Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  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?"

  "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 complemented 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.

  ,Sims, 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 call 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.

  "nerinal diffusion," Parsons shouted, "for separating U-235. Did you know Phil Abelson at call Tech?" Parsons pointed to a slender man in shirt-sleeves 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 O.O.D; but inside this standard replacement part a first-class young physicist was imprisoned, and there 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 call 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 suppored 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'll 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 Ancostia."

  "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 dodars to one. They'll probably make a bomb, if nature was careless enough to leave that possibility open.

  Meantime we'll 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 Nouma 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.

  "Darling," 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 g shuddered. He had indeed been drifting into a doze while he talked"- fusing dreams with memory, picturing Warren alive in that jammed smoky Nouma 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 stpipes, the less action."

  It was pure fantasy; in his lifetime Warren had never come to Noumda.

  "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 shade 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 Chamberlin 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, all 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.

  A shy touch on his face, and he opened his eyes to see her smiling down at him. "I don't think coffee'll help much, Pug."

  "No. Most discouraging."

  Getting ready for bed half-woke him. Coming from the bathroom, he found her, fully dressed, turning down his twin bed. He felt like a fool. He tried to embrace her. She fended him off with the laughing deftness of a coed. "Sweetie pie, I love you to little pieces, but I truly don't believe you'd make it. One good night's sleep, and the tiger will be back on the prowl."

  . Pug sank into bed with a sleepy groan. Softly she kissed him on the mouth. "It's good to have you back."

  "Sorry about this," he murmured, as she turned out the light.

  Not in the least put out, rather relieved than otherwise, Rhoda took off the red dress and donned an old housecoat.

  She went downstairs and cleaned up every trace of the dinner, and of the day gone by; emptied the living room ashtrays, shovelled the fireplace ashes into a scuttle, laid a new fire for the morning, and put out -the ashes and the garbage. She enjoyed the moment's breath of icy air in the alley, the glimpse of glittering stars, and the crunch of snow under her slippers.

  In her dressing room, with a glass of brandy at hand, she ran a hot bath and set about the dismantling job under glaring lights between large mirrors. Off came the rouge, the lipstick, the mascara, and the skin makeup which she wore down to lief collar bone. The naked woman stepping into the vaporous tub was leap, almost stringy, after months of resolute starving. Her ribs unattractively showed; but her belly was straight, her hips slim, her breasts small and passably shaped.

  About the face, alas, there was nothing girlish. Still, Colonel Harrison Peters, she thought, would find her desirable.

  To Rhoda's view desirability was nine-tenths in the man's mind, anyway; the woman's job was to foster the feeling, if she detected it and if it suited her purpose. Pug liked her thin, so she had damned well gotten thin for this reunion. Rhoda knew she was in trouble, but about her sexual allure for her husband she was not worried. Given Pug's dour fidelity, this was the rock on which their marriage stood.

  The warm water enveloped and deliciously relaxed her.

  Despite her outer calm she had been taut as a scared cat all evening.

  In his gentleness, his absence of reproach, his courteous manner, and his lack of ardor, Pug had said it all.

  His silences disclosed more than other men's words. No doubt he had forgiven her (whatever that might mean) but he had not even begun to forget; though it seemed he was not going to bring up the anonymous letters. Adding it all up, she was not unhappy with this first day.

  It was over, and they were off the knife-edge, on a bearable footing.

  She had dreaded the first encounter in bed. It could so easily have gone wrong, and a few silly minutes might have exacerbated the estrangement. Sex as pleasure, at this point, mattered to her not at all. She had more serious concerns.

  Rhoda was a woman of method, much given to lists, written and mental.

  The bath was her time for review. Item one tonight was nothing less than her marriage itself. Despite Pug's kind letters, and the wave of reconcig emotion after Warren's death -now that they had faced each other, was it salvageable? On the whole, she thought so.

  This had immediate practical consequences.

  Colonel Harrison Peters was amazingly taken with her. He was coming to Saint John's Church on Sundays just to see more of her. At first she had wondered what he wanted of her, when (so she had heard) plenty of round-heeled Washington girls were his at a push. Now she knew, because he had told her. She was the military man's lady of his dreams: good-looking, true, decorous, churchgoing, elegant, and brave.

  He admired the way she was bearing the loss of her son. In their moments together-she was keeping them infrequent and public, having learned her lesson with Kirby-he had gotten her to talk about Warren, and sometimes had wiped away his own tears. The man was tough and important, doing some highly secret Army job; but when it came down to cases, he was just a lonesome bachelor in his mid-fifties, tired of fooling around, too old to start a family, but wistful to settle down.

  There the man was for the having.

  But if she could hold on to Pug, that was what she wanted.

  He was her life. She had worked out with Palmer Kirby her romantic yearnings. Divorce and remarriage were messy at best. Her identity, her prestige, her self-respect, were bound up with remaining Mrs. Victor Henry. Moving to HawaU had proven too difficult and complicated; but maybe it was just as well that time had passed before a reunion, and the newest wounds had somewhat healed. Pug was a real man. You could never count Pug Henry out. Why, here was the White House calling him again! He had had a rotten run of luck, including her own misconduct; but if ever a man had the stuff to weather it, he did. In her way Rhoda admired and even loved Pug. The death of Warren had enlarged her limited capacity for love. A broken heart sometimes stretches when it
mends.

  The way Rhoda now sized matters up, soaking in her tub, it appeared that after a touch-and-go reonciliation they would make it.

  After all, there was the Pamela Tudsbury business; she had something to forgive too, though she did not know just what. When they had talked of Tudsbury's death at dinner she had carefully watched Pug's face. "I wonder what Pamela will do now," she had ventured. "I saw them when they passed through Hollywood, you know. Did you get my letter? The poor man gave a BRILLIANT speech at the Hollywood Bowl.

  "I know. You sent me the speech."

  -"Actually, Pug, she wrote it. So she told me."

  "Yes, Pam was ghosting a lot for him toward the end. But he gave her the Ideas." No surprising the old fox, tired or not; his tone was perfectly casual.