“Kill ’em all?” Wally suggested.
“We aren’t gonna do that,” Tom said, and the other reporter didn’t disagree with him. After a moment, he added, “Hell, even if we wanted to, I don’t think we could. Hitler’s goons pretty much tried it, and even they couldn’t pull it off. Besides, d’you really wanna imitate the goddamn SS?”
“They didn’t have the atom bomb, so they had to do it retail,” Wally said. “We could do it wholesale.”
“Maybe we could, but we won’t,” Tom said. “Ain’t gonna happen-no way, nohow. I almost wish it would. It’s the only thing that could get us out of the deep shit we walked into.”
“Either that or just packing up and going home,” Wally said. “You oughta write the rest of it up. It’d make a good column, y’know, especially if you use the Heydrich story for a hook.”
“Damned if it wouldn’t.” Tom carried his filthy mug over to the coffee pot that sat on a hot plate in the corner of the room. The pot had been there since sunup, and it was late afternoon now. The black, steaming stuff that came out when he poured would have stripped paint from a destroyer’s gun turret. Adulterated with plenty of cream and sugar, it also tickled brain cells.
Tom ran a sheet of paper into his Underwood and started banging away. When things went well, he could pound out a column in forty-five minutes. This was one of those times. He passed it to Wally when he finished.
“Strong stuff,” the other reporter said, nodding. “Truman’ll call you every kind of name under the sun.”
“Okay by me,” Tom said. “Only thing I want to know now is, what’ll the guys back in Chicago do to me?”
“If you don’t like getting edited, you shoulda written books instead of going to work for the papers,” Wally said.
“Nah,” Tom replied. “I’ll never get rich at this racket, but I won’t starve, either. You try writing books for a living, you better already have somebody rich in the family. Yeah, I don’t like what the editors do sometimes, but I can live with it. A regular paycheck helps a lot.”
“You think I’m gonna argue with you?” Wally shook his head. “Not me, Charlie. I got two kids, and a third on the way.”
Schmidt’s column ran in the Tribune the next day. At the President’s next press conference, Truman said, “I didn’t imagine anybody could make me think a guttersnipe like Westbrook Pegler was a gentleman, but this Schmidt character shows me I was wrong.” Tom felt as if he’d been giving the accolade.
Then Walter Lippmann, who was staunchly on the side of keeping American troops in Germany till the cows came home, attacked him in print. Up till then, Lippmann had never deigned to acknowledge that he existed, much less that he was worth attacking. Tom fired back in another column, one that drew him even more notice than the first had. He was as happy as Larry.
Every once in a while, though, he got reminded of what his happiness was built on. As if to celebrate Heydrich’s escape, the diehards blew up an American ammunition dump on the outskirts of Regensburg. The blast killed forty-five GIs, and wounded a number the War Department coyly declined to state. It broke windows ten miles away.
A survivor was quoted as saying, “I thought one of those atomic whatsits went off.”
How do we let things like this happen? Tom wrote. And if we can’t keep things like this from happening, why do we go on wasting our young men’s lives in a fight we can’t hope to win? Wouldn’t it be better to come home, let the Germans sort things out among themselves, and use our bombers and our atomic whatsits to make sure they can never threaten us again? Sure looks that way to me. He paused. That wasn’t quite a strong enough kicker. He added one more line-Sure looks that way to more and more Americans, too.
No Brigadier General summoned to testify before Congress ever looked happy. In Jerry Duncan’s experience, that was as much a law of nature as any of the ones Sir Isaac Newton discovered. This particular brass hat-his name, poor bastard, was Rudyard Holmyard-looked as if he’d just taken a big bite out of a fertilizer sandwich.
Which didn’t stop the Indiana Congressman from trying to rip him a new one. “How do we let things like this happen?” Duncan thundered. If a newspaper columnist had put it the same way a few days earlier, well, it was still a damn good question.
“Um, sir, when both sides have weapons and determination, you just aren’t likely to pitch a perfect game,” Holmyard said. “We found that out the hard way in the Philippines at the turn of the century, and again in the Caribbean and Central America during the ’20s and ’30s. Sometimes you get hurt, that’s all. You do your best to prevent it, but you know ahead of time your best won’t always be good enough.”
“One of those things, eh?” Jerry laced the words with sarcasm. General Holmyard nodded somberly. Jerry went on, “When we were fighting in the Philippines at the turn of the century, though, we didn’t have to worry about the guerrillas getting the atom bomb, did we?”
“No, sir,” the general replied. “Of course, we didn’t have it ourselves, either.”
Would we have dropped one on the Philippines if we’d had it then? Duncan wondered. His guess was that we probably would have. How could Teddy Roosevelt have carried a bigger stick? And the Philippines were a long way away, and the people there were small and brown and had slanty eyes. They weren’t quite Japs, but…. Yeah, Teddy would have used the bomb if he’d had it.
With an effort, the Congressman pulled his thoughts back to the middle of the twentieth century. “Why haven’t we been able to recapture any of the physicists the fanatics kidnapped?” he asked.
General Holmyard looked even gloomier; Jerry hadn’t thought he could. “A couple of points there, sir,” he said. “First, we don’t know for a fact that the missing scientists ever entered our occupation zone. They may be under British or French administration, or even Russian.”
“So they may. The only thing we’re sure of is that they’re under Reinhard Heydrich’s administration. Isn’t that a fact?”
A muscle in Holmyard’s jaw twitched. But his nod seemed calm enough. “Yes, sir,” he said stolidly. “Another thing I need to point out is that, unfortunately, a nuclear physicist looks like anybody else when he’s not wearing a white lab coat. Coming up with these guys is like looking for multiple needles in a heck of a big haystack.”
“Terrific,” Jerry said, at which point the Democrat running the committee rapped loudly for order. “Sorry, Mr. Chairman,” Duncan told him. He wasn’t, but the forms had to be observed. “I only have a few more questions. The first one is, how likely are the fanatics to be able to manufacture their own atom bombs now that they know it’s possible?”
“Very unlikely, Congressman. I have that straight from General Groves,” Holmyard replied. Jerry winced; having run the Manhattan Project to a successful conclusion, Leslie Groves owned a named to conjure with. General Holmyard continued, “Atom bombs may be possible, but they aren’t easy or cheap. You need a sizable supply of uranium ore, and you need an even bigger industrial base. The Nazi fanatics have neither.”
“You’re sure they can’t get their hands on uranium?” Duncan said.
“When we entered Germany, we had a special team ordered to take charge of whatever the Germans were using to try and build their own bomb,” Rudyard Holmyard said. “That team did a first-rate job. The War Department is confident Heydrich’s goons can’t come up with anything along those lines.”
“The War Department was also confident the Germans would stop fighting after they signed their surrender,” Jerry pointed out. The chairman banged the gavel again. Jerry didn’t care. He’d wanted to get in the last word, and now he had. “No further questions,” he said, and stepped away from the microphone.
None of the other Congressmen raked General Holmyard over the coals the way Jerry had. Of course, the majority of the committee members were Democrats, but the rest of the Republicans also stayed cautious. The Democrats wished the issue of Germany would dry up and blow away. Too many men on the same side of the aisle as Jerry Duncan didn’t have the nerve to reach out and grab it with both hands.