The university sat at the top of a sloping meadow at the northwest edge of Lexington. Professor FitzBelmont’s office, in one of the red brick buildings with white porticoes at the heart of the campus, had a fine view of the forested mountains to the west. The professor’s tweeds seemed far more appropriate here than Potter’s butternut uniform.

With such patience as Potter could muster, he said, “I have to understand this business as well as I can, Professor, to be able to give my people in the United States the best possible idea of what to look for.”

“Indeed.” Professor FitzBelmont looked like a maiden aunt called upon to discuss the facts of life with the madam of the local bawdyhouse. He looked just like that, in fact. He might not approve of Clarence Potter the soldier, but he definitely didn’t approve of Clarence Potter the spy.

Potter nodded to himself. He’d seen that before. “Professor, there isn’t a country in the world that can get along without an intelligence service. We spy on the damnyankees, yes, and you can bet your bottom dollar they spy on us, too. If they’re ahead of us in this uranium business, we need to do everything we can to catch up, don’t we?”

“Indeed,” FitzBelmont repeated, even more distaste in his voice than he’d shown the time before.

“Sir, you were the one who brought this to the President’s attention. You must have done that because you’re a patriotic citizen,” Potter said.

“I don’t want those people to beat my country again.” Henderson FitzBelmont packed more scorn into that than most Confederates did into damnyankees. He went on, “If that makes me a patriot, so be it. But if you expect me to jump up on my hind legs and shout, ‘Freedom!’ every other sentence, I fear you will be disappointed in me.”

He was either braver or more naive than Potter had thought-maybe both. The Intelligence officer said, “I don’t do that, either.” FitzBelmont’s eyebrow was eloquently skeptical. Potter continued, “By God, sir, I don’t. My politics have always been Whig, and I did everything I could to keep Jake Featherston from getting elected.” That was not only true, it was a spectacular understatement. He could talk about it, too, because it was common knowledge. Talking about going up to Richmond in 1936 with a pistol in his pocket was a different story. He finished, “I’m also a Confederate patriot, though. For better or worse”-for better and worse-“this is my country.”

Professor FitzBelmont studied him, perhaps seeing the man instead of the uniform this time. “Maybe,” he said at last.

“Maybe isn’t the right answer, Professor,” Clarence Potter said gently. “You can talk to me now, or you can have some less pleasant conversations with some much less pleasant people later on. Your call, either way.”

FitzBelmont didn’t try to misunderstand him. The physics professor did try to get huffy. “This is not the right way to get my cooperation, General. And if I don’t work with you wholeheartedly, how will you go forward?”

Potter’s smile, all sharp teeth, might have been borrowed from a gator. He named four physics profs at universities scattered across the CSA. Henderson V. FitzBelmont looked appalled. Still smiling carnivorously, Potter said, “Give me credit for doing my homework, please. If you were the only fellow in the country who could do this work, we couldn’t compete with the Yankees anyhow, because they have so much more manpower than we do-and that includes trained manpower along with every other kind. You may be important, Professor-you are important-but you’re not indispensable, and you’d better get used to it.”

Plainly, FitzBelmont wanted to be indispensable. How many years had he been the next thing to invisible? A lot, no doubt-who paid attention to a bespectacled physics professor? Well, important would damn well have to do. With a sigh, FitzBelmont said, “Tell me what you already know.”

“There are two kinds of uranium. U-235 will go boom. U-238 won’t, but maybe, if you do things to it, it will turn into something else that will go boom. I don’t quite follow that part. It seems like magic. But anyway, most of the uranium is 238, and it’s going to be harder than hell to separate the 235 out of it.” Potter paused. “How am I doing?”

“You’ll never make a physicist,” Professor FitzBelmont said.

“I don’t want to be a physicist. That’s your job,” Potter said. “I want to know enough to be able to do my job. Tell me what my people need to look for to tell whether the damnyankees are separating 235 from 238, or if they’re doing this other stuff with 238 to make it go boom.”

He’d asked FitzBelmont the same thing when he first walked into the professor’s office. If FitzBelmont had started talking then, he could have saved both of them some time. Potter approved of saving time wherever he could. Some people, though, had to work up to things by easy stages.

Potter had done more homework than he’d shown the physics professor; he believed in keeping a couple of hole cards hidden. All the same, once FitzBelmont did start talking he had a hard time keeping up. Gaseous diffusion, thermal diffusion, centrifuges…

Those were complicated enough, but what FitzBelmont called an atomic engine was worse. “Wait a minute,” Potter protested. “You really change the U-238 into another element?”

“That’s right.” FitzBelmont nodded.

“When I went to Yale back before the last war, my chemistry professor told us transmutation was impossible,” Potter said.

“So that’s why you talk the way you do,” Henderson FitzBelmont murmured. He shrugged narrow shoulders and went on, “Your chemistry professor was right, in a way. You can’t transmute elements chemically. Chemistry only has to do with the electrons around the nucleus. Change the nucleus, though, and you change the atom. And nuclear processes are much more energetic than chemical ones.”

“Do you have any idea how long it will take us or the Yankees to get the 235 for a bomb or to get one of your atomic engines going?” Potter asked. “Can we do it in this war? Can they?”

“Turning theory into engineering is never simple,” FitzBelmont said. “The researchers in the USA must think they can do it fast, or they wouldn’t be putting so much effort into it. And who knows where the Germans are? They were the ones who discovered uranium fission in the first place, after all.”

“Are England and France working on this stuff, too?” Potter asked.

“I’d be amazed if they weren’t. They have some talented people-more than we do, probably.” The parenthetical phrase, while true, plainly made Professor FitzBelmont unhappy. It made Clarence Potter unhappy, too. It was true in more areas than nuclear physics. The Confederacy’s biggest problem had always been doing all the things it needed to do with the number of white men it had to do them. Doing all of them had proved beyond its ability in the Great War. Potter had to hope it wouldn’t this time around.

That one of the things the CSA’s whites had to do was hold down the country’s blacks made things no easier. The Freedom Party’s determination to settle that mess once and for all helped justify its rule in Potter’s eyes. If whites didn’t have to worry about niggers, they could get on with the serious business of building the country they should have had from the beginning.

Incorporating blacks into the pool of trained manpower would also have reduced the drain on whites and on the CSA generally, but it never once crossed Clarence Potter’s mind-or those of any other whites in the Confederate States. They’d experimented with colored soldiers in the Great War… and some of those men, who’d learned what fighting was about, remained in arms against the CSA even now. No one in authority would make that mistake again.

Potter pulled his thoughts back to the business at hand. “You don’t know for a fact what the British and French are up to?”