The Grapple (20 page)

After some thought and an apparent wrestle with himself, Hodding nodded. “Yeah, you’re right, Doc. You have need-to-know.” The way he brought out the phrase would have told O’Doull he was in Intelligence even without any other evidence. He continued, “We infiltrated some people down south of the river and extracted this guy. What he doesn’t know about their trains and trucks in Kentucky and Tennessee isn’t worth knowing. We should have got him out clean, but he put up more of a fight than we figured.” He shrugged. “These things happen.”

“In films, the guy always has the secret for the new poison gas,” O’Doull said.

“Yeah, and the blonde with the big boobs teases it out of him, and he loves every minute of it,” Hodding said. “Doctors in films never treat ringworm, either. But if the Confederates have trouble moving supplies, that makes our life a hell of a lot easier.”

He wasn’t wrong. Granville McDougald murmured, “Pentothal?”

O’Doull nodded. “Best chance I’ve got.” He turned to the Intelligence officer. “Sodium pentothal may make him not care so much about what he says. Or it may not. Drugging a guy and making him spill his guts is another one of those things that work better in films.”

“All right. Do what you can,” Hodding said. “He’s likelier to blab with the stuff in him than without it, right?” O’Doull nodded again—that was true, and didn’t commit him to anything. Captain Hodding gestured toward the door. “Come on, then.”

The Confederate officer was wounded in the leg and shoulder. He glared at O’Doull. “I am Travis W.W. Oliphant, colonel, C.S. Army.” He gave his pay number.

“Pleased to meet you, Colonel. I’m Major O’Doull. I’m a doctor, and I’m going to give you something to make you feel a little better,” O’Doull said. Colonel Oliphant looked suspicious, but he didn’t try to fight as O’Doull injected him.

After a little while, the Confederate said, “I
do
feel easier.” Pentothal sneaked up on you. It didn’t make your troubles go away, but it did mean you weren’t likely to remember them once you came out from under it.

Captain Hodding started questioning Oliphant. The logistics specialist didn’t seem to worry about what he said. A lot that came out was drivel, but enough wasn’t to keep Hodding scribbling notes. O’Doull gave the colonel more pentothal. Too much and he’d stop making sense altogether. Not enough and he’d clam up. O’Doull found what seemed the right dosage by experiment.

“Thanks, Major,” Hodding said when Colonel Oliphant ran dry. “I think you helped.”

“Well, good,” O’Doull answered, and wondered if it was. Would he want to look in a mirror the next time he passed one?

I
nstead of going off to the peaceful, even bucolic campus of Washington University, Clarence Potter summoned Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont to Richmond. Potter wanted the nuclear physicist to see what the war was doing to the capital of the CSA. Maybe then FitzBelmont wouldn’t think of his experiments as abstractions that could move along at their own pace. Maybe.

If some Florida cinema studio needed a professor out of central casting, it could do much worse than Henderson FitzBelmont. He was tweedy. He was bespectacled. Clarence Potter wore eyeglasses, too, and had since he was a young man. But he didn’t look perpetually surprised at the world around him the way Professor FitzBelmont did.

He met the physicist in Capitol Square, across Ninth Street from the War Department. The bench on which he waited was the one where he and Nathan Bedford Forrest III hadn’t quite plotted against Jake Featherston. It gave a fine view of the bombed-out ruins of the Capitol, of the craters whose dirt sported new grass and even flowers as spring advanced, and of the sandbagged statues of George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston. If you looked around, you could see more of what almost two years of Yankee air raids had done to Richmond.

Professor FitzBelmont came into Capitol Square at two o’clock, just when Potter asked him to. Potter stood up and waved. He kept waving till FitzBelmont spotted him. A look of relief on his face, the professor waved back and picked his way over the battered ground to the bench.

“Hello, uh, General,” FitzBelmont said, sticking out a hand.

“Professor.” Potter shook hands. Henderson FitzBelmont did have a respectable grip. Potter gestured to the bench. “Have a seat. We’ve got some things to talk about.”

“All right.” Professor FitzBelmont looked around. “I must say I’ve seen views that inspired me more.”

“You surprise me,” Potter said.

“I do? Why?” the physicist said. “It’s dreary, it’s battered, it’s sad—I can’t think of one good thing to say about it.”

“That’s
why
it ought to inspire you,” Potter said. Behind the lenses of his spectacles, Henderson V. FitzBelmont blinked. Potter went on, “It shows you that your country’s in trouble. If any one man can get us out of trouble, you’re him. If we have uranium bombs, we win. It’s that simple.”

“Mr. Potter—” FitzBelmont began.

“General Potter, please,” Potter broke in. He saw the faint scorn the other man didn’t have the sense to hide. Nettled, he did his best to explain: “It means as much to me as
Professor
does to you, and I had to go through a lot to earn it—not the same kinds of things you did, but a lot.”

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 UF
₆
.”

UF
₆
?
Potter wondered. Then he realized it was another way to say
uranium hexafluoride.
If he weren’t used to hearing
CO
₂
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 UF
₆
with the U-235 from the UF
₆
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, UF
₆
, you get slightly more enriched UF
₆
? 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 that 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.