The second sun, p.4
The Second Sun, page 4
He nodded. “Fair enough. But once I tell you, taking your leave, as you so quaintly put it, won’t be an option. And I wouldn’t tell you except for what I heard at the hospital. More importantly, what you heard. Remember what that prisoner said?”
I thought back. Weapons program. Our weapons program. The Germans had been doing something with uranium, but then the world fell in on them. That older one had implied, no, he’d outright said it: our weapons program. That meant the Japanese were doing something with uranium.
Van Rensselaer watched me work it out, his face inscrutable.
“You’re telling me,” I said, “that we’re trying to make some kind of a weapon out of uranium? And, secondly, that the Germans and the Japanese have also been trying to accomplish this? And, third, that the bit about Japan having such a program was news to you?”
He gave me an unfathomable look. “They told me you were smart and quick,” he said, finally. “First off, you, personally, face new circumstances. You no longer work for the CNO, by the way. My boss spoke to him this morning. You work for me now, for the moment, anyway. Go get your stuff from the BOQ and be back aboard this train by midnight. And then I’ll tell you about something called the Manhattan Project.”
“May I ask where are we going?” I asked, when I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“A middle of nowhere place in deepest, darkest Tennessee called Oak Ridge,” he replied. “Nice, small Appalachian town with a prewar population of around two thousand people. It’s grown somewhat since this project got going, but more on that later. Lots of rules, but the main one is never to say or write the words Manhattan Project. When I show you what it’s all about you will completely understand. Now: enough cryptic conversation. This train will be going straight through to Oak Ridge with this uranium. We’ll give you some time in a week or so to close out your lodgings in Washington and settle all local accounts, bills, and so on. Anyone close to you who might get upset if you just vanish?”
Vanish. I momentarily conjured up an image of Billy Peterson. Then a second image of six men in suits and sunglasses escorting him out of the gym.
Okay, this was definitely serious, I thought. So I shook my head. My parents had both passed away. I had no siblings. I was the original solitary man, even in the Navy.
“Good,” he said. “That helps.”
He paused for a moment. Van Rensselaer was a man who thought before speaking, something I admired. I’d been trying to adopt that habit for years.
“This project—this Manhattan Project—will, if it succeeds, put the power of the sun itself into the hands of man. Everything we know and think about weapons will change forever. War, itself, will be changed forever. The news that the Japanese are also attempting to do what we’re attempting to do is—shattering.
“We. Had. No. Fucking. Idea.
“It was the Germans we were worried about. They’ve surprised the Allies time and again with new, horrendous weapons we never thought possible. Giant ballistic missiles coming silently straight down out of the sky with two-thousand-pound warheads that flatten whole towns, jet-engine-powered fighters, height-finding radars. Two years ago, the Brits discovered the Nazis were making something called heavy water up in Norway. They asked their scientists what the hell heavy water was, and their guys told them to bomb that plant immediately if not sooner. You’ve heard of Albert Einstein?”
I nodded. Who hadn’t, although exactly what he did or thought about was still a mystery to regular humans. Strange-looking German guy with a big mop of hair and a disarming, almost childish grin.
“Well, back in 1942, Dr. Einstein wrote FDR a letter warning him that the German scientific community was trying to develop a bomb using atomic science. And uranium. FDR called him in and they talked. FDR then called in some of our top physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and metallurgists. That’s when he found out that research into getting vast quantities of energy out of purified uranium had been going on for over a decade, all over the world. This was news. The president’s reaction was to initiate a wartime program here to catch up. That’s the Manhattan Project nobody’s ever heard of. Or speaks about.
“Now Germany, facing the endgame and certain defeat, has thrown in the towel. We needed to defeat the Germans first, before we turned all our military strength against the Japanese. A cornered Nazi Germany with a weapon that could draw on the almost unlimited energy from an atomic device of some kind would certainly use it, unless they simply ran out of time. Which, thank the gods, they did. Our whole focus has been on that possibility; everyone just assumed that the Japanese, whose weapons have not advanced like the Germans’ stuff, and whose industrial base has been bled white by American submarine warfare, couldn’t begin to develop such a capability. Now all those assumptions have been undone by our little discussion in that hospital and the presence of a captured, large U-boat, bound for Japan, filled with uranium. The shock to the thousands of people we have working on this project in complete secrecy will be profound, magnified by the common knowledge that Japan will never, ever surrender.”
This was a lot to take in at such short notice; my expression must have revealed that I was simply stunned. Van Rensselaer was staring at me like an eagle about to grab its prey. Thousands of people? Since 1942? Where were they? Who were they?
“Of necessity, I’m going to pull you into the project, which I will explain later. From here on out, every day of your life will seem like GQ, day and night, just like mine. Especially now. If Japan succeeds before we do at what we’re now both trying to achieve, our casualties during an invasion will be one hundred percent, not the fifty being projected.”
Not surprisingly, I was speechless, because I didn’t know either what he was talking about regarding uranium or how I ever could be of use in what seemed like a galactic effort. Putting the best face on it, I told him I’d help in any way I could. As soon as I understood what the hell he was talking about.
“Go make preparations to get underway, Captain,” he said with total authority. “As I said, we’re going to Tennessee.”
SEVEN
THE NIGHT TRAIN
I’d come to New Hampshire expecting only a one-day stay, so I went straightaway to the shipyard’s Navy uniform shop and stocked up on extra work khakis, underwear, socks, and toiletries. I then went to the package store and purchased two bottles of Scotch.
Everything else that I owned—the rest of my uniforms, civvies, and a car—was in Washington. My parents had both been government bureaucrats. They’d owned a house in the Chevy Chase area of Washington, up at the northern end of Connecticut Avenue. It was no mansion but still a nice 1920s vintage two-story house on a half-acre lot, one block south of Military Avenue. My father had suffered a heart attack back in 1938, and my mother, unable or unwilling to cope, had turned her face to the wall one night a year later and died. As the only child, I’d inherited the house. I was at sea at the time, so I considered selling it, but another CO had advised me to hang on to it against the day when I had to go back to Washington for my post-command tour. I had no intentions of getting anywhere near Washington headquarters duty, but he’d just smiled. Wiggle as you might, Wolfe, that will happen sooner rather than later. So, when the hammer fell, I fortunately had a ready-made, fully furnished home. When I did go back to Washington and found out what a house like that cost in the capital in 1945, I’d been more than grateful to my friend.
I dropped my purchases in my BOQ room and went down to the BOQ office to use a telephone to call the admiral’s office. I felt as if I owed him some kind of back brief, having invaded his command on such short notice. Interestingly, he was “presently unavailable” and did I want to leave a message? I told his chief yeoman to thank him for all his help and say that I’d be leaving late tonight. The chief took that down, and then said: actually, Captain, I think he’s been informed about that. He’ll appreciate the courtesy. Have a good trip, sir.
Ah, I thought, the long arm of Captain Van Rensselaer at work, no doubt. Still, I thought it was only polite to make my manners. I told the desk I’d be checking out later that night (yessir, we know, they said) then went to my room for a nap. Afterward, I had dinner at the club and then, with bags in hand, went down to Pier 5 and checked in with the train staff. They took me to a sleeper room in one of the passenger cars. I worked on paperwork for a few hours, had a nightcap, and then went to bed. I’d looked out the window and seen that the unloading operation was still ongoing up on the pier. The crane with its spotlights lit up the pier as men in white protective gear struggled to bring those short, heavy barrels of—what, exactly?—aboard.
Uranium, I thought. That’s what. Advancing technology and scientific wonders had characterized my time in actual at-sea naval service since Pearl Harbor. New and better radars. Better sonars. Gun projectiles that no longer had to hit an airplane to bring it down. Air-conditioning aboard ship. Antibiotic medicines. UHF radios. And now an odd element from the exotic and large-atomic-weight end of the periodic table was suddenly center stage in some supersecret research project or weapons program. How could that be? Were they going to drop some on someone’s head?
I woke up late the next morning—eight o’clock. That notorious sleeping drug called clickety-clack had put me down for a good night’s sleep. I glanced out the window and saw what looked like the industrial backyard area of a major city flashing by. Drab warehouses. Small and large factories. Grimy neighborhoods. Sludge-filled canals. One startlingly large power plant with four brick smokestacks. A river, crisscrossed with different kinds of bridges. A prison or penitentiary. A real urban beauty pageant.
Ah, I thought. This must be New Jersey.
I put on working khakis and made my way to the dining car, which was full. A waiter pointed me to an empty seat where three enlisted Marines were having breakfast. They tried to stand up when they saw the silver eagles on my shirt collars but I waved them down.
“Morning, gentlemen,” I said. “What’s good for breakfast?”
“Morning, sir,” they replied in a respectful chorus. “Coffee’s not bad.”
I got some coffee, then eggs and bacon. They finished up and I had to get up to let them out, but then I had the four-seat dining table to myself. For about one minute. Captain Van Rensselaer showed up. He, too, was in working uniform. He sat down opposite, and I got the impression from the waiters that we wouldn’t be joined by anybody else, even though I could see there were several soldiers still waiting for tables.
Van Rensselaer looked tired. I could guess why—the unloading operation had been going strong when I’d gone to bed and I’m sure he’d been there, supervising. I had a million questions, but decided to let him tell me things when he was ready. And besides, this was a rather public venue, with dozens of undoubtedly straining ears all around us.
He got coffee and asked for a donut. The waiter said they were all out, but he could rustle up some toast and marmalade. Van Rensselaer shook his head and stuck with just coffee.
“As I said, what we heard yesterday came as a real surprise,” he said. I was a bit surprised myself. Here? I thought. You’re gonna talk about this here?
“This project is an Army show,” he continued. “There are two chains of command, ending at the White House. One chain involves just about every university in the country with a strong scientific and engineering reputation. The other involves the Army and its air forces.”
I leaned forward. “Shouldn’t we do this in your office?” I asked.
His tired eyes looked up. I think he was so tired he didn’t know where he was, but then he realized. “Absolutely,” he said, shaking his head. “Damn! Thank you.”
“You should eat something,” I said. “You need fuel.”
“I don’t eat much,” he said, starting to get up. Then he swayed a bit and sat back down. That unnaturally tall body had just reminded him that, yes, it needed fuel. I signaled the waiter and told him to bring us some bacon, eggs, toast, marmalade, and whatever else he had. He was back in five minutes, and Van Rensselaer tucked in with sudden enthusiasm.
I’d seen guys like this before. The entire weight of the world on their shoulders. No sense of how to pace themselves. I wasn’t an athlete, but I did know something about calories out and calories in. If you did a full set of weights and then didn’t rehydrate and refuel, you could pass out in the gym’s parking lot. And I knew what was coming next. A full load of carbohydrates and protein after eating very little would have him asleep in about ten minutes. I knew he had a suite in that command car, but I hadn’t seen any connections to that car from the rest of the train. I took him back to my room and then told him I needed to hit the head. When I came back, he was sound asleep in the cabin’s one reclining chair.
I left him to it and went back to the now almost empty dining car with my briefcase. I took up residence at one of the corner tables while the staff cleaned up after breakfast. I realized as I sat down that this paperwork was probably no longer mine to work, but old habits die hard. Once we got to Washington, I’d go back to Main Navy and perhaps turn over my duties to—whom? That was assuming we were going to stop in Washington. Of course we were. Washington had this great suction effect on any govvie getting near it. Everybody official who came near Washington always stopped, if only to kiss a few rings and otherwise get a little visibility.
Except—we didn’t. We went through the maze of tracks and switches around Union Station at a sedate pace with lots of clicking and clacking and whistle blowing, but we never stopped moving. In fact, I noticed that our train was the only train moving in that ordinarily bustling rail hub. Every other visible train was stopped. I even saw some military personnel along the tracks. Armed soldiers posted next to panting steam locomotives or one of the new, rumbling diesels. High-priority military train coming through; everybody freeze in place, please. Wow.
We did stop on a gated siding just outside of Richmond to add six more boxcars that looked like general freight and one more of these newfangled long-haul diesel engines, positioned at the back of the train. I took the opportunity to get off and stretch my legs, as did many others. The Army guys set up a cordon around the two unmarked freight cars. Typical Army move. The two cars had been totally inconspicuous. Now, of course, they weren’t.
A steady stream of trucks came and went, loading “stuff” into the additional boxcars. After about an hour the farthest forward engine, which was now a steamer, sounded a long blast on her whistle and the crowd on the landing scurried to get back aboard. I went back to my compartment and found Van Rensselaer gone. My turn for a nap.
That evening we stopped again, I wasn’t sure where, so I stayed aboard. I’d missed lunch so I went back to the dining car and took up residence at “my” corner table, determined to be in place before the hordes arrived. There a messenger found me and asked me to accompany him back to the command car. I discovered there was a way to get from the main train to his car, through a canvas-covered tunnel that required me to step over the open-air coupling and the ties flashing below. The messenger delivered me to Van Rensselaer’s private suite at the front end, where he offered me a Scotch-rocks and then we sat down at the conference table.
He sat there for a few minutes while we enjoyed the whiskey and he gathered his thoughts. He’d been one year ahead of me at the academy, but as the late afternoon sunlight came through the windows, his face was that of an old man. I suppose I looked old, too, but his face showed the wear and tear of four years of wartime, not warfare. Not shooting war, but the perhaps even more insidious grinding down that came with endless political, diplomatic, and bureaucratic pressures, combined with the notion that everything depended on his not screwing something up. These were the pressures that forged energetic, outgoing, full-of-life, national election–winning presidents of the United States into quiet-speaking, hollow-eyed human ingots of case-hardened, gray-haired steel. In the federal bureaucracy, there was rarely if ever a clear winner. They just shape-shifted and came back at you through another door.
Van Rensselaer had never had the opportunity to experience the rush of battle, where you put the intellectual side of your brain into a corner and let the lizard brain cry: havoc! If you live through it, as I had, you find yourself weirdly refreshed, renewed, and with rising confidence moderated by a sudden, keen understanding of what a huge role luck plays in actual combat when you finally compile your casualty list. He’d missed all that, so I did not prod. Finally, with his eyes now closed, he resumed his lecture.
“The Manhattan Project is about creating a weapon of such unbelievable power that one such weapon, detonated over a large modern city, will reduce that city to blackened ashes in one-thousandth of a second and burn every living being in that city into a bleak carbon stain on whatever ground they stood on when it detonated.”
I gulped. That was clear enough, if more than a little scary. One weapon? He went on.
“This weapon,” he said, “will summon the fires of the sun itself for just long enough to utterly destroy anything and everything within its sight. It draws its power from the energy contained in atoms, the smallest things in the physical universe. I’m talking about the energy required to hold together each individual atom, with its nucleus and with a varying number of electrons and other particles orbiting about that nucleus. It is a mysterious force the physicists call atomic energy. It is minuscule, when measured atom by atom. But the physicists discovered that in every physical substance on earth: iron, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, gold, chlorine, uranium—all those arcane symbols on the periodic table of the elements—there are billions and billions of these atoms. Then some genius realized that there must be some kind of energy present that is strong enough that you can hold a solid ounce of, say iron, in your hand and feel it, see it, weigh it, work it, forge it, melt it, hammer it—do all of those things and yet still have a piece of iron in your hand—and, secondly, that the sum of all that energy sitting in your hand must be enormous. Beyond enormous.”
