She hadn’t even asked about that yet. In spite of that forbidding name and those titles,Generalleutnant Graf Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt was indeed a gentleman of the old school. That helped Ludmila make up her mind to nod in agreement to him. Later, she would decide she should have picked better reasons for making up her mind.
Richard Peterson was a decent technician but, as far as Brigadier General Leslie Groves was concerned, a hopeless stick-in-the-mud. He sat in the hard chair in Groves’ office in the Science Building of the University of Denver and said, “This containment scheme you have in mind, sir, it’s going to be hard to maintain it and increase plutonium production at the same time.”
Groves slammed a big, meaty fist down on the desk. He was a big, meaty man, with short-cropped, gingery hair, a thin mustache, and the blunt features of a mastiff. He had a mastiff’s implacable aggressiveness, too. “So what are you telling me, Peterson?” he rumbled ominously. “Are you saying we’re going to start leaking radioactives into the river so the Lizards can figure out where they are? You’d better not be saying that, because you know what’ll happen if you are.”
“Of course I know.” Peterson’s voice went high and shrill. “The Lizards will blow us to kingdom come.”
“That’s just exactly right,” Groves said. “I’m damn lucky I wasn’t in Washington, D.C., when they dropped their bomb there.” He snorted. “All they got rid of in Washington was some Congresscritters-odds are, they helped the war effort. But if they land one on Denver, we can’t make any more nuclear bombs of our own. And if we can’t do that, we lose the war.”
“I know that, too,” Peterson answered. “But the reprocessing plant can only do so much. If you get more plutonium out of it, you put more byproducts into the filters-and if they make it through the filters, they go into the South Platte.”
“We have to have more plutonium,” Groves said flatly. “If that means putting in more filters or doing more scrubbing of the ones we have, then take care of it. That’s what you’re for. You tell me you can’t do it, I’ll find somebody who can, I promise you that. You’ve got top priority for getting materials, not just from Denver but from all over the country. Use it or find another job.”
Behind his horn-rimmed glasses, Peterson looked like a puppy who’d got a kick in the ribs for no reason at all. “It’s not the materials, General. We’re desperately short of trained personnel. We-”
Groves glowered at him. “I told you, I don’t want excuses. I want results. If you don’t have enough trained men, train more. Or else use untrained men and break all your procedures down into baby steps any idiot can understand: if this happens when you do that, then go on and do this next thing. If something else happens, do that instead and try the procedure again. And ifthat orthat happens, yell for your boss, who really knows what’s going on. Takes a while to draft procedures like that, so you’d better get cracking on it.”
“But-” Peterson began. Groves ignored him-ostentatiously ignored him, picking up the topmost sheet from his overflowing IN basket. The technician angrily got up and stomped out of the office. Groves had all he could do not to laugh. He’d seen furious stomps much better done. He made a mental note to keep an extra close watch on the plutonium reprocessing plant over the next few weeks. Either Peterson would get production up without releasing radioactive contamination into the river, or somebody else would get a crack at the job.
The sheet Groves had picked up was important in its own right, though, important even by the standards of the moment, where everything in any way connected with atomic weapons had top priority. He rubbed his chin. This one was routed through the Office of Strategic Services, which was something he didn’t see every day.
“So the damn Russians want our help, do they?” he muttered. He didn’t think much of the Russians, either their politics or their engineering ability. Still, they’d made the first human-built atomic bomb, even though they had used fissionables they’d stolen from the Lizards. That showed they had more on the ball than he’d given them credit for.
Now, though, they were having trouble turning out their own radioactives, and they wanted somebody to get over there some kind of way and give them a hand. If it hadn’t been for the Lizards, Groves would have reacted to that with all the enthusiasm of a man who’d had a rattlesnake stuck in his skivvies. But with the Lizards in the picture, you worried about them first and only later about the prospect of Uncle Joe with an atomic bomb, or rather a whole bunch of atomic bombs.
Groves leaned back in his swivel chair. It squeaked. He wished for a cigarette.While you’re at it, why not wish for the moon? Instead of worrying about the moon, he said, “I wish Larssen were still with us. He’d be the perfect guy to ship off to Moscow.”
Larssen, though, was dead. He’d never been the same after his wife took up with that Army fellow-Yeager, that was his name. Then, even after Larssen made it to Hanford, Washington, and back, nobody’d wanted to disrupt work at the Metallurgical Laboratory by relocating. That had been a hell of a trip; too bad it was wasted. When it came to coping with the travails of the open road, Larssen was top-notch.
What he couldn’t handle were his own inner demons. Finally, they must have got the better of him, because he’d shot a couple of men and headed east, toward Lizard-held territory. If he’d sung a song for the aliens, as Groves had feared he might, nuclear fire would have blossomed above Denver. But the cavalry had hunted him down before he could go over to the enemy.
“Well, who does that leave?” Groves asked the office walls. Trouble was, the memorandum he’d got didn’t tell him enough. He didn’t know where the Reds were having trouble. Did they even have an atomic pile going? Was separating plutonium from an active pile their problem? Or were they trying to separate U-235 from U-238? The memo didn’t say. Trying to figure out what to do was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle when you didn’t have all the pieces and weren’t sure which ones were missing.
Since they were Russians, he had to figure their problems were pretty basic. His own problem was pretty basic, too: could he spare anybody and ship him halfway around the world in the middle of war, with no guarantee he’d get there in one piece? And if he could, who did he hate enough to want to send him to Moscow, or wherever the Russians had their program?
He sighed. “Yeah, Larssen would have been perfect,” he said. Nothing he could do about that, though. Nothing anybody could do about it, not till Judgment Day. Groves was not the sort to spend time-to waste time, as he would have thought of it-on something he couldn’t do anything about. He realized he couldn’t decide this one off the top of his head. He’d have to talk things over with the physicists.
He looked at the letter from the OSS again. If somebody went over to lend the Russians a hand, the U.S.A. would get paid back with gadgets taken from a Lizard base that had mutinied and surrendered to the Soviet Army.
“Have to make sure the Reds don’t cheat and give us stuff that doesn’t work or that we’ve already got,” he told the walls. The one thing you could rely on about the Russians was that you couldn’t rely on them.
Then he stopped and read the letter again. He’d missed something there by letting his worries about the Russians blind him to the other things that were going on.
“A Lizard base up and mutinied?” he said. He hadn’t heard of anything like that happening anywhere else. The Lizards made for solid, disciplined troops, no matter how much they looked like chameleons with delusions of grandeur. He wondered what had driven them far enough over the edge to go against their own officers.