by Herman Wouk
Resignedly, and with a sense of foreboding, Slote said, “You’ll do the talking, though.”
The minister wore a Palm Beach suit and well-chalked white shoes. He was going to a garden luncheon, he said, so this interview would have to be a brisk one. He dropped into his swivel chair and keenly regarded with his living eye the two men sitting side by side on the couch.
“Sir, I appreciate your giving me this time out of your busy schedule,” Beall began, somewhat overdoing the briskness in tone and gesture.
The minister made a tired deprecatory hand wave. “What new information have you?”
Wayne Beall launched into his report. Two hard separate confirmations of the massacre had come into his office from very high-level persons. From a third source, he had eyewitness affidavits of the mass murder process in action. He said this at length, with much talk about disaster, American humanitarianism, and the minister’s wisdom.
Leaning his face on one hand like a bored judge, the minister asked, “What high-level persons gave you confirmation?”
The vice consul said that one was a well-known German industrialist, the other a top Swiss official of the International Red Cross. If the minister needed the names, he would try to get the gentlemen’s consent to be identified.
“You’ve talked to them yourself?”
“Oh, no, sir! Neither one would level with an American official. Not unless they knew him very, very intimately.”
“How did you get their reports, then? And how do you know they’re authentic?”
With a trace of embarrassment Beall said that Jewish sources had given him the reports: the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Slote perceived the fall in the minister’s interest: a wandering of the live eye, a slump of the shoulders. “Indirect reports again,” Tuttle said.
“Sir,” Slote spoke up, “what other kind can there be about a secret plan of Hitler’s?” He could not keep irritation out of his voice. “As to this German industrialist, I spoke to the chap at the WJC myself, and he —”
“What’s the WJC?”
“World Jewish Congress. He all but named the man. I know who he means. This man is very high up in German industry. I also read the file of eyewitness affidavits. They’re substantial and shattering.”
“And that’s not the whole story yet, sir,” said Beall.
“Well, what else?” The minister took an ivory paper cutter and slapped it on his palm.
Beall described how he and the British consul in Geneva had sent home identical coded cables about the new evidence, for confidential transmittal to Jewish leaders. The British Foreign Office had forwarded it at once to the designated British Jews, but the American State Department had suppressed the telegram. Now the Jewish leaders in both countries, besides being in a turmoil over the disclosures, were up in arms over the State Department’s action, which had been found out.
“That I will look into,” the minister declared, throwing the paper cutter down on his desk. “You’ll be hearing further from me, Wayne, and now I’d like a word with Leslie.”
“Certainly, sir.”
“See you in my office, Wayne,” Slote said.
When the door closed behind Beall, the minister said to Slote, looking at his watch and rubbing his good eye, “I’ve got to go. Now listen, Les, I don’t like this business of suppressing cables. The Division of European Affairs puzzles me. It’s already ignored two letters of mine, about the visa regulations, and about your photostats.”
“You did write about the photostats?” Slote burst out. “When?”
“When the Polish government-in-exile’s stuff came out. That gave me second thoughts. How on earth could they fabricate all that? The statistics, the locations, the carbon monoxide vans, the midnight raids on the ghettos? That business of searching the dead women’s rectums and vaginas, for God’s sake, for jewelry? How could anybody just imagine such things?” Slote stared dumbfounded at the minister. “But okay, let’s assume the Poles are unreliable. Let’s say they’re blackening the Germans to cover their own misdeeds. What about that business in Paris? The Vichy police separating thousands of foreign Jews from their kids and shipping off the parents, God knows where! In front of news cameras, this was. Nothing secret about it. I got a YMCA report on the details. Just heartrending. That was when I wrote the department about your photostats, but it was like throwing a stone down a well. And the visa thing, Les, is just too much.”
“Good God, I hope you mean the good conduct certificate!” Slote exclaimed. “I’ve been battling that nonsense for months.”
“Exactly. I can’t look these Swiss officials in the eye anymore, Leslie. We’re not fooling them, we’re simply disgracing our country. How can an escaped Jew produce a good conduct certificate from his hometown police in Germany? It’s an obvious gimmick to keep the Jews piling up here. We’re going to have to waive it.”
Staring pallidly at Tuttle, Slote cleared his throat. “You’re making me feel human again, sir.”
The minister got up, combed his hair at a closet mirror, and fitted on his broad-brimmed straw hat. “Besides, the railroad intelligence is getting damned strange. These huge jammed trains really are hauling civilians from all over Europe to Poland, and then turning around and rattling back empty, while the German army’s hurting for cars and locomotives. I know that for a fact. Something funny is going on, Leslie. I’ll tell you something entre nous. I wrote a personal letter to the President about this business, but then I tore it up. We’re losing the goddamned war, and he just can’t be burdened with anything else. If these Germans do win, the whole world will become one big execution yard, and not just for Jews.”
“I believe that, sir, but still —”
“Okay. You tell Wayne Beall to pull his material together. Go to Geneva and help him. Get that Red Cross big shot to put what he knows in writing, if you possibly can.”
“I can try, sir, but these people are all petrified of the Germans.”
“Well, do your best. I’ll send the stuff straight to Sumner Welles this time. In fact, you may be the courier.” The good eye sparked appraisingly at Slote. “Hey? How does that strike you? Á nice little Stateside leave?”
Slote instantly recognized in such a mission the final ruin of his Foreign Service career. “Isn’t Wayne Beall your man for that, sir? He’s collected the stuff.”
“The specific gravity isn’t there. And he hasn’t mastered this subject as you have.”
“Mr. Tuttle, the car is waiting,” the desk loudspeaker grated.
Tuttle left. Returning to his office, Slote heard merry laughter as he opened the door. Wayne Beall and Heidi stood there looking sheepish, and Heidi hurried out. Slote relayed the minister’s instructions to Beall. “The sooner we get at it, the better, Wayne. The minister’s hot on this at last, so let’s keep up the momentum. Shall we go down to Geneva on the two o’clock train?”
“I just made a lunch date with your secretary.”
“Oh, I see.”
“In fact, Les, I thought I’d stay overnight, and —” He gave Slote a man-to-man grin. “Do you mind?”
“Oh, be my guest. We’ll go tomorrow.”
Soon Slote heard more laughter from the next room. One pretty girl on hand counted more than a million vague people suffering far away; nothing would ever change that fact of nature.
On his desk in the morning mail lay a formal report from Dr. Hesse, summarizing the Henry-Jastrow situation. Slote dropped it into a file marked Natalie, then tore up the unfinished letter to Byron. Perhaps good news would come in soon from some Mediterranean consulate, or even from Lisbon. For bad news there was always time.
37
PALMER FREDERICK KIRBY sat in shirt-sleeves at an old rented desk in a grimy office building near the University of Chicago campus, trying to finish a report before Rhoda’s arrival by train. He was in a low mood; partly from dread of this encounter, partly because Vannevar Bush demanded facts and detested gloom in reports, and
all the facts about the availability of pure graphite for a uranium reactor were gloomy. So was the weather. On this sultry gray August afternoon, opening the window admitted a gale off Lake Michigan warm as a desert sandstorm, and — what with Chicago’s airborne dust and detritus — perhaps half as gritty; and shutting it gave him a gasping sense of taking a steam bath with his clothes on.
The graphite problem typified the grotesque enterprise in which Dr. Kirby was now passing his days. The languid trickling effort on uranium had become since Pearl Harbor a rising river of ideas, money, people, and problems tumbling along in murky secrecy. Kirby worked for the S-1 Section of Vannevar Bush’s Office of Scientific Research and Development. To the initiated “S-1” meant uranium, but — and this was the root of his trouble — to everybody else it meant nothing. In his quest for materials and building sites, he could not beat out the tough procurement men from giant corporations and the armed forces. The Chicago scientists were blaming the repeated fizzling of their uranium reactor on the graphite, demanding purer stuff; but it was not to be had, and the large chemical firms capable of producing it were swamped with war orders from stronger bidders. This was the nub of Kirby’s report to Bush, with some half-hearted optimistic suggestions to sugar the pill.
A telephone call from Arthur Compton at the Physics Department interrupted him. The Compton brothers were two crushingly brilliant men; this one had a Nobel Prize, the other headed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kirby knew them both. He knew most of these dazzling physicists and chemists who were trying, at alarmingly wasteful cross-purposes, to make an atomic bomb before the Germans did. With some he had gone to school. They had not seemed much superior to himself at bull sessions and dances, or even in the laboratory; ambitious hardworking youngsters, as fond as he of girls, beer, and raw jokes. But in achievement they had pulled away from him like racehorses from a milkwagon nag. Being on first-name terms with them gave him no illusion of equality. On the contrary, it was a chronic sore in his ego.
“Fred, there’s a Colonel Peters here.” Compton, dry and direct as usual. “He’d like to come over and talk to you.”
“Colonel Harrison Peters? Army Corps of Engineers?”
“That’s the man.”
“I just sent a stack of reports to him in Washington.”
“He got them.”
Kirby looked at his desk clock; Rhoda was arriving in two hours. This was how everything happened in the uranium project. “Tell him to come along, Arthur.”
Soon Peters appeared, windblown and perspiring. Kirby seldom met men taller than himself, but Colonel Harrison Peters was one. The colonel was lean and long-skulled, with heavy graying hair, broad-shouldered, very erect; his grip was hard and his blue eyes were hard, too. Kirby gestured to his oversize armchair and ottoman. With a grateful sigh, Peters sank down, stretched out his legs, dusted his khaki uniform and pulled it straight, and clasped long muscular hands behind his head. “Thanks. This feels good! I’ve been on the go here since dawn. I’ve seen a lot, but I’m so ignorant that not much penetrates. You’re a physicist, aren’t you?”
“Well, I got my Ph.D. at Cal Tech. I’m an electrical engineer. A manufacturer, now.”
“At least that’s close, electrical engineering. I’m a civil engineer, West Point and Iowa State.” Peters yawned, a picture of relaxed chattiness. “Bridge-building is what I do best, but I’ve done a lot of general construction. Also some hydraulics, with all the harbors and rivers stuff the Corps handles. But this high-powered physics is out of my line. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing on this assignment. We’ll be invading Europe or Africa or the Azores in the next six months. I’ve been counting on a field command. However” — the long arms waved wide — “Befehl ist Befehl, the Krauts say.”
Kirby gave a short nod. “If you know German, that can be of use.”
“Why, is there much literature on uranium in German? I can hardly make out the stuff in English. I was very grateful for your material. Reading it was like wiping a foggy windshield. I began to see where I was at.”
“Glad it helped.”
“Well, I still think somebody’s crazy, Kirby, trying to play guessing games with triple-A priority materials, in the middle of a war, on a scientific riddle that may have no answer. I foresee nothing for myself but a knobby skull from butting stone walls. How’s your skull?”
“All knobs.” They both laughed, and Kirby added, spreading his hands, “I’m at your service.”
Shoving the ottoman forward, Colonel Peters sat up, long legs crossed, elbows on the arms of the chair, fingers interlaced. Kirby, with his stocking feet up on the desk, felt a trifle sloppy under the big man’s scrutiny. “Okay, Kirby. You and I have things in common.” The tone now was curt. “We’re both outsiders to chemical engineering and nuclear physics. We were both dragged into this thing. We both seem to have the same essential job, I on the Army side, you for this S-1 outfit of Vannevar Bush’s. You’ve been in it a long time. I’d like to get some guidance from you before I plunge in.”
“Ask me anything.”
“Okay, now I’ve been travelling around the country getting a quick look-see at this whole undertaking. To start with, all these scientists grind axes like mad, don’t they? Compton and his crowd here in Chicago are sure that this new Element 94, produced in a reactor, is the shortcut to the bomb. Only their reactor doesn’t work; gets warm, then dies out. Dr. Lawrence’s people out in Berkeley push electromagnetic separation of U-235. But they produce no U-235, with all that mess of big contraptions. The Columbia University crowd — and I take it, the British — think that diffusion is the way —”
“Gaseous dimision, not thermal diffusion,” Kirby put in with a chop of a flat palm. “Get that straight. Vastly different.”
“Right. There’s the Westinghouse thing, too, the ionic centrifuge. That makes the most sense to me, as an ignoramus. You’ve got two substances intermingled — natural uranium U-238 and the rare explosive isotope U-235. Okay? One’s heavier than the other, so you spin ‘em and get out the heavier one by centrifugal force. Cream separator principle.”
“That one’s pretty iffy, Colonel. Very complicated when you try to go to the large-scale mechanics. Ionized gas molecules don’t act like butter fat.” The colonel slightly grinned, and nodded in understanding. “I’m betting on gaseous diffusion myself,” Kirby went on. “Simply because it’s an established principle. Working with a corrosive gas like uranium hexafluoride you get into some nasty design problems, but there’s no new concept to be tested. If you build enough stages and build them right — acres and acres of barriered chambers, I grant you, thousands of miles of conduits, and very difficult tolerances — you’ve got to end up with U-235. That magnetic separator of Lawrence’s is a brilliant shortcut concept. I’m a Lawrence man, in fact a Lawrence worshipper, and my firm supplies him with high-performance equipment, but his whole idea just may not work. Nobody knows. It’s a new principle. You’re in green fields. Same thing with Compton’s reactor. It has never been done anywhere on God’s earth, unless the damned Germans have already brought it off.”
“I spent two hours today,” Peters said, “in that reactor setup under the football field bleachers. Ugly, sullen damned thing, this black heap towering to the ceiling, just standing there. Sooty technicians hovering around it, like devils fussing with a fire in hell that won’t burn.”
“Well put!” Kirby said with a sour smile. “There again, great concept. You nudge uranium with a neutron source and get it to splattering more neutrons around and splitting itself up. In theory if you design it right, you should get a chain reaction and blow up Chicago — except that the controls seem foolproof, so you just boil up a lot of heat and radiation and produce this new element, plutonium, that will also blow up with a hell of a bang, like U-235. That’s what the pencil-and-paper gentlemen predict. Yet the thing keeps fizzling and dying out. Why? Nobody’s sure. In a way I hope we’re up against some fact of nature, some physical im
possibility that nobody has discerned yet. That blank wall would stop the Germans, too. But is it really a solid wall? Or are we muffing the way through, while they’re finding it? That’s the damnable question.”
“You rate gaseous diffusion first.” Harrison Peters struck a stiff finger on the chair arm, as though to pin down Kirby’s view.
“Yes, but I’m an ignoramus myself. We’ve got to assume the Germans are on all of these tracks, so we can’t afford to bypass any of them. That’s the position of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, so it’s mine. I grind an axe too.”
“Kirby, you keep looking at the clock. Am I keeping you?”
“I have to meet somebody at the Union Station at six. She hates to stand around waiting.”
“Ah. A gal,” said Colonel Peters. His smile turned to a goatish grin; he ran a hand along his handsome gray hair; his demeanor became charged with mischievous appetite. The Army brigadier general who had authorized Kirby to send Peters the secret reports had volunteered that “Big Pete” was a wild bachelor, with a plus score on pretty girls quite impressive in a man his age.
“Well, a lady,” Kirby said.
“Good friend?”
“She’s the wife of an old good friend. They just lost a son at the Battle of Midway, a naval aviator.”
This wiped away, like a damp sponge swept over blackboard writing, the lecherous look of the colonel. His face went stiff and stern, his eyes clouded, and he shook his head. “That’s rough.”
“It’s an all-Navy family. The father’s commanding a cruiser, and another son’s in submarines. She’s been out on the West Coast, visiting the submariner and a daughter.”
“Look, I won’t hold you up then.”
“I don’t have to go yet.”
“Can I pick your brain on one more point?”
“Shoot.”
“If I understand it, the Army has come into this picture for the big production jobs. S-1 will carry on the experimental work, the pilot plants, and so forth.”