Heroes by David Hagberg (reading cloud ebooks TXT) 📗

was going to be very hard to leave her and the baby—very hard, because he had committed the sin of sins for a deep cover agent in enemy territory: He had fallen in love with one of the natives.

He shuddered.

“I don’t blame you,” Catherine said. “I wouldn’t want to go out there this morning.” The baby started to cry again, and she looked toward the bedroom door. “Have a cup of soup or something, at the canteen. Promise me?”

“All right,” Schey said, looking deeply into her eyes. She read something in his look, because her hand went to her mouth.

But then Schey turned and went to the back door where he took his coat down from its hook and pulled it on. The baby was crying louder now, and he was coughing.

“I’ll be home a little after noon,” Schey said to Catherine, and he went out the back door, leaving her standing in the kitchen, a strange look on her face.

She knew, Schey told himself as he hunched up his coat collar and headed up the street toward the bus stop in front of Administration. Damn. She had read it in his eyes. She knew that he was going to leave soon. She probably thought it was another woman.

During his training and during the first months here, he had never given this moment a thought. He had been caught up in the excitement of his job and of meeting Catherine, in New Jersey, where they both worked in the shipyards. It had been an altogether heady experience, courting her, marrying her, and then getting this job at Oak Ridge. Everything had fallen into place for him, exactly as his instructors said it would if he would remember his training.

But this part now—the hurt deep inside him—he had not foreseen.

In the past few days he had come up with any number of wild schemes to convince Catherine and the authorities that the man they knew as Robert Mordley was dead. An automobile accident and fire; a boating accident; an accident at the big TVA dam.

But for that he’d need a body. One that wouldn’t be missed. So far he’d drawn a blank on that score. But he did have the car parked in a rental garage in Knoxville. When the time came, he’d get down there and drive to Washington, D. C., where his contact would be waiting for him.

He stopped. Was there a balance between all that and Catherine and the baby? Or was he being pressed into a corner where he’d have to make a choice.

They had congratulated him when he got married. And they had been ecstatic when Robert, Junior, was born. He blended perfectly into his environment. The perfect cog to fit the perfect gear.

All along he had told himself that someday Catherine would understand him when he explained to her about the Thousand Year Reich. He could tell her about the beauties of his home: about the Lorelei along the Rhine; about the Tiergarten or the Ziigspitze; about Unter den Linden or the castle at Heidelberg.

Christ! When it was over, they could have an apartment in Berlin, perhaps even a small cottage in Garmischpartenkirchen for the summers. They could even spend an occasional Christmas there.

But whenever Edward R. Murrow reported the latest offenses in the war, reported the latest Wehrmacht defeat, Catherine would shudder and look at her husband, her eyes round, liquid.

“We’re not like that, Bob, are we?”

“What do you mean?” he asked carefully, not trusting his own emotions.

“I mean about the concentration camps they’re talking about,” she said. She sat forward, the Knoxville newspaper she had been reading falling to the floor. “They’ve rounded up the Jews and they’re putting them in concentration camps. It’s possible they’re even being murdered. Innocent babies … just like ours.”

“Katy,” Schey started, but he could not go on for a moment.

There was so much he wanted to tell her, to explain to her, but he hadn’t gotten it all straight in his own mind yet. In the first place, it was almost certain that the radio and newspaper reports were grossly exaggerated. There were concentration camps all right. For enemies of the state. Just like Roosevelt’s Japanese camps out in the desert. That wasn’t widespread knowledge, but it was happening. And he also wanted to explain to her how the Jews had strangled the German economy for years—the economy as well as the white man’s strain. Couldn’t the world see what had been going on for the last two thousand years: It was so ^clear.

“Bob?” Catherine asked in a tiny voice. Something in his look had frightened her.

He smiled sadly. Once again he was in control. “It’s not what you think, Katy,” he said.

“But it says in the paper.”

“I know. But governments have a way of exaggerating things to make their own side seem much better and free of sin.” He heard his own words and thought about Goebbels.

“None of us are … are we?”

“What?”

“Free of sin?”

Schey had to smile at the innocence of the remark. He shook his head. “Only you and the baby.”

Administration was housed in a large building called the castle.

It was lit up, and several dozen people stood between the streetlights out front, waiting for the early buses that would take them over to Y-12, the electromagnetic separation plant; to S-50, the thermal diffusion operation; to X-10, the graphite reactor; or to gigantic K-25, the gaseous diffusion plant where Schey worked.

Each operation had been designed to separate an isotope of uranium from its ore, which in turn could be used to build a bomb. Germany could never have mounted such an operation; the entire Reich did not have the resources. It was the reason Schey’s work here was absolutely essential.

The Americans themselves had not known which method would produce results—or, indeed, if any method of separating the bomb material would be effective. Yet the plants had all been built. Tens of thousands of workmen were employed here and at a place called Hanford in