The Grapple

“If they bomb Lexington fifty times, there won’t be anything left,” Henderson FitzBelmont said, horror in his eyes. “There’s not a whole lot left now.”

“Town’s been lucky up till now,” Jake remarked. Off in the Blue Ridge Mountains, without much industry to draw enemy bombers, Lexington had largely escaped the war. The President of the CSA leaned forward. He could think of only one reason bombers would visit Lexington. “How much damage did they do to the project?”

“Well, sir, the works weren’t badly hurt. A lot of bombs hit around them, but not very many on them,” FitzBelmont answered.

“That’s good news!” Jake meant it from the bottom of his heart. The sooner the CSA got uranium bombs, the better-it couldn’t be too soon.

FitzBelmont raised a warning hand. “It’s not so simple, Mr. President. I wish it were. We lost several men who specialized in enriching the uranium we have and extracting element ninety-four from it-jovium, we’re calling that.”

“Wait a minute. Ninety-four? Uranium’s ninety-two, right? What happened to ninety-three?” Jake Featherston could no more become a nuclear physicist than a clam could fly. But he had a devil of a memory for details.

“Element ninety-three-saturnium, we’re calling it right now-doesn’t have an isotope that yields a useful fission product,” FitzBelmont answered.

“It won’t go boom?” Jake Featherston translated academese into English.

“It won’t go boom.” The professor looked pained, but he nodded. “And Martin, Collins, Delancey, and Dean knew more about isolating jovium than anybody else, and the raid killed three of them and left Delancey…well, maimed.” He grimaced. “I saw him afterwards. It’s not pretty.”

Jake had seen a great many horrors in his life. Henderson FitzBelmont probably hadn’t. He looked a little too young to have fought in the Great War. Chances were he didn’t go in for street fighting, either. “How long will he be out?” Featherston asked.

“I don’t know yet, sir. He’s lost a leg and a hand,” FitzBelmont answered. “He won’t be back soon-I can tell you that.”

“Damn!” Jake said. FitzBelmont wasn’t kidding when he said Delancey’d got maimed. “All right, then. Who are your next best people in Lexington? Who can you bring in from somewhere else? The work has to go on, even if you take casualties. That’s part of what war’s all about.”

“I understand that, but physicists are harder to replace than riflemen,” Professor FitzBelmont said stiffly. So there, Featherston thought. The professor went on, “Just about everyone in the Confederacy who could help is already in Lexington. There weren’t very many nuclear physicists here to begin with. We might be able to bring in a few men from Tulane. They won’t begin to fill the shoes of the people we lost, though. The ones I mentioned were only the most important.”

“Damn!” Featherston said again. “So that means the Yankees sure as hell know where we’re working on the bomb.” Henderson V. FitzBelmont blinked behind his spectacles. Jake spelled it out for him: “Why the fuck else would they plaster Lexington? Your uranium works is the only thing going on there that matters to the war.”

“How…unfortunate,” FitzBelmont muttered.

“Tell me about it!” Featherston pointed to the situation map. “The country’s in trouble, Professor. If anybody’s got a chance to save it, you’re the man. Whatever you need, we’ll give you.”

“What I need most is time. If you hadn’t sent me packing when I first came to you…”

FitzBelmont had nerve, to remind Jake of his mistakes. The President of the CSA sighed heavily. “Ask me for something I’ve got, dammit. Yeah, I was wrong. There. You happy? Not many people ever heard me say that, and you better believe it. But I thought you were selling me snake oil. Can you blame me? It sounded too fantastic to be true. Still does, but I reckon it is.”

“Yes, sir, it is. The United States think so, too,” FitzBelmont said, which made Jake wince. The physicist went on, “If the Yankees hit us once in Lexington, aren’t they likely to do it again? We may take more damage the next time around.”

“I’ve already pulled four antiaircraft batteries away from Richmond and sent ’em west,” Jake said. “I’ve pulled two wings of night fighters, too. We’ll get hit harder here, but we can live with that. We can’t live without you. I didn’t want to do anything special about Lexington before. If we had all kinds of defenses around a no-account little college town, the United States’d be bound to wonder why. Well, now the damnyankees know why, so we’ll do everything we can to hold ’em back.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.” FitzBelmont hesitated, then asked his question: “What do you think the odds are?”

“Not as good as I wish they were.” Featherston wanted to lie, but feared the USA would show he was lying in short order. “We can make hitting Lexington expensive for them. I know that for a fact. I can’t promise we’ll keep everything off you. How much time would you lose if you packed up and went somewhere else?”

“A good deal. Several weeks, anyhow-maybe months.” Henderson V. FitzBelmont eyed the map to which Jake had pointed. “Besides, where would we go?”

That was a much better question than the President wished it were. With airstrips in southern Te

By the expression on FitzBelmont’s face, he liked none of them. Neither did Jake Featherston. But he didn’t like leaving the facility where it was, either. The devil and the deep blue sea, he thought. Yet the devil lurked in the deep blue sea. U.S. submersibles prowled the Confederate coast. If they sank a ship with the uranium project aboard, they sank the CSA, too.

“How much of your work can you move underground?” he asked. “That’ll give the damnyankees a harder time, anyhow.”

“It will also involve delay.” But Professor FitzBelmont looked thoughtful. “With reinforced concrete above it, perhaps…”

“You need concrete? I’ll give you concrete till it’s coming out your ass,” Jake said. “And we’ll give the Yankees something new to think about pretty soon, too.”

“May I ask what?” The professor was starting to get the hang of security.

Normally, Jake wouldn’t have said boo, but he needed something to buck up FitzBelmont’s spirits-and his own. He made the rules. He could break them. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got us a project down in Huntsville, too. Pretty soon-any day now, matter of fact-we’ll be able to fire rockets with a ton of TNT in the nose a couple of hundred miles into Yankeeland. Let’s see ’em try and stop those, by God!”

“That would help. I can see as much. How accurate are they?”

“They can hit a city. They can’t hit a city block.” Jake stabbed a finger out at Professor FitzBelmont. “How heavy will your uranium bomb be? Put one of those in a rocket and it’d be the perfect weapon, near enough.”

“Calculations are still theoretical. The best estimate is on the close order of ten tons,” FitzBelmont answered.

“Shit!” Jake said feelingly. “Need bigger rockets or smaller bombs. Which do you reckon I could get first?”

“Since we don’t have any bomb at all yet, getting larger rockets would seem easier,” the professor said.

“Makes sense,” the President of the CSA agreed. “I’ll tell the boys in Huntsville to get on it, and pronto. Damnyankees haven’t sniffed them out yet, so they can work without having the sky fall on ’em.” He muttered under his breath. “Only a matter of time, probably. Spies everywhere. Everywhere, I tell you.” He made himself brighten. It wasn’t easy. “Wouldn’t that be something, though? A rocket big enough to throw a uranium bomb all the way to San Francisco and Seattle?”

“That would be…remarkable,” FitzBelmont said. “Of course, a just peace would be even better.”