"And even if I did find a woman I liked here, well, I might want to lay her, but I don't think I'd ever marry a Confederate," Toricelli said. "I'd wonder why she wanted to marry me, and all my superiors would wonder whether I'd gone out of my mind."
He wasn't wrong. A marriage like that could blight his hopes for promotion. It could also blight his life if it didn't work, and it was much too likely not to. Even so…Dowling said, "You wouldn't be the first, you know. We've already had a couple of petitions from enlisted men to let them marry local girls."
"I'd better know, sir," his adjutant said. "That paperwork crosses my desk before it lands on yours."
"Yes, yes." Dowling didn't want the younger man to think he was forgetting things like that. As soon as they started believing you were past it, you were, whether you knew it or not. Hastily, Dowling went on, "I'm the one who has to decide, though. That's one more thing they didn't teach at West Point. Does this PFC really have good reason to marry a Virginia woman? Should I ship him back to the USA instead? Or should I just hose him down with cold water till he comes to his senses?"
"Cold water would put a lot of these proposals or propositions or whatever they are on ice," Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli said gravely.
Dowling sent him a severe look. Toricelli bore up under it like the soldier he was. Dowling said, "If I do let them get married and things go sour, they'll blame me. Plenty of perfectly normal marriages go bad, God knows. Usually it's nobody's fault but the bride and groom's. Figure anybody would remember that?"
"Fat chance," Toricelli said. "Sir."
"I know. But the one where the guy knocked the gal up…I am going to approve that one, hell with me if I'm not. If I say no, her father's liable to use a shotgun on our soldier, and then we'll have to take hostages, and it'll just be a goddamn mess. I'll pay for an unhappy marriage to stay away from firing squads."
"That makes sense, sir," Toricelli said. "Kind of a cold-blooded way to look at things, but it makes sense."
"You get as old as I am, if you're hot-blooded you're either dead or you're George Custer, one," Dowling said. "I know damn well I'm not Custer-thank God! — and I wasn't dead last time I looked. So…I try not to blow my cork unless my cork really needs blowing."
His adjutant returned a sly stare. "Like with General MacArthur, right?"
"I won't waste my time answering that, even if it is true." Dowling stood on his dignity, a shaky position for a man of his bulk.
Before his adjutant could call him on it, a noncom stuck his head into the office and said, "Sir, that professor guy wants to see you."
"FitzBelmont?" Dowling asked.
The sergeant nodded. "That's him."
Dowling didn't want to see the physicist. He said, "Send him in," anyway. Sometimes what you wanted was different from what you needed. If this wasn't one of those times, he could have the pleasure of throwing Henderson FitzBelmont out on his ear.
When FitzBelmont came in, he looked as angry and as determined as a professorial man could. "General, when am I going to get my life back?" he demanded. "It is now almost four months after the surrender, but your interrogators continue to hound me. To be frank, sir, I am tired of it."
"To be frank, sir, I don't give a flying fuck." Abner Dowling didn't blow his cork, but he didn't need to waste politeness on FitzBelmont, either. "When you went to work for Jake Featherston, you sold your soul to the Devil. Now you've got to buy it back, one nickel at a time. If the boys aren't finished with you, too bad. You have a train to catch, or what?"
"I would like to be a normal human being in a normal country, not a…a bug under a microscope." The professor didn't have the force of personality to hold anger together very long. His voice went high and shrill and petulant.
"Sorry, but that's what you are. Get used to it," Dowling said. "You're going to be under the microscope for the rest of your life. You're too dangerous for us not to keep tabs on you. If you don't believe me, ask what's left of Philadelphia."
"I can't do that again. You've made very sure I can't," FitzBelmont said. "And some of your interrogators are nothing but idiots. You know more about the physics of fission than they do."
"God help them if that's true." Dowling hadn't known anything about 235 and 238 and the other magic numbers till this assignment landed on him. He hoped he'd learned enough to be effective, but he wouldn't have sworn to it.
"Well, it is," Professor FitzBelmont said. "One imbecile asked me why we didn't use iron instead of uranium. It was easier to find and to make, he said, and much cheaper, too. The frightening thing is, he was serious."
"And the answer is…?" Dowling asked.
"Very simple, General. I'm sure you can figure it out for yourself: you can do whatever you please to iron, but you'll never make a superbomb out of it. The same goes for lead or gold or most other things you can think of."
"Not all of them?" Dowling said sharply.
Professor FitzBelmont hesitated. "If I didn't know for a fact that your physicists were already working on this, I wouldn't say a word. Not ever."
"Well, you already did. Now go on," Dowling told him.
"It's theoretically possible, using isotopes of hydrogen with a superbomb for a fuse, you might say, to make a bomb a thousand times as powerful as the ones we have now, a bomb that burns the way the sun burns-a sunbomb, you might say."
"A thousand times as strong as a superbomb?" Dowling's mind bounced off that like a rotary saw recoiling from a spike driven into a tree trunk. "Good God in the foothills! You could blow up a thousand Philadelphias or Petrograds?"
"You could blow up an area more than thirty times as wide as the area those bombs destroyed," FitzBelmont said. "Area varies as the square of the diameter, of course."
"Of course," Dowling agreed in a hollow voice. "So a…a sunbomb could pretty much blow Rhode Island off the map?"
"How big is Rhode Island?" By the way FitzBelmont said it, he didn't waste time keeping track of U.S. geography.
"I don't know exactly," Dowling said. "A thousand square miles-maybe a little more."
Henderson FitzBelmont got a faraway look in his eyes. Doing the math, Dowling realized. FitzBelmont finally nodded. "Yes, that's about right. One of those bombs should destroy most of it. Why do you have such a small state?"
"Beats me." Dowling couldn't recall enough colonial history to come up with the reason. It didn't matter, anyhow. What did matter…"How long would it take to build one of these sunbomb things?"
"I don't know," FitzBelmont said. "I would be surprised if anyone had them in five years. I would be surprised if no one had them in twenty-five."
"Good God!" Dowling said again. If God wasn't in the foothills, He was probably running for them. The general tried to imagine a world where six or eight countries had sunbombs. "How would you fight a war if a bunch of your neighbors could blow you into next week if you got frisky?"
"General, I wouldn't," FitzBelmont said bleakly. "Whether that will stop the politicians…"
"Ha!" Dowling stabbed out a forefinger at him. "You've got your nerve saying something like that after you went and worked for Jake Featherston."
The professor turned red. "He led my country in time of war. What should I have done? Not helped him?"
That wasn't a question with a simple answer. Had the CSA won, U.S. scientists would have asked Confederate interrogators the same thing, hoping to stay out of trouble. Yeah, but we weren't gassing our own people by the millions, Dowling thought. To which victorious Confederates would have replied, So what? And if all or even most physicists felt the way FitzBelmont did…The world was in big trouble, in that case.