When he took his seat in the conference room the next morning, three places down from Joe Steele, he wondered how much he remembered of what he’d read. And he wondered how much what wasn’t in the encyclopedia made what he did remember obsolete.
Also sitting in with the President were his three California cronies, J. Edgar Hoover, and a scholarly-looking Navy captain named Rickover. A White House staffer led Einstein in a few minutes after ten. “Mr. President,” the physicist said in good but accented English.
“Professor Einstein,” Joe Steele replied. “Sit down, please. Do you want coffee or anything like that?” His voice was under tight control. His face showed nothing at all.
“Thank you so much, but no,” Einstein said as he slid into a chair across the table from the President.
“All right, then,” Joe Steele said. “I have learned that the Germans were trying to make a bomb, a very powerful bomb, from uranium. They don’t seem to have tried too hard, but some of my military men who reviewed their work”-he nodded toward Captain Rickover-“tell me this might be possible.”
Einstein nodded sadly. Sadness seemed to live naturally on his face. “Yes. This is possible, I am sorry to say. I have understood that it is possible since I learned of the Hahn-Meitner experiments at the end of 1938 or the beginning of 1939.” Charlie’d never heard of the Hahn-Meitner experiments. They weren’t in the Britannica. Plainly, Rickover had; he leaned toward the President and whispered something.
Joe Steele waved his words aside. He turned the full force of his will on Einstein. “You knew of this for so long, but you said nothing about it?” The question was all the more fearsome for being so soft.
“Yes, sir.” If it put Einstein in fear, he didn’t let on.
“Why?” Joe Steele asked, more softly yet.
“Because I was afraid you would build this bomb, sir. Because I was afraid you would use it.” Einstein didn’t say Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. The words tolled inside Charlie’s head all the same. Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.
And the writing was on the wall for Albert Einstein, too. Just for a moment, Joe Steele’s calm mask slipped and showed the raw, red rage underneath. Charlie flinched away from the President, as he would have flinched away from a furnace door that suddenly opened and blasted heat in his face.
“You deprived the United States of a weapon that might have won the war sooner?” Joe Steele hissed.
“I tried to stop, or at least to delay, the birth of a weapon that may destroy the world,” Einstein said calmly.
Joe Steele swung toward J. Edgar Hoover. “Tend to him. He’s not just a wrecker. He’s the king of wreckers.”
Hoover nodded. “I’ll take care of it.” He bounced to his feet and hustled out of the room. Einstein watched him go with what looked like mild interest. As the President did, the physicist smoked a pipe. He took it out and started charging it with tobacco.
He never got the chance to finish. Hoover came back with four burly Jeebies. Had they been waiting outside for a moment like this? They must have. They hauled Einstein out of the chair and hustled him away. The pipe fell on the floor. One of the GBI men picked it up and stuck it in his pocket on his way out.
As if such things happened at the White House every day, Joe Steele asked Captain Rickover, “With what you know now, can you go on and finish the job?”
“Yes, sir, I think so,” Rickover said. “There will be engineering issues to overcome, but it should be doable.”
“How long? Six months? A year? You’ll have whatever resources you need.”
“I fear it may take longer than that, sir. We’ll be doing things no one has ever done before, you know. The Germans barely even opened the door. We have to go through it.”
“You will not waste time.” Joe Steele sounded like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai hurling Thou shalt nots at the children of Israel. “The Reds will know about this, too. So will the English, for that matter.”
“If you think you can find someone better to run the project, sir, put him in charge instead of me,” Rickover said. “If you don’t, I’ll do the best I can.”
“That will do. I hope that will do,” Joe Steele said.
“Whatever resources I need, you said?” Rickover asked him.
“That’s right.” The President gestured impatiently. “What about it?”
“Some of the people who could help me a lot on this project are serving terms in labor encampments on one charge or another,” Rickover said. “If I can get them released-”
“You can use them,” Joe Steele said. “They’ll be released if they do what I need fast enough. In the meantime, we’ll set up your project as a special labor encampment. If they do any more wrecking, we’ll dispose of them. Be plain about that when you recruit them, understand me?”
“Yes, sir. I will do that, sir,” Rickover said.
“All right, then. Go ahead.”
Charlie took his courage in both hands and asked, “Sir, what will you do with Einstein? He’s too famous just to bump off.”
“We took him in when he had to run from Hitler. This is how he thanks us? By keeping quiet about something so important?” Joe Steele shook his head. “I said it before-he is the king of wreckers. He will get what he deserves. Any of the others we took in who also kept still about this, they will get it, too.” His eyes warned that, if Charlie said one more word, he would get some, too.
He even had a point. . of sorts. But Einstein might have said more had he thought more of the man to whom he would be saying it. As one of that man’s aides, Charlie was in no position to point out such things. He kept quiet. Poor Einstein, he thought.
* * *
Mike squatted in a cratered field, stripping and cleaning his grease gun. Not far away lay the highway that ran from Kyoto to Tokyo. American forces were supposed to have cut the road already. They had cut it, in fact. A Jap counterattack had opened it again, at least for a little while.
Several men from Mike’s company stood guard while he cared for his weapon. He was still a sergeant, but he headed a company anyhow. Nobody who’d been a scalp in an encampment would ever make officer’s rank, even if he commanded a regiment. Captain Magnusson had commanded a regiment till he picked up another leg wound. He was on the shelf again, but he was supposed to get better.
Here on Honshu, they actually had fought girls carrying spears. Jugs would have laughed if he hadn’t stopped a machine-gun round with his nose outside of Nagasaki. Mike hadn’t thought it was funny. He didn’t want to kill those high-school kids. They sure as hell wanted to kill him, though. Sometimes you didn’t get many choices, not if you wanted to go on breathing.
He clicked the magazine back into place and chambered a round. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get moving.”
One of his men, a nervous little greaser named Gomez, pointed west along the highway. “Maybe we better hold up a second, Sarge,” he said. “Looks like something’s comin’ towards us.”
“Well, shit,” Mike said mildly. “When you’re right, you’re right. I don’t wanna fuck with Jap tanks.”
The Japs didn’t have many. They never had. The ones they did have weren’t as tough as American Shermans. That didn’t mean they were anything foot soldiers wanted to face, though. Mike could have yelled for one of the company’s bazooka teams. But stalking the tanks wouldn’t be easy-there wasn’t much cover close by the road. He lit a cigarette instead. He’d done plenty of fighting for his country. He knew he’d do more, but not right this minute.
There were four tanks: two, then a gap, then two more. And in the gap. . “Well, will you look at that?” Mike said. “I wonder who the big shot is.” In the gap, plainly being escorted by all that armor, came a plain black car. A Japanese flag fluttered on a small staff-it could have been a radio aerial-sticking up from the right front fender.