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None of your business, Nazi, she thought. With the first smile of genuine amusement she’d worn since she flipped her aircraft, she said, “Shall we be off, comrades?” The rest of the trek back to the airstrip was liable to be interesting.
Along with the rest of the physicists, Jens Larssen watched tensely as Enrico Fermi manipulated the levers that raised the cadmium control rods from the heart of the rebuilt atomic pile under the University of Denver football stadium.
“If we have the design correct, this time the k-factor will be greater than one,” Fermi said quietly. “We will have our self-sustaining chain reaction.”
Beside him, Leslie Groves grunted. “We should have reached this point months ago. We would have, if the damned Lizards hadn’t come.”
“This is true, General,” Fermi said, though Groves still wore colonel’s eagles. “But from now on work will be much faster, partly because of the radioactives we have stolen from the Lizards and partly because they have shown us that what we seek is possible.”
Larssen thought about Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and bringing it down to mankind. He thought about what happened to Prometheus afterwards too: chained to a rock somewhere, with an eagle gnawing his liver forever. He suspected a lot of his colleagues had had that image at one time or another.
Unlike most of them, of course, he didn’t need the Met Lab to have a feel for the myth of Prometheus. Every time he saw Barbara hand in hand with that Sam Yeager, the eagle took another peck at his liver.
The project was an anodyne of sorts, though the pain never left him, not entirely. He watched the instruments, listened to the growing chatter and then the steady roar of the Geiger counter as it let the world know about the growing cloud of neutrons down in the heart of the pile. “Any second now,” he breathed, more than half to himself.
Fermi drew out the rods another couple of centimeters. He too glanced at the dials, worked his slide rule, scrawled a quick calculation on a scrap of paper. “Gentlemen, I make the k-factor here to be 1.0005. This pile produces more free. neutrons than it consumes.”
A few of, the physicists clapped their hands. More just nodded soberly. This was what the numbers predicted. All the same, it remained a solemn moment. Arthur Compton said, “The Italian navigator has discovered the New World.”
“Gentlemen, this means you can now produce the explosive metal we need to make bombs like the ones the Lizards use?” Groves said.
“It means we are a long step closer,” Fermi said. With that, he lowered the control rods back into the pile. Needles swung to the left on the instrument board beside him; the rhythm of the Geiger counter’s clicks slowed. Fermi let out a small sigh of relief. “And, it seems, we can control the intensity of the reaction. This is also of some considerable importance.”
Most of the scientists smiled; Leo Szilard laughed out loud. Larssen had the urge to yank the cadmium rods all the way out of the pile and leave them out until the uranium spat radiation all over, the stadium, all over the university, all over Denver. He fought it down, as he had other lethal, but less spectacular, impulses over the past weeks.
“What do we do next?” Groves demanded. “What exactly do we have to accomplish to turn what we’ve got here into a bomb?” The big man was not a nuclear physicist, but he had more determination than any four Nobel Prize winners Jens could think of. If anybody could drive the project to, success by sheer force of will, Groves was probably the one.
Leo Szilard, on the other hand, had his own sort of practicality. “There is in my office a bottle of good whiskey,” he remarked. “What we do next, I say, is to have a drink.”
The motion passed by acclamation. Jens trooped over to the science building with everyone else. It was good whiskey; it filled his mouth with the taste of smoke and left a smooth, warm trail down to his stomach. The only thing it couldn’t do was make him feel good, which was why people had started distilling whiskey in the first place.
Szilard raised the bottle. A couple of fingers’ worth, coppery bright like a new penny, still sloshed there. Jens held out his glass (actually, a hundred-milliliter Erlenmeyer flask he devoutly hoped had never held anything radioactive) for a refill.
“You have earned it,” Szilard said, pouring. “All that work on the pile-”
Jens knocked back the second shot. It hit hard, reminding him he hadn’t had any lunch. It also reminded him he didn’t have any business celebrating; no matter how well his work was doing, his life was strictly from nowhere.
“Good booze,” said one of the engineers who’d worked under him. “Now we all oughtta go out and get laid.”
Larssen set the flask on a bookshelf and slithered out of the crowded office. His eyes filled with tears which he knew came out of the whiskey bottle but which humiliated him all the same. A week before, he’d picked up a floozy in Denver. He’d been drunk then, not two drinks tiddly but plastered. He wasn’t able to get it up. The girl had been kind about it, which only made things worse. He wondered when he’d have the nerve to try that again. Failure once was bad enough. Failure twice? Why go on living?
With that cheerful thought echoing in his head, he went downstairs to reclaim his bicycle. Oscar the guard stood by the newly built wooden bike rack to make sure none of the machines walked with Jesus. He nodded when he saw Jens. “Back to BOQ, sir?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Jens said through clenched teeth. He hated his Army cot, he hated the base, he hated having to go to the base and sleep on the cot, and he hated Colonel Hexham with a deep and abiding loathing that matured like a fine burgundy as the days went by. He wished he could have used Hexham as a control rod in the nuclear pile. If only the man had a neutron capture cross-section like cadmium’s…
And then, to make his day complete, Barbara came strolling up the walk toward the apartment she and Sam Yeager were using. Sometimes she just ignored him; that his own behavior might have had something to do with that hadn’t crossed his mind. But Barbara wasn’t the sort to be rude in public. She nodded to him and slowed down a little.
He walked over to her. Oscar was good at sticking with him-all the physicists had bodyguards these days-but knew better than to follow real close this time. A small voice inside Jens warned him he’d only end up bruising himself, but two nips of Szilard’s good hooch made him selectively deaf.
“Hello, dear,” he said.
“Hello,” Barbara answered-the lack of a return endearment set a fire under his temper. “How are you today?”
“About the same as usual,” he said: “not so good. I want you back.”
“Jens, we’ve been over this a hundred times,” she said, her voice tired. “I
t wouldn’t work. Even if it might have right after I got to Denver, it wouldn’t any more. It’s too late.”
“What the devil is that supposed to mean?” he demanded.
Her eyes narrowed; she took half a step back from him. Instead of answering, she said, “You’ve been drinking.”
He didn’t explain that they were drinks of triumph. “What if I have?” he said. “You going to tell me Mr. Sam Walk-on-Water Yeager never takes a drink?”
He knew the words were a mistake as soon as he said them. That, of course, did him no good. Barbara’s face froze. “Goodbye,” she said. “I’ll see you some other time.” She started walking again.
He reached out and grabbed her arm. “Barbara, you’ve got to listen to me-”
“Let me go!” she said angrily! She tried to twist away. He held on.
As if by malign magic, Oscar appeared. He stepped between Jens and Barbara. “Sir, the lady asked you to let go,” he said, quietly as usual, and detached Larssen’s hand from Barbara’s forearm. He wasn’t what you’d call gentle, but Jens got the feeling he could have been a lot rougher if he felt like it.
Sober he never would have swung on Oscar. With two whiskeys in him, he didn’t give a damn any more. He’d seen some action himself, by God-and, by God, Barbara was his wife… wasn’t she?
Oscar knocked his fist aside and hit him in the pit of the stomach. Jens folded up like a fan, trying to breathe and not having much luck, trying not to puke and doing a little better with that. Even as he went down on his knees, he was pretty sure Oscar had pulled that punch, too; with arms like those, Oscar could have ruptured his spleen if he really got annoyed.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” Oscar asked Barbara.
“Yes,” she said, and then, a moment later, “Thank you. This has been hell on everybody, and on Jens especially. I know that, and I’m sorry, but I’ve done what I have to do.” Only then did her voice change: “You didn’t hurt him, did you?”
