War and Remembrance (72 page)

“I spent two hours today,” Peters said, “in that reactor setup under the football field bleachers. Ugly, sullen damned thing, this black heap towering
to the ceiling, just standing there. Sooty technicians hovering around it, like devils fussing with a fire in hell that won’t burn.”

“Well put!” Kirby said with a sour smile. “There again, great concept. You nudge uranium with a neutron source and get it to splattering more neutrons around and splitting itself up. In theory if you design it right, you should get a chain reaction and blow up Chicago — except that the controls seem foolproof, so you just boil up a lot of heat and radiation and produce this new element, plutonium, that will also blow up with a hell of a bang, like U-235. That’s what the pencil-and-paper gentlemen predict. Yet the thing keeps fizzling and dying out. Why? Nobody’s sure. In a way I hope we’re up against some fact of nature, some physical impossibility that nobody has discerned yet. That blank wall would stop the Germans, too. But is it really a solid wall? Or are we muffing the way through, while they’re finding it? That’s the damnable question.”

“You rate gaseous diffusion first.” Harrison Peters struck a stiff finger on the chair arm, as though to pin down Kirby’s view.

“Yes, but I’m an ignoramus myself. We’ve got to assume the Germans are on all of these tracks, so we can’t afford to bypass any of them. That’s the position of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, so it’s mine. I grind an axe too.”

“Kirby, you keep looking at the clock. Am I keeping you?”

“I have to meet somebody at the Union Station at six. She hates to stand around waiting.”

“Ah. A gal,” said Colonel Peters. His smile turned to a goatish grin; he ran a hand along his handsome gray hair; his demeanor became charged with mischievous appetite. The Army brigadier general who had authorized Kirby to send Peters the secret reports had volunteered that “Big Pete” was a wild bachelor, with a plus score on pretty girls quite impressive in a man his age.

“Well, a lady,” Kirby said.

“Good friend?”

“She’s the wife of an old good friend. They just lost a son at the Battle of Midway, a naval aviator.”

This wiped away, like a damp sponge swept over blackboard writing, the lecherous look of the colonel. His face went stiff and stern, his eyes clouded, and he shook his head. “That’s rough.”

“It’s an all-Navy family. The father’s commanding a cruiser, and another son’s in submarines. She’s been out on the West Coast, visiting the submariner and a daughter.”

“Look, I won’t hold you up then.”

“I don’t have to go yet.”

“Can I pick your brain on one more point?”

“Shoot.”

“If I understand it, the Army has come into this picture for the big production jobs. S-1 will carry on the experimental work, the pilot plants, and so forth.”

“That’s the general idea,” Kirby said. “The Army should have been in long ago. I’ve learned
that
lesson, trying to get priorities for S-1. No corporation will pay attention to a pack of mad scientists with a secret Buck Rogers weapon, when the President’s ordered sixty thousand planes a year, eight million tons of shipping, forty-five thousand tanks and God knows how many AA guns and shells. Yet this project begins to look like such a stupendous strain on this country’s total resources, Colonel, that only the Army can handle it.”

The colonel’s eyes glinted. “Possibly, but won’t S-1 and the Army be bucking each other? We’ll want the same triple-A stuff, won’t we? Won’t you and I end up in a back-stabbing contest that I’ll win, thus strangling your effort, which may be the key to the crucial advances?”

“Good question,” Kirby replied, “but Vannevar Bush’s uranium section can’t last long now. The Army will soon take over in toto. I’m talking like a traitor, because Compton and Lawrence and company are having a great time running the whole thing themselves. Scientists have never played with such big chips. But at this point the problem is twenty percent theoretical science, and eighty percent industrial effort, a forced performance, Colonel, on a giant scale at top speed in dead secrecy.” Kirby stood up, excited by his own words, and rapped the desk with a sweaty hand. “The muscle to ass-kick that performance out of American industry has got to come from the United States Army. In six months I’ll be out of here, and glad of it. Maybe I’d better get down to Union Station now.”

Peters got up too, stretching his great arms. “Are we going to make a bomb?”

Kirby put on a tie and a jacket as he replied, “Ask me some other time. Today I’m down. That black pile you saw, they just can’t get it going. This has been happening for months. They try one thing and another, and now they’re blaming the graphite. They say boron impurities absorb too many neutrons, so the thing fizzles out. You’re going to be hearing a lot about neutrons, and —”

“My head’s swimming with them now. Fast neutrons, slow neutrons — between two dunderheads, what the hell is a neutron?”

“If you’re serious —”

“Sure I am. I’m ignorant as a horse about this stuff.”

“It’s a particle without a charge, in the nucleus of the atom. An Englishman named Chadwick discovered it in 1932. Neutrons are what radioactive substances give off. They can penetrate another nucleus and knock it apart into two other lighter substances. A couple of Germans did that first, back in
’39. That’s splitting the atom, with a loss of mass and therefore a tremendous energy release.”

“Einstein’s law,” Peters said, and he recited solemnly, as in a classroom,
“E equals me squared.
I know that much.”

“Okay. Neutrons aren’t your job, of course. You’ll just be looking at things like that dirty black pile and Lawrence’s big electromagnet, all covered with dials and valves. Various Ph.D.’s and a Nobel laureate or two will yell at you for purer graphite or some bigger magnets or some other unobtainable thing. Someday something made out of uranium or Element 94 will probably go off with the biggest noise ever heard on earth. The smartest men alive think so. Whether it’ll happen in our lifetimes, and whether we’ll make that thing first — those are the crucial questions. If the Germans do it first, Hitler will shut down our effort rather rudely. And if they don’t, and we don’t make a bomb in time to use in this war — which is a real possibility, I assure you — well, Colonel, picture peace coming, and Congress learning that the Army blew in a few billion dollars on huge plants that produced a crock of horseshit. And start preparing your testimony.”

Rhoda had spent two difficult hours in a swaying train compartment, grooming for this last encounter with the one guilty love of her life. Her charcoal shantung suit, a Beverly Hills purchase, set off her pretty figure with subtle charm; the purple hat added a sweet melancholy touch of color; gloves and shoes, still black. Her costume was appropriate for bereavement; also for an attractive widow getting ready to look around again. Two weeks of California sun and swimming had given her a rosy tan and cleared her eyes; and a nose veil so softened her features that a stranger might have taken her for a woman of thirty or so.

When a woman is about to discard a man — or to be discarded by him, for that matter — she often wants to look her best; arraying herself (so to say) for the last glimpse into the coffin of dead love. More prosaically, she simply prefers that he feel regret, not relief, if she can arrange it. The look on Palmer Kirby’s face, when he first espied her at the train gate, rewarded her pains. Their talk in the taxicab was all about her family. Overshadowing Madeline’s movie job was the news of Byron’s orders to Gibraltar. He had telephoned it to her in great excitement from San Diego. His new duty, she supposed, was something hush-hush connected with submarines in the Mediterranean. He still meant to fly to Switzerland and work on freeing his wife and child; from Lisbon it was perhaps feasible, though Rhoda thought it a quixotic notion, and hoped they would get out of Italy before he tried it. Anyway, Byron had sounded happy, she said, for the first time since Warren’s death. Those words slipped out. Then she and Kirby looked sadly at each other, and Rhoda turned away, her eyes watering.

The only hint of wartime in the famous Pump Room was the number of men in uniform, mostly bald or gray-headed colonels and captains. Expert waiters bustled about, chafing dishes flamed, rich roasts wheeled here and there, handsome bejeweled women devoured big lobsters, and the wine steward, clanking his brass tokens, hurried from table to table with bottles projecting from ice-filled buckets.

“We’ll have wine, I suppose,” he said to her when the waiter asked for their drink orders. “Would you like a drink first?”

“No wine tonight, I think,” Rhoda returned with cool good cheer. “A very dry martini, please.”

A long silence ensued between them, but the restaurant buzz made it tolerable. The drinks came. They lifted their glasses. Kirby shook his head, and spoke haltingly. “Rho, I keep thinking of the Berlin airport, the time you drove me there. I don’t know why. There’s no resemblance in the surroundings, God knows.”

She peered at him through the veil, sipping at the martini. Delicately she put down the oversize glass. “That was a farewell.”

“Well, we thought it was.”

“Certainly I did,” Rhoda sighed.

“Is this a farewell?”

Rhoda gave a slow bare nod. Her glance wandered away over the restaurant, and she began to prattle. “I once ate here with Pug, d’you know? We were on our way from San Francisco to Annapolis. BuOrd had stationed him in Mare Island to work on battleship turret design, and we were going back east for Warren’s graduation from the Severn School. Ten years ago, I guess. Or is it eleven? All that’s getting blurry.” She stirred the martini, round and round. “You never know when you’re happy, Palmer, do you? Imagine, I thought I had problems then! Byron kept failing in school. Madeline was fat, and her teeth were crooked. Big tragedies like that. Our house in San Francisco was too small, and on a noisy street. Dear me, I gave Pug a bad time about all those things. But how proud we were of Warren! He won the school sword, and a track medal, and the history prize — oh, hell.” Her voice failed. She finished off her drink. “Please order me another, and then no more.”

He signalled to the waiter for a second round, and said, slowly and gruffly, “Rhoda, let me speak my piece and get it over with. I won’t embarrass you with a messy spill of my feelings. I have to accept your decision, and I do. That’s all.”

Rhoda’s smile was sad and gentle. “Aren’t you glad to be out of it, Palmer?”

“In your presence, I can’t be.”

Her eyes flashed at his intense look and tone. “A pretty speech, sir.”
She held out her hand, and they shook hands as though sealing a bargain. “Well! Now I think we can enjoy our dinner,” Rhoda tremulously laughed. “It would be a pity at that, wouldn’t it, not to have a good time in the Pump Room?”

“Yes. Change your mind about the wine?”

“Oh, why don’t you order us a half-bottle?”

“Hello, Kirby.”

It was Colonel Peters, following the head waiter past their table with a tall girl in a green dress. Kirby knew her slightly by sight: a large colorless female who worked in Compton’s office. Now her eyes were excited, her dark hair was piled up in a beauty-parlor do, and she was painted in a most nonacademic way. The green dress was a shade too tight on her lush figure. They sat down nearby, and Kirby and Rhoda could hear Peters jollying the girl. Their laughter rang across the noisy restaurant.

Over their dinner and the half-bottle of Chablis, Rhoda told Kirby of her plan to go to Hawaii, of the varying advice some admirals on the West Coast had given her, and of her intention to close up, and perhaps sell, the Foxhall Road house. Kirby made little comment, and the topic lapsed. They passed some of the time watching, with amusement and ironic remarks, the rapid progress of Colonel Peters with the green-clad girl. He clearly did these things by the book, using basic principles and tested materials: smoked salmon, champagne, shish kebab on flaming swords, crepes suzette, and brandy. The joking and the laughter of the couple seldom paused, and the girl was glowing with aroused delight. Peters had an eye for spotting the prey, thought Kirby, as well as skill at netting it. Kirby was not above a play for a secretary when he got lonesome, but he had never given this big Miss Chaney in Compton’s outer office a second thought.

Rhoda’s train did not leave until midnight. By ten they had finished the meal, and there seemed to be nothing else to do. In other days they might have gone to Kirby’s apartment, but that was unthinkable. Their relationship had run out like a phonograph record; their chitchat was the last scratching of the needle. Rhoda was acting friendly, and she was even being lightly funny about Colonel Peters’s amorous tactics; but woman to man, she had turned distant as a sister. There she sat, in an elusive way made more desirable than ever by time and by grief; an elegant quiet lady, so correct and serene that his irrepressible mental pictures of her naked in the throes of passion seemed indecent falsehoods, or contemptible peeks into a bedroom.

The Army man was leaning over Miss Chaney, whispering as he helped her out of her chair, and they were both laughing richly. They had no problem about what to do next, thought Kirby; but he was confronted with this problem of a remote woman for two more long hours.

“I’m going to suggest something strange, dear,” Rhoda said, “and if you become cross, you’ll distress me.”

“Yes?”

“Did you see that little theatre in the Union Station that shows nothing but newsreels and cartoons? Let’s go there. Or if you’re terribly busy, I’ll go, and you can get back to your work. Do you still sit up nights, writing reports about that horrible
THING
you’re working on, whatever it is?”