going to Find a Fellow Who's Yellow, and Beat Him Red, White, and Blue." What a creep!"
Anderson's sober face cracked in a boyish laugh. "You're kidding, Mad."
Her mother asked, "Now what is this, dear? Have you quit your job or not?"
"I'm trying to decide. As for Hugh Cleveland, that egomaniac I work for, what do you suppose he's contributing to the war effort, Mom?
Why, he's bought his wife a sable coat, that's what. And he's taken her off to Palm Springs. Just left the show on my hands, with & dumb comedian named Lester O'Shea to interview the amateurs. Christ, what a coat, Main a! Huge collar and cuffs, solid sables down to mid-calf.
I mean it's vulgar to own and wear such a coat in wartime. I plain got disgusted and came home. I need a vacation myself."
Madeline had told Rhoda with great indignation of Mrs. Cleveland's unjust suspicions about her and Cleveland. The mother now had a clue to Madeliiie's conduct. "Madeline, dear, was that quite responsible?"
"Why not? Didn't he just up and leave?" She jumped to her feet.
"Come on, Sime, feed me."
"Won't you two eat here, dear? There's plenty."
Madeline's ironic glance at Kirby made him feel his years, it declared so plainly her lack of interest in the idea.
We're just snatching a bite, Mom, before the movie.
Thanks."
Rhoda treated her lover, in the matter of creature comforts, as she had her husband. She served him excellent lamb and rice, and a good wine. She had a hot mince pie for him, and the heavy Italian coffee he preferred. They brought the coffee into the living room by the fire. Kirby lolled his great legs on the sofa, mildly smiling at her in warm well-being over the coffee cup.
This was the moment, Rhoda thought, and she walked out on the tightrope. "Palmer, I have something to tell you. I wrote Pug about a month ago, asking for a divorce."
His smile faded. His heavy brows knotted. He put down his coffee and sat straighter. Rhoda was not sur
prised, though this was a letdown; he might have showed gladness. In good balance, she ran lightly along the rope. "Now, darting, listen, you're free as air.
Just remember that! I'm not sure I ever want to marry again. I'm in a terrible turmoil. You see, I thought he might ask me to come and set up house in Honolulu. I simply couldn't face leaving you. So I did it, And now it's done."