Von Schlichten looked. He had no more than the average intelligent layman's knowledge of nuclear physics--enough to recharge or repair a conversion-unit--but the drawings looked authentic enough. They seemed to be copies of ancient blueprints, lettered in First Century English, with Lingua Terra translations added, and marked TOP SECRET and U. S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS and MANHATTAN ENGINEERING DISTRICT.
"And look at this!" Pickering opened at a marked page and showed it to him. "And this!" He opened where another slip of paper had been inserted. "Everything we want to know, practically."
"I don't get this." He wasn't sick, any more; just bewildered. "I read some reviews of this thing. All the reviewers panned hell out of it--'World War II Through a Bedroom Keyhole'; 'Henty in Black Lace Panties'--that sort of thing."
"Yeh, yeh, sure," Pickering agreed. "But this Hernandez has illusions of being a great serious historical novelist, see. She won't try to write a book till she's put in years of research--actually, about six months' research by a herd of librarians and college-juniors and other such literary coolies--and she boasts that she never yet has been caught in an error of historical background detail.
"Well, this opus is about the old Manhattan Project. The heroine is a sort of super-Mata-Hari, who is, alternately and sometimes simultaneously, in the pay of the Nazis, the Soviets, the Vatican, Chiang Kai-Shek, the Japanese Emperor, and the Jewish International Bankers, and she has affairs with everybody from Joe Stalin to Joe McCarthy, and of course, she is in on every step of the A-bomb project. She even manages to stow away on the Enola Gay, with the help of a general she's spent fifty incandescent pages seducing.
"In order to tool up for this production-job, La Hernandez did her researching just where Lourenço Gomes probably did his--University of Montevideo Library. She even had access to the photostats of the old U. S. data that General Lanningham brought to South America after the debacle in the United States in A.E. 114. Those end-papers are part of the Lanningham stuff. As far as we've been able to check mathematically, everything is strictly authentic and practical. We'll have to run a few more tests on the chemical-explosive charges--we don't have any data on the exact strength of the explosives they used then--and the tampers and detonating device will need to be tested a little. But in about half an hour, we ought to be able to start drawing plans for the case, and as soon as they're finished, we'll rush them to the shipyard foundries for casting."