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He dressed, too, as fast as he could. Getting back into clothes in the backseat was even more awkward than escaping from them had been, but he managed. He opened the car door and slid out, Zofia right behind him. They stood for a couple of seconds, looking at each other. As people do in such circumstances, Mordechai wondered where that first coupling would end up taking them. He said, “You’d better get back to your house. Your father will wonder where you’ve been.” Actually, he was afraid Roman Klopotowski might know where she d been but he didn’t’ want to say that.
She stood on tiptoe so she could kiss him on the cheek. “That’s for caring enough about me to worry what my father will think,” she said. Then she kissed him again, open-mouthed. “And that’s for the rest.”
He squeezed her. “If I weren’t so tired from working in the fields-”
She burst out laughing, so loud he twitched in alarm. “Men are such braggarts. It’s all right. We’ll find other times.”
That meant he’d pleased her. He felt several centimeters taller. “I hope we do.”
“Of course you hope we do. Men always hope that,” Zofia said without much anger. She laughed again. “I don’t know why you Jews go to so much trouble and hurt to make yourselves different. Once it’s in there, it’s the same either way.”
“Is it? Well, I can’t help that,” Anielewicz said. “I am sorry about your Czeslaw. Too many people, Poles and Jews, haven’t come back from the war.”
“I know.” She shook her head. “That’s God’s truth, it certainly is. It’s been a long time-three and a half years, more. I’m entitled to live my own life.” She spoke defiantly, as if Mordechai were going to disagree with her.
But he said, “Of course you are. And now you had better go home.”
“All right I’ll see you soon.” She hurried away.
Anielewicz went back into the Ussishkins’ house. They came in a few minutes later, tired but smiling. Judah said, “We got a good baby, a boy, and Hannah I think will be all right, too. I didn’t have to do a cesarean, for which I thank God-no real chance for asepsis here, try as I will.”
“That’s all good news,” Anielewicz said.
“It is indeed.” The doctor looked at him. “But what are you doing still awake? You’ve been studying the chessboard, unless I miss my guess. I have noticed you don’t like to lose, however polite you may be. So what are you going to do?”
The chess game hadn’t crossed Mordechai’s mind once since the sound of airplane engines made him go outside. Now he walked back over to the board. Thanks to the pawn move Ussishkin had crowed about, he couldn’t attack with his queen as he’d planned. He shifted the piece to a square farther back along the diagonal than he’d intended.
Fast as a striking snake, Judah Ussishkin moved a knight. It neatly forked the queen and one of Mordechai’s rooks. He stared in dismay. Here was another game he wasn’t going to win-and Ussishkin was right, he hated to lose.
All at once, though, it didn’t seem to matter so much. All right, so he’d lose at chess one more time. He’d played a different game tonight, and won it.
Leslie Groves looked down the table at the scientists from the Metallurgical Laboratory. “The fate of the United States-and probably the world-depends on your answer to this question: how do we turn the theoretical physics of a working atomic pile into practical engineering? We have to industrialize the process as fast as we can.”
“A certain amount of caution is indicated,” Arthur Compton said. “By what we’ve been told, they’re paying in Germany for rushing ahead with no thought for consequences.”
“That was an engineering flaw we’ve already uncovered, wasn’t it?” Groves said.
“A flaw? You might say so.” Enrico Fermi made a fine Latin gesture of contempt. “When their pile went critical, they had no way to shut it down again-and so the reaction continued, out of control. For all I know, it continues still; no one can get close enough to find out for certain. It cost the Germans many able men, whatever we may think of them politically.”
“Heisenberg,” someone said softly. An almost invisible pall of gloom seemed to descend on the table. Many of the assembled physicists had known the dead German; you couldn’t be a nuclear physicist without knowing his work.
“I am not about to let a foreign accident slow down our own program,” Groves said, “especially when it’s an accident we won’t have. What were they doing, throwing pieces of cadmium metal into the heavy water of their pile to try to slow it down? We’ve designed better than that.”
“In this particular regard, yes,” Leo Szilard said. “But who can say what other problems may be lurking in the metaphysical undergrowth?”
Groves gave the Hungarian scientist an unfriendly look. However brilliant he was, he was always finding ways things could go wrong. Maybe he was so imaginative, he saw flaws no one else would. Or maybe he just liked to borrow trouble.
Whichever it was, Groves didn’t intend to put up with it. He growled, “If we never tried anything new, we wouldn’t have to worry about anything going wrong. Of course, If we’d had that attitude all along, the Lizards would have conquered us about twenty minutes after they landed here, because we’d all have been living in villages and sacrificing goats whenever we had a thunderstorm. So we will go ahead and see what the problems are. Objections?”
No one had any. Groves nodded, satisfied. The physicists were a bunch of prima donnas such as he’d never had to deal with in the Army, but no matter how high in the clouds their heads were, they had their hearts in the right place.
He said, “Okay, back to square one. What do we have to do to turn our experimental pile here into a bomb factory?”
“Get out of Denver,” Jens Larssen muttered. Groves glowered at him; he’d had enough of Larssen’s surly attitude.
Then, to his surprise, he noticed several other physicists were nodding. Groves did his best to smooth out his features. “Why?” he asked as mildly as he could.
Larssen looked around; maybe he didn’t want the floor. But he’d opened his mouth and so he had it. He reached into a shirt pocket, as if digging for a pack of cigarettes. Not coming up with one, he said, “Why? The most important reason is we don’t have the water we’ll need.”
“Like any other energy source, a nuclear pile also generates heat,” Fermi amplified. “Running water makes an effective coolant. Whether we can divert enough water here from other uses is an open question.”
Groves said, “How much are we going to need? The Mississippi? The Lizards are holding most of it these days, I’m afraid.”
He’d intended that for sarcasm. Fermi didn’t take it as such. He said, “That being so, the Columbia is probably best for our purposes. It is swift-flowing, with a large volume of water, and the Lizards are not strong in the Northwest.”
“You want this operation to move again, after we’ve just gotten set up here?” Groves demanded. “You want to pack everything up into wagons and haul it over the Rockies?” What he wanted to do was start heaving nuclear physicists out the window, Nobel laureates first.
“A move like the move we made from Chicago, no, that would not be necessary,” Fermi said. “We can keep this facility intact, continue to use it for research. But production, as you call it, would be better placed elsewhere.”
Heads bobbed up and down, all along the table. Groves sighed. He’d been given the power to bind and loose on this project, but he’d expected to wield it against bureaucrats and soldiers; he hadn’t imagined the scientists he was supposed to ride herd on would complicate his life so. He said, “If you’re springing this on me now, you probably have a site all picked out.”
That’s what he would have done, anyhow. But then, he was a hardheaded engineer. The ivory-tower boys didn’t always think the way he did. This time, though, Fermi nodded. “From what we can tell by long-distance research, the town of Hanford, Washington, seems quite suitable, but we shall have to send someone to take a look at this place to make c
ertain it meets our needs.”
Larssen stuck his hand in the air. “I’ll go.” A couple of other men also volunteered.
Groves pretended not to see them. “Dr. Larssen, I think I may take you up on that. You have experience traveling through a war zone by yourself, and-” He let the rest hang. Larssen didn’t. “-and it’d be best for everybody if I got out of here for a while, you were going to say. Now tell me one I hadn’t heard.” He ran a hand through his shock of thick blond hair. “I’ve got a question for you. Will the Lizard POWs stay with the research end or go to the production site?”
“Not my call.” Groves turned to Fermi. “Professor?”
