The telephone rang. Not the regular phone, but the Special One. Rico answered.

"Doc? We found more stuff, sent it to Area 10. Good stuff. You should have some more by the end of the week."

"Thank you," he said, and hung up. "Good news," he said to the young man across from him. "There will be more slugs coming up from Oak Ridge by the end of the week."

"Oh, that's great, Doctor Fermi!" exclaimed the young man. "We've had the graphite blocks ready for over a week."

"Yes," said another, older man. "It's a long process, but this new uranium hexafluoride seperation is faster than the old centrifuge method. But...do you know where they're getting the uranium from?"

"Leo," Enrico Fermi said, "I understand that a very patriotic chap in New York had stored a warehouse of it away before the war broke out. He thought that we might need it, and he stored several tons of Congo pitchblend." He chuckled. "I understand that the FBI was quite surprised when they asked him for pounds and he offered -- for free, mind you -- several tons of high grade ore."

They all laughed at their mental pictures of what the poor G-man would have looked like.

"So, back to work," Szilard said. "Enrico, what do you think of this?" And on the blackboard he quickly wrote an equation.

"Interesting...interesting. If the moderators fail, then we could expect, maybe, the obliteration of a goodly part of Chicago."

"Or nothing at all. Or a puddle of radioactive chemicals."

"True, true. But if Albert is right, and he is you know, we might even set the atomsphere alight."

Szilard chuckled. "Well, that would certainly end the war!"

Fermi turned to the young man. "Do you think that you could get some students who would be willing to pour buckets of cadmium compound on the pile if the reaction got out of hand?"

Szilard said, "That's not very effective, Enrico."

Fermi sighed. "Yes, but it's the best we can do right now."