Rodriguez started. Then he nodded. It really wasn't that surprising to have Senor Quinn understand what was in his mind. Quinn knew how many men here had sons or brothers in the Army, and what could happen to those men.
"On to happier news," the Freedom Party man said. "Our guns are now pounding Sandusky, Ohio. Let me show you on the map where Sandusky is." He walked over to a campaign map pinned to the wall of Freedom Party headquarters. When he pointed to the city on the shore of Lake Erie, a low murmur ran through the men who crowded the room. Quinn nodded. "Si, senores, es verdad-we have cut all the way through Ohio and reached the water. Soon our men and machines will be on the lake. The United States cannot send anything through the middle of their country. It is cut in half. And do you know what this means?"
"It means victory!" Carlos Ruiz exclaimed.
Quinn nodded. "That is just what it means. If los Estados Unidos cannot send the raw materials from the West to the factories in the East, how are they going to make what they need to go on fighting?" He beamed. "The answer is simple-they cannot. And if they cannot make what they need, they cannot go on with the fight."
Could it be as simple as that? It certainly seemed to make good sense. Rodriguez hoped it did. A short, victorious war… The North American continent hadn't seen one like that for sixty years. Maybe this wouldn't be a fight to the finish, the way the Great War had been. He could hope not, anyhow.
"War news elsewhere is mostly good," Quinn said. "There is no more U.S. resistance in the Bahamas. Some raiding does go on, but it is by black guerrillas. The mallates may be a nuisance, but they will not keep los Estados Confederados from occupying these important islands."
As far as Rodriguez was concerned, mallates were always a nuisance-a deadly nuisance. He'd got his baptism of fire against black rebels in Georgia. That fight had been worse than any against U.S. troops. The blacks had known they couldn't surrender, and fought to the end.
Well, the Freedom Party was putting them in their place in the CSA. And if it was doing the same thing in the Bahamas, too… good.
"Sandusky." Jake Featherston spoke the ugly name as if it belonged to the woman he loved. When the thrust up into Ohio began, he hadn't known where the Confederates would reach Lake Erie-whether at Toledo or Sandusky or even Cleveland. From the beginning, that had depended as much on what the damnyankees did and how they fought back as on his own forces.
"Sandusky." He said it again, eyeing the map on the wall of his office as avidly as if it were the woman he loved slipping out of a negligee. Where Confederate troops reached Lake Erie didn't matter so much. That they reached it… That they reached it mattered immensely. He'd seen as much before the fighting started. The United States were only starting to realize it now.
"Sandusky." Featherston said it one more time. Getting to Sandusky-or anywhere else along the shores of Lake Erie-didn't mean victory. He had a hell of a lot of work to do yet. But if his barrels had been stopped in front of Columbus, that would have meant defeat. He'd done what he had to do in the opening weeks of his war: he'd made victory possible, perhaps even likely.
Lulu knocked on the door. Without waiting for his reply, she stuck her head in the office and said, "Professor FitzBelmont is here to see you, Mr. President."
"Send him in," Jake said resignedly, wondering why he'd given the man an appointment in the first place. "I promised him, what-ten minutes?"
"Fifteen, Mr. President." Lulu spoke in mild reproof, as if Featherston should have remembered. And so he should have, and so he had-but he'd done his best to get out of what he'd already agreed to. Lulu was better at holding him to the straight and narrow path than Al Smith dreamt of being. She ducked out, then returned with a formal announcement: "Mr. President, here is Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont of Washington University."
Henderson V. FitzBelmont looked like a professor. He wore rumpled tweeds and gold-framed eyeglasses. He had a long, horsey face and a shock of gray hair that resisted both oil and combing. When he said, "Very pleased to meet you, Mr. President," he didn't tack on a ringing, "Freedom!" the way anybody with an ounce of political sense would have done.
"Pleased to meet you, too." Jake stuck out his hand. FitzBelmont took it. To the President's surprise, the other man had a respectable grip. His hand didn't jellyfish under Featherston's squeeze. Obscurely pleased, Featherston waved him to the chair in front of his desk. "Why don't you take a seat? Now, then-you're a professor of physics, isn't that right?"
"Yes, sir. That is correct." FitzBelmont talked like a professor, too. His voice had the almost-damnyankee intonation so many educated men seemed proud of, and a fussy precision to go with it, too.
"Well, then…" Jake also sat, and leaned back in his chair. "Suppose you tell me what a professor of physics reckons I ought to know." He didn't quite come out and say that a professor of physics couldn't tell him anything he needed to know, but that was in his own voice and manner.
Henderson V. FitzBelmont didn't seem to notice. That didn't surprise Featherston, and did amuse him. The professor said, "I was wondering, Mr. President, if you were familiar with some of the recent work in atomic physics coming out of the German Empire."
Jake didn't laugh in his face, though for the life of him he couldn't have told why not. All he said was, "Sorry, Professor, but I can't say that I am." Or that I ever wanted to be, either. He looked at his watch. Damned if he would give this fellow a minute more than his allotted time.
"The Germans have produced some quite extraordinary energy releases through the bombardment of uranium nuclei with neutrons. Quite extraordinary," Professor FitzBelmont said.
"That's nice," Jake said blandly. "What does it mean? What does it mean to somebody who's not a professor of physics, I ought to say?"
He didn't know how he expected FitzBelmont to answer. The tweedy academic made an unimpressive fist. "It means you could take this much uranium-the right kind of uranium, I should say-and make a blast big enough to blow a city off the map."
"Wait a minute," Jake said sharply. "You could do that with one bomb?"
"One bomb," Professor FitzBelmont agreed. "If the theoretical calculations are anywhere close to accurate."
Featherston scratched his head. He'd heard things like that before. Theory promised the moon, and usually didn't even deliver moonshine. "What do you mean, the right kind of uranium? Up till now, I never heard of uranium at all, and I sure as hell never heard of two kinds of it."
"As you say, sir, there are two main kinds-isotopes, we call them," the professor answered. "One has a weight of 238. That kind is not explosive. The other isotope only weighs 235. That kind is, or seems to be. The trick is separating the uranium-235 from the uranium-238."
"All right." Featherston nodded. "I'm with you so far-I think. The 235 is the good stuff, and the 238 isn't. How much 235 is there? Is it a fifty-fifty split? One part in three? One part in four? What?"
Henderson V. FitzBelmont coughed. "In fact, Mr. President, it's about one part in a hundred and forty."
"Oh." Now Jake frowned. "That doesn't sound so real good. How do you go about separating it out, then?"
The professor also frowned, unhappily. "There is, as yet, no proven method. We cannot do it chemically; we know that. Chemically, the two isotopes are identical, as any isotopes are. We need to find some physical way to capitalize on their difference in weight. A centrifuge might do part of the job. Gaseous diffusion might, too, if we can find the right kind of gas. The only candidate that seems to be available at present is uranium hexafluoride. It is, ah, difficult to work with."