There is a good chance that I’ll be gone before any letter you might write could get here, so you can save stamps. I have no idea where I’ll be stationed in the States, but perhaps I’ll be able to come to Memphis to see you. I would like very much to buy you the most elaborate dinner the Peabody dining room has to offer. Please say hello to Ann, and if you’d like to risk the paper and a stamp, write your Fond Pen Pal, “He’s been hurt,” Sarah said to Ann.
“Not seriously. He had some kind of an accident.”
“He’s lying through his teeth,” Ann said, Sarah looked at her in surprise. Ann walked back out of the bedroom and returned with the manila envelope in which she had all the rest of the story, copies of the radiogram, and the letters from the Chinese embassy and from Peter Doug lass, Jr.” and the clippings from Time and Life.
“He looks terrible,” Sarah said when she saw the photographs. “He looks starved.”
“He’s alive,” Ann said.
“And he’s coming home.”
“Why didn’t you show me this stuff before?”
Sarah demanded. Ann shrugged her shoulders. “I was suffering from perfectly normal postnatal depression,” Sarah said furiously.
“I wasn’t crazy!” Ann smiled at her. Sarah thought of something else.
“Have you heard from Dick Canidy?
A “Not from or about,” Ann said. “Well, they’re probably keeping him busy,” Sarah said, “and he just hasn’t had time to write.”
“Sure,” Ann said.
“Either that, or there is a Chinese girl, or girls, or an American nurse, or an English nurse, or all of the above.”
“You don’t know that,” Sarah said. “I know Richard Canidy, damn him,” Ann said.
FOUR I Warm Springs, Georgia June 8, 1942
The President of the United States and Colonel William J. Donovan took their lunch, fried chicken and a potato salad, on the flagstone patio outside Roosevelt’s cottage. The two were shielded from the view of other patients and visitors at the poliomyelitis care center by a green latticework fence. Roosevelt had a guest, who vanished immediately on the arrival of Donovan by car from Atlanta. Donovan wondered why he was surprised and shocked. Roosevelt was a man, even if his legs were crippled. Eleanor, he well knew, could be a pain in the ass. Barbara Whittaker was far more charming, and certainly better-looking, and Chesly Whittaker had died in the bed of a woman young enough to be his daughter.
Why should he expect Roosevelt to be a saint? And, he told himself, in any event it was none of his business. He had come to Georgia to discuss the war, and what COI was doing to help win THE SECRET WARRIORS N TO it, Whether Franklin Roosevelt was getting a little on the side had nothing to do with that. The most important thing on Roosevelt’s mind at lunch was neither the beating the nation was taking in the Pacific nor even the first American counter stroke, Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, scheduled for the fall. What he wanted to discuss was the super bomb. Donovan had previously learned that while the experiments at the reactor at the University of Chicago were by no means near completion they had yet to try for a chain reaction-Dr. Conant of Harvard had reported that the scientists were more and more confident that things were going to work. After these reports Roosevelt had been so confident-or, Donovan thought, so desperate-that he had authorized a virtual blank check on his secret war appropriations funds to go ahead with the effort. As of June 1, under an Army Corps of Engineers officer, Brigadier General Leslie R.
Groves, the Manhattan Project had come into being, with the mission of developing a bomb whose explosive force would come from atomic fission.
Manhattan had been chosen for the project name in the hope that the enormous expenditures about to be made would be connected with Manhattan Island, rather than the facilities being built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Han ford, Washington, and in the deserts of the Southwest.
The Office of the Coordinator of Information had so far been involved in this program in the operation that had located and brought to the United States Grunier, the French mining engineer who had worked before the war for Union Mini re in the Belgian Congo. One of the very few known sources of uraninite ore, from which it was theoretically possible to extract uranium 235, was in Katanga Province of the Belgian Congo. From Grunier it had been learned that there were in fact many tons of uraninite in Katanga Province lying around as by-products of other Union Mini re mining and smelting operations. Some of it had simply been removed and pushed aside as slag during copper and tin mining operations. A few people questioned how much to trust Grunier, for he had been brought involuntarily to the United States from Morocco where he was working in phosphate mining. His family was in France, and he was understandably concerned for their welfare. This concern was promptly used as leverage by COI He was thus prevailed upon to draw maps. Donovan then sent an so a agent to the Belgian Congo from South Africa who had returned with fifty pounds of uraninite ore in twenty bags. The source of each bag was labeled according to which pile of spellings it came from. Twelve of his packages turned out to be useless. They were not what Grunier thought–or at least so he told the COI interrogators-were supplies of uraninite. Seven more samples had not contained enough uraninite to make refining possible.