"Atomsk won't be there then," said the State Department man. "At least, it won't if your own reports are correct. Your man said that he has sabotaged the radioactive disposal system. Strikes me as a pretty risky business to undertake in time of peace. Possibly it's even criminal. I'm glad I had no part in it and I won't take any official notice of the incident unless you force me to do so by sending it to me in writing."
"Do you want it in writing?" asked the Chief of Staff, who was a very honorable and extremely literal man.
"No. Of course not," stammered the State Department man.
Turning to the engineers, the Chief said, "I'll have your reports on the technical papers and on the agent's narrative later on. Do you have any preliminary conclusions to give us now?"
They started to speak at the same time, but one took the cue. "It's just as the — er — agent says. They probably have a pile there. They may be studying the biophysical effects of radioactive materials on human beings. It's as though we had combined our Argonne laboratories in Chicago with the Bethesda Naval Hospital facilities. The actual weapons work must be going on somewhere else. You couldn't have the Peenemunde people — the ones they took over from the Nazi payroll — working in an area which depended on forest for its camouflage. I don't have much to add to what the spy says. The Russians are doing just about what we could expect them to do. They're wasting some time with melodrama and so on, but they have a big country and can afford to waste a lot."
"What about the valve and the story of radioactive waste seeping into all the water patterns inside the hills?" asked the Director of Intelligence. "Could the whole mountain get radioactive?"
One of the engineers spoke up: "That's as bad as asking if a car in Australia can be repaired if we've never been in Australia, and if we don't know what kind of a car it is, and if we don't know what's supposed to be wrong with it. Your man seems to have made as good a guess as anybody. I'd give my right hand for a half hour's conversation with that fellow Dekanosov, though. He's re-thought a hell of a lot of engineering in order to make it fit procedures for radioactive materials."
Again there was a silence.
The Chief of Staff looked around the room. The warm July sunlight violated military regulations by shining into the room. The men around the table were all so much relaxed that they could hear their own breathing and could note the soft creaking of the sentry's gun-strap as he shifted his gun ever so slightly. The Chief sighed.
"This isn't like wartime. There's nothing to do about the information, now that we do have it."