"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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sociates, to run against the two-bit chiseler who was the inc.u.mbent 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 G.o.d, 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 . . . h.e.l.lo, 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 b.u.m 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 Const.i.tution 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 t.i.tle 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 a.s.sociating with the heavy-weights with which the laboratory was staffed.
Colonel Manning had taken an Army p. g. course at Ma.s.sachusetts 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 ma.s.s 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sistants 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?"