His airplane landed outside of Pittsburgh to refuel. As it spiraled down toward the runway, he got a good look at what the battle had cost the city. His first thought was, Everything. But that wasn't an obvious truth. Smoke rose from tall stacks-and from some truncated ones-from steel mills that were either back in business or had never gone out of business. Nobody had bothered repairing shell-pocked walls or, sometimes, roofs. Those could wait. The steel? That was a different story. Trucks on the roads, trains in the railroad yards, and barges on the rivers took it where it needed to go.
When he got out of the airplane to stretch his legs and spend a penny, his nose wrinkled. He'd expected the air to be full of harsh industrial stinks, and it was. He hadn't expected the stench of death to linger so long after the fighting ended.
'Not as bad as the graves outside of Camp Determination,' Toricelli said.
'Well, no. I don't think anything in the whole world is that bad,' Dowling replied. 'But this is what the Great War battlefields were like. Most of the ones this time around aren't so foul. They move faster and cover more ground, so there aren't so many bodies all in the same place.'
'Except here there are,' his adjutant said.
Dowling nodded. 'Yeah. Except here there are.'
Philadelphia was another bomb-pocked nightmare of a city, another place where factories sent up defiant plumes despite the destruction. A green-gray motorcar met Dowling at the airport. 'I'll take you to the War Department, sir,' said the bright young captain who accompanied the enlisted driver.
'How bad are these long-range rockets we hear about?' Dowling asked as the auto picked its way through streets often cratered and rubble-strewn.
'They sure aren't good, sir,' the captain answered. 'First thing you know is, they go boom-and if you're there when they do, then you aren't any more.'
That was convoluted, but Dowling got the message. Damage grew worse as the auto got closer to the center of town. A lot of the rockets seemed to have fallen there. Dowling saw the finned stern of one sticking up, and curved sheet metal from a couple of more.
The War Department had taken lots of near misses but no direct hits Dowling saw. He had to show his ID before they let him in. Even after he did, they patted him down. No one apologized-it was part of routine. The captain took him down to John Abell's office. 'Good to see you, sir,' Abell said, his usual bloodless tones sucking the warmth from the words.
'And you,' Dowling replied, which wasn't entirely true but came close enough. He pointed to a map of Virginia on Abell's wall. 'What are we going to do to them?'
Abell got up and pointed. 'This is what we've got in mind.'
Dowling whistled. 'Well, whoever came up with it sure didn't think small.'
'Thank you,' Abell said. That made Dowling blink; the General Staff officer was more likely to see what could go wrong than what could go right. This scheme, though, definitely counted on things going right.
'You really think they're on their last legs, don't you?' Dowling said.
'Last leg,' John Abell replied. 'They're standing on it in Georgia. If we hit them here, too, the bet is that they fall over.'
'It could be.' Dowling hesitated, then said the other thing he thought needed saying: 'Is General MacArthur really the right man to knock them over?'
'If you want command of the army group, sir, you won't get it.' Now Abell's voice was as icy as Dowling had ever heard it, which said a good deal.
'No, no, no. I wasn't asking for myself. After a question like that, I wouldn't take it if you gave it to me on a silver platter,' Dowling said. 'But if we've got somebody better than that scrawny bastard handy, we ought to use him.'
The General Staff officer relaxed fractionally. 'Since you put it that way…Well, General Morrell is busy in Georgia, which is also of vital importance. And General MacArthur is the man on the spot, and familiar with conditions.'
'All right,' Dowling said. It wasn't, not really, but he'd made the effort. 'When we're ready down there, I'll do everything I can.'
C larence Potter was so glad to get away from Georgia and George Patton that he almost didn't mind shuttling back and forth between Richmond and Lexington every few days. President Featherston couldn't seem to make up his mind whether he wanted Potter to pick up his work in Intelligence again or act as liaison with the uranium-bomb project.
Either way, Potter figured he was better suited to the work than he was to commanding a division under Patton. As far as he could see, the only things that suited a man to command a division under Patton were a rhino's hide and an uncanny ability to turn off one's brain. That probably wasn't fair-Patton had grievances with him, too. Potter didn't much care. Not dealing with Patton was such a pleasure.
Of course, not dealing with the general meant dealing with the President of the CSA-and, incidentally, with Professor FitzBelmont. But Potter had been dealing with Jake Featherston since the Great War, and he scared the living bejesus out of the professor. He could handle both of those jobs without wanting to retread his stomach lining twice a day.
FitzBelmont was a man facing a problem all too common in the CSA these days: he was trying to do a key job without quite enough men or resources, and with the damnyankees pounding the crap out of him from the air. Back before the United States found out what was going on there, Washington University had been a lovely, leafy, grassy campus. Potter remembered what a joy coming to Lexington had been after the devastation visited on Richmond.
Lexington was making up for lost time these days. Everything except the uranium-bomb project had abandoned the university campus, which looked like a real-estate poster for a subdivision in one of the ritzier neighborhoods of hell. The slagged and cratered earth might have caught smallpox. Ruins of what had been elegant, graceful buildings, many dating back before the War of Secession, offered a sorry reminder of better times. Only the square, brutal simplicity of reinforced concrete, ton upon ton of it, had any hope of surviving the Yankees' nightly visits.
Down below that concrete, the pile was turning uranium into jovium, which was what FitzBelmont had christened element 94. Enough jovium would go boom, just like U-235. Making it go boom, though, wasn't so simple.
'With U-235, we could shoot a plug into a hole in a bigger chunk, and then everything would go up,' FitzBelmont said.
'Why can't you do that with the jovium, too?' Potter asked.
'Our calculations show it would start going off too soon and get too deformed for a full blast,' the physicist answered.
'Well, you seem to think you can make it go off,' Potter said, and Henderson FitzBelmont nodded. Potter asked what looked like the next reasonable question: 'How?'
'We have to slam a lot of pieces down into a sphere-that's what the math says,' FitzBelmont replied. 'It's harder than making a U-235 bomb would be, because it's so much more precise. But getting the jovium is easier, because we can chemically separate it from the uranium in the pile.'
'My chemistry prof at Yale told me transmutation was nothing but a pipe dream,' Potter said.
'Mine told me the same thing.' FitzBelmont shrugged. 'Sometimes the rules change. They did here. Transmutation isn't chemistry-it's physics.'
'It could be black magic, and I wouldn't care,' Potter said. 'As long as we say, 'Abracadabra!' before the damnyankees do, nothing else counts.'
'They're doing their best to make sure we don't. Are we doing the same to them?' the professor asked.
'What we can. Getting to Washington State isn't easy for us, and it got tougher after they went and grabbed Baja California from Mexico,' Potter said. Henderson FitzBelmont looked blank. He was no military man. Patiently, Potter explained: 'It makes it much harder for us to get ships and subs out of Guaymas. But we did it not so long ago, and we attacked their facility.'
'And?' FitzBelmont asked eagerly.
'And past that I don't know,' Potter admitted. 'The attack went in-that's all I can tell you for sure. The United States keep real quiet about their project, same as we keep quiet about ours. We haven't picked up any leaks to let
