Eating C-rations behind a wrecked building, Mike said, “This must be what Trotskygrad was like.”
One of his men nodded wearily. By then, the section was down to seven guys: less than a squad’s strength. The tired soldier said, “That reminds me, Sarge. I heard the Russians are finally fighting the Japs with us.”
“About time,” Mike said between bites of canned ham and eggs. The ration wasn’t bad if you heated it. You could eat it straight from the can, the way he was, but you’d like it less. He went on, “I sure as hell wish they’d come fight the ones we got here.”
“There you go,” the soldier said.
Something blew up near them. “Here we go,” Mike said, and made sure he had a full magazine on his grease gun.
XXI
Charlie had put a National Geographic map of the Home Islands on the wall in his office. Blue pins measled Kyushu. Nothing at all was left of Nagasaki, near the westernmost part of the island. B-29s full of incendiaries had annihilated the old port city even more thoroughly than they’d leveled Tokyo. Kagoshima? Fukuoka? Miyazaki? Likewise names for places that were no longer there.
Also no longer there were too many thousands of American soldiers. As far as Charlie knew, Mike was still okay, but he didn’t know how far he knew. Japanese casualties, military and civilian? Nobody had any idea, not to the nearest hundred thousand.
Farther north, red pins measled Hokkaido the same way. The Russians had swept through the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, which they’d lost in the Russo-Japanese War. They’d swept across the Kuril Islands. They’d roared into what had been Japanese Manchukuo and Chosen, and what were now nominally part of China (though still under Trotsky’s thumb) and the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea under a native Red called Kim Il-sung, which was every bit as independent as Father Tiso’s Slovakia had been under the Nazis.
And the Red Army had invaded Hokkaido, the northernmost Home Island. The Russians had had just as much fun there as the Americans had in Kyushu. The Japs fought as if there were no tomorrow. For them, there mostly wasn’t.
But they wouldn’t quit. They had no idea how to quit. The Emperor and his generals ruled only Honshu and Shikoku. They still bellowed defiance at the rest of the world. The rest of the world responded with incendiaries and high explosives. The Japs shot back when they could. They sent raiding parties to harass the Allies occupying Kyushu and Hokkaido.
So Coronet was on-was, in fact, only a couple of weeks away, from what Charlie’d heard. With it would come a Russian invasion of northern Honshu. The whole campaign would be an enormous, bloody mess. Everybody knew it. But how else could you knock out an enemy who wouldn’t quit on his own?
As Charlie didn’t know for sure that Mike was all right, he also didn’t know whether his brother’s punishment brigade was part of the invasion force for Operation Coronet. He feared it was, though. You served in a punishment brigade for the duration: yours or the war’s. Usually, it was yours. Mike still had a chance of coming back, though.
Charlie was studying the map and trying to stay hopeful when Lazar Kagan came in and said, “Got a question for you.”
“Shoot,” Charlie said. Whatever Kagan asked him, it would help take his mind off the bad reflections the map of the Home Islands stirred in him.
“What do you know about uranium?” Kagan said.
Charlie stared. As a matter of fact, Charlie gaped. “I don’t know what the hell I thought you’d ask me, but I could’ve guessed for a million years before I came up with that one,” he said. “Why?”
“I’ll tell you why in a minute. Tell me what you know first.” Kagan sounded serious. Charlie couldn’t remember the last time Kagan hadn’t sounded serious. He had none of Mikoian’s occasional impishness. To give him his due, he also wasn’t so nasty as Vince Scriabin.
“O-kay.” Charlie flogged his brains. He got tiny little bits from highschool chemistry he’d done his best to forget over the intervening quarter-century and more, and a few others from science stories before the war. “It’s an element. Is it ninety-one or ninety-two? Ninety-two, I think. And it’s-what’s the word? Radioactive, that’s it. Like radium, only it doesn’t glow in the dark, does it? And-” He stopped with a shrug. “And that’s about it. How’d I do, Mr. Baker?”
“Heh,” Kagan said. Phil Baker had hosted Take It or Leave It, the radio quiz show with questions that kept doubling in value till they got to sixty-four dollars, since before the Japs hit Pearl Harbor. After a moment, though, Kagan grudged a nod. “You did pretty well. Better than Vince and me, better than Hoover, about as well as Stas.”
Mikoian’s brother knew science, being an engineer. Maybe some had rubbed off on Joe Steele’s aide. “Now you’ve got to tell me why you asked me,” Charlie said.
Lazar Kagan nodded again. “All right, I will. But it goes no further. Not even your wife, you hear? I’m serious about this. So is Hoover. So is the boss. If you don’t think you can do that, forget I ever asked you.”
“I know when to keep my mouth shut. I’ll keep it shut now.” Charlie would have liked to tease Kagan, but that didn’t look like a good idea, not if he wanted to find out what was what.
Even as things were, Lazar Kagan hesitated. He must have seen he’d gone too far to stop, though. “You’re right-uranium’s radioactive. But that’s not all. It turns out you can split the right kind of uranium atom. When you do, you release energy-a lot more than you can get from dynamite or TNT. I mean, a lot more, enough so one bomb could blow up a whole city. The Germans were working on this during the war, we’ve found out. They didn’t get too far, thank God, but they were trying.”
One bomb, one city? Charlie’s mind spun dizzily. It sounded like one of those stories you read in the pulps with the robots and the little green men on the cover. But Kagan sounded as serious as he ever did, which was saying something. “The Germans were working on this, you say?” Charlie asked. Kagan nodded yet again. Charlie found the next question with no trouble at alclass="underline" “How come we weren’t, too? If we weren’t.”
“We weren’t.” Kagan spoke the words like a judge passing sentence. “As to why we weren’t. . It is possible that there have been wreckers inside the scientific community.”
Charlie didn’t burst out laughing. He remembered that Mikoian had said his brother had said the same thing. He hadn’t believed it then, and he didn’t believe it now. But he didn’t want to cut his own throat, either.
And it was just as well that he kept his mouth shut and his features still, for Lazar Kagan went on, “Einstein is coming down from Princeton to discuss this with the boss. Since you know a little something, maybe you should sit in on the meeting-it’s tomorrow at ten. I’ll talk to the boss. Unless I tell you otherwise, you’re in.”
Once more, Charlie didn’t laugh in Kagan’s face. A little something was what he knew about uranium, all right! Accent on little. Before he went home that night, he stopped at the public library, yanked the Britannica off the shelf, and read what it had to say about uranium and radioactivity. He took no notes; if the Jeebies found them, he figured they’d shoot him before they questioned him. The encyclopedia said nothing about splitting any kind of uranium atoms. Well, that made sense-it wasn’t exactly common knowledge.
As ordered, he didn’t tell Esther anything about uranium or Einstein. She noticed he had something on his mind, even if she didn’t know what. “You okay?” she asked him. “You’re kind of not quite with it tonight.”
“Work stuff,” he answered, as lightly as he could. “I can’t talk about it yet.”
“Oh.” She left it there-she respected that. She wasn’t the kind of person who tried to pry business out of him, for which he was duly grateful.