The Sharecropper Prodigy (29 page)

             
“What about silver? Ben said. “Silver is a slightly better conductor of electricity, anyway.”

             
Anderson looked at Peppers. Both men were silent for a minute. Then Anderson spoke. “Impossible. Where would we find that much silver in such a short time?”

             
“The U.S. Mint,” Ben said, as if it were a given.

             
“The U.S. Mint? Yeah, I’m sure they’d just hand it right over to us,” Peppers said, laughing.

             
“Wait a minute,” Anderson said quietly. He was looking down at the floor rubbing his chin. “All we have to do is
borrow
it. Once this thing is finished, then all we’d have to do is melt it down and give it right back.” He snapped his fingers. “I’ll contact Oppenheimer and Mr. Conant immediately. This just might work!”

             
“Do you mean Robert Oppenheimer?” Ben asked.

             
“The very one. Mr. Evans, as a student of physics, you are in for a treat. You may get to work with men who you’ve read about and studied and are the greatest minds on earth. Dr. Oppenheimer and Dr. Einstein are certainly the greatest theoretical physicists the world has ever seen or likely ever will see.”

             
“Work with Oppenheimer? What do you mean sir,?” Ben asked, dumbfounded.

             
“What I mean, Mr. Evans, is that as soon as I can get you clearance, you will no longer be on the construction crews. You’ll be working with us. Welcome aboard!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

              Ben came to eat supper with me and Rachel that night as usual. He might have been relegated to living in a hutment in Gamble Valley, but Rachel wasn’t about to let the federal government, or anybody else, tell her who she could entertain in her own home. Ben had been unusually quiet when he got back from wherever it was the man with the clipboard had taken him. I thought he might have gotten himself into some kind of trouble for telling me what he thought the building we were working on was going to be used for. I told Rachel about it. I knew if anybody could pry information out of him, it was her.

             
Ben didn’t have much of an appetite even though Rachel had fried chicken and made biscuits and gravy, his favorite meal on earth. When we finished eating, me and Ben started to help Rachel clear the table and start washing dishes. We usually always played a few games of Rummy or Hearts after everything had been cleaned up. But as soon as the table was cleared, Rachel told Ben to sit back down and that the dishes could wait. Ben looked like a little whipped puppy. It was amazing the power Rachel still held over him.

             
“Okay, Ben. Tom tells me you haven’t spoken ten words all afternoon and you barely ate anything. You love my fried chicken and you usually eat four or five biscuits. So tell me what is botherin’ you?” Rachel asked, giving Ben that look of hers that said,
and you better tell me everything.

             
“Nothings bothering me, really,” Ben answered. “In fact, I got some great news today. It’s just that I’m not supposed to tell anybody.”

             
“Well, did you swear an oath or something?” Rachel asked.

             
“No. No, I didn’t swear an oath, but I did give my word.”

             
“Well, I won’t ask you to break your word, but please just tell Tom and me that you are not in any kind of trouble.”

             
“I promise I’m not in trouble and what happened today was a good thing. I will tell you this, because Tom is gonna know anyway. I got assigned a new job and I get to move out of Gamble Valley into a nice little house.”

             
“That’s great,” I said, although my joy for Ben didn’t sound very enthusiastic. I was thinking that now I would have to run my crew without Ben’s help. In truth, he was the one that really ran it anyway. He was the brains. I was just the spokesman. But I had figured a lot of things out by watching and listening. I couldn’t expect Ben to prop me up forever. It wasn’t right that I got all the credit for what he did, plus got paid a dollar an hour more.

             
“Are you gonna be makin’ more money?” I asked.

             
“I….I suppose so. I mean, I’m sure I will. But we didn’t discuss money.”

             
“Well, I’m proud for you,” Rachel said. “When somebody has the talent you do, Ben, it doesn’t take long for people to find it out. That’s what you always told me. If you make yourself valuable enough with knowledge, no matter where you came from or the color of your skin, people will inevitably have to recognize it. You will be indispensable.”

*****

              “We’re having all kinds of trouble with welds failing, Dr. Anderson. The vibration of the magnets is just much more than we anticipated once they are running at full power.” The young engineer had been racking his brain trying to find a solution. The schedule they had been given was impossible, even if everything went perfectly, which it most certainly wasn’t.               Westinghouse and Allis-Chalmers had been awarded the contracts for the magnets and the majority of the electrical components that went into the
calutrons,
as they had been named. But there wasn’t enough time for testing in the research and development stages of any of the components. The race was on with the German’s to build a bomb and nobody knew how far along the German’s were. The Y-12 enrichment plant at Oak Ridge would have to be a learn-as-we-go endeavor.

             
Ben was looking over some drawings for the beta stage that had just begun assembly when he overheard the engineer talking to Dr. Anderson.

             
“We have to have something other than what we are using to absorb the shock,” Ben said loud enough for Anderson to hear him. He never looked up from the drawing he was studying.

             
“We’re using the rubber bushings that the Allis-Chalmers company provided, Ben. We’ll just have to tell them they aren’t adequate and let them find a solution. They’ll have to beef them up somehow,” Anderson said.

             
“Well, until they do, we have to find an alternative,” Ben answered, getting up from the drawing table and walking over to where Anderson and the engineer were standing.

             
“What can we do that will be any faster than letting Allis-Chalmers engineers make a quick design change and get the specifications out to their plant? It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. Do you have a better solution?” Anderson asked Ben.

             
Ben thought for a minute. “Where are the erection drawings showing the front elevation view of the calutrons?” he asked.

             
“In the next room on table seven,” the engineer answered.

             
The three men walked down the corridor that separated the two rooms. Anderson took out his keys and unlocked the door. Ben couldn’t imagine why each door in the building had to remain locked at all times. There were armed guards surrounding the place and nobody got near the entrance without a series of passwords that changed twice a day, every day. They walked over to table seven and found the series of architectural drawings that showed the front elevations. Ben looked at them and saw there were no dimensions on the joints between the vacuum and collection tanks.

             
“I’ve got to find a section cut,” Ben was talking out loud to himself. He turned the page and found a continuation of elevation drawings, then another page, and another, until finally he found an elevation that had an obscure section cut through the front elevation.

             
“Section BB on sheet A-324,” Ben said. “Are the section sheets in this set of drawings?”

             
“No,” the engineer answered. “A-100 through A-600 of the elevation sections are over on table twelve,” the engineer answered pointing toward the back of the room. “There are so many drawings coming in so fast, it takes a team of assistants working constantly trying to keep everything organized and in a system that’s easy to access. They can’t keep blueprints coming in fast enough to keep up with the pace of the construction. It’s a miracle we don’t find more mistakes than we do at the pace the architects and engineers are having to work.”

             
Ben thumbed through drawings until he found sheet A-324. Then he looked at section BB and noted the dimension. “There should be just enough room for a partially inflated tire to fit in the joint,” Ben told Anderson. “But it needs to be a small tire, like a…..say, maybe a tire from a wheelbarrow or something. How fast could we lay our hands on some of those?” Ben asked Anderson.

             
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Anderson said. “We have countless numbers of wheelbarrows on the construction sites. We’ll tell whoever’s in charge of procurement to order just the tires from the manufacturer. In the mean time, we’ll rob what we can off the wheelbarrows we have.”

             
The engineer, whose name was Ray, looked at Anderson and shook his head. “I can’t believe you are just taking this boys word for all this,” he said. “He’s still just a kid, really, and you are taking his suggestions and running with them like he was Einstein or something.”

             
Anderson gave Ray a piercing look as if to say,
how dare you question my authority.
“Ray. We don’t have a lot of time here, as you well know. General Groves is in charge of this project and answers only to the president. I’m sure he knows a lot of things that we are not privy to as to where the Germans are on their quest for an atomic bomb. Our country, and maybe our very lives, and those of our European allies, are in peril. We sure as hell don’t have time to worry about who comes up with what idea. Hell, I’d listen to a pig if I thought he could give me one idea that would help. Ben has come up with countless solutions to potential problems before they got out into the field and became real problems that take up precious time. Time we don’t have to spare. We are all scientists and engineers that work in this building. But Ben, besides being a brilliant physicist, has the advantage of most of us. He has experience with hands on construction projects. So, I’m going to continue to listen to his advice when I believe it to be sound. So far, he hasn’t steered me wrong on anything.”

             
Ray looked embarrassed after the admonishment and turned on his heel and walked off. Anderson shook his head and turned back to face Ben. “Some people can’t get passed who gets credit for what, and can’t wait until they can get their pat on the back. Whether they’ve done anything to deserve it or not. And by the way, Ben. I apologize for using the pig analogy.”

             
Ben laughed, “No offense taken, Dr. Anderson. Now, if we can make those tires work, I have another idea that might solve the problem permanently.”

             
“Alright,” Anderson answered, “let’s hear it.”

             
“Hydraulic shock absorbers. Maybe with coil springs as a back-up. Kind of like what they use on automobiles. Of course, they might have already thought of that and deemed it not feasible as far as costs and time of production are concerned. But they could always subcontract the devices to another company, and the extra time it takes to produce them would still be much better than all the downtime we have when a weld fails.”

             
“Sounds like a good idea to me and they would certainly absorb much  more shock than a rubber bushing,” Anderson said as he was scribbling something on a piece of paper. When he finished writing, he tore the piece of paper out of his notebook and handed it to Ben.

             
“What is this?” Ben asked, taking the paper from Anderson’s hand.

             
“The number for the engineering department at Allis-Chalmers. The man you’ll want to talk to is Joseph Greene.”

             
“You want
me
to call him?” Ben asked in a puzzled tone.

             
“It’s your idea, Ben. And you can explain it to him better than me.”

*****

              Ben’s design of the shock absorber was quickly adapted by the Allis-Chalmers company and put into production. So were several other ideas for improvements he discovered while toiling day and night, pouring through sheet after sheet of the voluminous blueprints from the many different subcontractors involved in the monumental project. What Ben and me were both involved in was an engineering marvel that’s scope was so leviathan, with so many intricate and heterogeneous parts coming together from so many people, if we had known it at the time we would have thought it completely impossible.