◆ SpookStack

Sp = ee eee ee ra 4 7 0 ; ~ {y ~ .- a a i a i ane: a ete a fg eT r] RD ilinedewith platinum,” he sald. jbombing of Japanese cities under project and the “secret tipcin the | f Had an FBI man been listening | rather wierd circumstances. ew Mexico desert. - “But what of it?” asked s British it thro ugh a Eeypfole al the time, the! It was in Budapest about the sec- lady correspondent. with our little yi professor might have gore to jail Tor | ond week ‘in August two years S§0.} group. “It's just another explosive, f! S Inedvertant remark ut in| was there, with two or three other | im't it? pone ai been bringivg acl ‘|e moment of rather scared ange, | war correspondents, strictly against|DeW weapons [Eee se [orders This cerly-lovely, ‘rulned| is ony something » Uti worse than In the summer of 1941 I accom- Slory tt wus barred to all Amer-| “No.” I aid. “You can compare panied a Navy expedition which|icans and British except two small|the situation to thet or on janie Marines in Yceland—perhaps| detachements of soldiers and clvil- eae over the about the alr st American move in the war,|ian clerks we represented the ference between this stuff and « ‘The. destroyer I wes on at the| Allied Contre we were tb g|block buster as between # bombing] . time Was sunk by a German mine| Nevertheless, we were there and) 7 og ine bows of the Eighth a few months later—the first Amer-|the afternoon suidity of the Fee archers.” - Jican ship sunk in a war which had |courtesy 4 lady was duly im. |not yet been declared. _: sans. I never one tell “which, and i think “the nm gt y There was & very assertive young e eres Gen: that the - mic. born’ ‘Weutenant aboard for whom I had|Mark Clark's public relations off-(4Pt ® case 4an instinctive dislike. cers in Vienna—Americans, British “T know all about this 0-235,” he [and Russians were quite exclied. A jsaid in the wardroom one night. Hungarian newspaper bad just ap- “The Navy knows all about it"—|peared with & banner headline and he always spoke as if he was the|a few distorted details of the bomb- official voice of the Navy. ing of Hiroshima. The account was “The way the Navy looks af it is|in Hungarian and very few foreign- that It's a lot of bunk—just stuff put [ers cam read this langauge, and of the relatively small con! out by German agents trying te stir] 1 found myself probably the only! butions of my fellow countrymen | up trouble.” ‘_iman'in Budapest with the faintest|untii just before the end. . "And as for ibese theoretical lides of what it was all about. I had! it was futile to belittle the claims scientists with German naiies—F'll|known about most of the experi-/of Lord Rutherford, the first man tell you right now the Nary’s got no|mental work on atom splitting pre-|ever tonsciously to split an atom; of if for them,” he continued. “If|vious to the fall of 1941 when se-|Sir James Chadwick, the discoverer glishman, . This was & rd wer, if it wag worth answering, because nobody was more keenly aware than I of the magnitude of the British contributions to great revolution in human destinies ee 7 5 ie gq % *g 5 ad my way we'd line them all ‘up|curity restrictions had been placedjof the neutron, and of ® score of ainat the wall tomorrow morn-|on most aspects of it. I had elsc| others others. «And it would be eet ' |known, through rumors picked Up | Wasted breath to have’ talked first heard about the atomic here and there, of the Manhattan Beque , of the Curies, of mB the D ¢, of- the Germans, Russian, even of the Hun The Russians put us up in a vent that night. The kindly old, eletave alen ware aenitesdt aheat the! MoS Ba WE CALM SW GL atomic Bomb. In the middle of the might there was s battle in the street outside between Russians and Hungarian guerrillas; bullets pinged through our windows and ‘we all spent part of the night laying fat on the finer of « hellwes . seee OR ENS Door ok & waiwes: - 4 ‘After thet J felt like writing and , ot out my typewriter. The moon was full over the ruins. From s ew blocks away came the weird usic-of « gypsy orchestra. In & w minutes an mother nerior knocked at mv dow She" ir uperior aos Se oe Sawer) ee id the nolse of my typewriter was eeping the nuns awake and she , ought they had had enough of an eal for one night. _ ‘The. title of my war book, when I ' 4 around to writing it, will be mewhat misleading fot should as oe ave # good sales pull. Tt will be ct Nights in aréervert ats ar rr TE IT me ms oer a oe hei lhe tla, —.