Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

not to strain his bum heart. “It’s impossible, of course.” We grabbed a taxi from

the stand in front of the office building and headed for the Department.

But it was possible, and Manning agreed to it, after the Chief of Staff presented

his case. Manning had to be convinced, for there is no way on earth for anyone, even

the President himself, to order a congressman to leave his post, even though he

happens to be a member of the military service, too.

Page 42

The Chief of Staff had anticipated the political difficulty and had been

forehanded enough to have already dug up an opposition congressman with whom to pair

Manning’s vote for the duration of the emergency. This other congressman, the

Honorable Joseph T. Brigham, was a reserve officer who wanted to go to duty

himself-or was willing to; I never found out which. Being from the opposite

political party, his vote in the House of Representatives could be permanently

paired against Manning’s and neither party would lose by the arrangement.

There was talk of leaving me in Washington to handle the political details

of Manning’s office, but Manning decided against it, judging that his other

secretary could do that, and announced that I must go along as his adjutant. The

Chief of Staff demurred, but Manning was in a position to insist, and the Chief had

to give in.

A chief of staff can get things done in a hurry if he wants to. I was sworn

in as a temporary officer before

we left the building; before the day was out I wa the bank, signing a note to pay

for the sloppy ser uniforms the Army had adopted and to buy a d uniform with a

beautiful shiny belt-a dress uniform which, as it turned out, I was never to need.

We drove over into Maryland the next day and l”~’ fling took charge of the

Federal nuclear research oratory, known officially by the hush-hush title of1

Department Special Defense Project No. 347. I di know a lot about physics and

nothing about mo atomic physics, aside from the stuff you read in Sunday

supplements. Later, I picked up a smatter mostly wrong, I suppose, from associating

with heavyweights with whom the laboratory was stal Colonel Manning had taken an

Army p.g. cours Massachusetts Tech and had received a master of ence degree for a

brilliant thesis on the mathemal theories of atomic structure. That was why the Army

had to have him for this job. But that had been s years before; atomic theory had

turned several c wheels in the meantime; he admitted to me tha had to bone like the

very devil to try to catch up tc point where he could begin to understand what

highbrow charges were talking about in their rep I think he overstated the degree of

his ignora. there was certainly no one else in the United St who could have done the

job. It required a man

could direct and suggest research in a highly esot field, but who saw the problem

from the standpoii

urgent military necessity Left to themselves the physicists would have reveled in

the intellectual luxury ofan unlimited research expense account, but, while they

undoubtedly would have made major advances in human knowledge, they might never have

developed anything of military usefulness, or the military possibilities of a

discovery might be missed for years.

It’s like this: It takes a smart dog to hunt birds, it takes a hunter

behind him to keep him from wasting time chasing rabbits. And the hunter needs to

know nearly as much as the dog.

No derogatory reference to the scientists is intended-by no means! We had

all the genius in the field that the United States could produce, men from Chicago,

Columbia, Cornell, M. I. T., Cal Tech, Berkeley, every radiation laboratory in the

country, as well as a couple of broad-A boys lent to us by the British. And they had

every facility that ingenuity could think up and money could build. The

five-hundred-ton cyclotron which had originally been intended for the University of

California was there, and was already obsolete in the face of the new gadgets these