Fermi sat in his desk chair, poring over equations. It squeaked.

The chair, not the equations. The equations were fine, dead on.

He picked up the intercom phone, punched a button. "Feynman? If you're not busy, I have those equations ready for you."

A few minutes later there was a knock on the door and Richard Feynman entered. Fermi handed him the sheaf of equations, turned back to his desk. Feynman hesitated, cleared his throat.

"Something more?" Fermi asked quietly.

"Well, yes. Some of the guys and me, we were wondering...do you know when that next shipment is coming up from The Area in Tennessee? We're getting awfully close to critical, we think."

"Hmmm...no, I don't, but I think that it should be any day now. How much U235 have we embedded? The pile keeps growing every day."

"About 8.4 kilograms. More exactly," he continued, seeing the professorial look creep into Fermi's eyes, "8.391458845 kilograms. Eighteen and a half pounds."

Fermi chuckled. "I want to get this self-sustaining as much as you do, Richard," he said. "And we are so close. So very close. You know, we could have done this in Italy, in Rome, don't you? We would have discovered the fissioning of the nucleus if I hadn't followed a bad hunch and wrapped foil around the test tubes to preven beta leakage! And so Otto and Lise did the same thing, showed that fissioning was occuring, and got the Nobel Prize!" He laughed, a real laugh. Fermi wasn't jealous of his German colleagues.

"More cadmium control rods came last night," Feynman observed. "We're in pretty good shape there. Miller is fitting them into the mechanism right now."

"Any more of the radioactives disappear?" Fermi asked, his face serious.

"No, not lately. There was a rumor, something from the MPs I think, or maybe the FBI, about a bunch of bodies found up on the lakeshore north of town. Apparently they were in pretty bad shape. General Groves sent North and South over to the hospital; he thinks it might be radiation caused."

"Ed North and John South? Good men. They'll find out. But it couldn't be, of course."

"Of course not. Well, I'm off to read these equations. Drop around later, if you want. Some of the guys have gotten some good chianti."

"Thank you, I might very well do that."

The door closed. Fermi sighed, picked up his pipe and relit it. He reached into his in-basket, pulled out a several pages of equations, and became engrossed again.