For all that, though, his grip was still strong when he reached out to shake General Groves’ hand after the engineer had saluted. “You’ve lost weight, General,” he observed, amusement in his eyes-his body might be falling to pieces around it, but his mind was still sharp.
“Yes, sir,” Groves answered. Roosevelt had lost weight, too, but he wasn’t about to remark on it.
“Sit down, sit down.” The President waved him to the swivel chair behind his desk. Groves obediently sat. Roosevelt turned the wheelchair to face him. Even his hands had lost flesh; the skin hung loose on them. He sighed and said, “I wish to God I had a cigarette, but that’s neither here nor there-certainly not here, worse luck.” FDR sighed again. “Do you know, General, when Einstein sent me that letter of his back in ‘39, I had the feeling all his talk of nuclear weapons and bombs that could blow up the world was likely to be so much moonshine, but I couldn’t take the chance of being wrong. And, it turns out, I was right-and how I wish I hadn’t been!”
“Yes, sir,” Groves repeated, but then added, “If you hadn’t been right, though, sir, we’d have been in no position to resist the Lizards and to copy what they’ve done.”
“That’s true, but it’s not what I meant,” Roosevelt said. “I wish I’d been right, and that all the talk about nuclear weapons and atomic power and who knows what were so much moonshine. Then all I’d have to worry about would be beating Hitler and Hirohito, and the Lizards would be back on the second planet of the star Tau Ceti where they belong, and people wouldn’t meet them for another million years, if we ever did.”
“Is that where they’re from?” Groves asked with interest. “I’ll have to have our liaison man put the question to the Lizard POWs we have here.”
FDR made a gesture of indifference. “As you like, and if you have the time; otherwise don’t trouble yourself about it. These Lizards are an astonishing intelligence resource, aren’t they?”
“Yes, sir,” Groves said enthusiastically. “The ones we have here have been extremely cooperative.”
“Not just them, General. With what we’re learning from systematic interrogation of all our captives, we’ll leap forward by decades, maybe centuries.” Roosevelt’s expression, which had brightened, turned cloudy again. “If we win the war, that is-which is what I came to talk about. What I want to know is, how soon will we have nuclear weapons of our own to use against the Lizards?” He leaned forward in his chair, intently awaiting Groves’ reply.
Groves nodded; he’d expected the question. “Sir, I am told we can have one nuclear bomb fairly soon. England supplied us with enough plutonium that we need to manufacture only a few more kilograms of our own to have enough for a bomb. Within a. year, the scientists here tell me.”
“That’s not soon enough.” Roosevelt made a sour face. “It may do, but every day they shave off it will bring the country one day closer to being saved. How long for more after the first?”
Now it was Groves’ turn to look unhappy. “You understand, sir, that we have to come up with all the explosive material for them on our own. The pile-that’s, what they call it-the Met Lab staff has built here isn’t ideally designed for that, although we are improving it as we gain experience. And one of our physicists is scouting a site where we can build a pile that will give us larger amounts of plutonium.” He wondered how Jens Larssen was doing.
“I know about Hanford,” Roosevelt said impatiently. “I don’t need the technical details, General-that’s why you’re here. But I do need to know how long I have to wait for my weaponry so I can make sure there’s a country left when I get it.”
“I understand,” Groves said. “If all goes well-if the pile goes up on schedule and works as advertised, and if the Lizards don’t overrun Hanford or wherever we put it-you should have more bombs starting about six months after the first one: by the end of 1944, more or less.”
“Not soon enough,” Roosevelt repeated. “Still, we’re better off than the rest. The Germans might have been right there with us, but you’ve no doubt heard about the mistakes they made with their pile. The British are relying on us; we’re passing information to the Japanese, who are well behind us; and the Russians-I don’t know about the Russians.”
Groves’ opinion of Soviet scientific prowess was not high. Then he remembered the Russians had got some plutonium from that raid on the Lizards, too. “A wild card,” he said.
“That’s right.” Roosevelt nodded emphatically. His famous jaw still had granite in it, no matter how badly the rest of his features had weathered. “I’ve been in touch with Stalin. He’s worried-the Lizards are pushing hard against Moscow. If it falls, who can say whether the Russians will keep on listening to their government, and if they don’t, we’ve lost a big piece of the war.”
“Yes, sir,” Groves said. Although he was as security-conscious as a man in his position had to be, he also had a well-honed curiosity-and how often did you get to pick the brain of the President of the United States? “How bad is it over in the Soviet Union, sir?”
“It’s not good,” FDR said. “Stalin told me that if I had any men to spare, he’d leave them under their own officers, leave them under my direct personal command if that was wanted, as long as they went over there and fought the Lizards.”
Groves’ lips puckered into a soundless whistle. That was a cry of pain if ever he’d heard one. “He’s not just worried, sir, he’s desperate. What did you tell him?”
“I answered no, of course,” Roosevelt said. “We have a few small differences with the Lizards on our own soil at the moment.” The high-pitched laugh so familiar from the radio and the newsreel screen filled the office. As it had so often in the past, it lifted Groves’ spirits-but only for a moment. The danger facing-filling-the United States was too great to be laughed off. The President continued, “For instance, the Lizards are pushing hard against Chicago, too. They have us cut in half along the Mississippi almost as badly as the North did with the South during the Civil War, to say nothing of the other areas they’ve carved out of the country. It hinders us every way you can think of, militarily and economically both.”
“Believe me, sir, I understand that,” Groves said, remembering how he’d had to bring the plutonium to Denver by way of Canada. “What can we do about it, though?”
“Fight ’em,” Roosevelt answered. “If they’re going to beat us, they’ll have to beat us, no other way. From what we hear from prisoners we’ve captured, they’ve taken over two other whole worlds before they attacked us, and they’ve ruled them for thousands of years. If we lose, General, if we lay down and. give up, it’s for keeps. That’s why I came to talk about the atomic bomb: if I have any weapon I can use against those dastardly creatures, I want to know about it.”
“I’m sorry I can’t give you better news, sir.”
“So am I.” Roosevelt hunched his shoulders and let out another long sigh. His shirt and jacket both seemed a couple of sizes too big. The burden of the war was killing him; Groves realized with a jolt that that was literally true. He wondered where Vice President Henry Wallace was and what sort of shape he was in.
He couldn’t t say that to the President. What he did say was “The trick will be to get through the time between using the one bomb we can make fairly quickly and the rest, which will take longer.”
“Yes indeed,” FDR said. “I‘d hoped that would be a shorter gap. As it is we’ll have to be very careful picking the time when we use the first one. you’re right that we would be very vulnerable to whatever atomic response the Lizards make.”
Groves had seen pictures of the slag heap the Lizards had made of Washington, D.C. He heard men who’d seen it talk about the incongruous beauty of the tall cloud of dust and hot gas that had sprouted over the city like a gigantic, poisonous toadstool. He imagined such toadstools springing into being above other cities across the United States, across the world. A bit of Latin from his prep school days came back to haunt him: they make a desert and they call it peace.