Winds of War (56 page)

“He’d be disappointed if I didn’t disappoint him. Good-bye, Mom.”

In the bedroom Dr. Kirby sat at a desk, checking off a stack of journals and mimeographed reports that Victor Henry had brought him from Germany. As he scribbled in a yellow notebook, the little desk shook and two reports slid to the floor. “They must rent this suite to midgets,” he said, continuing to write.

Victor Henry said, “Fred, are you working on a uranium bomb?”

Kirby’s hand paused. He turned, hanging one long loose arm over the back of his chair, and looked into Henry’s eyes. The silence and the steady look between the men lasted a long time.

“You can just tell me it’s none of my goddamn business, but” - Pug sat on the bed - “all that stuff there zeroes in on the uranium business. And some of the things I couldn’t get, like the graphite figures, why, the Germans told me flatly that they were classified because of the secret bomb aspects. The Germans are fond of talking very loosely about this terrible ultra-bomb they’re developing. That made me think there was nothing much to it. But that list of requests you sent gave me second thoughts.”

Kirby knocked out his pipe, stuffed it, and lit it. The process took a couple of minutes, during which he didn’t talk, but looked at Captain Henry. He said slowly, “I’m not a chemist, and this uranium thing is more a less a chemical engineering problems. Electricity does come into it for production techniques. A couple of months ago I was approached to be an industrial consultant.”

“What’s the status of the thing?”

“All theory. Years away from any serious effort.”

“Do you mind telling me about it?”

“Why not? It’s in the college physics books. Hell, it’s been in
Time
magazine. There’s this process, neutron bombardment. You expose one chemical substance and another to the emanation of radium, and see what happens. It’s been going on for years, in Europe and here. Well, these two Germans tried it on uranium oxide last year, and they produced barium. Now that’s transmutation of elements by atom-splitting. I guess you know about the fantastic charge of energy packed in the mass of the atom. You’ve heard about driving a steamship across the ocean on one lump of coal, if you could only harness the atomic energy in it, and so forth.” Victor Henry nodded. “Well, Pug, this was a hint that it might really be done with uranium. It was an atom-splitting process that put out far more energy than they’d used to cause it. These Germans discovered
that
by weighing the masses involved. They’d been an appreciable loss of mass. They published their finding, and the whole scientific community’s been in an uproar ever since.

“Okay, the next step is, there’s this rare hot isotope of uranium, U-235. This substance may turn out to have gigantic explosive powers, through a chain reaction that gives you a huge release of energy from mass. A handful maybe can blow up a city, that sort of talk. The nuclear boys say it may be practicable right now, if industry will just come up with enough pure U-235.”

Pug listened to all this with his mouth compressed, his body tensed forward. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he kept saying when Kirby puffed on his pipe. He pointed a stiff finger at the engineer. “Well, I follow all that. This is vital military intelligence.”

Kirby shook his head. “Hardly. It’s public knowledge. It may be a complete false alarm. These chemical engineers don’t guarantee anything. And what they want will take one hell of a big industrial effort to deliver. Maybe the stuff will explode, maybe it won’t. Maybe as soon as you have enough of it, it’ll all fly apart. Nobody knows. Five minutes of scratch pad work shows that you’re talking about an expenditure of many many millions of dollars. It could run up to a billion and then you could end up with a crock of horseshit. Congress is on an economy rampage. They’ve been refusing Roosevelt the money for a couple of hundred new airplanes.”

“I’ll ask you a couple of more questions. If I’m off base, tell me.”

“Shoot.”

“Where do you come into it?”

Kirby rubbed his pipe against his chin. “Okay, how do you separate out isotopes of a very rare metal in industrial quantities? One notion is to shoot it in the form of an ionized gas through a magnetic field. The lighter ions get deflected a tiny bit more, so you stream ‘em out and catch them. The whole game depends on the magnetic field being kept stable, because any wavering jumbles up the ion stream. Precise control of voltages is my business.”

“Uh-huh. Now. One last point. If an occasion arises, should I volunteer my valued opinion to the President that he should get off his ass about uranium?”

Kirby uttered a short baritone laugh. “The real question here is the Germans. How far along are they? This cuteness of theirs about pure graphite disturbs me. Graphite comes into the picture at a late stage. If Hitler gets uranium bombs first, Pug, and if they happen to work, that could prove disagreeable.”

A doorbell rang.

“I guess that’s your daughter,” Kirby said. “Let’s go down to dinner.”

* * *

Madeline arrived in a black tailored suit with a flaring jacket and a tight sheath skirt, dark hair swept up on her head. It was hard to think of her as only twenty. Possible she was putting on the young career woman a bit, but she did have to leave the table in the Empire Room twice, when the headwaiter came said with a bow that CBS was on the telephone. Victor Henry liked her confident, demure manner and her taciturnity. With alert eyes darting from face to face, she listened to the talk about Germany and about the wedding plans, and said almost nothing.

In the studio building, at the reception desk, a stiff, uniformed youngster awaited them. “Miss Henry’s party? This way, please.” He took them to a barren low-ceilinged green room where Hugh Cleveland and his staff sat around a table. Briskly cordial, Cleveland invited them to stay in the room till the show started. He was looking at the cards, memorizing spontaneous jokes he would make later, and discussing them with his gagman. After a while he snapped a rubber band around the cards and slipped them in his pocket. “Well, five minutes to go,” he said, turning to the visitors. “I hear this fellow Churchill gave a pretty good speech. Did you catch it?”

“Every word,” Rhoda said. “It was shattering. That speech will go down in history.”

“Quite a speech,” Pug said.

Madeline said, “Darn, and I was so busy I missed it.”

The show’s producer, who looked forty-five and dressed like a college boy, put a manicured hand to the back of his head. “It was fair. It needed cutting and punching up. Too much tutti-frutti. There was one good line about blood and sweat.”

“There was? How would that go with the butcher who plays the zither?” Cleveland said to the joke writer at his elbow, a melancholy young Jew who needed a haircut. “Could we throw in something about blood and sweat?”

The joke writer sadly shook his head. “Bad taste.”

“Don’t be silly, Herbie. Try to think of something. Captain Henry, how’s the war going? Will the Gamelin Plan stop the Krauts?”

“I don’t know what the Gamelin Plan is.”

Madeline put her guests in privileged seats on the stage of the studio, near the table where Cleveland interviewed the amateurs before a huge cardboard display extolling Morning Smile pink laxative salts. She posted herself in the glassed control booth. A large audience, which to Victor Henry seemed composed entirely of imbeciles, applauded the stumbling amateurs and roared at Cleveland’s jokes.

Cleveland ran the program with smooth foxy charm; Pug realized now that Madeline had latched herself to a comer. But the show disgusted him. One amateur identified himself as a line repairman. Cleveland remarked, “Well, haw haw, guess they could use you in France right about now.”

“France, Mr. Cleveland?”

“Sure. On that Maginot Line.”

He winked at the audience; they guffawed and clapped.

“Does this amuse you?” Pug said across Rhoda, in a low tone to Palmer Kirby.

“I never listen to the radio,” said the engineer. “It’s interesting. Like a visit to a madhouse.”

“That Cleveland’s cute, though.” Rhoda said.

Madeline came to them after the show, as the audience swarmed on stage around Hugh Cleveland seeking his autograph. “Damn, two of our best bits got cut off the air by news bulletins. They’re so high-handed, those news people!”

“What’s happening?” Victor Henry asked.

“Oh, it’s the war, naturally. Just more of the same. The Germans have overrun some new town, and the French are collapsing, and so on. Nothing very unexpected. Hugh will have a fit when he hears they cut the butcher with the zither.”

“Miss Henry?” A uniformed page approached her.

“Yes?”

“Urgent long-distance call, miss, in Mr. Cleveland’s office, for Miss Lacouture. From Puerto Rico.”

* * *

On the flying bridge of the fishing boat
Blue Bird
, rocking gently along at four knots in the Gulf Stream, Byron and Natalie lay in each other’s arms in the sun. Below, the jowly sunburned skipper yawned at the wheel over a can of beer, and the ship-to-shore telephone dimly crackled and gabbled. From long poles fixed in sockets at the empty fighting chairs, lines trailed in the water. Sunburned, all but naked in swimming suits, the lovers had forgotten the fish, the lines, and the skipper. They had forgotten death and they had forgotten war. They lay at center of a circle of dark blue calm water and light blue clear sky. It seemed the sun shone on them alone.

The deck echoed with loud rapping from below, four quick knocks like a Morse code V. “Hey, Mr. Henry! You awake?”

“Sure, what is it?” Byron called hoarsely, raising himself on an elbow.

They’re calling us from the beach. Your father wants you to come on in.”

“My father? Wrong boat. He’s in Washington.”

“Wait one – Hello, hello,
Blue Bird
calling Bill Thomas –” They heard the squawking of the ship-to-shore again. “Hey, Mr. Henry. Your father – is he a naval officer, a captain?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, the office has your girl’s mother on the telephone. Your father’s at her house and the message is to get back there pronto.”

Natalie sat up, her eyes wide and startled. Byron called, “Okay, let’s head back.”

“What on earth?” Natalie exclaimed.

“I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

The boat, scoring a green-white circle on the dark sea, picked up speed and started to pitch. The wind tumbled Natalie’s long free black hair. She pulled a mirror from a straw basket. “My God, look at me. Look at that mouth. I look gnawed. As though the rats had been at me!” She put the back of her hand to her lips. “Well, no use trying to patch up this Gorgon’s head till we come in. What can your father want, Briny?”

“Why are you so alarmed? Probably he’s here with my mother, and she wants a look at you. I can’t blame her, the way I shot down here. If so, I’m going to tell them, Natalie.”

Her face turned anxious. She took his hand. “Angel, there’s some Jewish law about not getting married too soon after a parent dies. Possibly for as long as a year, and - good heavens! Don’t make such a face! I’m not going to observe that. But I can’t distress my mother at this point. I need some time to figure this out.”

“I don’t want you violating your religion, Natalie, but lord, that’s a blow.”

“Sweetie, I wasn’t planning on marrying you until about an hour ago.” She shook her head and ruefully laughed. “I feel weird. Almost disembodied. Too much sun, or maybe I’m just drunk on kisses. And now your father suddenly showing up! Isn’t it all like a fever dream?”

He put his arm around her shoulders, holding her close as the boat pitched and rocked more. “Not to me. It’s damned real, and the realest thing of all is that we’re getting married. Reality just seems to be starting.”

“Yes, no doubt. I certainly don’t look forward to writing to Leslie - Jehosephat, that scowl again! You put it on and off like a Hallowe’en mask, it’s unnerving - Briny, he came down to see me right after Papa died. He was remarkably helpful and kind. A new Slote, just a bit too late. He’s been writing to his university friends to find me a teaching job. I
wish
I knew what your father wanted! Don’t tell him about us, Byron. Not till I’ve talked to my mother.”

“You’d better talk to her right away, then. My father has a way of getting at the facts.”

“Oh! Oh!” She put both hands to her hair. “I’m so happy, and so confused, and so upset! I’m dizzy. I feel sixteen, which I’m not, God knows! Better for you if I were.”

When the
Blue Bird
drew closer in, Byron got the binoculars and scanned the ragged row of skyscraper hotels along the beach. “I thought so. There he is, waiting on the pier.”

Natalie, lounging in one of the chairs, sat bolt upright. “Oh, no. You’re sure?”

“Right there, pacing back and forth. I know that walk.”

She seized her basket and darted into the cabin, saying to the skipper, “Slow down, please.”

“Right, miss.” The bewhiskered man, with a grin, pulled back on the throttle.

She closed the little door to the forward cabin. Soon she emerged in a cotton skirt and white blouse, her black hair brushed gleaming and loose to her shoulders. “I’m seasick,” she said to Byron, wanly smiling. “Try putting on eyebrows and a mouth sometime in a rocking boat, in a hot little cabin. Whew! Am I green? I feel green.”

“You look wonderful.”

The boat was wallowing half a mile from the pier. Natalie could see the man in blue walking up and down. “Full steam ahead,” she said shakily. “Damn the torpedoes.”

Victor Henry, leaning down from the tar-smelling pier, held out a hand as the boat stopped. “Hello, Natalie. This is a helluva thing to do to you. Watch it, don’t step on that nail.”

Byron leaped ashore. “What’s up, Dad? Is everybody all right?”

“Have you two had lunch?” Pug said.

They looked at each other, and Natalie nervously laughed. “I did pack sandwiches. They’re in this basket. “

“We, well, I don’t know, we forgot.”

An amused look came and went in Victor Henry’s eyes, though his face remained stern. “Uh-huh. Well, the smells from that joint there” – he pointed with his thumb at a dilapidated clam bar on the pier - “have been driving me nuts, but I thought I’d wait for you. I haven’t eaten yet today.”