“Can’t argue with you there, sir.” Goldfarb had been trying to get back into Sylvia’s good graces-to say nothing of her bed-ever since he returned to Dover. He’d been making progress with the one, if not the other. Now he waved a fond farewell to any hope of seeing the inside of Sylvia’s flat again. Women had a way of throwing themselves at Basil Roundbush-his problem wasn’t in catching them but in throwing back the ones he didn’t want. If he did want Sylvia, odds for anyone else’s drawing her notice were abysmally poor.
Sighing, Goldfarb bent low over the radar he’d been working on when Roundbush came in. Work couldn’t make you forget your sorrows, but if you kept at it you found yourself too busy to do much fussing over them. In a world that showed itself more imperfect with every passing day, that was about as much as any man had a right to expect.
Because it was large and round, the Met Lab crew had dubbed their first completed bomb the Fat Lady. Leslie Groves eyed the metal casing’s curves with as much admiration as if they belonged to Rita Hayworth. “Gentlemen, I’m prouder than I can say of every one of you,” he declared. “Now we have only one thing left to do-build another one.”
The physicists and technicians stared at him for a moment, then burst into laughter and applause. “You had us worried there for a moment, General,” Enrico Fermi said. “We are not used to unadulterated praise from you.”
Another man might have taken that for an insult Groves took it in stride. “Dr. Fermi, when the war is over and the United States has won, I will praise all of you to the skies and ten miles further. Till that day comes, we have too much work to do to waste time saying nice things.”
“No one ever accused you of wasting time in this fashion,” Leo Szilard said, drawing a fresh round of laughter from the Met Lab crew. Groves even saw a smile flicker on the face of Jens Larssen, who had been more gloomy and taciturn than ever since he got back from Hanford, Washington, and found the whole program not only wasn’t moving there but had moved on without him. Groves understood how all that could grate on a man, but didn’t know what to do about it.
It was, in any case, far down on his list of worries. He knew what was at the top of the list: “I wasn’t joking there, my friends. We had help with this bomb: the plutonium we got from the British, who got it from the Polish Jews, who got it from the Germans, who got it from the Lizards with help from the Russians. Next time, we make it all ourselves, all by ourselves. How long till the next bomb?”
“Now that we have made the actual product once, doing it again will be easier; we will make fewer mistakes,” Szilard said. That drew nods from almost everyone, Groves included. Any engineer knew half the trouble in making something for the first time lay in figuring out what you were doing wrong and figuring out how to do it right.
“We have almost enough plutonium for the second weapon now,” Fermi said. “Once we use it in the bomb, though, we will for a time be low. But production is steady, even improving. With what we have now, with the third atomic pile coming into full production, from now on we will be manufacturing several bombs a year.”
“That’s what I want to hear,” Groves said. The production numbers had told him the same thing, but hearing it from the man in charge of the piles was better than inferring it from figures.
“The next question is, now that we have these bombs, how do we place them where we want to use them?” Szilard said. He waved a stubby hand toward the Fat Lady. “This one would have to go on a diet before it could fit in an airplane, and the Lizards would shoot down any airplane before it got where it was going, anyhow.”
Both those points were true. The Fat Lady weighed nearly ten tons, which was more than any bomber could carry. And anything bigger than a Piper Cub drew the Lizards’ immediate and hostile attention. Groves didn’t know how to make a nuclear weapon small enough to fit into a Piper Cub, but he did know that, no matter what theLuftwaffe thought, you didn’t have to deliver a bomb by air.
“I promise you, Dr. Szilard: we will manage when the time comes,” he said, and let it go at that. He didn’t want everybody to hear what the delivery plans were. Security wasn’t as tight as it had been with the Japs and Nazis to worry about; he had trouble imagining anybody vile enough to want to betray American atomic secrets to the Lizards. But he was just an engineer, and knew his imagination had limits. What was unthinkable for him might not be for someone else.
“How do we even get the thing out of the reprocessing plant?” a technician asked. He worked at one of the piles, not here where the plutonium was extracted and the bomb made. Groves just pointed to the wooden cart on which the Fat Lady sat. It had wheels. The technician looked foolish.
He needn’t have. Moving ten tons was no laughing matter, especially when those ten tons included complicated gadgetry and had to be moved in utmost secrecy. Groves had most of the answers now. Inside a week, he needed all of them. He was confident he’d get them. Moving heavy things from one place to another was a technology mankind had had under control since the days of the Pharaohs.
Somebody said, “We got our bombs now. How soon will the Germans have theirs? When will the Russians set off another one? What about the Japs?”
“If there are no other questions, class is dismissed,” Groves said solemnly. That got the laugh he’d hoped for. When it was over, he went on, “The Germans aren’t very far behind us. If they hadn’t had their, ah, accident, they might be ahead of us.”
The intelligence information on which he based that wasn’t firsthand. Much of it came from things Molotov had said when he was in New York. Where Molotov had got it, Groves didn’t know. The Russians had been wrong about the Germans before, generally to their sorrow.
Groves also took special care in describing what had gone wrong with the Germans’ first effort to set up a pile that went critical. Though the Germans seemed to have been spectacularly careless about safety precautions, it wasn’t as if running a pile was an exact science. Things could go wrong here, too.
“What of the Russians?” Enrico Fermi echoed. “They were first with their bomb, but only silence from them since-a long silence now.”
“They say they’ll be ready with another bomb come spring,” Groves answered. “If I had to make a guess, I’d say you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for them. They got a jump start with the plutonium they and the Germans stole from the Lizards. That was enough to give them the one bomb. Past that…” He shook his head. “Russia simply does not have the precision industry, technical skill, or scientific numerical strength to come even close to manufacturing their own. Not yet.”
“How long do you think they’ll need?” In almost identical words, three people asked the same question.
“Oh, I don’t know-1955, maybe,” Groves answered, deadpan. That got another laugh. He didn’t really think the Reds would take that long, but he didn’t look for a new bomb from them next Tuesday, either.
“And the Japanese?” Leo Szilard asked, as if he expected Groves to forget. “What of them?”
Groves spread his hands. “Dr. Szilard, there I just don’t know what to tell you. They were on the track of something, or the Lizards wouldn’t have blown Tokyo off the map. How much they knew, how many of their top people got killed when the bomb hit, how far they’ve come toward rebuilding their program-I don’t know, and I’d be lying if I said I did.”
Szilard nodded. “That is fair, General. So often, people are in the habit of saying they know more than they do. Seeing a case where this is not so makes a pleasant change.”
That was the first compliment Groves had got from Szilard in as long as he could remember. He cherished it for that very reason. For the sake of his own peace of mind, though, he wished he could give the Hungarian physicist a more authoritative answer. The Japanese worried him. Before Pearl Harbor, the United States hadn’t taken Japan seriously: not a white man over there, for one thing, he thought. But whether the Japs were white, yellow, or bright blue, their warships had proved as good as those Americans made, and their airplanes probably better. Buck-toothed, slant-eyed little bastards they might be, but if you thought they couldn’t fight-if you thought they couldn’t engineer-you had another think coming.