Tilting the Balance

The chess game hadn’t crossed Mordechai’s mind once since the sound of airplane engines made him go outside. Now he walked back over to the board. Thanks to the pawn move Ussishkin had crowed about, he couldn’t attack with his queen as he’d planned. He shifted the piece to a square farther back along the diagonal than he’d intended.

Fast as a striking snake, Judah Ussishkin moved a knight. It neatly forked the queen and one of Mordechai’s rooks. He stared in dismay. Here was another game he wasn’t going to win-and Ussishkin was right, he hated to lose.

All at once, though, it didn’t seem to matter so much. All right, so he’d lose at chess one more time. He’d played a different game tonight, and won it.

Leslie Groves looked down the table at the scientists from the Metallurgical Laboratory. “The fate of the United States-and probably the world-depends on your answer to this question: how do we turn the theoretical physics of a working atomic pile into practical engineering? We have to industrialize the process as fast as we can.”

“A certain amount of caution is indicated,” Arthur Compton said. “By what we’ve been told, they’re paying in Germany for rushing ahead with no thought for consequences.”

“That was an engineering flaw we’ve already uncovered, wasn’t it?” Groves said.

“A flaw? You might say so.” Enrico Fermi made a fine Latin gesture of contempt. “When their pile went critical, they had no way to shut it down again-and so the reaction continued, out of control. For all I know, it continues still; no one can get close enough to find out for certain. It cost the Germans many able men, whatever we may think of them politically.”

“Heisenberg,” someone said softly. An almost invisible pall of gloom seemed to descend on the table. Many of the assembled physicists had known the dead German; you couldn’t be a nuclear physicist without knowing his work.

“I am not about to let a foreign accident slow down our own program,” Groves said, “especially when it’s an accident we won’t have. What were they doing, throwing pieces of cadmium metal into the heavy water of their pile to try to slow it down? We’ve designed better than that.”

“In this particular regard, yes,” Leo Szilard said. “But who can say what other problems may be lurking in the metaphysical undergrowth?”

Groves gave the Hungarian scientist an unfriendly look. However brilliant he was, he was always finding ways things could go wrong. Maybe he was so imaginative, he saw flaws no one else would. Or maybe he just liked to borrow trouble.

Whichever it was, Groves didn’t intend to put up with it. He growled, “If we never tried anything new, we wouldn’t have to worry about anything going wrong. Of course, If we’d had that attitude all along, the Lizards would have conquered us about twenty minutes after they landed here, because we’d all have been living in villages and sacrificing goats whenever we had a thunderstorm. So we will go ahead and see what the problems are. Objections?”

No one had any. Groves nodded, satisfied. The physicists were a bunch of prima donnas such as he’d never had to deal with in the Army, but no matter how high in the clouds their heads were, they had their hearts in the right place.

He said, “Okay, back to square one. What do we have to do to turn our experimental pile here into a bomb factory?”

“Get out of Denver,” Jens Larssen muttered. Groves glowered at him; he’d had enough of Larssen’s surly attitude.

Then, to his surprise, he noticed several other physicists were nodding. Groves did his best to smooth out his features. “Why?” he asked as mildly as he could.

Larssen looked around; maybe he didn’t want the floor. But he’d opened his mouth and so he had it. He reached into a shirt pocket, as if digging for a pack of cigarettes. Not coming up with one, he said, “Why? The most important reason is we don’t have the water we’ll need.”

“Like any other energy source, a nuclear pile also generates heat,” Fermi amplified. “Running water makes an effective coolant. Whether we can divert enough water here from other uses is an open question.”

Groves said, “How much are we going to need? The Mississippi? The Lizards are holding most of it these days, I’m afraid.”

He’d intended that for sarcasm. Fermi didn’t take it as such. He said, “That being so, the Columbia is probably best for our purposes. It is swift-flowing, with a large volume of water, and the Lizards are not strong in the Northwest.”

“You want this operation to move again, after we’ve just gotten set up here?” Groves demanded. “You want to pack everything up into wagons and haul it over the Rockies?” What he wanted to do was start heaving nuclear physicists out the window, Nobel laureates first.

“A move like the move we made from Chicago, no, that would not be necessary,” Fermi said. “We can keep this facility intact, continue to use it for research. But production, as you call it, would be better placed elsewhere.”