by James Thayer
Contractors were equally perplexed. August Knuth, an expert cabinetmaker from Local 1922, was hired to put three-quarter-inch holes in graphite blocks. He almost went mad drilling twenty-two thousand holes at the rate of one hundred holes an hour. No one would tell him why they needed pure graphite blocks, much less blocks with holes in them. For his trouble he received the union wage and a warning that he would be swiftly imprisoned without public trial if he discussed his work with anyone. Each night that month his wife asked Knuth why he was leaving a thick graphite film on her shower walls every night after work. His story that he was sharpening pencils at the union hall was not well received.
Protection was intense. A dozen armed guards discreetly surrounded the lab, which was located on Ellis Avenue across the street from the Stagg Field west stands. The lab and the field were in the heart of the campus, so the guards easily camouflaged themselves by dressing like students. If anyone noticed the unusual number of older students carrying pool-cue cases, long objects loosely wrapped with Christmas paper, and, in the best of Chicago traditions, violin cases, they did not mention it to school authorities.
Students wandering into the lab building were politely turned away by a desk man who referred them to other labs, other professors, or anywhere else. Persistent students saw the initially courteous man quickly become angry, a tactic which always drove them away. Stray tourists were given a handful of pamphlets about amoebas. If that did not satisfy them, the desk man launched into a calculatedly boring speech about food vacuoles, contractile vacuoles, and other amoeba body parts. Only the hardiest tourists lasted more than five minutes.
One minute into the amoeba speech, Crown and Heather showed the desk man their identification cards.
"Thank God," the man said. "I've set a record for that speech this week. One old lady with nothing else to do checked out a book on single-cell animals from the university library and now comes here once a day to argue with me." He waved them through the double doors.
A pudgy man wearing the monotony of his job on his face sat behind a card table in the vestibule near the double doors. He pressed Crown and Heather's left thumbs and index fingers on the ink-smeared glass plate, then onto print paper. He shoved the paper through a slot in the wall. Two full minutes passed before the heavy door squeaked open.
Five uniformed army soldiers sat on a bench behind the black door. The soldier who had opened the door, a gangly youth whose head was shaved almost to the skin, asked Crown and Heather for their identification cards. He strung a thin cord through the hole in each card. Anyone in the building who was not wearing his card around his neck or on his belt was immediately arrested.
"Who's expecting you, sir?" he asked as he handed the identification cards to them.
"Enrico Fermi."
They followed the soldier down the brightly lit, sterile hallway, turned right, and continued at his heels. Other guards were stationed at corners, so the hallways were under constant surveillance. All office doorways were closed and had no numbers or names on them. Every fifteen paces or so, a small alarm was attached to the wall. Crown supposed each office would have a similar alarm.
The soldier stopped in front of a door identical to all the others and knocked twice, paused, and knocked twice again. Several seconds later an electronic throw bolt clicked, and he swung the door open.
Fermi was not there, so Crown and Heather waited in steel chairs facing his desk. The office was a disappointment to Crown, who had expected the working quarters of the famous Nobel laureate to reflect his status. The predominant fixtures were wall blackboards covered with meaningless hieroglyphics. Behind the desk, two portable blackboards on rollers hid the boarded-up windows. A waist-high bookshelf stood to the left of Fermi's desk. The desk was covered with loose papers, a telephone, the alarm box, several slide rules, and a hand-crank calculator. The only nonacademic item in the office was a pair of cross-country skis leaning against one of the blackboards. Crown looked in vain for the Nobel plaque.
"Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Crown," Enrico Fermi said as he entered the office through a side door and walked to his desk. He was a small man, perhaps five feet, five inches. His hairline had receded almost to the back of his head. He had a sharp nose, and his sideburns stopped at the top of his ears. He was wearing a herringbone sports jacket without a tie. The identification card was stuck on the front of his belt buckle. His pants looked as if he slept in them, and judging by the cot near the back wall, he frequently did. His Italian accent was just noticeable. "Sometimes I think the security measures are taken a bit too far. Each morning I'm given photographs of those who have appointments with me. Whenever anyone knocks, I must adjourn to the side room, click open the front office door with the switch there, and wait until they are seated, so I can look at them through a one-way mirror in the door. They don't want me to be surprised by a visitor."
Fermi leaned across the desk and shook hands with Crown and Heather and said, "I'm glad you could come, Miss McMillan. You'll have an easier time transcribing the interviews if you know a little about what's going on in this lab."
He sat down and asked, "How was your trip from England?"
"No problems. Hess is safe in a house in Hyde Park right now."
"General Groves described how you got him here. You must have been worried about the trip."
"We aren't sure of Hess's status with the powers-that-be in Germany, whether they've forgotten him or whether they want to get rid of him," Crown said. "There are enough German agents in England to have caused us problems if they wanted to."
Fermi leaned back in his chair, lifted a leg up on the corner of his desk, then glanced at Heather as if he had forgotten she was there, and quickly lowered his leg to the floor.
What impressed Crown most about the Italian was not his suitably professorial appearance, but the energy Fermi emitted. The taut lines around his eyes; the rapid tapping of his fingers on the desk, the chair arm, or whatever they came in contact with; and his darting eyes—all were symptoms of the man's tremendous energy. Crown guessed it was only with massive willpower that Fermi remained in his chair and did not pace the room.
"You are making a bomb?" Heather asked abruptly.
Fermi glanced at her and smiled. Fermi's grin involved his entire face and set his eyes at a delightful angle. He was a man who enjoyed smiling.
"That's only part of what we are doing here, Miss McMillan," he said. "Actually, what we are looking for is a cheap, compact form of energy. That energy can be released at once, as in a bomb, or released slowly, like a piece of burning wood. It is conceivable that a million-kilowatt electrical power plant with nuclear fission as its source of energy could be no larger than a power substation. Compare this with the enormity of the Grand Coulee Dam and you can see its potential. Or compare uranium with coal. We estimate that one pound of uranium can give off energy equivalent to fifteen hundred tons, not pounds, tons of coal." Fermi paused to see if Heather cared to venture a gasp of disbelief, and when she did not, he continued, "We think that one pound of uranium or plutonium can yield enough energy to supply the total power consumption of the United States for fifteen minutes."
Heather's short question had put Fermi on the defensive. He acted as if he had given this speech many times before, perhaps to himself.
"Some benefits are more immediate," continued Fermi as he switched his gaze to Crown. "Fission does not produce the smog that is Chicago's hallmark. And it's much more economical to transport two pounds of uranium than three thousand tons of coal. And on and on."
"But, nevertheless, your work centers on the production of the bomb?" Heather persisted.
Fermi looked at her with a hint of pleading in his eyes and said, "And there are a lot of nonpower uses that will be the offshoot of our work. Developments in medicine and biology will be greatly accelerated because of the large amounts of radioactive substances that will be available to researchers. It's possible that these substances can be used to treat diseases and
wounds. And the availability of high-intensity radiation will have an unprecedented effect on industrial research. Who knows what can be done with chemicals that have been treated with high doses of radioactive substances? Uses of our research are endless."
Fermi paused to collect himself. He dropped his hands onto the desk and smiled broadly. "You know, Miss McMillan, you have an amazing ability to make me want to justify myself. Very few people do that. My wife, for one."
"I'll take that as a compliment, Mr. Fermi," Heather said, warming to the scientist.
"It is. She's precious." Fermi gestured to the blackboards and said, "Yes, we are working on a bomb. These things I mention, these peaceful uses, are only a secondary goal now. Our first priority is to produce a weapon that will quickly end the war, and to produce it before the Germans do. I don't need contorted logic to rationalize my work on this project, Miss McMillan. I saw what was happening in Italy before I left, what the Germans were doing to Italy.
"Because of economic sanctions against Italy imposed by the League of Nations due to the Ethiopian campaign, Italy has found itself allied with the Germans. This has made most Italians gag, because the Germans are ancient enemies of Italy, and the two countries fought each other as recently as the First World War. Italians couldn't believe we were fighting on the same side as the Germans in the Spanish Civil War. We thought Hitler was a prancing idiot who was doing his best to imitate the Duce. Our newspapers led us to believe that Mussolini was the leader of this strange relationship. This delusion was shattered in 1938, when Hitler occupied Austria without even informing Mussolini in advance. The Duce could do nothing but acquiesce after the fact. Italy has slowly become Germany's slave.
"To my wife and me, the most agonizing aspect of Germany's hold on Italy was the new anti-Jew campaigns announced by Mussolini. Please remember that Italy has never been anti-Semitic. We simply didn't have traces of that German disease of anti-Semitism in our population. But suddenly the government started announcing anti-Jewish measures.
"The first anti-Semitic laws were passed in September 1938, and that's when Laura and I decided to leave Italy. Not all the laws were aimed at the Jews, however. The Duce went berserk with his laws. He issued laws prescribing proper hairdos for women and proper uniforms for civil-service workers. And Mussolini, always thinking, banned ties for men's clothing, because he said they pressed on certain nerves in the neck, which might prevent men from taking accurate aim with a rifle after they were drafted. We simply couldn't live in such a repressive, silly climate. We left Rome for the last time on December 6, 1938."
"But is a silly government enough of a reason to work on a bomb that can kill hundreds of thousands?" Heather asked.
"No, no." Fermi looked away and searched for words. "Conditions in Germany and Italy have gone far beyond being silly. I'm personally familiar with one example. Laura's piano teacher in Rome is a Jew. We received a letter from her several weeks ago saying she had been taken to a camp in Germany. The letter was newsy. But then she asked us to say hello to her brother Alexander. And she wanted to know how Laura's violin lessons were going. And she asked how I was, but called me Paul. Well, she has no brothers, Laura was taking piano lessons, and my name is not Paul. The letter was full of errors that she knew we would recognize as errors. We can only conclude she is in deep trouble and that conditions at her camp are not as rosy as the letter's censor would like us to believe. She was warning us of what is going on in Germany."
John Crown was uncomfortable. His task was to learn the layout of the experiment and see that Heather was introduced to some of the technical jargon she would encounter during the Fermi-Hess interviews, not to expose the scientist to a young Englishwoman's concepts of morality. He was sure Fermi felt ill at ease under Heather's constant gaze.
"Well," Fermi said, rising from his seat, "I seem to have run off at the mouth. Let me explain a little about our project before I take you to the squash court."
"Squash court? I've never played squash," Heather said.
"We don't play squash there, Miss McMillan. You'll see that in a few minutes," replied Fermi, glad she was not in total command of the conversation.
Fermi picked up a dusty eraser and wiped clean a portion of blackboard. He said, "Please suffer through a few seconds of physics. It'll make the squash court clearer."
Fermi drew a circle on the board and began, "You know that all matter is composed of atoms, and that they are extremely small. A spoonful of water contains a million billion atoms.
"In 1910, Lord Rutherford first showed that the atom, which theretofore had been thought the smallest particle, was in fact made of even smaller particles—a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged particles called electrons. Although practically all the mass is in the nucleus, it is very small. And its satellite electrons are also extremely small. The orbit of an electron is not even a hundred-millionth of an inch in diameter."
"I can't even imagine those figures," said Heather.
"Well, if the nucleus could be magnified to the size of a baseball, the outermost electron would be circling it a half-mile away. So even when atoms are packed tightly together, the nuclei are very far apart.
"Later, it was discovered that the nucleus of most elements is a combination of particles—protons and neutrons. The protons and neutrons within an atomic nucleus are held together by an extremely strong force. What we are trying to do is to split them."
Fermi drew circles and straight and crooked lines as he spoke. Heather leaned forward in her chair and did not even blink as she stared at the blackboard. Crown looked alternately at his fingernails and Heather. She had thawed a little since last night's discussion of Hess, and he was glad of it.
"We've found that we can bombard a nucleus with a tiny projectile, a neutron. Heavy nuclei can be split into almost equal parts. This is nuclear fission. It isn't a hard theoretical concept."
"It doesn't seem that much energy could be released by the splitting of one atom," said Heather.
"That's true. But we're trying to set it up so that the separation of one atom causes the splitting of other atoms, and those cause the splitting of more atoms, and on and on. The potential energy of this chain reaction would be enormous."
Fermi clapped his hands together to rid himself of the chalk dust and said, "Let's take a tour of the contraption we've built, which hopefully will allow us to have a self-sustained nuclear reaction."
"You mean this hasn't been done yet?" Heather asked as she rose from her seat.
"No. the self-sustained reaction is still theory. We'll know in a few days whether my theory is correct. To the squash court."
The soldier was leaning against the hallway wall as the three emerged from the office. Fermi took a key from his sports-coat pocket and threw one of the door bolts. The soldier locked the second with a key chained to his belt.
"Sometimes I yearn for a lab where I don't have to ring six bells and unlock ten doors to go to the bathroom accompanied by a soldier," Fermi said as he led them through the hallways, past the security doors, and out onto the sidewalk. He discreetly pointed to the Stagg Field grandstand across the street.
"There's the location of our experiment, the basement of Alonzo Stagg Stadium," he said.
The backside of the grandstand was designed in the best architectural tradition of the University of Chicago. Crown wondered why a football field needed castle turrets at each corner of the grandstand. Ivy climbed up the red-brick turrets, in which were small recessed windows. The windowsills were beveled toward the ground to deny footing to a potential attacker. As with all good castles, the top eight feet of the four-story turrets were extended on cantilever beams a foot beyond the circular wall beneath, thereby making a ladder assault difficult. Archers' slits ringed the turrets and the connecting wall. Lest their work be considered too militant, the architects had infused a religious theme into the grandstand. Midway between the turrets was the main entrance, a sweeping arched doorway reminiscent of
French Gothic cathedrals. The high, arched windows along the walls on both sides of the entrance continued the cathedral theme. One expected but did not see stained glass. Above these windows were more archers' slits. An architectural mess, thought Crown.
They followed Fermi under the Stagg Field entrance to a small door on the south wall of the lobby. Fermi knocked a certain way, and the iron door opened. Crown could see from the brickwork that the old door had been recently replaced with its solid-metal substitute. Crown and Heather underwent the fingerprint ritual again, and after several minutes were cleared for entry. A second door scraped open, and they walked along a long hallway past several sentries and down a steep flight of stairs.
"These are the university's old indoor courts. Handball, squash, racketball, and such. You can see the shower rooms over there," Fermi said as they walked past carpenters' tool chests and a small pile of graphite blocks carefully stacked on a canvas sheet. The hallway's dim light flickered dully off the buckles and epaulet buttons on the guards' uniforms. After a close scrutiny by two guards at the final sentry post, Heather, Crown, and Fermi walked through the door and onto a squash-court viewing platform. At one end of the platform, a curly-black-haired, spectacle-wearing technician was meticulously examining electrical components of a control panel. The parts, seemingly hundreds of them, were spread on a white cloth draped over a wooden desk. The technician did not look up as Fermi approached the viewing-platform rail.