Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Here you go, ma’am.” The driver pulled up in front of the War Department. It had taken plenty of damage, too, even if it was built from the best reinforced concrete taxpayer dollars could buy. Most of its business went on underground these days. Flora didn’t know how far underground the tunnels ran. She didn’t need to know. Not many people did.

She paid the cabby. Her breath smoked as she went up the battered steps. She showed the sentries her identity papers. “I’m here to see Assistant Secretary Roosevelt,” she said.

“Hold on for a minute, ma’am.” One of them picked up a telephone and spoke into it. After not much longer than the promised wait, he hung up and nodded to her. “You can go ahead, ma’am. You’re legit, all right. Willie, take her to Mr. Roosevelt’s office.”

Willie looked younger than her own Joshua. He led her down endless flights of stairs. All she knew when he walked her along a corridor was that at least one more level lay below the one she was on. He stopped at a door with ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR neatly painted on the frosted-glass window. “Here you are, ma’am. When you need to come up, call the front desk and somebody will come down to guide you.”

Don’t go wandering around on your own, he meant. “All right,” Flora answered. Willie looked relieved.

She opened the door. “Hello, Flora! Come in,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said. Sitting at his desk, a cigarette holder in his mouth at a jaunty angle, he looked strong and virile. But he sat in a wheelchair, and went on, “You’ll have to excuse my not rising, I’m afraid.” A shrug of his broad shoulders might have added, What can you do?

“Of course,” Flora said quickly, and then, “Happy New Year.” She couldn’t go wrong with that.

“Same to you,” Roosevelt answered. “And I hope it will be a Happy New Year for the country, too. We’re in better shape now than we were when 1942 started, anyhow. I don’t think the Confederates will be able to get out of the noose around Pittsburgh, and that will cost them. That will cost them plenty.”

“Good,” Flora said. “Lord knows they’ve cost us plenty. Is that what you wanted to talk about tonight?”

“As a matter of fact, no. I wanted to tell you Columbus has discovered America.”

Flora didn’t know how to take that. With a smile seemed the best way. “I thought he might have,” she agreed. “Otherwise we’d be doing this somewhere else and speaking a different language-a couple of different languages, I expect.”

Roosevelt’s big, booming laugh filled the office. “Well, when you’re right, you’re right. But that’s the message we got back from Washington State-Hanford, the name of the town is-the other day. It means they’ve done the first big part of what they set out to do.”

“And what is that, Franklin?” she asked. “I’ve sat on the secret for so long, don’t you think I’m entitled to find out?”

“ That’s what I wanted to talk about tonight,” he answered. “I have clearance from the President to tell you what’s what.” He cocked his head and gave her a coy, even an arch, smile. “So you want to know, eh?”

“Maybe a little,” Flora said, and Roosevelt laughed again.

“Tell me everything you know about uranium,” he said.

Flora sat silent for perhaps half a minute. “There,” she said. “I just did.”

This time, Roosevelt positively chortled. “Well, that’s what I said when this whole thing started-my exact words, to tell you the truth. Now I’m going to tell you what the professors with the slide rules told me.”

And he did. He was a lively, well-organized speaker. He could have lectured at any college in the country. Flora’s head soon started spinning even so. Uranium-235, U-238, uranium hexafluoride, centrifuges, gaseous diffusion, thermal diffusion… It all seemed diffuse to her, and quite a bit of it seemed gaseous.

“What have they done out there now?” she asked.

“They’ve enriched enough uranium to have a self-sustaining reaction,” Roosevelt replied. Enriched, Flora had learned, meant getting a mix with more U-235-the kind that could explode-and less U-238, which couldn’t. A sustained reaction wasn’t an explosion, but she gathered it was a long step on the way towards one.

“If everything goes right and we get the weapon soon enough, this could win us the war, couldn’t it?” Flora said.

“Well, nobody knows for sure,” Roosevelt answered, “but the professors seem to think so.”

“The Germans are working on it, too?” she asked.

“Yes. No doubt about it. They’re the ones who found fission in the first place,” he said.

“All right. What about the Confederates?” Flora asked.

“We think they have something going on,” the Assistant Secretary of War said carefully. “We don’t know as much about it as we wish we did. We’re trying to find out more.”

“That sounds like a good idea.” Flora’s own calm meant she would have started screaming at him if he’d told her anything else. “How much do they know about what we’re doing?”

“That is the question.” Maybe Roosevelt was quoting Hamlet, maybe just answering her. “The truth is, we’re not sure. Counterintelligence hasn’t picked up whatever intelligence they’ve gathered on us.”

“I hope you’re trying everything under the sun,” Flora said, again in lieu of yelling.

“Oh, yes,” Roosevelt said. “So far, we’ve only figured out one defense against these atomic explosions.”

“Really? That’s one more than I’d imagined,” Flora said. “What is it?”

“To be somewhere else when they go off.”

“Oh.” Flora laughed. But Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t laughing now. He meant it. Another thing she hadn’t imagined was a race where the winners won everything and the losers were probably ruined forever. “How long between the, uh, sustained reaction and a real bomb we can use?”

Roosevelt spread his hands. “That’s what we’re trying to find out. The physicists say anywhere between six months and ten years, depending on how fast they can solve the engineering problems.”

“That’s no good!” Flora said. “If it’s ten years for us and six months for the CSA, we’ll never get the chance to finish.”

“They tell me it’s more likely to be the other way around,” Roosevelt said. “For one thing, we do seem to have started before the Confederates did. For another, we’ve got three times as many physicists and engineers and such as they do.”

“Serves them right for not educating their Negroes.” Flora stopped and grimaced. These days, the Confederates were doing worse with their Negroes than not educating them. Thinking of what they were doing made her say, “We’d better win this race.”

“I think we will.” Franklin Roosevelt sounded confident-but then, he usually did. “Whether we’ll win it in time to use one of those bombs in this war… That I don’t know, and I’d be lying if I said I did.”

“What about Germany and England and France? What about Japan?” Flora asked.

“As I said, we have to guess the Kaiser is somewhere ahead of us. How far, I don’t know,” Roosevelt said. “The others? I don’t know that, either. If we have intelligence about what they’re doing, it doesn’t come through me.” Flora thought it should have, but that wasn’t her province. She decided she had done the right thing by not making a fuss about the budget entry she’d found. If this worked, it would win the war.

And if it didn’t, how many hundreds of millions of dollars would they have thrown down a rathole? As 1942 passed into 1943, she tried not to think about that.

Armstrong Grimes had charge of a platoon. In the middle of Salt Lake City in the middle of winter, he could have done without the honor. But Lieutenant Streczyk was somewhere far back of the line, his left leg gone below the knee. He’d been unlucky or incautious enough to step on a mine.