The Fire Baby: A Tale of Two Times, #3

By JBS Palmer

The Fire Baby is the third volume of A Tale of Two Times.  This volume reveals the drama and intrigue surrounding the creation of the Nazi's deepest war secret: the Separator, designed by the beautiful and brilliant physical chemist Ellie Herder, the scandal queen of Berlin and Ottilie Krüger's Goth Sword rival.  The Separator will quickly produce the isotopes needed to make atomic bombs at the very beginning of the Second World War.  Only Ottilie, who is obligated to work with Ellie Herder as her partner, knows that this use will be the lesser evil to which the Separator will be put by the Ancient Foe.  Listening to Yohanna recount this story of the recent past, Hans, Isabel, Leo and Antonia are themselves being sought for by the Ancient Foe and his Circle in modern Los Angeles.  Meanwhile, at the Clan's Home Ranch in Texas, Rhoda Knox is writing her own drama in a deadly game of human and godly politics, while still hoping to dodge the fate of Ottilie, and so, not to lose Ricardo Chavez, the man she loves.  Into this unfolding theater of high peril, Yohanna and her audience are being inexorably drawn. (107,500 words)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Lad Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215925751

JBS Palmer

JBS Palmer lives with family and a hoodwink of cats in Idaho.  He is a graduate of Oberlin College and has a PhD in biology from the University of Oregon.   Retiring from a career in science and industry before the turn of the century he brings the insight of long experience into the yet to be critically acclaimed semi-historical saga, A Tale of Two Times, a tale to stir mind and heart about Earth’s Province and the surrounding unseen supernatural world, the gates of which are held by the Keen Makers of the Clan of Thiuderieks.  A Tale of Two Times is being released in nine tantalizing volumes.  He also has written two books of mind-stretching Thought Verse which speaks in the Venn intersection of supernatural religion, philosophy and science.   Old Wine and New New Wine was published in 2022 and The Spiritual Thing will be released by April of this year. The author's portrait is by Mari and the cover is by Mariel, both talented young women of his clan.

Book preview

Chapter 1 — Fire Baby

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~ 1 ~  Two years later, in 1938, the air taxi business—owned jointly by Miss Wilberforce, the Countess, and Max and Reyna Schroeder—was prospering.  Air taxi had become the preferred style of travel to the Countess’s salon, and in addition to its on-call service for the wealthy, Alps Aero had developed a popular tourist network with scheduled flights connecting among southern Germany, the Sudetenland, Switzerland and northern Italy.

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Ellie Herder thought often about her brilliant idea, and she took great pleasure in reviewing its secrets hidden in her diary.  She had little time for it, because of her work with Werner on the Vessel Propulsion Project, but she knew that her idea had the potential to actually transform the Project.  This is too good for Werner!  I must share it with Uncle Georg, whom I can easily control.  She made time to carefully copy out by hand her two-year-old burst of inspiration.  Further developing it, she felt a growing glow of excitement.

This is brilliant, my dear!  Ellie’s uncle and mentor, Dr. Georg Kiefer, felt the excitement, too.  He was well aware of the challenges involved, and he told her, The separator apparatus to achieve these reactions will be devilishly complicated to make; it must allow for extreme delicacy of control, and each component must be tested before the next is built.  But, what a feat of chemical engineering it will be!  And in the end, we will have the world at our feet!

They saw in each other the hungry desire to accomplish this thing, knowing that it could be done.  What shall we call it between us? Georg asked.  Each of them was seeing an image of the completed Separator standing before them, fully functional.

Uncle, I will call it my Fire Baby!

Then I will be its grandfather.  Who is its father?

Death, the Elixir of Life.

Ah!  You are your mother’s daughter.  Georg was pleased.  He entwined the fingers of his chubby hands behind his bald head and leaned back in his chair, smiling in satisfaction.

Abruptly, he sat up straight with his hands on his knees, looking ready to spring into action.  Enough, my dear niece, of that Sorrow of the Gods in which we all must share.  Making the Fire Baby’s backbone is no small challenge, but we may be able to acquire the assistance of a colleague of mine named Dwight Hemming, who is nearly my peer in his knowledge of plutonium chemistry.  Frankly, his lab chief has the technical edge over mine.  My colleague is an American who is working for the U. S. military—not to make an explosive weapon, but to concoct a deadly poison.  The first stage of your Fire Baby’s chemical pathway is identical to the route of reactions on which he is working to make his poison, which is an organic compound of plutonium.  He is a handsome man—rather to your taste, I fancy.  From under his bushy brown eyebrows, Georg’s small, intense blue eyes stared at her.

Uncle, what do you know of my tastes in men?

I speak only of empirical comparisons, not of your subjective assessment.

Ellie fastened her steeliest look on her uncle, giving him a shiver of satisfaction.  This man Dwight will not come here from America only to give you a hand.

To give us a hand, dear niece.  I suspect that Dwight Hemming would like very much to meet you; your reputation has reached that far shore.  And I have recently received a letter from him seeking laboratory space to use during his sabbatical.  Cambridge is his other option.  I will write to him assuring him that he is welcome here at no charge for laboratory space and with full access to my equipment and my laboratory space.  Cambridge charges for these things, so he will come here.  He is fluent in German.

The gods are with us.

After further discussion with Ellie, Georg decided to set his own laboratory staff to work constructing the first component of the Separator.  Most likely, it will not work or it will be incomplete, but it will give Dwight’s man a place from which to begin when he arrives.

If he arrives, said Ellie flatly.  She felt the weight of the practical difficulties which she was facing in attempting to give birth to her Fire Baby.

Two months later, Dr. Dwight Hemming arrived at the Kaiser Wilhelm Center, along with his chief laboratory technician, Norman, and a graduate student from Japan named Ichiro Koge.  Soon after their arrival, Norman met with Georg’s technical staff, getting to know them and learning about the apparatus which they were struggling to build.

Dwight, Georg, Ellie and Ichiro discussed briefly Ellie’s chemical theory for the Separator apparatus.  Georg and Ellie spoke only about the Separator’s first stage, as if it were the whole of their plan, revealing nothing about their astronomically more ambitious plan to separate the isotopes of plutonium and uranium electrochemically, to make atomic weapons.  Dwight's interests were only in making a poison from plutonium.  In his research, he had devised a long and laborious bench top procedure to produce minute quantities of the isotopes with which to make his poison, and his War Department research consisted of efforts to make this process more efficient.  In his scientific papers he referred to the poison as a powerful chemical sanitizer.  The American military understood that this sanitizer would be an effective poison gas which would act in less than a minute and then would decompose in the next minute, so that there would be no 'blowback' on troops using it.

Meeting with Ellie and Georg and Ichiro for a complete formal technical discussion,  Dwight became fascinated by Ellie’s performance as she imperiously explained her electrochemical theory.  She rose with a flourish of her ripe-peach-colored custom-made lab coat, and the soft fabric of its open front parted to display her body’s elegant contours as she moved about the room.  As her lecture progressed, she periodically stopped and picked up her cup of tea.  Then, standing perfectly still, she would allow her lab coat to hang modestly straight while she cradled her teacup’s saucer in one hand, sipping thoughtfully from the cup in her other hand and surveying her audience of three men at the table.

To display diagrams, with their attendant lines of chemical and mathematical notation, Dr. Ellie Herder stood at the large wood-framed blackboard attached to the marble wall, writing firmly, swiftly, clearly, and without error.  After a bout of rapid chalkboard work, she would turn with a swirl of her lab coat and resume her place at the table, her message floating above her head while she discoursed upon it for several minutes.  During the following discussion, she would rise and pace around the room with her teacup in her hand, occasionally pausing in thought in the most flattering light from a window before replying to some question or summarizing a point.  At a nod of her head, the chalkboard attendant—a thin and bald older man in a stiff white lab coat—would quickly erase the board with a large eraser at the end of a pole.  (The instrument resembled a push broom.)  Aways, as she approached the board, he would give her a fresh piece of chalk.  The man’s wife—as antique, thin and spry as he—prepared Ellie’s tea and cared for her purse and coat.  Occasionally, the woman would take Ellie’s cup of tea from her and hold it, knowing exactly when Ellie wanted to use both hands to express herself or to adjust the complex coiffure in which her shoulder-length dark brown hair was arranged.

The couple were Georg’s hereditary house servants, who had known and tended to Ellie in various ways for all of her life.  In fact, her tea attendant was the choreographer of Ellie’s scientific performances, advising her on her wardrobe and gestures.  She had designed Ellie’s lab coat as well as the long, finely-pleated, close-fitting navy blue skirt and the peacock blue long-sleeved blouse revealed beneath it.  She had choreographed Ellie’s brief, pensive moments at the sunlit windows, bracketed by sudden, graceful turns which swung her lab coat and the pleats of her skirt, displaying the pleasing complementarity of their ripe-peach and blue colors.  And she had chosen Ellie’s one piece of jewelry, a necklace of natural pearls which caught the hue of her lab coat as it flashed with the movement of her body.

The four scientists were observed by professors and advanced students seated randomly at respectful distances from them in the elegant, many-windowed marble conference room of the Kaiser Wilhelm Center.  Persons without scientific credentials were allowed to observe the proceedings by standing at either of two large windows in the hall outside.

Ellie’s fans were gathered before the hall windows to observe the scientific elite of Germany and the world holding deep technical discussions.  Today there was even a German-speaking Japanese scientist to be seen at the conference table.  Ellie’s performances were always advertised ahead of time by rumor.  They were well-attended, and photographs of her in performance frequently appeared in the Berlin papers.

Ellie was explaining to Dwight that her process—My Separator—would easily produce the isotopes which he had been laboriously producing, in sufficient quantities to synthesize at production levels his powerful chemical sanitizer (pronounced by Ellie in American English).  Dwight felt, rising simultaneously within him, a powerful envy and an equally powerful sexual attraction.  She was, as Georg had told him, brilliant and beautiful.  With sudden ferocity, he hated her for it.  He desired only one or the other quality in his female assistants.  (To him, everyone, even Georg, was his assistant; Dwight would allow no peers.)  He and Ellie did most of the talking for the next several hours.  Twice, Dwight stood up and walked around while he talked.  He looked and dressed like a Hollywood star, but as he strutted about the room it was seen that Dwight did not possess sufficient athletic grace to compare well with Ellie.  He saw the smirks and laughter of the spectators behind the hall windows.

Georg steered the conversation, understanding their temperaments and the chemistry between the two brilliant young scientists.  He observed that Ichiro Koge, although fluent in German and highly accomplished as a chemist, spoke infrequently.  Georg understood that Ichiro was mostly silent not only because he had much to learn about this subject, but also because he was dazzled by Ellie's beauty and brilliance of mind.  Georg had noticed that when she did converse with Ichiro, Ellie spoke to him with respectful warmth, whereas she treated Dwight as a familiar peer in whom she was not personally interested.  When she and Ichiro had been introduced, Ellie had inquired about Ichiro’s family, finding out that he was of high social status, his father being a personal friend of the Emperor.  (Dwight had not bothered to learn anything about Ichiro.)  She is flirting with him and treating him with the respect due someone of a somewhat higher station in life.  What a chameleon my dear niece is!

Georg was treated perfectly by Ellie—as a wise uncle.  She had not yet met the man whom she could not play as well as she played her Stradivarius, and she had no fear of producing sour notes.  Georg understood neither her taste in men nor the use she made of them.

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~ 2 ~  Ellie had not returned Dwight’s calls or replied to his messages.  She found him as insufferable as he found her, and each of the two fiercely wanted the upper hand over the other.  In spite of Georg's best efforts to moderate, they had continued to squabble on into the next week, each feeling that the other owed an apology.  Ellie had stopped coming to the Wilhelm Center after she had realized that Dwight's attempts to communicate with her were intended to give her an opportunity to apologize.  Ignoring him gave her the advantage, and she took pleasure in provoking him with silence.

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Norman, Dwight's technical chief, sought out Ellie a month after she had met Dwight.  It was clear to Ellie that he had not come to her as Dwight's ambassador.  It was his own reason for which he was requesting her time at this awkward moment in the Black Cat.  She was sitting at a table with Werner—the head of the Vessel Propulsion Project—and several other staff members, and she did not want them to know about the little project on which she was working with Georg.  But she knew that Norman, standing there next to her chair, might be the key to the fulfillment of her ambitions.  She needed to speak with him in private.

She was aware of Herbert Schooner’s presence at an adjacent table.  He was new at the Steinmetz Institute, and Ellie saw him as a desirable man.  In the past week, she and he had exchanged telephone numbers, and they had been glancing frequently at each other this afternoon from their separate tables.  Norman’s request, however, caused Ellie to cross off romantic adventure from her current mental agenda.

Herbert Schooner had come to the Black Cat for a drink with Winfred Wahl, the founder and head of the Steinmetz Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science.  Such informal meetings at the Black Cat were Winfred’s way of reviewing the projects at his Institute and learning what he needed to know about them.  It was the first such interview for Herbert, who had been in Berlin only a few months as the new head of the Steinmetz’s Jet Turbine Project.  Winfred had met him two years earlier when Herbert was chief engineer of Max Schroeder’s Bush Hopper factory in the Sudetenland, learning that Herbert was a very competent engineer who enjoyed Max’s full confidence.  As they were recalling their first meeting, by way of establishing their new relationship, Winfred remembered that the meeting with Schooner had occurred during that business visit to the Schroeder Flight Works on which he, Fr. Sigurd and Albert had come upon the scene of Gertrude Kaster’s death.

The conversation between Winfred and Herbert had touched on that subject, and Herbert had remarked, Yes, Max told us that the lady who had died suddenly had once been his mentor.  As I recall, we found it necessary to postpone our meeting with you for a day.  Now, Herbert was telling Winfred that heading the jet turbine project at the Steinmetz was an opportunity which he could not have afforded to pass up.  Winfred had wondered a little about Herbert’s use of the word mentor for teacher in speaking of Gertrude Kaster.  The term had a Goth flavor... but Herbert had probably picked it up from Max.  Winfred knew that Max was now walking a tightrope in his position in the beleaguered Sudetenland, and would dearly miss the services of his chief engineer.  Appearing to read Winfred’s mind, Herbert said, I am retaining my position with the Flight Works, and I commute there by air every other week.  In a near whisper, he added, And I think that the technology of the turbine research project could be easily adapted to the basic Sarxx Bush Hopper design, because the Hopper’s air frame is so sturdy.

Acknowledging this fact with a very slight nod, Winfred said, I understand that your predecessor in the project has taken a position with Messerschmidt.  Willy has told me that he recruited the man to work on new airframes.

Interesting, Herbert commented, noticing at that moment that Ellie was looking not at him, but at Winfred.  I understand that they have their own turbine project.

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Ellie knew that she would be able to get from Norman the truth about progress on her Separator.  Georg’s accounts of it were muddled.  Georg’s staff, with Norman’s assistance, had been working on her Separator at the Wilhelm Center on the other side of Berlin ever since Norman’s arrival in Germany with Dwight.

Let me find a place where we can talk easily; it is far too noisy in here, Norman.  Ellie touched his hand lightly and slid back her chair.  She rose and approached the adjacent table, where she nodded to each of the two men sitting there.  She said, Dr. Wahl, Dr. Schooner, please excuse my interruption.  Winfred, may I make use of your private dining room for an hour or so?  I have been advising my uncle Georg on a minor project on which he is working with an American, Dr. Dwight Hemming.  The gentleman with whom I have been speaking just now is Hemming’s laboratory chief, who has a few questions to ask me about the project.

As she had said, Winfred, Ellie had knelt down to be at Winfred’s eye level to speak with him, lightly brushing against Herbert.  Kneeling was hardly Ellie Herder’s style, and Winfred knew instantly that it was an involuntary gesture of supplication.  Whatever this American had to say, Ellie desperately wanted to hear it—now and in private.  Many of the Black Cat’s patrons were watching her, including Herr Seitz, the proprietor, to whom Winfred nodded.  Herr Seitz, please conduct Dr. Herder to my private dining room and provide her and her guest with refreshments for the afternoon.

Ellie had taken Norman away before Werner, who had been concentrating on trying to overhear Ellie’s words to Winfred, had thought to question Norman about his business with Ellie.  Her behavior had been unusual for the past month:  She had been civil!  Previously, it had been rare for a week to pass without a burst of temper from her, in which she threw objects in his Vessel Propulsion laboratory, leaving bruises on nearly everyone who worked there.  What was going on now?  Werner cast a glance at Winfred, but Winfred had resumed his conversation with the new man, Herbert Schooner.

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Soon after Ellie’s spell of good behavior had begun, Werner had accompanied her and Georg to the salon of Countess Thersa in Switzerland.  On that little vacation, it had become clear to him that Georg and Ellie were working on a chemical research project involving plutonium.  Werner’s own engineering challenges, in working with radioactive isotopes of plutonium and uranium, were not chemical like Georg’s, but physical.  He hoped that whatever their project was, it would not take Ellie’s time away from his own project.  Until the engineering was completed, Ellie could not be replaced.  (But if the time should ever come when he was able to replace her, then, The Devil take her!)

Ellie’s abrupt departure from Werner’s table was a reversion to her former insulting behavior toward him, and he feared that soon it would be an embarrassment as well.  Everyone at his table had been waiting for Commander von Klopstock, in order to hold an informal review with him of Ellie’s gaseous diffusion equations describing the elaborate process of physical isotope separation.  These equations were Ellie’s chief contribution to Werner’s project.  He knew now that many very large factories would be required for getting isotope separation in production quantity, and the factories would take years to build.  It was time to choose a technology for the separation process, in order to draw up final engineering designs.  The cost would be enormous, and von Klopstock needed to know this, for he was the one who would have to persuade the government to allocate the resources required for Germany to become the first power in the world to wield atomic weapons.

The Vessel Propulsion Project had been internationally known for years, and this public openness made the change in its true objective easy to hide.  Even Winfred seemed not to know that, under Werner, the Vessel Propulsion Project had been invisibly altered:  Its purpose was no longer to make a new power source for marine vessels, but to create power capable of destroying entire cities.  Winfred Wahl, head and founder of the Steinmetz Research Institute, was incredibly naive and trusting, and totally dedicated to his ideal of public dissemination of scientific research.  And what had been said by Goering was true:  The best way to keep a secret was not to be secretive, but simply to give things deceptive names.

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Werner had been waiting anxiously for Commander von Klopstock.  The Commander, after entering the crowded Black Cat, stood waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light before looking around.  Then he went first to Winfred’s table, speaking with him briefly and shaking hands with Herbert Schooner.

Winfred informed him of Ellie’s departure, commenting, Poor Werner!  He has not learned that wildcats cannot be tamed.

As what sort of wildcat would you paint our Fraulein, Winfred? von Klopstock asked.

Oh, I would paint her as a panther.

Herbert smiled blandly at Winfred as Commander von Klopstock sat down at Werner’s table in the chair vacated by Ellie.

To Werner’s great relief, von Klopstock simply made a joke of Ellie’s absence:  She left with a balding old man?  Perhaps he is her banker and she is overdrawn!  The others at Werner’s table laughed with the Commander, whose tall, lean, powerful body had—although he was not in military uniform—the look of a Prussian officer who has lately been on the battlefield.  If you understand her equations, the Commander said to Werner, you can explain to me their importance, and we will all have time for a leisurely dinner afterwards.  Perhaps Fraulein Herder will rejoin us then, and we can, with full stomachs, take the time to enjoy her commentary on her own work.  ...How large will our seagoing vessels need to be, to use these new engines which you are developing?

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Agents from foreign powers were always present in the Black Cat.  Those who sent the agents were too wise to bother to read the reports issued by the projects at the Steinmetz; they sent their agents to obtain the truth which they were certain flowed with the beer in the Black Cat.  Today the ears of those agents picked up the discussion between Winfred and Herbert about about jet turbines.  The agents knew that high-speed jet aircraft would be able to elude any existing air defenses in Europe, and they wondered if the Germans were in fact nearing the capability to build jet aircraft.  Jets could be manufactured in months, whereas the giant ships being discussed at Werner’s table would take many years to build.  Therefore, all of the foreign agents were avidly listening to Winfred and Herbert.  No espionage agent in the room thought to look into the identity of the nondescript fat man with whom Ellie had departed.

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In those days, only Hitler and Goering believed in the Blitzkrieg, which was being fashioned from the German armed forces according to Field Marshal Herder’s vision of the next war.  Goering knew that he, himself, was the only one who believed in the power of atomic weapons, which he thought would come into his hands in three or four years.  He foresaw that, in that near future, the vastness of the Atlantic and of the Soviet Union would have daunted Germany’s military and would have dimmed the initial glorious success of Field Marshal Herder’s coming Blitzkrieg.  Then the German people would have become weary of a protracted war which begged for complete victory.  Hitler would become easy to remove, and, in no time, the true Blitzkrieg would bring the whole world under German hegemony.  Goering would be the new heroic Leader—the first man to rule the world, which had become his people’s territory, his to dispose of as he pleased.  To von Klopstock I will give the British navy, and I will make Liuva’s daughter Ellie the Empress of America.  Dreaming such dreams, Goering slept soundly at night.

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The table in Winfred’s private Black Cat dining room—the same room in which Winfred, Vladimir, Albert and Ottilie had met two years earlier—was furnished with pencils and a supply of blank paper.  Ellie and Norman made ample use of these, each secretly admiring the other’s speed of technical expression on paper.

As they worked, Norman came to understand Ellie’s concept in precise detail.  He became certain that he would be able to remake the apparatus which Georg’s staff had begun, to be ten times more efficient than Dwight’s bench method in separating radioactive isotopes.  Once built, it would work automatically, rather than requiring a half-dozen laboratory workers to nurse it along.  Certainly, it would be beyond the state of the art.  The challenge of making it excited him.  Gradually, however, he came to realize that Dr. Herder was not satisfied with an order of magnitude increase in efficiency.

...Suddenly, she struck the paper on which she had written a string of chemical equations, breaking her pencil.  In that very moment, he grasped the meaning of the unexpected exponent which she had written:  She expected many orders of magnitude greater efficiency in her Separator!  Mad Scientist!, was Norman’s immediate thought.  He stared at Dr. Herder in amazement.  But, no... in principle, this incredible efficiency could be achieved!  She was not mad!  But, Dr. Herder, it would be necessary to manipulate Nature on the scale of macromolecules—on the scale of things which go on inside of living cells!  Who can do that?  Maybe in a hundred years, or a thousand, someone can make your Separator.

She stalked out of the room without looking at him.  Norman watched her go.  He gathered up their notes and he picked up Ellie’s broken pencil—its touch sending a cold chill through him.  He shuddered, wanting suddenly, more than anything, to be back in America.

Descending the stairs furiously from Winfred’s private dining room, Ellie almost ran over Werner.  Werner’s meeting with von Klopstock had gone well, and he had paused at the foot of the stairs, curious about Ellie’s private meeting.  Werner was shorter than Ellie and he was not especially agile, but—seeing the speed of her descent and the look on her face—he sprang out of her way in the nick of time and then raced out after her onto the sidewalk calling, Ellie, won’t you join us for a drink, before dinner?

Thank you; I will drink at home! Ellie neither stopped nor turned her head.

Well, at least she gave me the courtesy of a reply.  Werner was panting, and he stopped for a moment on the busy Berlin street to catch his breath.  She was talking to Dwight Hemming’s laboratory assistant, Norman. ...Hemming is Georg’s co-author, the other plutonium chemist.  If only I could find this Norman...  Damn this waste of time!  Damn their pursuit of a Nobel Prize!

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Norman reported to Dwight his assessment of the electrochemical apparatus made by Georg’s staff.  Boss, the Kraut’s machine will do no better than your bench process, but it will be automated, so you could contract with him to build ten or a hundred of them and you’d have enough stuff to develop your poison.  That’s one of two possibilities.

What’s the other, Norman?

I can build a new apparatus myself, and I’m confident I’ll get a much higher yield.

How can you be so confident?

Because I’ve had a long talk with Dr. Herder, so I know how it's supposed to work.  Norman smiled at Dwight.

Norman, I’m the one who talks with Dr. Herder!  Where did you meet her?  She hasn't been around the Kaiser since the first week we were here.

Look, Boss, you two don’t talk because both of you are prima donnas.  And Dr. Herder's like you, too, in being big on theory and a little short on the practical.  Georg's people got her plan for the apparatus through Georg, so they’re not quite sure what they’re doing.  I needed some answers.

Norman, you should have explained your issues to me, and I would have gotten answers for you from Dr. Herder.  You know I don’t like you going over my head.  You don’t consider politics.

You're talking like a German, Dwight.  And how would you know what I really need to know?

Norman was irreplaceable.  He was a first-rate laboratory chief who understood Dwight’s theories, the technicians who made things, and the materials from which laboratory equipment was made.  He was stoop-shouldered, heavy and balding, and he was twenty years older than Dwight, but his hands were strong, slim-fingered and nimble, and he used the people who worked for him as skillfully as he used his hands.  Protected by Dwight’s Nobel ambitions, Norman was free to mock his pretentious habits.

You haven't told me where you met her.  Dwight was beginning to whine.

Norman was winning again.  He said, She and the other Steinmetz scientists and engineers take afternoon beer breaks at the Black Cat.  I just went up and introduced myself and told her I needed a few hours of her time.  It was that simple.

Dwight curled his lip.

Boss, said Norman, if we return to America, I can make you an isotope separator that’ll work automatically.  It’ll be based on Georg’s design and on what I learned by talking with Dr. Herder yesterday, and I guarantee it’ll be ten times more efficient than your bench process.  That’s enough plutonium precursor to make your poison.  The War Department will keep on funding you, because this separator can be scaled up to production level.

Interesting... Norman is serious, and I’m tired of being in the same city with that bitch Herder.  ...Witteric’s offer is still good.  I like that plan, Norman.  Ichiro wants to stay on here as Georg’s student, but let’s you and me pull up stakes and move on to Cambridge, where Witteric Hemming has room for us for a few months.  Then we’ll sail on to Boston.

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~ 3 ~  Her housekeeper having gone home for the evening, Ellie viciously stabbed her key into the door’s lock, yanked the door open and slammed it behind her with a powerful kick.  Then she stood motionless in the vestibule, her fury over Norman’s news settling slowly into a cold resolve to do something...  There, standing among the umbrellas in a large ceramic vessel, was the Goth Victory sword with which she had attacked her living room’s furniture two years earlier.  She pulled it out.  What power there is in this thing!  She swung the sword at the umbrella stand, intending to shatter it.

The stand fell in two intact pieces onto the soft rug on the vestibule’s tiled floor. The umbrellas within it were also cleanly severed, and they remained in their former positions within the vessel’s severed halves.  Instantly, Ellie’s anger was eclipsed by amazement!

With the sword in her hand, Ellie entered her redecorated living room which she had furnished with expensive, custom-made Bauhaus-style metal furniture.  She laughed, speaking to her empty room while holding the sword high.  I like you now in your new style; you are safe from me.  So, my Victory Sword, we must find other work for you!  She tossed the sword through her bedroom’s open doorway onto her bed.  The night is not lost; an invitation is in order!  From her liquor cabinet, which was a gift from her father, Field Marshal Erick Herder, she selected a decanter of vodka and two cut-crystal glasses and placed them on the bedside table.  Then she prepared a light dinner for herself in the kitchenette.  While eating it she made a telephone call:  Herr Schooner, ...Yes.  Tonight!  Now!  I know that you are free.  Plan to eat breakfast with me; we will talk about your proposition then.  My doors are open.

Ellie poured herself a full glass of vodka and swilled it down, standing.  She smiled to herself and picked up the sword with one hand, with the other hand tossing the bed covers to the bed’s far side.  Then she lay the sword on the exposed bottom sheet and disrobed, tossing her clothes carelessly into a corner.  She threw herself diagonally across the bed, snatching up the sword, and admired her glowing body in the large wall mirror, playing with the sword while waiting for her guest.  The alcohol flowed slowly and hotly into every part of her body; she thought better of drinking more alone.

She heard her apartment’s door open... and close.  Herbert Schooner had come to her.  Like Klaus two years earlier, he at once saw the evidence of Goth sword work.  Kneeling