Baird located it, and slowly tore it opened. He unfolded the single sheet
of paper and scanned it.
"Well? Out with it!"
"One thirteen P.M. . . . today."
They took this in silence.
Their dynamic calm was broken by a member across the table from Baird
reaching for the lock box. Baird interposed a hand.
"What do you want?"
"My prediction. It's in there?we're all in there."
"Yes, yes,"
"We're all in there."
"Let's have them."
Baird placed both hands over the box. He held the eye of the man opposite
him, but did not speak. He licked his lips. The corner of his mouth
twitched. His hands shook. Still he did not speak. The man opposite relaxed
back into his chair.
"You're right, of course," he said.
"Bring me that wastebasket." Baird's voice was low and strained, but
steady.
He accepted it and dumped the litter on the rug. He placed the tin basket
on the table before him. He tore half a dozen envelopes across, set a match
to them, and dropped them in the basket. Then he started tearing a double
handful at a time, and fed the fire steadily. The smoke made him cough, and
tears ran out of his smarting eyes. Someone got up and opened a window.
When Baird was through, he pushed the basket away from him, looked down and
spoke.
"I'm afraid I've ruined this table top."
SOLUTION UNSATISFACTORY
IN 19O3 THE Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.
In December, 1938, in Berlin, Dr. Hahn split the uranium atom.
In April, 1943, Dr. Estelle Karst, working under the Federal Emergency
Defense Authority, perfected the Karst-Obre technique for producing
artificial radioactives.
So American foreign policy had to change.
Had to. Had to. It is very difficult to tuck a bugle call back into a
bugle. Pandora's Box is a one-way proposition. You can turn pig into
sausage, but not sausage into pig. Broken eggs stay broken. "All the King's
horses and all the King's men can't put Humpty together again.
I ought to know?I was one of the King's men.
By rights I should not have been. I was not a professional military man
when World War II broke out, and when Congress passed the draft law I drew
high number, high enough to keep me out of the army long enough to die of
old age.
Not that very many died of old age that generation!
But I was the newly appointed secretary to a freshman congressman; I had
been his campaign manager and my former job had left me. By profession, I
was a high school teacher of economics and sociology?school boards don't
like teachers of social subjects actually to deal with social problems?and
my contract was not renewed. I jumped at the chance to go to Washington.
My congressman was named Manning. Yes, the Manning, Colonel Clyde C.
Manning. U.S. Army retired?Mr. Commissioner Manning. What you may not know
about him is that he was one of the army's No. 1 experts in chemical
warfare before a leaky heart put him on the shelf. I had picked him, with
the help of a group of my political associates, to run against the two-bit
chiseler who was the incumbent in our district. We needed a strong liberal
candidate and Manning was tailor-made for the job. He had served one term
in the grand jury, which cut his political eye teeth, and had stayed active
in civic matters there after.
Being a retired army officer was a political advantage in vote-getting
among the more conservative and well-to-do citizens, and his record was O.
K. for the other side of the fence. I'm not primarily concerned with
vote-getting; what I liked about him was that, though he was liberal, he
was tough-minded, which most liberals aren't. Most liberals believe that
water runs downhill, but, praise God, it'll never reach the bottom.
Manning was not like that. He could see a logical necessity and act on it,
no matter how unpleasant it might be.
We were in Manning's suite in the House Office Building, taking a little
blow from that stormy first session of the Seventy-eighth Congress and
trying to catch up on a mountain of correspondence, when the war department
called. Manning answered it himself.
I had to overhear, but then I was his secretary. "Yes," he said, "speaking.
Very well, put him on. Oh . . . hello, General. . . . Fine, thanks.
Yourself?" Then there was a long silence. Presently, Manning said, "But I
can't do that, General, I've got this job to take care of. . . . What's
that? . . . Yes, who is to do my committee work and represent my district?
. . . I think so." He glanced at his wrist watch. "I'll be right over."
He put down the phone, turned to me, and said, "Get your hat, John. We are
going over to the war department."
"So?" I said, complying.
"Yes," he said with a worried look, "the Chief of Staff thinks I ought to
go back to duty." He set off at a brisk walk, with me hanging back to try
to force him not to strain his bum heart. "It's impossible, of course," we
grabbed a taxi from the stand in front of the office building, swung around
the Capitol, and started down Constitution Boulevard.
But it was possible, and Manning agreed to it, after the Chief of Staff
presented his case. Manning had to be convinced, for there is no way on
earth for anyone, even the President himself, to order a congressman to
leave his post, even though he happens to be a member of the military
service, too.
The Chief of Staff had anticipated the political difficulty and had been
forehanded enough to have already dug up an opposition congressman with
whom to pair Manning's vote for the duration of the emergency. This other
congressman, the Honorable Joseph T. Brigham, was a reserve officer who
wanted to go to duty himself?or was willing to; I never found out which.
Being from the opposite political party, his vote in the House of
Representatives could be permanently paired against Mannings and neither
party would lose by the arrangement.
There was talk of leaving me in Washington to handle the political details
of Manning's office, but Manning decided against it, judging that his other
secretary could do that, and announced that I must go along as his
adjutant. The Chief of Staff demurred, but Manning was in a position to
insist, and the Chief had to give in.
A chief of staff can get things done in a hurry if he wants to. I was sworn
in as a temporary officer before we left the building; before the day was
out I was at the bank, signing a note to pay for the sloppy service
uniforms the Army had adopted and to buy a dress uniform with a beautiful
shiny belt?a dress outfit which, as it turned out, I was never to need.
We drove over into Maryland the next day and Manning took charge of the
Federal nuclear research laboratory, known officially by the hush-hush
title of War Department Special Defense Project No. 347. I didn't know a
lot about physics and nothing about modern atomic physics, aside from the
stuff you read in the Sunday supplements. Later, I picked up a smattering,
mostly wrong, I suppose, from associating with the heavy-weights with which
the laboratory was staffed.
Colonel Manning had taken an Army p. g. course at Massachusetts Tech and
had received a master of science degree for a brilliant thesis on the
mathematical theories of atomic structure. That was why the Army had to
have him for this job. But that had been some years before; atomic theory
had turned several cartwheels in the mean-time; he admitted to me that he
had to bone like the very devil to try to catch up to the point where he
could begin to understand what his highbrow charges were talking about in
their reports.
I think he over stated the degree of his ignorance; there was certainly no
one else in the United States who could have done the job. It required a
man who could direct and suggest research in a highly esoteric field, but
who saw the problem from the standpoint of urgent military necessity. Left
to themselves, the physicists would have reveled in the intellectual luxury
of an unlimited research expense account, but, while they undoubtedly would
have made major advances in human knowledge, they might never have
developed anything of military usefulness, or the military possibilities of
a discovery might be missed for years.
It's like this: It takes a smart dog to hunt birds, but it takes a hunter
behind him to keep him from wasting time chasing rabbits. And the hunter
needs to know nearly as much as the dog.
No derogatory reference to the scientists is intended?by no means! We had
all the genius in the field that the United States could produce, men from
Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, M. I. T., Cal Tech, Berkley, every radiation
laboratory in the country, as well as a couple of broad-A boys lent to us
by the British. And they had every facility that ingenuity could think up
and money could build. The five-hundred-ton cyclotron which had originally
been intended for the University of California was there, and was already
obsolete in the face of the new gadgets these brains had thought up, asked
for, and been given. Canada supplied us with all the uranium we asked
for?tons of the treacherous stuff?from Great Bear Lake, up near the Yukon,
and the fractional-residues technique of separating uranium isotope 235
from the commoner isotope 238 had already been worked out, by the same team
from Chicago that had worked up the earlier expensive mass spectrograph
method.
Someone in the United States government had realized the terrific
potentialities of uranium 235 quite early and, as far back as the summer of
l940, had rounded up every atomic research man in the country and had sworn
them to silence. Atomic power, if ever developed, was planned to be a
government monopoly, at least till the war was over. It might turn out to
be the most incredibly powerful explosive ever dreamed of, and it might be
the source of equally incredible power. In any case, with Hitler talking
about secret weapons and shouting hoarse insults at democracies, the
government planned to keep any new discoveries very close to the vest.
Hitler had lost the advantage of a first crack at the secret of uranium
through not taking precautions. Dr. Hahn, the first man to break open the
uranium atom, was a German. But one of his laboratory assistants had fled
Germany to escape a program. She came to this country, and told us about
it.
We were searching, there in the laboratory in Maryland, for a way to use
U235 in a controlled explosion. We had a vision of a one-ton bomb that
would be a whole air raid in itself, a single explosion that would flatten
out an entire industrial center. Dr. Ridpath, of Continental Tech, claimed
that he could build such a bomb, but that he could not guarantee that it
would not explode as soon as it was loaded and as for the force of the
explosion?well, he did not believe his own figures; they ran out to too
many ciphers.
The problem was, strangely enough, to find an explosive which would be weak
enough to blow up only one country at a time, and stable enough to blow up
only on request. If we could devise a really practical rocket fuel at the
same time, one capable of driving a war rocket at a thousand miles an hour,
or more, then we would be in a position to make most anybody say "uncle" to
Uncle Sam.
We fiddled around with it all the rest of 1943 and well into 1944. The war
in Europe and the troubles in Asia dragged on. After Italy folded up,
England was able to release enough ships from her Mediterranean fleet to
ease the blockade of the British Isles. With the help of the planes we
could now send her regularly and with the additional over-age destroyers we
let her have, England hung on somehow, digging in and taking more and more
of her essential defense industries underground. Russia shifted her weight
from side to side as usual, apparently with the policy of preventing either
side from getting a sufficient advantage to bring the war to a successful
conclusion. People were beginning to speak of "permanent
war."
I was killing time in the administrative office, trying to improve my
typing?a lot of Mannings reports had to be typed by me personally?when the
orderly on duty stepped in and announced Dr. Karst. I flipped the
inter-office communicator. "Dr. Karst is here, chief. Can you see her?"
"Yes," he answered, through his end.
I told the orderly to show her in.
Estelle Karst was quite a remarkable old girl and, I suppose, the first
woman ever to hold a commission in the corps of engineers. She was an M. D.
as well as an Sc.D. and reminded me of the teacher I had had in fourth
grade. I guess that was why I always stood up instinctively when she came
in the room?I was afraid she might look at me and sniff. It couldn't have
been her rank; we didn't bother much with rank.
She was dressed in white coveralls and a shop apron and had simply thrown a
hooded cape over herself to come through the snow. I said, "Good morning,
maam," and led her into Mannings office.
The Colonel greeted her with the urbanity that had made him such a success
with women's clubs, seated her, and offered her a cigarette.
"I'm glad to see you, Major," he said. "I've been intending to drop around
to your shop."
I knew what he was getting at Dr. Karst's work had been primarily
physiomedical; he wanted her to change the direction of her research to
something more productive in a military sense.
"Don't call me 'major,' " she said tartly.
"Sorry, Doctor?"
"I came on business, and must get right back. And I presume you are a busy
man, too. Colonel Manning, I need some help."
"That's what we are here for."
"Good. I've run into some snags in my research. I think that one of the men
in Dr. Ridpath's department could help me, but Dr. Ridpath doesn't seem
disposed to be cooperative."
"So? Well, I hardly like to go over the head of a departmental chief, but
tell me about it; perhaps we can arrange it. Whom do you want?"
"I need Dr. Obre."
"The spectroscopist?hm-m-m.
I can understand Dr. Ridpath's reluctance, Dr.
Karst, and I'm disposed to agree with him. After all, the high-explosives
research is really our main show around here."
She bristled and I thought she was going to make him stay in after school
at the very least. "Colonel Manning, do you realize the importance of
artificial radioactives to modern medicine?"
"Why, I believe I do. Nevertheless, doctor, our primary mission is to
perfect a weapon which will serve as a safe-guard to the whole country in
time of war?"
She sniffed and went into action. "Weapons?fiddle-sticks! Isn't there a
medical corps in the Army? Isn't it more important to know how to heal men
than to know how to blow them to bits? Colonel Manning, you're not a fit
man to have charge of this project! You're a . . . you're a, a warmonger,
that's what you are!"
I felt my ears turning red, but Manning never budged. He could have raised
Cain with her, confined her to her quarters, maybe even have
court-martialed her, but Manning isn't like that. He told me once that
every time a man is court-martialed, it is a sure sign that some senior
officer hasn't measured up to his job.
"I am sorry you feel that way, Doctor," he said mildly, "and I agree that
my technical knowledge isn't what it might be. And, believe me, I do wish
that healing were all we had to worry about. In any case, I have not
refused your request. Let's walk over to your laboratory and see what the
problem is. Likely there is some arrangement that can be made which will
satisfy everybody."
He was already up and getting out his greatcoat. Her set mouth relaxed a
trifle and she answered, "Very well. I'm sorry I spoke as I did."
"Not at all," he replied. "These are worrying times. Come along, John."
I trailed after them, stopping in the outer office to get my own coat and
to stuff my notebook in a pocket.
By the time we had trudged through mushy snow the eighth of a mile to her
lab they were talking about gardening!
Manning acknowledged the sentry's challenge with a wave of his hand and we
entered the building. He started casually on into the inner lab, but Karst
stopped him. "Armor first, Colonel."
We had trouble finding overshoes that would fit over Manning's boots, which
he persisted in wearing, despite the new uniform regulations, and he wanted
to omit the foot protection, but Karst would not hear of it. She called in
a couple of her assistants who made jury-rigged moccasins out of some
soft-lead sheeting.
The helmets were different from those used in the explosives lab, being
fitted with inhalers. "What's this?" inquired Manning.
"Radioactive dust guard," she said. "It's absolutely essential."
We threaded a lead-lined meander and arrived at the workroom door which she
opened by combination. I blinked at the sudden bright illumination and
noticed the air was filled with little shiny motes.
"Hm-m-m?it is dusty," agreed Manning. "Isn't there some way of controlling
that?" His voice sounded muffled from behind the dust mask.
"The last stage has to be exposed to air," explained Karst. "The hood gets
most of it. We could control it, but it would mean a quite expensive new
installation."
"No trouble about that. We're not on a budget, you know. It must be very
annoying to have to work in a mask like this."
"It is," acknowledged Karst. "The kind of gear it would take would enable
us to work without body armor, too. That would be a comfort."
I suddenly had a picture of the kind of thing these researchers put up