“My English is adequate,” the Censeur said.
Implying: Better than your French. Well, that was true enough. Fabrikant was secretly relieved. “More than adequate, obviously. I apologize, Censeur. Please, sit down and tell me what I can do for you this morning.”
The Censeur, who carried a leather case, directed at Fabrikant a smile that provoked his deep suspicion. “Oh, many things,” the Censeur said.
Cile brought more coffee.
“Your work here is the separation of uranium,” M. Bisonette said, consulting a sheaf of papers he had drawn from his case. “Specifically, the isolation of the isotope, uranium 235, from the raw ore.”
“Exactly,” Fabrikant said. Cile’s coffee was hot and thick, almost Turkish. Tonic against the northern chill. Taken in excess, it gave him palpitations. “What we ultimately hope to achieve is a cascading nucleic division of the atom through the release of neutrons. To accomplish this—” He looked at Bisonette and faltered. The Censeur was regarding him with a bored contempt. “I’m sorry. Please go on.”
This might be serious.
“You’re pursuing three routes to purification,” Bisonette intoned. “Gaseous diffusion, separation by electromagnetism, and centrifugation.”
“That’s what these buildings are for, Censeur. If you would like to see the work—”
“The electromagnetic and centrifugal projects are to be discontinued and abandoned. The diffusion will be pursued with certain refinements. You’ll be sent blueprints and instructions.”
Fabrikant was aghast. He could not speak.
Bisonette said mildly, “Do you have any objections?”
“My God! Objections? Whose decision is this?”
“The Office of Military Affairs. With the consent and approval of the Bureau de la Convenance.”
Fabrikant couldn’t disguise his outrage. “I should have been consulted! Censeur, I don’t mean to offend, but this is absurd! The purpose of running three processes simultaneously is to determine which is most effective or efficient. We don’t know that yet! Diffusion is promising, I admit, but there are still problems—enormous problems! The diffusion barriers, to take an obvious example. We’ve looked at nickel mesh, but the difficulty—”
“The barrier tubes are already in production. You should have them by December. The details are explained in the documents.”
Fabrikant opened his mouth and closed it. Already in production! Where could such knowledge have come from?
Then it struck him: the obvious implication. “There’s another project. That’s it, isn’t it? They’re ahead of us. They’ve achieved a usable enrichment.”
“Something like that,” M. Bisonette said. “But we need your cooperation.”
Of course. The Bureau must have sponsored its own research program, the hypocrites. Wartime redundancy. My God, Fabrikant thought, the waste!
And—admit it—he was ashamed that he had been beaten to the finish line; that somewhere else, all his problems had been solved.
He looked at his coffee cup, all appetite fled.
“The bomb itself,” Bisonette was saying. “You have a preliminary design?”
Fabrikant worked to recover his composure. Why was it the Proctors must always strip a man of his dignity? “A sort of nucleic gun,” he told Bisonette, “although this is premature, but in essence, a conventional explosive to compact the purified uranium—”
“Look here,” Bisonette said, and handed him a technical cutaway drawing of what Fabrikant mistook, at first, for a soccer ball.
“The casing contains these cells of explosives. The core is a hollow sphere of plutonium. I’m not a theorist, Monsieur Fabrikant, but the documents will explain it.”
Fabrikant gazed at the drawing. “The tolerances—”
“Will have to be precise.”
“To say the least! You can achieve that?”
“No. You can.”
“This is untested!”
“It will work,” Bisonette said.
“How can you know that?”
The Censeur displayed once more his secretive, sly smile. “Assume that we do,” he said.
Fabrikant believed him.
He sat alone in his office after the Censeur left. He felt stunned, immobilized.
He had been rendered useless in the space of—what had it been? An hour?
Worse, it all seemed too real to him now. These blueprints were evidence that the project would go ahead; the Censeur’s certainty was undeniable. The atom would be divided; the fire would seethe.
Fabrikant, who was not conventionally religious, nevertheless shivered at the thought.
They would sunder the heart of matter, he thought, and the result would necessarily be destruction. Theologians spoke of the mysterium coniunctionis, the mystery of union: in Sophia Achamoth, of man and woman, perfect androgyny; in nature, of particle and wave, the uncollapsed wave function; the balance of forces in the atom. A balance which Fabrikant, like some noxious demiurge, was about to disturb. And cities would be destroyed, if not worlds.
He felt like Adam, imprisoned by the Archons in a mortal body. And here, on this desk, was his Tree.
Its branches are the shadow of death; its sap is the unction of evil and its fruit is the wish for death.
His last question to the Censeur had been, “How far has this gone? Has the bomb itself been tested?”
“There is no bomb until you build it,” Bisonette told him. “The testing you may leave to us.”
Chapter Seven
“Until the spring,” Censeur Bisonette said, “pacify the town until the spring. Can we trust you to do that?”
There was an insult lurking in the question. Symeon Demarch looked at the telephone with a sour expression.
It was Evelyn Woodward’s telephone, finally connected to the external world through some sort of impedance transformer the military engineers had installed: no more radiotelephones. But the handset, pink and lightweight and obscenely curved, felt peculiar in his hand. It was made of a substance like Bakelite, but less substantial; an oil-based synthetic, the engineers said.
“The town is already pacified,” Demarch said. “The town has been pacified for months. I don’t anticipate a problem as long as the militia cooperates.”
“It will,” said Bisonette’s distant, metallic voice. “Corporal Trebach is not in a position to argue with the Bureau.”
“He seems disposed to.”
“He’ll be tamed. The weight of the Bureau is about to fall on his shoulders. The corporal has not led an impeccable life.”
“If you threaten him, he’ll blame me. I’m the one on the scene.”
“No doubt. But we’ll also tell him you’ve been ordered to report any obstruction. That should rein him in. He doesn’t have to like you, Lieutenant.”
“All right. What about the Ideological Branch? I’ve had complaints from the Ordinal attache.”
“Delafleur? A pompous idiot. Une puce. Pay no attention.”
“The Ideological Branch—”
“The Ideological Branch is under control,” the Censeur said. “I’m giving them what they want.”
“What Delafleur wants is to destroy the town.”
“He can’t. Not now.”
“Not until spring?”
“Precisely.”
“Is there a schedule?”
“Do you need to know more? There should be a packet from the Oversight Committee in a week or two. All I want is your guarantee that the situation is stable for a few more months.”