"If you want command of the army group, sir, you won't get it." Now Abell's voice was as icy as Dowling had ever heard it, which said a good deal.

"No, no, no. I wasn't asking for myself. After a question like that, I wouldn't take it if you gave it to me on a silver platter," Dowling said. "But if we've got somebody better than that scrawny bastard handy, we ought to use him."

The General Staff officer relaxed fractionally. "Since you put it that way…Well, General Morrell is busy in Georgia, which is also of vital importance. And General MacArthur is the man on the spot, and familiar with conditions."

"All right," Dowling said. It wasn't, not really, but he'd made the effort. "When we're ready down there, I'll do everything I can."

C larence Potter was so glad to get away from Georgia and George Patton that he almost didn't mind shuttling back and forth between Richmond and Lexington every few days. President Featherston couldn't seem to make up his mind whether he wanted Potter to pick up his work in Intelligence again or act as liaison with the uranium-bomb project.

Either way, Potter figured he was better suited to the work than he was to commanding a division under Patton. As far as he could see, the only things that suited a man to command a division under Patton were a rhino's hide and an uncanny ability to turn off one's brain. That probably wasn't fair-Patton had grievances with him, too. Potter didn't much care. Not dealing with Patton was such a pleasure.

Of course, not dealing with the general meant dealing with the President of the CSA-and, incidentally, with Professor FitzBelmont. But Potter had been dealing with Jake Featherston since the Great War, and he scared the living bejesus out of the professor. He could handle both of those jobs without wanting to retread his stomach lining twice a day.

FitzBelmont was a man facing a problem all too common in the CSA these days: he was trying to do a key job without quite enough men or resources, and with the damnyankees pounding the crap out of him from the air. Back before the United States found out what was going on there, Washington University had been a lovely, leafy, grassy campus. Potter remembered what a joy coming to Lexington had been after the devastation visited on Richmond.

Lexington was making up for lost time these days. Everything except the uranium-bomb project had abandoned the university campus, which looked like a real-estate poster for a subdivision in one of the ritzier neighborhoods of hell. The slagged and cratered earth might have caught smallpox. Ruins of what had been elegant, graceful buildings, many dating back before the War of Secession, offered a sorry reminder of better times. Only the square, brutal simplicity of reinforced concrete, ton upon ton of it, had any hope of surviving the Yankees' nightly visits.

Down below that concrete, the pile was turning uranium into jovium, which was what FitzBelmont had christened element 94. Enough jovium would go boom, just like U-235. Making it go boom, though, wasn't so simple.

"With U-235, we could shoot a plug into a hole in a bigger chunk, and then everything would go up," FitzBelmont said.

"Why can't you do that with the jovium, too?" Potter asked.

"Our calculations show it would start going off too soon and get too deformed for a full blast," the physicist answered.

"Well, you seem to think you can make it go off," Potter said, and Henderson FitzBelmont nodded. Potter asked what looked like the next reasonable question: "How?"

"We have to slam a lot of pieces down into a sphere-that's what the math says," FitzBelmont replied. "It's harder than making a U-235 bomb would be, because it's so much more precise. But getting the jovium is easier, because we can chemically separate it from the uranium in the pile."

"My chemistry prof at Yale told me transmutation was nothing but a pipe dream," Potter said.

"Mine told me the same thing." FitzBelmont shrugged. "Sometimes the rules change. They did here. Transmutation isn't chemistry-it's physics."

"It could be black magic, and I wouldn't care," Potter said. "As long as we say, 'Abracadabra!' before the damnyankees do, nothing else counts."

"They're doing their best to make sure we don't. Are we doing the same to them?" the professor asked.

"What we can. Getting to Washington State isn't easy for us, and it got tougher after they went and grabbed Baja California from Mexico," Potter said. Henderson FitzBelmont looked blank. He was no military man. Patiently, Potter explained: "It makes it much harder for us to get ships and subs out of Guaymas. But we did it not so long ago, and we attacked their facility."

"And?" FitzBelmont asked eagerly.

"And past that I don't know," Potter admitted. "The attack went in-that's all I can tell you for sure. The United States keep real quiet about their project, same as we keep quiet about ours. We haven't picked up any leaks to let us know what we did-none I've heard, anyhow."

"We can't hit them the way they hit us," FitzBelmont said mournfully. "And it looks like they started work on this before we did."

Potter had been worrying about those very things for quite a while now. Except for getting the latest strike at the Yankee project started, he couldn't do much but worry. "That means we have to be smarter," he told the physicist. "We're up to that, aren't we? If we make fewer mistakes and don't get stuck in blind alleys, we can still win. You're as good as anybody they've got, right?" You'd better be, or we're history.

"Yes, I think so," FitzBelmont replied. "They may well have more highly competent people than we do, though. And I worry about Germany a good deal. The Kaiser's physicists, and the ones he can draw from Austria-Hungary, are the best in the world. Has the President been able to get any technical help from our allies?"

"If he has, he hasn't told me," Potter said. "I'll ask him next time I'm in Richmond."

That was only a couple of days later. Traveling inside Richmond was safer by day. U.S. airplanes mostly came at night. Confederate defenses and fighters still made daytime raids too costly to be common. The bombers had taken a terrible toll all the same. Intact buildings stood out because they were so rare. The streets were full of holes of all sizes. The smell of death floated through the air.

The grounds to the Gray House might have been hit harder than anything else in Richmond. The United States wanted Jake Featherston dead. They wanted to avenge Al Smith, and they thought the Confederacy would grind to a halt without its leader. Potter feared they were right, too, which made him leery of plots against Featherston.

After going underground, after a couple of unpleasantly thorough searches, he was escorted to the waiting room outside the President's office, and then into Featherston's presence. The President's secretary sniffed as she closed the door behind him.

"Lulu doesn't much fancy you." Jake Featherston sounded amused, which was a relief. "She doesn't reckon you think I'm wonderful enough."

How right she is. But saying that was impolitic. "The country needs you. I know it." Potter could tell the truth without giving away his own feelings.

"What's the latest from Lexington?" Featherston asked, letting Lulu go.

"They're doing everything they know how to do, and the United States are trying to make sure they can't," Potter answered. "Do you know what we did in Washington State?"

"Something," the President answered. "They've had repair crews in there-I know that for a fact. Don't know much more, though."

How did he know even that much? A spy on the spot? Reconnaissance aircraft? Intercepted signals? Whatever the answer was, the word hadn't come through Potter. "How are things in Georgia?" he asked. The wireless didn't say much, which was never a good sign.