As she smelled the medley of forest odors, she could hear a whining hum that throbbed in the air, pitched just at the edge of hearing. The plant was operating at its full capacity.
“We use K-25 for our gaseous diffusion work with uranium,” Groves said. “Like I described it in the car, we take a uranium hexafluoride gas and pump it through three thousand separate filter stages, all in a row inside that one building. The filter material is so fine that it can preferentially allow uranium-235 atoms, the lighter isotope, to pass through a little bit easier than the heavier isotope uranium-238.
“But the uranium hexafluoride is extremely corrosive. None of the piping or valves in that entire building are made of steel or conventional alloys because they’d get eaten away within hours. Most everything’s glass, specially crafted. The filtration material had the same constraints. And this is only a single facility.”
Groves put his thumbs into his protruding waistline as if he had just impressed himself. “After we pump the gas through the three thousand stages, what comes out the other end is a little bit enriched in the uranium isotope we want. Only about one percent, but that’s better than anything we’ve achieved before.”
“And that’s why you need such a large complex,” Engel said.
“Yes, sir.”
“But what do you need it/or?”
Groves scowled. “I’m afraid we can’t tell you that, Mr. Congressman.”
Stimson turned and looked over the car at Engel. “We need it to win the war, Albert. We need it to get back at the Nazis for what they did to New York.”
“But-”
“Oh Albert, can’t you see this isn’t all just a fraud?” -
Engel shuffled his feet on the opposite side of the limousine. “Of course I can see the money hasn’t been embezzled away somewhere. But I still can’t understand what it’s about.”
General Groves took a step toward the front of the car, then waved at a pair of mosquitoes in his face. “Congressman, we have an army of workers inside those buildings. Every man or woman stands at their own station. They have been given very careful instructions about what the needles on their gauges should read and which knobs to turn if they need to adjust anything. We have thousands of stations, every one monitoring just a single part of this gigantic process.
“But not one of those workers knows how his piece fits in with anything else. Not one of them has the vaguest idea of what the whole thing is for. They don’t need to. They only need to know that they’re doing war work and their country depends on them. And pardon me for saying this, sir, but you don’t need to know either.”
“The general means no offense, Albert,” Stimson interrupted.
Groves nodded down at the K-25 building, then turned his conversation down a different track. He pointed to a distant set of buildings on another flattened hilltop. “The Y-12 plant over there is where we use a different process, the electromagnetic method, to separate the isotopes further. We have giant magnets wound with silver wires all arranged in an enormous loop called a racetrack, and the gas gets passed through the magnetic fields. We’ve also got a third plant, S-50, using yet another process called thermal diffusion.”
“Why so many different methods, General?” Engel asked, still defensive. His eyes looked glazed from the technical jargon, though. “Why not just pick the best one and go with it? We don’t have infinite financial resources, you know. That’s what my constituents would be most distressed about. It’s typical of the way Roosevelt has been handling things throughout his administration. That’s why Dewey is doing so well in the polls.”
Groves drew in a deep breath, apparently to quell an outburst in front of the congressman. “Mr. Engel, we must find the process that works. We are at war, and the attack on New York has shown us that German secret research is following the same lines as ours. We don’t have the luxury to try one idea, then another, then another. We must try them all at once and proceed immediately with whatever solves our problem. We must have this working now.” He pulled a cigar out of his breast pocket but did not light it. “And it is. We have been successful. Now we must put it to use. The Germans aren’t going to know what hit them.”
Congressman Engel looked down at the K-25 building and shook his head. Elizabeth could tell he was astonished, but she still didn’t know if he was convinced.
“We’ve come all the way out here, Mr. Secretary,” Groves said. “I know you’re probably tired already, but I would like to show you the Y-12 and the S-50 plants as well.”
“Just have that driver mix me an old-fashioned and I can last a few hours more,” Stimson said.
“I would like to see the other plants,” Engel said. “But I wish we could get rid of some of these bugs!” He slapped at something on his hand, then climbed back into the car.
“General Groves,” Stimson said, lowering his voice with a glance at Engel slipping into his seat and out of earshot. “I would suggest that you hurry up with your Project. You know I have always supported you with the full resources of the War Office, but I’m not sure how much longer I can continue to serve. This atomic bomb idea is about the only thing that keeps me in office.
“But that’s not even the worst of it. Too many people have blamed FDR for what happened to New York. This war has been going on for too long, and his popularity is plummeting. All of us in the White House know that there’s practically no chance in hell that Roosevelt could ever win against Dewey now.”
Groves stopped moving in shock—the first time Elizabeth had ever seen him stand still. “And Dewey knows nothing about the Project. There’s no telling whether he’ll even support it.”
Stimson nodded. “That’s right, General. I would say it behooves you to get something ready before November.”
Groves stared down at the K-25 plant. “That’s impossible, Mr. Secretary.”
“Impossible?” Elizabeth interrupted. “General Groves, I thought you said yourself that you never wanted to hear that word spoken aloud by anyone connected with this project.”
The general turned red and glared at Elizabeth. She ducked inside the car before he could lash out at her. Congressman Engel fidgeted in the backseat of the limousine. “Are we going to get moving?” he asked. “It’s awfully hot in this car.”
As Stimson clambered into the back, making every move as if his joints had been fashioned out of fine china, Groves stuck his head in and spoke to the driver. “We’re skipping the rest of the tour. Back at the office we can find someone to show Congressman Engel and Secretary Stimson around. Miss Devane and I must get to Knoxville and catch the next train back to New Mexico.”
“General, I would still like to see—” Engel began.
“I’m trying to think right now.” Groves rubbed his forehead. “Miss Devane, if you have any more brilliant ideas as my technical advisor, you had better come up with them between now and the time we board the train.”
20
Dachau Concentration Camp
November 1944
“First, it’s very possible that Germany will soon produce some fissionable material. We have no evidence to the contrary. Second, there is no known defense against a nuclear weapon. And third, if we succeed In time, we’ll shorten the war and save tens of thousands of American lives.”
—General Leslie R. Groves
They hauled another dead one outside the big doors that morning.
Daniel Waldstein—rather, the skeletal man who had once been Waldstein—and one of the other prisoners picked up the shrunken, disintegrating man they had known only as Eli. Eli did not moan or move as they carried him from the concrete floor of the reactor building; that didn’t mean he was dead, but once a man reached this state of collapse, Daniel knew he was doomed.
When they opened the door to set out Eli’s body on the cold muddy ground, the breath of frigid wintry air felt like the snap of a wet towel in his face. The odors of the concentration camp struck him, as did the briskness of the air. New snow had melted ar
ound the reactor building, dotting the ground with puddles trying to freeze.
Daniel and Saul, his helper, set the body down where other prisoners would come to retrieve him. The Nazi guards refused to go near the reactor building. Saul turned and shuffled back inside to the humid warmth. Daniel caught one last breath of the fresh air, then pulled the enormous doors shut behind him with a clatter on their metal tracks.
Inside, the cavernous reactor building felt unbearably hot and stifling. Steam filled every breath. The other prisoners remained silent, and the reactor itself made only humming and hissing noises from the coolant water being pumped through its pipes into the core. No mechanical sounds could be heard—the reactor worked by magic, it seemed. None of them knew what the thing did or what it was for.
They knew only that if they worked inside there for a week, they would earn their freedom. They had seen others walk out, carrying a few possessions and a new coat. Most of them did not survive their term of labor—but it was worth the risk. Any of them would have said so.
No one could understand what kind of sickness struck them down, why their bodies fell apart simply from being in the same room with the reactor. Occasionally, the Dachau doctors would remove one of the workers for inspection and analysis, and those workers never came back.
Daniel Waldstein kept ignorant of science. He had been a jeweler, a fine jeweler with his own shop in Berlin. He had not harmed anyone; he had simply made his jewelry, rings, pendants. Some of the finer pieces he wore himself—or had worn. Everything had been stripped from him on the day he arrived at Dachau.
He thought of those days sitting in the dimness of his shop, with light shining through the windows that he cleaned regularly. He could smell the precious metal as he worked on it; he could feel the smooth craftwork on his strong but delicate fingers—fingers that had long since been smashed and dulled by hard work here in the camp. Daniel remembered talking to his customers, Germans and Jews alike. He thought about going home at the end of the day and relaxing in his apartment, perhaps lighting the candle for a dinner with his wife Emmi.
They had shot Emmi within the first month here.
Now Daniel felt only a tiny candle of life burning in him, focusing existence on merely carrying his soul from one second to the next. He could not give up. He could not surrender. He had endured this, and it could not possibly get worse.
Already gaunt and nearly starved, half dead from exposure to the cold autumn and approaching winter, Daniel had grown much worse in the few days he had worked in the reactor building. In another day or two it would be his turn with the four others to disassemble the reactor, wearing scarred and burnt leather gloves to pull away the hot blocks of graphite, moving them aside to withdraw the glowing warm tubes of uranium, preparing them for shipment somewhere else. It was the day after disassembly that workers most often succumbed.
Daniel remembered his rush of excitement when the camp officials had picked his name for the duty. Tears had streaked his cheeks; he had fallen to his knees with gratitude toward the guard who had told him of his opportunity.
Now he knew he could not survive the length of his term of service, though only a few days remained. He could not keep his meals down. Sores covered his skin. Diarrhea had exhausted him, torn him apart. Retching, trembling, sweating, he could not last much longer. He would never leave Dachau alive.
Daniel had always feared he would die here. Somehow he had known it in the back of his mind. But the desperate need to survive refused to let him believe, though now it had become even worse: not only was he going to die, but he was going to die without knowing the reason, without knowing what this infernal device was for, how the Nazis would use it… to win the war? To destroy the world?
Saul looked at him before returning to his work, as if knowing what Daniel was thinking. Saul kept his voice low and bleak. “We are all dead men here. How many more days before they carry us out? Before you carry me, or I carry you?”
Daniel saw a flash of anger behind Saul’s eyes. The anger startled him, and he realized that his own anger had slept for too long. While he remained passive, had his own dignity been trampled beyond the hope of recovery? Why had he let them do everything to him? Was it just to survive? If survival cost that much, was it worth living?
Daniel looked at his hands, blackened from the carbon bricks and the ever-present graphite dust. These were the hands that had just carried a man, a human being, out into the mud, where he would be thrown into a trench and buried with the others.
Daniel took a step closer to Saul. He kept his voice low, as if afraid someone might hear him, though none of the Nazis would dare enter such a dangerous place. “You see what they are doing to us. Why are we helping them?” Saul’s face hung slack, as if the brief flash of anger had been all the emotion remaining within him. “We don’t even know what this does.”
Daniel remained silent, and then stared into Saul’s eyes. They were bloodshot, with dark pupils that looked blasted and shrunken from everything the other prisoner had seen and done.
“But I bet we could break it.”
Saul blinked and took a step backward. He looked down at his own hands, at the tattooed number on the inside of his forearm. “We don’t know how it works. It has no mechanical parts. I used to build and fix machines. This is not a machine.” It seemed an empty objection. “We could knock down the pile?”
Daniel shook his head. “No, they would shoot us and have someone else rebuild it in a day. We must cause more damage than that.”
He jerked a bony shoulder to indicate the cooling pipes where water rushed through the reactor, bursting into steam and pouring out the smokestacks above. Day after day, when not assigned to other work details, Daniel had watched the smokestacks, looked at the white steam, wondering what it was like inside the reactor building. He hoped and prayed that his name would be picked because that would give him a slim but definite possibility that he could escape this place and go back to his old world, to his jeweler’s shop, back to an imaginary life with Emmi.
He knew that would never happen. Emmi was gone. His shop was smashed, the windows broken out during the one frenzied night called Kristallnacht. He could not go back, but he could get out of here. Or so Daniel had thought. Now he knew otherwise.
“Saul, we cannot let it continue. Who knows what they are going to use this for? If we smash the cooling pipes, that is the only thing that could perhaps cause enough damage to stall them a little while. They will kill us for it, but we are dead anyway.”
Saul now looked as if he had second thoughts. “I do not want to die to serve no purpose. What if we do no good?”
“Does it not serve a purpose just to do something, just to strike a blow against them?”
Saul pondered this a moment. The other prisoners continued their aimless jobs, but some had stopped to listen.
“Yes,” Saul said. “It does.”
Daniel and Saul spoke to the other workers in the reactor detail. All agreed, except one man who hung so close to death he could barely keep himself moving.
“I heard that other Dachau prisoners sabotaged the construction work on showers that were to be used to gas Jews,” Daniel said. “We will do the same to this project, whatever it is. The Nazis will have no success from our labors.”
Saul found a small wrench used to adjust some of the apparatus and handed it to Daniel. “You should be the one to do this first,” he said.
Daniel took the wrench and looked at it. The tool was too small to be used as a weapon against any of the guards, not that the guards would fear them anyway, strutting around with their rifles and machine guns. The Jewish prisoners outnumbered the guards hundreds to one, but still none of them did anything. The guards enjoyed taunting them, knowing the prisoners would not resist; they had all been too cowed.
The lack of guards inside the reactor building was another reason why working there was such an attractive assignment. Regardless of the chance for freedom, even if they knew they we
re likely going to succumb at the end of a week, a few days without the taunting, without the nightmare of having a rifle barrel pointed at your back every moment, was perhaps worth dying for.
Daniel took the small wrench over to the red-painted valves protruding from the main cooling pipes. He slipped the wrench through the padlock and twisted, although he had not the strength to break it. Black spots danced in front of his eyes and he felt dizzy from the effort, but still he pushed and twisted.
One of the other prisoners, wearing a pair of the burned gloves, came back with a brick of the soft graphite and pounded on the wrench with it.’ The graphite crumbled into splinters of glossy black powder, but it added enough force to snap the hasp of the padlock.
Daniel took the lock off and dropped it. The rushing sounds of water pulsed next to his ear just on the other side of the pipe. He didn’t hear the padlock as it struck the concrete floor. He yanked out the chain holding the valve in place and, with a burst of strength, tossed the chain toward the towering, silent reactor.
Saul and Daniel turned the valve together, cranking it on resisting threads until they had shut all the water off. The other prisoners used the wrench to break smaller, secondary padlocks off, turning valves.
Saul opened up a large shunt valve, which sent a jet of water blasting into the echoing reactor bay. The water looked clean and cool as it splashed up on the concrete. Daniel stared at it. One of the prisoners held his hands out and stood in the stream, but the force knocked him backward. Daniel let the water run over his own hands and feet, feeling it soak into his clothes.
The river water felt icy, and his whole body numbed in an instant. Daniel didn’t mind. He wanted to feel numb. The weakness and nausea welled up in him again, and he fell retching onto the floor. He spat blood into the swirling water.
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