Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Don’t think so.” Big and ponderous, Koenig rose to his feet. “I’ll get on the telephone to Pinkard right away.”

“Yeah, you do that.” Featherston got up, too, and walked to the door with him. As Koenig left, Jake asked, “Who’s next on the list, Lulu?”

“A Professor FitzBelmont, Mr. President,” his secretary answered. Working underground fazed her not at all. Jake suspected working underwater wouldn’t have fazed her, either.

“FitzBelmont…” The name was vaguely familiar. And then, with a good politician’s near-total recall for people, Jake remembered exactly who Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont was. He groaned. “Oh, for God’s sake! The uranium nut. How did he get another appointment?”

“Do you want me to tell him it’s been canceled, sir?” Lulu asked.

“No, no,” Jake said resignedly. “If he’s out there cooling his heels in the waiting room, he’ll raise a stink if you send him home now. Fetch him in. I’ll get rid of him as quick as I can.”

Professor FitzBelmont was as rumpled and tweedy as he had been the year before. “Good to see you, Mr. President,” he said.

“Likewise,” Jake lied. “What’s on your mind today, Professor? Kindly cut to the chase-I’ve got a lot to do.”

“You will remember, sir, that I told you that uranium-uranium-235, that is-has the potential to make an explosive thousands of times as strong as dynamite.”

“I do recollect, yeah. But I also recollect it’d cost an arm and a leg, and you weren’t sure how long it’d take or whether you could do it at all. Has anything changed since then? Better be something, Professor, or I won’t be real happy with you. I haven’t got time to waste.”

Henderson V. FitzBelmont licked his lips and nervously fiddled with his gold-framed spectacles. “In terms of what we know about uranium itself, not much has changed.” Jake started to growl angrily, but FitzBelmont plowed ahead anyway: “But I do know, or I can make a good guess, that the United States are probably looking at this same question.”

“How do you know that?” Featherston rapped out. Professor FitzBelmont had found a way to make him pay attention, all right.

“For one thing, their journals have suddenly stopped mentioning uranium at all. For another, there are large engineering works in the northwestern USA that appear consistent with an effort along these lines.”

“And how do you know that ?”

“I was asked by C.S. Intelligence to identify buildings in photos,” the professor replied. “No doubt because of my previous visit to you, those officers knew of my interest in that field. And if I were to build a plant for producing enriched uranium, it would look something like what the United States are building in Washington.”

“All right.” Featherston surprised himself by how mildly he spoke. Every once in a while, somebody who looked and sounded like a nut turned out not to be one after all. This felt like one of those times. “If the damnyankees are interested in this uranium stuff, too, there must be something to it. That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, sir, not for sure. I don’t know whether we can isolate U-235, how long doing it would take, or how much it would cost. There also seems to be a possibility that U-238 can be transmuted-”

“Can be what?” Jake wished the prof would stop talking like a prof.

“Changed,” FitzBelmont said patiently. “Maybe it can be changed into another element that will also explode. Theory seems to suggest the possibility. I know less about this than I do about U-235. There is much more U-238, so the second possibility would be advantageous to us. But I am certain of one thing.”

“Oh? And what’s that?” Jake asked, as the physics professor surely wanted him to do. Usually, he manipulated. Not today; not right now.

Henderson V. FitzBelmont moved in for the kill, an intellectual tiger on the prowl: “If the enemy succeeds in acquiring this weapon and we do not, I fail to see how our cause can avoid disaster.”

Jake thought about it. Twenty thousand times as strong as TNT? One bomb and no more city? The USA with eight or ten of those bombs and the CSA with none? A fleet of Yankee bombers had done horrible things to Fort Worth and Dallas, catching the Texas towns by surprise. That wouldn’t happen again. The officer who’d been asleep at the switch now made his reports in hell; those bombers had made him pay for his mistake. But if the USA didn’t need a fleet of bombers, if one airplane would do the job… Nobody could stop every single goddamn airplane.

“Figure out what you need, Professor,” Jake said heavily. “Money, machinery, people-whatever it is, you’ll get it. I want the list as fast as you can shoot it to me. No more than two weeks, you hear?”

“Uh, yes, sir.” FitzBelmont sounded more than a little dazed. He lost a point in Jake’s book on account of that. If he’d really believed in this, he would have pulled that list out of his briefcase now. Maybe he hadn’t believed he could persuade the President of the CSA. Featherston hoped that was it.

He accompanied FitzBelmont out of his subterranean sanctum, as he had Ferd Koenig a little while before. After the physics professor left, Jake turned to Lulu and said, “Get on the horn to General Potter. Tell him I want to see him here ten minutes ago.”

“Yes, Mr. President.” She didn’t bat an eye. She never did. “Can I tell him what this is in reference to?”

“Nope. I’ll take care of that when he gets here.”

“Yes, Mr. President.” Lulu knew what was always the right answer.

Featherston endured a delegation of Freedom Party officials from Alabama and Mississippi going on about how they needed more men and more guns to help keep their smoldering Negro rebellions from bursting into flames. Since Jake couldn’t possibly give them more men, he promised them more guns, and hoped he wasn’t crossing his fingers on the promise. They seemed satisfied as they went away. Whether he could keep them satisfied… I’ll do my goddamnedest, that’s all.

Clarence Potter came in next. Somebody in the waiting room down the hall was bound to be madder than hell. Too bad, the President thought. Without preamble, he barked, “What do you know about Henderson V. FitzBelmont and uranium?” Sweet Jesus Christ, he thought. Till FitzBelmont came here last year, I’d never even heard of the shit. I wish I still hadn’t.

“Ah,” Potter said. “Has he convinced you?”

“He sure as hell has,” Jake answered. “How about you?”

“I’m no scientist,” Potter warned. Jake made an impatient noise. Potter made an apologetic gesture. “Yes, sir, he’s convinced me, too. Sooner or later, somebody’s going to be able to make a hell of a bang with that stuff. If it’s sooner, and if it’s the damnyankees, we’ve got us some big worries.”

“That’s how it looks to me, too,” Featherston said unhappily. He pointed at Potter. “How the hell did you find out about that place in Washington? That’s as far from here as it can be.”

“It’s in the U.S. budget-a lot of money, and no details at all about what the Yankees are spending it on,” the Intelligence officer replied. “Spotting the combination sent up a red flag.”

“Good,” Jake said. “Nice to know somebody in your outfit wouldn’t blow his brains out if he farted, by God. Now the next question is, how did you get the pictures of that place for FitzBelmont to look at? I didn’t think our spy airplanes could fly that far, and I reckon the USA’d shoot ’em down most of the time even if they could.”

“Yes, Mr. President, I agree with you-that’s what would have happened if we’d taken off from Texas or Sonora,” Potter said. “And we would have given away our interest in the area, too. So we didn’t do that. Our man in western Washington rented a crop duster at a local airstrip. Nobody paid any attention to him, and he got his photos.”