The bureaucratic dam, already strained by constant political pressure from Senator Truman's later-famed committee, then exploded. The infighting within departments over Tennessee land rights concluded with a sudden abruptness that caught old Washington veterans breathless. The Army Corps of Engineers, with a speed they achieved but rarely, pushed to a limit the War Powers Act.
They assembled at a remote, deserted valley in eastern Tennessee, a peaceful place of rolling hills and small, laborious farms. Within seven days, nearly sixty thousand acres were seized by eminent domain. Farm families, who from time eternal had worked those fields, were given a few weeks to pack up, their families and their heritage to be erased from the landscape, to be offered up to a cause they were never to be allowed to understand.
Soon came up the bulldozers. They did not arrive singly, but a torrent, a parade of yellow machines that gouged into the red Tennessee earth, tearing up forests, leveling hills, and plowing new highways from virgin bush. Most were emblazoned with the symbols of construction companies that were, by a byzantine holding company structure, owned by Ezra's industrial empire. There was being built a city that was hidden, its genesis brutal and swift.
Leading everything was a frustrated and angry General Leslie Groves. He had been given a mission of supreme national importance and an effectively bottomless budget, but he found himself up to his eyeballs in a quagmire of logistical nightmares. He was trying to build the world's most advanced industrial plants in the heart of a desert, and he needed it all, right away. He needed thousands of tons of structural steel. He needed to consume hundreds of miles of copper wire at a time when copper was among the war effort's most severely rationed materials. He needed imported pumps, otherworldly chemical tanks, and entire power substations.
And each demand he made to the War Production Board was met with the same infuriating, bureaucratic response: forms to be filled, arguments to be pursued, committees to be consulted.
At a furious, closed progress meeting in Washington, Groves lost his cool finally. He unloaded a thick batch of refused requests onto the conference table, his face puce with rage. "It's unthinkable!" he yelled to the assembled officials and scientists. "The WPB tells me that it takes eighteen months to deliver the steel I need to construct the K-25 foundation! The copper wiring to go into the calutrons cannot be ordered! At this rate, two years just to get materials to get a start to construct the plants, to say nothing of running them!"
The room was silent. The sheer, overwhelming vastness of the problem was insurmountable. The project was doomed to fail, not because the science did not work, but because the red-tape was unbeatable.
After the disastrous meeting, General Groves was seen talking to Ezra along the corridor. The general was still infuriated, muttering to himself about sloppy politicians and paper-shufflers.
"General," said Ezra calmly, his own gentle voice a still counterpoint to Groves' explosive rage.
Groves regarded him, his face impatient. "Prentice. If you have invented a way to work a miracle and get twenty thousand tons of steel, then I'm not here to listen."
"Certainly not magic," replied Ezra calmly. "Just... private enterprise. Don't bother with the War Production Board. Their arrangement exists to be taken up during a standard war, not during a project such as this. Just present your needs. All that you need."
Groves stared at him, desperation and bitter skepticism reflected in his eyes. He stared into the eyes of this suave, wealthy civilian, the man who by some accident deigned to get him attached to this blasted project, and his first urge was to walk away. But he was a drowning man, and Ezra was throwing him a lifeline. He grunted, pulling out a crumpled list from his own jacket pocket. It was a long, circuitous, illegible litany of his highest priority, unattainable needs.
Ezra took the list and skimmed it. He rolled it up and put it away in his own pocket. "You'll have your materials, General," he said casually. "Expect to see the first convoys to arrive at the Clinton Engineer Works within a week."
He strode off, leaving Groves frozen in shock in the corridor.
Ezra returned to his suite and grabbed the telephone. He did not call up govenment agencies. He called privately listed phone numbers of CEOs and company presidents of his own corporations, his industrial resources which he so diligently bought. His first call was to a subsidiary steel company he then owned.
"Harrison," said Ezra, his voice conveying no room for disagreement. "Immediately, you are to change ten percent of all your shipments of structural steel to a priority status. It's a job from the government. A convoy of trucks will come to your mill next Thursday in Pittsburgh to begin loading."
"But Mr. Prentice," the CEO protested, "we are already booked up! The War Production Board has committed us to naval shipbuilding work for the next six months—"
"I know what the WPB plans to allocate," Ezra cut him off, his voice cold. "My office will work up the right paperwork to grease palms with them later. You are to treat this as a supreme national directive. Do I make myself clear?"
The CEO, who owed his job and his company's new profitability to Ezra, swallowed. "Yes, sir. Absolutely clear."
Ezra called a dozen times more like that. To his copper fabricators, his machine tool plants, his electronics laboratories. He did not bargain or ask. He commanded. He was seizing a huge swath of America's industrial might with nothing but the flat, unvarnished authority of an owner.
Less than a week later, General Groves was strolling across a Tennessee hillside blanketed with mud when he experienced a roar. It was a convoy of heavy trucks by the hundreds, scarring up dirt roads, loaded to their limits with I-beams of structural steel. The next day, another, its cargo enormous spools of heavy-duty copper cable. There then ensued shipments of specialized pumps, generators, and electronics. A Bottomless torrent of vital material began to flow into the site, disregarding even the approved U.S. government supply channel.
Groves was absolutely flabbergasted. He watched a civilian do in days what all the combined might of the United States Government bureaucracy could not achieve in months. He began to see Ezra Prentice less as a civilian advisor, or wealthy amateur, but as a logistical typhoon, a man who could make the industrial world dance to his tune. A grudging, abiding respect was developed between the two hard, practical, results-oriented men.
Months after the beginning of the construction, Ezra returned to Tennessee. He stood beside General Groves on a similar hill. Below, the valley was being re-shaped. It was a huge, litter-strewn, magnificent monument to raw industrial power. The enormous, mile-long U-shaped K-25 plant to make gases by diffusion was being erected up from the earth. The gargantuan plant constructions to be used by the Y-12 electromagnetic separation plant were rising. A secret city, already up and running with tens of thousands of men who did not know what they were building, was being assembled up from the mud. It was a material manifestation of Ezra's intangible atomic empire.
"I have erected forts on dangerous islands and dams in the middle of a void," Groves said, his gruff, awe-struck reverence thickening his tone. He waved toward the miraculous vista. "I never assumed I could look upon something to equal this. You have constructed in half a year what might have taken five."
Ezra looked out over the titanic industrial complex. He thought back to the small, plain, black ledger book stored within his study's vault. This city, this monstrous undertaking that was draining the national treasuries dry and straining the capacities of engineering, was, to his eyes, a lone entry on a lone page. He had used his political influence to prime ground. He had used his industrial power to build the city. And he had used his scientific knowledge to give it its dreadful, secret mission. The alignment was complete.
"We're just getting started, General," Ezra spoke quietly, his gaze across the horizon. "Just getting started."