"It will be over next month!"
What I thought must have been written on my face, for my mouth hung open in surprise.
"No, I'm not crazy, Herr Cord," Strassmer said quickly.
"To no one else but you would I say this.
It is the only way I can repay you for saving my life. I know how important this could be to your business."
"But- but how- "
"I cannot tell you more," he interrupted. "Just believe me.
By next month, Japan will be verfallen!" He turned and almost ran out the door.
I stared after him for a moment, then went over to the sink and washed my face in cold water.
I felt I must be even crazier than he was, because I was beginning to believe him.
But why? It just didn't make any sense.
Sure, we were pushing the Nips back, but they still held Malaya, Hong Kong and the Dutch East Indies.
And with their kamikaze philosophy, it would take a miracle to end the war in a month.
I was still thinking about it when Morrissey and I got on the train.
"You know who I ran into back there?" I asked. I didn't give him a chance to answer. "Otto Strassmer."
There seemed to be a kind of relief in his smile.
I guess he'd been expecting to catch hell for not telling me about that Air Corps test pilot.
"He's a nice little guy," Morrissey said. "How is he?"
"Seemed all right to me," I said.
"He was on his way back to New York." I looked out the window at the flat Nevada desert. "By the way, did you ever hear exactly what it was he was working on?"
"Not exactly."
I looked at him. "What was it you did hear?" "I didn't hear it from him," Morrissey said.
"I got it from a friend of mine down at the Engineers' Club, who worked on it for a little while. But he didn't know very much about it, either.
All he knew was that it was called the Manhattan Project and that it had something to do with Professor Einstein."
I could feel my brows knit in puzzlement.
"What could Strassmer do for a man like Einstein?"
He smiled again.
"After all, Strassmer did invent a plastic beer can that was stronger than metal."
"So?" I asked.
"So maybe the Professor got Otto to invent a plastic container to store his atoms in," Morrissey said, laughing.
I felt a wild excitement racing inside me.
A container for atoms, energy in a bottle, ready to explode when you popped the cork.
The little man hadn't been crazy. He knew what he was talking about.
I'd been the crazy one.
It would take a miracle, I'd thought.
Well, Strassmer and his friends had come into the desert and made one and now they were going home, their job done.
What it was or how they did it I couldn't guess and didn't care.
But deep inside me, I was sure that it had happened.
The miracle that would end the war.
2.
I got off the train at Reno, while Morrissey went on to Los Angeles.
There was no time to call Robair at the ranch, so I took a taxi to the factory.
We barreled through the steel-wire gate, under the big sign that read CORD EXPLOSIVES, now more than a mile from the main plant.
The factory had expanded tremendously since the war. For that matter, so had all our companies.
It seemed that no matter what we did, there never was enough space.
I got out and paid the cabby and as he pulled away, I looked up at the familiar old building.
It was worn now, and looked dingy and obsolete compared with the new additions, but its roof was gleaming white and shining in the sun.
Somehow, I could never bring myself to move out of it when the other executives had moved their offices into the new administration building.
I dropped my cigarette on the walk and ground it into dust beneath my heel, then went into the building.
The smell was the same as it always was and the whispers that rose from the lips of the men and women working there were the same as I always heard when I passed by