“You can go in now, General,” Lulu said.

“Thank you very much,” Potter said. From most Confederates, that would have been, Thank you kindly. He’d never lost the more than half-Yankee way of speaking he picked up to fit in while he was at Yale.

“Hello, Potter,” Jake Featherston said. The President of the CSA was in his early fifties, tall and rawboned, his close-cropped brown hair going gray. His eyes had dark pouches under them that hadn’t been there a few years before. They still blazed, though. If ruthless determination could pull the CSA through, Featherston was the man to give it.

“What’s up, sir?” Potter asked, hoping it had nothing to do with Nathan Bedford Forrest III.

“I need you to light a fire under Professor FitzBelmont. I don’t care if you promise him prime pussy or promise you’ll shoot his kids if he doesn’t get his ass in gear, but get him moving. We really need that uranium bomb,” Featherston said.

The Confederate uranium program had got off to a slow start because the President didn’t believe in it at first. Potter couldn’t blame him for that; who in his right mind would have believed it? But when the Confederates learned the United States were going after uranium explosives as hard as they could, they’d had to follow suit.

“If lighting a fire will do anything, I’ll do it.” Potter wasn’t sure it would. Separating U-235 from U-238 was proving fiendishly hard and fiendishly expensive. “They could use more money and more men, too.”

“Whatever they need, we’ll give it to them,” Featherston vowed. “If the damnyankees are ahead of us on this one, we’re screwed. If we beat ’em to the punch, we win. Even Pittsburgh won’t matter at all. It’s about that simple. Or will you tell me I’m wrong?” He glared a challenge at Potter.

“No, sir.” Potter meant it. He might despise Jake Featherston the man, but Jake Featherston the leader was dead right here.