“Right this minute?” she asked.
“Well, you might want to,” Roosevelt answered. And what did that mean? Something like, If you don’t you’ll be sorry. Flora couldn’t think of anything else it was likely to mean.
“On my way,” she said, and hung up. “Please apologize to the rest of the committee for me,” she told the page. “I’m afraid I need to confer with the Assistant Secretary of War.” The young man nodded and hurried away. Flora wondered what kind of connections he had, to be wearing a sharp blue suit instead of a green-gray uniform. She also wondered how long he would go on wearing his suit. Congressional pages did get conscripted. At least one had got killed.
And, as she hurried to the exit, she wondered what the other members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would think. People knew she often talked with Franklin Roosevelt. She hoped to heaven they didn’t know why. If they didn’t know why, what would they think? That she and Roosevelt were having an affair? He was married, but that mattered little in high government circles. Reporters knew better than to write such stories. People called it a gentleman’s agreement, though Flora had never seen anything very gentlemanly about it.
She walked over to the War Department. Sentries there scrupulously compared the photo on her ID card to her face. They searched her handbag. A woman took her into a closed room and patted her down. And they called Roosevelt’s office to make sure she was expected. Only when they were fully satisfied did a soldier escort her to that office far underground.
“Call when you need to come back up, ma’am,” the soldier said: a polite way of warning, Don’t go wandering around by yourself.
“I will,” Flora promised.
Roosevelt’s chief secretary or administrative assistant or whatever he was led her in to the Assistant Secretary of War. Then the man left, closing the door behind him. Did he knew about the work on uranium bombs? Flora wouldn’t have cared to guess one way or the other.
“How are you, Franklin?” she asked.
“Oh, a little tired, but not too bad,” he answered. He looked worn and weary, as if he was running on too much coffee, too many cigarettes in that jaunty holder of his, and not enough sleep. Few people with important jobs were doing anything else. He nodded, perhaps trying to make himself believe it. “No, I’m not too bad myself, but the news could be better.”
“What is the news?” Flora asked.
“The Confederates bombed our Hanford facility in the wee small hours this morning.”
“Gevalt!” She sank into a chair. Her knees didn’t want to hold her up. “How bad is it? Do I want to know?”
“Well, it’s not good,” Roosevelt said. “They know we’re working on this, they knew where we’re working on it, they know it’s important, and they must be working on it, too, or they wouldn’t try so hard to shut us down.”
Every word of that was true. But he hadn’t told her what she most wanted to know. “How much damage did they do?”
“Oh. That.” His resonant laugh filled the office. “Now that the sun’s up out there, we can see it’s less than we feared at first. They don’t have aircraft that can carry heavy loads a long way, and it’s hard to bomb accurately at night anyway. They hit some of the works, but they didn’t damage the plant where we’re separating U-235 and U-238 or the pile-that’s what they’re calling the gadget that makes more energy than goes into it.”
“That would have been bad,” Flora said. “Repairing those things would take a long time.” She didn’t even mention money.
“Repair isn’t the only worry. If the bombers hit those, we’d have to worry about radioactive contamination like you wouldn’t believe,” Roosevelt said. Flora must have looked blank, for he went on, “That kind of thing can cause cancer. It can poison you. If it’s strong enough, it can come right out and kill you. And it’s very hard to clean up.”
“But it didn’t happen?” Flora said.
“It didn’t happen. Hardly any contamination, in fact,” Roosevelt said.
“Good-I guess.” Flora hadn’t even thought about-what did Roosevelt call it?-radioactive contamination. She hadn’t known such a thing was possible, or that anybody needed to worry about it. She was just starting to realize how much she didn’t know about this whole uranium business.
“It’s very good, believe me,” Roosevelt said. “They could have made things worse for us than they did. We’re not badly delayed, anyhow.”
“That is good,” Flora said. “What kind of program do the Confederate States have? How far along are they? How do we go about finding out?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, and we’ll have to find a way, respectively.” The Assistant Secretary of War sighed. “That’s all I can tell you right now. As I say, they’re working on it, the same as we are. We’re in a race, and we’d better win.”
Eight words. As far as Flora could see, they said everything that needed saying. “If we knew where they’re working, we could visit them the same way they just visited us,” she said.
“If we knew that, we would have done it a long time ago,” Roosevelt said. “We’ve got to look harder, that’s all.”
“It’s a long way from Confederate territory to Washington State,” Flora said. “That’s one of the reasons you put the uranium works out there, I suppose. How did they manage to fly bombers all the way up there? And what happened to them afterwards?”
“They got cute,” Franklin Roosevelt said unhappily. “I don’t know what else to tell you. They flew a whole swarm of airplanes out of northwestern Sonora. Some of them headed for Los Angeles. Some attacked Las Vegas and Boulder Dam in Nevada. And some…some we just forgot about.” He looked angry and embarrassed at the same time. “Airplanes flying over the middle of the country-too many people assumed they were ours and didn’t worry about them. That won’t happen again, either.”
“They didn’t go back to the CSA, did they?” Flora asked.
He shook his strong-chinned head. “No. We might have done something about that. I hope to heaven we would have done something about it, anyhow. But they flew on to Vancouver Island and landed at strips there. The crews were gone by the time we got people there, and they set fire to the airplanes-or maybe the Canadians who helped them get away did. I don’t know about that. I do know it was a very smart operation, and we’re lucky it didn’t hurt us a lot worse than it did.”
“What can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?” Flora asked.
“You do know the right questions to ask,” Roosevelt said. Flattery? Truth? Both at once? He went on, “From now on, we’ll have fighters overhead all the time. That’s effective immediately. We’ll beef up the antiaircraft guns as soon as we can, and we’ll put a Y-ranging station close by so we can spot the enemy a long way off. And we’ll hit Confederate airports in Sonora and Chihuahua and even Texas to make it harder for them to fly up north.”
“What do we do about auto bombs? What do we do about people bombs?” Flora asked.
“Well, the area is well fenced, and the fences are a long way out from the buildings-for one thing, we need room if experiments get out of hand,” Roosevelt answered. “We have a garrison there.” He wrote himself a note. “We’d better reinforce it, and we’d better add some armored vehicles, too. You do know the right questions.” Maybe he really meant it this time.
“Did we lose any important people?” Flora asked.
“No. Absolutely not. No. We don’t have as many first-rate physicists as Germany does, but we’ve got plenty of good people to take us where we’re going,” Roosevelt said. “And the bombers didn’t hit any of them last night, so that’s all right. If we find the Confederates’ project, striking them will hurt them more, or I hope so, anyway. They only have a third as many educated people as we do. They can’t afford to lose anybody.”