But such fruitful imprecision was no longer allowed. Now Fabrikant spent his days negotiating with the war economy, balancing its amazing largesse against its even more amazing stinginess. For instance: ten thousand pounds of copper for the calutrons. No problem. But paper clips had been on back order for six months.
Purified silver, but no toilet paper.
And the endless requisitions were all routed through Fabrikant’s office, which also conducted goodwill tours for military procurement officers and endless informal accountings to Bureau officials skeptical of any expenditure on “mere” science, even a weapons project.
He left his bicycle in a broom closet, climbed two floors and said good morning to Cile, his secretary. She smiled without conviction. Fabrikant’s office faced west, where much of the view was occluded by the separation buildings, vast gray strongboxes streaked with rain. Beyond them, tundra. Chimneys vented steam into the foggy air.
He looked at the schedule Cile had prepared. All morning was devoted to a single meeting with a Proctor who had flown in from the capitaclass="underline" a Censeur named Bisonette. Subject of meeting, not stated. Another command performance, Fabrikant thought wearily. A fit agenda for a bleak morning: parading some hobble-footed bald monolingual bureaucrat past the diffusion chambers. He sighed and began to rehearse his own dubious French. Le reacteur atomique. Une bombe nucleaire. Une plus grande bombe.
Was it evil, Fabrikant sometimes wondered, even to consider constructing such a weapon?
The military misunderstood the project. One told them, so-and-so thousand tons of TNT. And they would think, Ah, a big bomb.
But it was not that. Fabrikant had glimpsed the potential, saw it perhaps more clearly than his colleagues. To liberate the energy locked into matter was to tamper with nature at the most fundamental level. Nucleic division was the prerogative of the stars, after all, and what were the stars but the provinces of God?
“If he flees westward, he finds the fire. If he turns southward, he finds the fire. If he turns northward, the seething fire meets him again. Nor does he find a way to the east to be saved, for he did not find it in his days of incarnation, nor will he find it in the day of judgment.” The Book of Thomas the Contender—Thomas the Humorless, Fabrikant had thought when he was forced to memorize the verses in secondary school. Doom at every compass point. Fabrikant wondered if he had become the hands of Thomas, manufacturing the vehicle of that ultimate flame.
But the Spaniards were pressing at the western border, and the news was not as rosy as the radio made it seem, and the Republic was worth preserving—for all its faults, Fabrikant thought, it was at least a place where the two races, the French and the English, had achieved a modus vivendi; it was more liberal than the European monarchies, with their nationalist heresies or Romish paganisms. So yes, a bigger bomb, a seething fire, to devastate Seville, perhaps, or some military port such as Malaga or Cartagena. And then the war would be over.
He looked up from these musings and a cold cup of coffee as Cile introduced the Censeur, M. Bisonette. Tall, a stubble of white hair, eyes sheathed in wrinkled flesh. Long-fingered hands: aristocratic, Fabrikant thought. Damn the French. At Consolidation, there had been no official decision that the English would control the civilian government and the French would dominate the religious hierarchy—but that was how it had turned out, a permanent standoff rendered as constitutional tradition. Miraculously, for 150 years, the truce had held. “Bonjour,” Fabrikant said. “Bonjour, Monsieur Bisonette. Qu’y a-t-il pour votre service?”
“My English is adequate,” the Censeur said.
Implying: Better than your French. Well, that was true enough. Fabrikant was secretly relieved. “More than adequate, obviously. I apologize, Censeur. Please, sit down and tell me what I can do for you this morning.”
The Censeur, who carried a leather case, directed at Fabrikant a smile that provoked his deep suspicion. “Oh, many things,” the Censeur said.
Cile brought more coffee.
“Your work here is the separation of uranium,” M. Bisonette said, consulting a sheaf of papers he had drawn from his case. “Specifically, the isolation of the isotope, uranium 235, from the raw ore.”
“Exactly,” Fabrikant said. Cile’s coffee was hot and thick, almost Turkish. Tonic against the northern chill. Taken in excess, it gave him palpitations. “What we ultimately hope to achieve is a cascading nucleic division of the atom through the release of neutrons. To accomplish this—” He looked at Bisonette and faltered. The Censeur was regarding him with a bored contempt. “I’m sorry. Please go on.”
This might be serious.
“You’re pursuing three routes to purification,” Bisonette intoned. “Gaseous diffusion, separation by electromagnetism, and centrifugation.”
“That’s what these buildings are for, Censeur. If you would like to see the work—”
“The electromagnetic and centrifugal projects are to be discontinued and abandoned. The diffusion will be pursued with certain refinements. You’ll be sent blueprints and instructions.”
Fabrikant was aghast. He could not speak.
Bisonette said mildly, “Do you have any objections?”
“My God! Objections? Whose decision is this?”
“The Office of Military Affairs. With the consent and approval of the Bureau de la Convenance.”
Fabrikant couldn’t disguise his outrage. “I should have been consulted! Censeur, I don’t mean to offend, but this is absurd! The purpose of running three processes simultaneously is to determine which is most effective or efficient. We don’t know that yet! Diffusion is promising, I admit, but there are still problems—enormous problems! The diffusion barriers, to take an obvious example. We’ve looked at nickel mesh, but the difficulty—”
“The barrier tubes are already in production. You should have them by December. The details are explained in the documents.”
Fabrikant opened his mouth and closed it. Already in production! Where could such knowledge have come from?
Then it struck him: the obvious implication. “There’s another project. That’s it, isn’t it? They’re ahead of us. They’ve achieved a usable enrichment.”
“Something like that,” M. Bisonette said. “But we need your cooperation.”
Of course. The Bureau must have sponsored its own research program, the hypocrites. Wartime redundancy. My God, Fabrikant thought, the waste!
And—admit it—he was ashamed that he had been beaten to the finish line; that somewhere else, all his problems had been solved.
He looked at his coffee cup, all appetite fled.
“The bomb itself,” Bisonette was saying. “You have a preliminary design?”
Fabrikant worked to recover his composure. Why was it the Proctors must always strip a man of his dignity? “A sort of nucleic gun,” he told Bisonette, “although this is premature, but in essence, a conventional explosive to compact the purified uranium—”
“Look here,” Bisonette said, and handed him a technical cutaway drawing of what Fabrikant mistook, at first, for a soccer ball.
“The casing contains these cells of explosives. The core is a hollow sphere of plutonium. I’m not a theorist, Monsieur Fabrikant, but the documents will explain it.”
Fabrikant gazed at the drawing. “The tolerances—”
“Will have to be precise.”
“To say the least! You can achieve that?”
“No. You can.”
“This is untested!”
“It will work,” Bisonette said.
“How can you know that?”
The Censeur displayed once more his secretive, sly smile. “Assume that we do,” he said.