eager aroused sparkle. She kissed him.

* * *

“…I have nothing to offer,” said the grainy strong singsong voice out of the radio, slurring the consonants almost like a drunken man, “but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

“Why, he’s a genius!” Rhoda exclaimed. She sat on the edge of a frail gilt chair in Kirby’s suite, champagne glass in hand, tears in her eyes. “Where has he been till now?”

Smearing caviar from a blue Russian-printed tin on a bit of toast, and carefully sprinkling onion shreds, Byron said, “He was running the British Navy when Prien got into Scapa Flow and sank the Royal Oak. And when the Germans crossed the Skagerrak to Norway.”

“Shut up and listen,” Victor Henry said.

Janice glanced from the son to the father, crossed her long, legs, and sipped champagne. Palmer Kirby’s eyes flickered appreciatively at her legs, which pleased her. He was an interesting-looking old dog.

“…You ask, what is our policy? I will say, it is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory — victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror… I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men…”

The speech ended. An American voice said with a cough and tremor, “You have just heard the newly appointed Prime Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill.”

After a moment, Rhoda said, “That man will save civilization. We’re going to get in now. The Germans over-played their hand. We’ll never let them conquer England. There’s something strangely thick about the Germans, you know? One must observe them close up for a long time to understand that. Strangely thick.”

Victor Henry said to Dr. Kirby, glancing at his watch, “Quite a speech. Can we talk now for a few minutes?”

Kirby got to his feet and Rhoda smiled at him. “Champagne, caviar, and business as usual. That’s Pug.”

“We’re just waiting for Madeline,” Pug said.

“Come along,” Kirby said, walking into the bedroom.

“Say, Dad. I’m going to have to mosey along,” Byron said. “There’s this plane to Miami I have to catch. It leaves La Guardia in about an hour.”

“What! Dr. Kirby thinks you’re dining with him.”

“Well, see, I made the reservation before I knew about this dinner.”

“You’re not waiting till Madeline comes? You haven’t seen her in two years. She’s taking us all to her show after dinner.”

“I think I’d better go, Dad.”

Abruptly, Pug left the room.

“Briny, you’re impossible,” his mother said. “Couldn’t you have waited until tomorrow?”

“Mom, do you remember what it’s like to be in love?”

Rhoda surprised him and Janice Lacouture by turning blood red. “Me? My goodness, Byron, what a thing to say! Of course not, I’m a million years old.”

“Thank you for my marvellous pin.” Janice touched the elephant on her shoulder. “That must be some girl, in Miami.”

Byron’s blank narrow-eyed look dissolved in a charming smile and an admiring glance at her. “She’s all right.”

“Bring her to the wedding with you. Don’t forget.”

As Byron went to the door, Rhoda said, “You have a real talent for disappointing your father.”

“He’d be disappointed if I didn’t disappoint him. Good-bye, Mom.”

In the bedroom Dr. Kirby sat at a desk, checking off a stack of journals and mimeographed reports that Victor Henry had brought him from Germany. As he scribbled in a yellow notebook, the little desk shook and two reports slid to the floor. “They must rent this suite to midgets,” he said, continuing to write.

Victor Henry said, “Fred, are you working on a uranium bomb?”

Kirby’s hand paused. He turned, hanging one long loose arm over the back of his chair, and looked into Henry’s eyes. The silence and the steady look between the men lasted a long time.

“You can just tell me it’s none of my goddamn business, but” — Pug sat on the bed — “all that stuff there zeroes in on the uranium business. And some of the things I couldn’t get, like the graphite figures, why, the Germans told me flatly that they were classified because of the secret bomb aspects. The Germans are fond of talking very loosely about this terrible ultra-bomb they’re developing. That made me think there was nothing much to it. But that list of requests you sent gave me second thoughts.”

Kirby knocked out his pipe, stuffed it, and lit it. The process took a couple of minutes, during which he didn’t talk, but looked at Captain Henry. He said slowly, “I’m not a chemist, and this uranium thing is more a less a chemical engineering problems. Electricity does come into it for production techniques. A couple of months ago I was approached to be an industrial consultant.”

“What’s the status of the thing?”

“All theory. Years away from any serious effort.”

“Do you mind telling me about it?”

“Why not? It’s in the college physics books. Hell, it’s been in Time magazine. There’s this process, neutron bombardment. You expose one chemical substance and another to the emanation of radium, and see what happens. It’s been going on for years, in Europe and here. Well, these two Germans tried it on uranium oxide last year, and they produced barium. Now that’s transmutation of elements by atom-splitting. I guess you know about the fantastic charge of energy packed in the mass of the atom. You’ve heard about driving a steamship across the ocean on one lump of coal, if you could only harness the atomic energy in it, and so forth.” Victor Henry nodded. “Well, Pug, this was a hint that it might really be done with uranium. It was an atom-splitting process that put out far more energy than they’d used to cause it. These Germans discovered that by weighing the masses involved. They’d been an appreciable loss of mass. They published their finding, and the whole scientific community’s been in an uproar ever since.

“Okay, the next step is, there’s this rare hot isotope of uranium, U-235. This substance may turn out to have gigantic explosive powers, through a chain reaction that gives you a huge release of energy from mass. A handful maybe can blow up a city, that sort of talk. The nuclear boys say it may be practicable right now, if industry will just come up with enough pure U-235.”

Pug listened to all this with his mouth compressed, his body tensed forward. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he kept saying when Kirby puffed on his pipe. He pointed a stiff finger at the engineer. “Well, I follow all that. This is vital military intelligence.”

Kirby shook his head. “Hardly. It’s public knowledge. It may be a complete false alarm. These chemical engineers don’t guarantee anything. And what they want will take one hell of a big industrial effort to deliver. Maybe the stuff will explode, maybe it won’t. Maybe as soon as you have enough of it, it’ll all fly apart. Nobody knows. Five minutes of scratch pad work shows that you’re talking about an expenditure of many many millions of dollars. It could run up to a billion and then you could end up with a crock of horseshit. Congress is on an economy rampage. They’ve been refusing Roosevelt the money for a couple of hundred new airplanes.”

“I’ll ask you a couple of more questions. If I’m off base, tell me.”

“Shoot.”

“Where do you come into it?”

Kirby rubbed his pipe against his chin. “Okay, how do you separate out isotopes of a very rare metal in industrial quantities? One notion is to shoot it in the form of an ionized gas through a magnetic field. The lighter ions get deflected a tiny bit more, so you stream ‘em out and catch them. The whole game depends on the magnetic field being kept stable, because any wavering jumbles up the ion stream. Precise control of voltages is my business.”

“Uh-huh. Now. One last point. If an occasion arises, should I volunteer my valued opinion to the President that he should get off his ass about uranium?”

Kirby uttered a short baritone laugh. “The real question here is the Germans. How far along are they? This

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