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By Root 1462 0

probably some naval guards, lurking in every dark hole. Truman turned again to the water, thought, yep, I suppose there’s somebody out there who’d do whatever it took to knock a hole in my head. Jap agents all over the damn place, so they tell me. Well, not out here. If there were any Jap subs puffing around anywhere in this whole damn hemisphere, they wouldn’t let me hang my face over the side of this ship like some gawking tourist. But in Washington … watch your step. They hated it when I walked to work, couldn’t wait for me to move my ass from Blair House to the White House. Hell, I liked walking to work. Hardly anybody recognized me, and the mornings can be damn nice in the spring. Once the Secret Service started clearing off sidewalks, shoving people aside, well, that took all the fun out of it. I liked Blair House too. There are too damn many offices in the White House, too many people who insist on talking to me. Everybody’s in a hurry, their pressing matter more pressing than the next guy’s. At least the Secret Service is happy. I’m behind thick walls, makes it a lot tougher for some Jap agent to pop a rifle in my direction. Well, maybe we can put a stop to that business altogether, give those people a reason to go home. I oughta hear something once I get to Potsdam. Unless there are delays, some problem that rattles the physicists, some reason why Oppenheimer or any of the rest of them think we need to wait, to do more research. They’re pretty rattled already, and I can’t blame them for that. I’m rattled, and I don’t have the faintest damn idea how this new bomb is supposed to work. They don’t like to talk about it, but they’re not sure the damn thing will work at all. Or, maybe it will work too well, and destroy the world. Now, there’s a hell of a notation for the encyclopedia. Harry Truman, Final President of the United States. Most Notable Accomplishment: Destroyed the World.

For eighty-two days he had become accustomed to being on the outside, rarely included in FDR’s most high-level discussions, especially with the military people. Truman wasn’t bothered by that, knew that the relationship between the president and his vice president could never be chummy. Both men were, after all, politicians, and there was always life after holding office, and then you were likely not to be chums at all. Indeed, he thought, Washington is still Washington. He shook his head. Well, it’s not always like that. But we’re not used to having our president die in office. Now there’s one damn good thing about the Constitution. Rules for this sort of thing. Otherwise somebody would just take charge, big mouth and big guns. We’d end up with somebody like … oh God … MacArthur. Yes, thank you, Founding Fathers. Whether FDR kept me involved really didn’t matter. But that piece of paper told everyone what they had better do next. There’s a new guy in charge. Tell him all the secrets.

The meeting had come in late April, and after Roosevelt’s death, it was the second shock Truman received. The messenger had been Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, and across Truman’s desk had come the astonishing details of something called the Manhattan Project. Until that meeting, just days after FDR’s death, Truman had no idea at all what the project was, no idea that the United States had been spending enormous numbers of man-hours, employing some of the finest minds in the world of physics, to develop a weapon unlike any ever known. Truman had faced the nervous Stimson, who seemed unhappy to be the one to inform the new president that the project had been so secret it was thought unwise to include in its inner circle the vice president of the United States. But Truman knew about it now, even if he didn’t completely understand the physics of nuclear fission. Stimson had told him that the physicists were confident then that the first atomic bomb would be ready for testing within four months of that meeting.

He glanced up at the sliver of moon, thought, that’s pretty damn soon. And damn it all, I have to go to this conference and stare down Joe Stalin,