The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  Szilard pursed his lips in disagreement. “The war comes first, surely.”

  “We should not promise too much.”

  “There is great power here—we should seize it!”

  “Do not advertise what we cannot deliver. Keep our work to ourselves.”

  Urey, Dunning, and Szilard blinked at this. “Secrecy?” Urey said. “In science? That just slows down the work. We need many minds focused on this opportunity.”

  Fermi paid attention to slicing his steak and then spoke with weight on each separate word. “Secrecy protects us all from undue speculation. I don’t understand this statement. Yes? Data must rule. We must do experiment to guide us.”

  Szilard began, “Time does not allow—”

  “Mistakes, yes, or improper speculations,” Fermi said sternly, eyes on Szilard.

  The two men stared long and hard at each other, two worldviews colliding silently across a table. In the background the happy chatter of the ladies sounded to Karl like voices from a distant land. Fermi came from Catholic Italian farmers. Szilard’s family was Ashkenazi Jewish. Karl was Ashkenazi as well, and he knew from comparing notes with Szilard that his parents were of the professional class who immigrated to Budapest and prospered. Szilard had good foresight. He had fled Germany, where he was doing research, immediately after Hitler came to power in 1933. He had gotten to America well ahead of the other fleeing Europeans.

  “We will have to disagree on that, Enrico,” Szilard said, the twist of his mouth making it clear he did not like to say it.

  “For now, it is not an issue,” Urey pointed out. “We have nothing more to report.”

  Silence all around the table. Fermi began talking about the ease of getting steak in America, plus many other things—even lemons shipped from Cuba—and the tension eased. Karl finished his fish and felt a whisper in his ear. “I have a doctor’s appointment near here,” Marthe said.

  Karl saw nothing more would be said at his table, now that the ladies were breaking up. “I’ll walk you over. But got to pay the bill first.”

  He and Marthe had debated coming to this hotel lunch because it was bound to cost at least a dollar each. “But you need to be in such discussions,” Marthe had said firmly. She knew bits of what he was working on, and he had hinted a little at what might be at stake. Karl went to Urey and whispered an apology for leaving, then asked his cut of the bill.

  Fermi heard this somehow and said to the entire table, “I invited all to this social occasion, and I pay.”

  Urey said, “Enrico, we could all—”

  “The Nobel money is burning a hole in pocket—funny American phrase, I like it. No, I am host.”

  This brought smiles to all those around the tables. “See, I was right,” Marthe said, “best to come.” She darted a quick, moist tongue in his ear, and he beamed.

  “What’s this doctor visit about?” Karl asked.

  “A feminine problem.”

  On the way over she told him the ladies had talked about domestic problems and hairdressers. Urey’s wife, Frieda, had described how her father still rode a bicycle and had been hit by a delivery truck.

  “How old is the father?”

  “Eighty-one.”

  When he said quite reasonably, “The physics is not promising,” he was startled at her laugh. She could always surprise him.

  Once he had dropped her off, he walked the streets around 98th, where her appointment was in a stern gray granite building.

  Karl had always walked to clear his mind. The March breezes carried blustery, welcome warmth. He reviewed the lunch discussions and decided to avoid the dispute over secrecy, to stick close to Urey. The work would have to show them what to do, not abstract theories about future risk. He savored the neighborhood, glancing in shop windows at washing machines and other appliances they might someday be able to afford. His $180 minus the ten dollars he was giving Rae each month, for getting the distant Paley relatives out of Europe, left them little room to maneuver.

  As he walked, he slowly realized that the once familiar streets where he had grown up were now strange. They buzzed and honked in their restless energy, so different from the ambling avenues of Paris, where the humming car traffic did not dominate. In Paris, people eyed the swaying couples and odd, passing eccentrics, characters to be studied beneath leafy bowers. Here people walked fast and looked away, no eye contact, bound up in their whirring worlds. Everybody here was getting things done. In Paris, people were living.

  How much more time would Hitler give the Parisia?

  He walked back toward Columbia and past the granite monolith where Marthe had gone—and here she came out the entrance, smiling broadly. To his surprise, she walked boldly up and kissed him.

  He chuckled. “Wow, did the doctor give you something?”

  “No, you did.”

  “Uh, what—”

  She gave a light, tinkling laugh. “In October we will have our first child.”

  A feeling unlike anything before rushed through him. He had gone from lover to husband to father in less than a year. Time was accelerating now, and the heady rush carried a surge of joy.

  5.

  Karl could not resist the show Dunning was putting on for the newspapers. He could hear the reporters’ questions volleyed back in Dunning’s booming tones. They echoed down the corridor and into his office. His cranny in the basement of Pupin Hall was next to Dunning’s cyclotron lab.

  He had taken a while to realize his desk was right in the cyclotron target field. On the other hand, he realized he would get little radiation, because Dunning’s cyclotron was finicky and didn’t run much; plus, he really preferred to work at home. He labored well after midnight and slept well into the day. Additionally, he and Marthe had discovered that making love in the afternoon had a warm resonance, to give way to sweaty languor when all around them New Yorkers scurried on their incessant tasks. It was very French, and he knew it also helped him avoid stray neutrons that might come through the wall.

  So now he got up and went into the big cyclotron lab, where Dunning held forth before a swarm of reporters. Karl hung back and saw that Dunning, lit by a helpful big-beam light, was demonstrating the circulation of the blood, using radioactivity. He kept up a line of patter, chuckling, calling his grad students by nicknames, warming the room.

  Dunning prepared a sample of sodium by irradiating a glass of salt water in the beam of the loud, humming cyclotron. Using a clicking Geiger counter, he first showed that some radioactivity was in the glass. He stretched out his hand with the Geiger counter at his fingertips: no activity. He then drank the glass of irradiated water.

  Reporters didn’t know the sodium spat out electrons that could do no harm to Dunning’s cells. They murmured; wasn’t this dangerous? Dunning didn’t say. After some anxious minutes, the Geiger counter began to respond as the circulating blood brought more and more of the radioactive salt to Dunning’s fingertips. Reporters scribbled all this down; flashbulbs popped. It was a great show.

  The Times reporter described him as “a radioactive being,” which drew laughs. Dunning’s assistants hustled around, showing how a small toy subterranean mine collapsed, as they spun it up in a large centrifuge. Meaningless, but an opportunity for a photo the papers might use. The entire engineering lab was open for public walk-throughs. Karl took no part; it seemed a violation of the unspoken agreement not to let word of their fission experiments into the press.

  He saw Harold Urey in the corridor outside. Urey had a big office upstairs but could not resist going to see the graduate students and experimenters in the dank bowels of the building. On any given morning he might burst into the office of a colleague, eager to talk. Seeing the colleague perhaps discussing current research with students, he would apologize and begin to back out. Of course, he was invited in. Urey would then rush to the blackboard and begin, “I’ve finally figured out . . .” and would soon be pouring out words faster than most could follow. “Does that seem right?” he would s
ay at the end. Maybe one question or comment would emerge. Urey would thank the group warmly, again apologize, and rush out. The effect of this display on young graduate students was remarkable. They knew they were not such fountains of ideas, so quick and deft—and so their dreams of fame and Nobel Prizes faded.

  “He’s a showman, all right,” Urey said, then shifted mood. “Now—we need to talk about what to do next.”

  Karl nodded, followed. “Y’know,” Urey said on the way up the stairs, “during my stay at Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, Bohr didn’t know I was a chemist. He thought I was a physicist. Helped me a lot. These physics guys think they own science.”

  Karl nodded. Chemists saw physicists as the undeserving wonder boys. “But learning from Bohr—”

  “I got most of my physics in Copenhagen restaurants while dining with Professor H. A. Kramers, that’s the truth. You got to know how to milk the essence out of these guys. Otherwise, it’s all differential equations.”

  “I can handle those.”

  “Sure, that’s why I hired you. Most chemists don’t know enough math. My point is that to work with them, you gotta think like them.”

  They got to Urey’s office and the Nobel laureate sat, put his feet up on his desk, and popped some chewing gum into his mouth. Karl recognized the rube style. Urey hadn’t changed from years before.

  Urey said, “Look, Bohr postulated that U-235 is the isotope that fissions. So let’s go with Bohr.”

  “Fermi thinks—”

  “The great Fermi is too cautious. Also wrong. Bohr’s model says U-235.”

  “Everybody seems to think we should wait until Fermi’s experiments show us which—”

  “He’ll burn half a year finding out Bohr’s right. So look—separating the uranium isotopes is the obvious step.”

  Urey was the recognized world leader in isotope separation. Karl knew nearly nothing about it but had been reading the background papers on using a centrifuge to separate out the heavier U-238. Working with about a 1 percent mass difference made it tough.

  “Look, did you read about that German-American Bund meeting they had in Madison Square Garden?” Urey pressed on.

  “Uh, no.”

  “I had to see what morons these were—so I went. Cost nothing—somebody’s footing the bill. Their leader denounced ‘Franklin D. Rosenfeld’ and called his policy the ‘Jew Deal.’ Unbelievable. This thing’s gonna get worse, lots worse. That Bund is setting up training camps in Jersey! Training their people right here. Our own army is tiny. That National Socialist German Workers’ Party running Germany has millions. We’d better have a knockout weapon.”

  Karl knew to just nod. Urey on a rant wanted no interruptions. Karl had heard of the Bund meeting but that evening took Marthe to see The Wizard of Oz, which she liked and he didn’t. They had watched the crowds going to the Garden—mostly heavyset men with short haircuts and some bony women with intent faces. Some carried swastika flags, a shock to them both.

  “So we—what?” Karl said. “Assume Bohr is right and find out how to separate out the U-235?”

  Urey brought his feet down from the desk and sat upright. “You bet. We need money to do it and we’ve got to get some, to finance some experiments.”

  “How?”

  “Go outside our usual routes.”

  “You have contacts with industrial people, sure. But why would they invest in a pulp fiction idea for a weapon?” Karl was honestly puzzled; he sat on the edge of Urey’s big desk and noticed the Nobelist had worn a hole in his right shoe.

  “Patents have lots of uses. I think the best hope for isotope separation is a high-speed centrifuge. Once we can separate the uranium, think what other isotopes we can get out. A lot of the radioactive ones may have medical uses, fighting cancer and so on. That guy Lawrence out at Berkeley is already doing plenty with that, using his cyclotron.”

  “So is Dunning,” Karl said.

  “Sure, we’ll work with him. Dunning’s not just a cyclotron man, he’s inventive.”

  Karl knew a bit about these devices, all based on the same principle as the cream separator. Centrifugal force in a cylinder spinning rapidly on its vertical axis could separate a gaseous mixture of two isotopes, since the lighter isotope would be less affected by the action and could be drawn off at the center and top of the cylinder. A cascade system composed of hundreds or thousands of centrifuges could produce a rich mixture. “That seems more engineering than physics,” he said.

  “It needs some real analysis.” Urey looked levelly at Karl. “You can do that.” And Karl knew he could.

  Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, 1939

  6.

  Wednesday, July 12, 1939

  Karl wondered why Einstein took his vacation down a lonely dirt road on Long Island. The man could go anywhere in the world and be greeted with glory and attention. Well, maybe that’s it, he realized.

  Teller was driving, scowling at the roads and muttering, with Szilard in the other seat and Karl behind. They had asked him to come along and deflect a French visitor who was with Einstein, and Karl’s French was good enough to get the fellow away for a bit, they thought, so the two could present their idea. The aroma of the woods reminded Karl that he missed the easy presence of nature in Paris. Except for Central Park, Manhattan was all noise and smells. Maybe Einstein felt the same.

  They got lost, of course, outside the small town of Peconic. Einstein’s secretary at Princeton had said he was staying at a cottage belonging to a Dr. Moore, but nobody they asked knew where that might be. So Karl said, “Stop beside that small boy.” Leaning out the window, he asked, “Where is Einstein living?” The boy snapped to, pointed, and directed them to a cabin at the end of Old Grove Road, a sunny prospect on a quiet blue bay. Even country boys knew the famous name.

  No answer to a knock at the door. Karl walked around the cottage and saw the great man just tying up a sailboat at a small dock. They went down into the moist heat. Szilard hailed Einstein, introduced Karl, and got them herded back to the cottage porch. Einstein had an easy smile and told them about how he’d created confusion in a local department store, from his thickly accented request for a pair of “sundahls.” The manager interpreted this as “sundial,” and some hilarity ensued.

  “Mine atrocious accent!” Einstein showed off his new white sandals. “For a dollar thirty-five cents, it is.” It turned out the French visitor had left that morning. Karl shrugged, not having a role anymore, and tongue-tied in the presence of the most famous scientist in the world. Einstein moved quickly with a muscular grace, though he was sixty years old and reeked of sweat; he had been sailing several hours. He was quite solid with little fat, sunburned, hair a windswept white halo.

  Karl knew enough to stay silent while Teller and Szilard outlined the neutron experiments, plus some calculations they had made of how to build a U-235 bomb. They had reached the same conclusion he and Urey had—a simple slug of U-235 fired into a cylinder of U-235 would change about 1 percent of the entire mass into energy, before heating blew the entire thing apart. But that was enough to yield a bomb equivalent to ten thousand tons of high explosives.

  “Daran habe ich gar nie gedacht,” Einstein muttered. Karl knew enough German to know he had said, I never thought of that. “These neutron experiments, I do not keep up as I once did. There was a time I could read all the papers on relativity. But now . . .” A shrug. “Kaput.”

  “We are sure of this now,” Teller said. “Fermi has confirmed the basic process.”

  “A city killer,” Einstein said simply, and sighed. “You want me to do . . . what?”

  “I think it best,” Szilard said, “not to involve the military quite yet. They will tie us up in red tape.”

  “I think higher,” Teller said. “I think, to the president.”

  Einstein considered this, puffing on his pipe. “Not to people I know in Europe?”

  “About a weapon?” Teller was aghast, already sweating through h
is white shirt, and tense. “It would not be seen well.”

  “I suppose,” Einstein said, and turned to Karl. “You are native born, yes? You think your government would not like me to write to the queen mother of Belgium, who is an old friend?”

  “Yes, don’t.” Karl said softly. “And I wonder if she has any real power.”

  Einstein chuckled. “Well, neither do I. And the Europeans will be fighting for their lives soon, as well.”

  “You expect another move by Hitler?” Szilard asked.

  “Soon.” Einstein had poured them some tea he kept in a thermos; now he sipped his. “He waits about half a year before making his next invasion. He took the rest of Czechoslovakia in March; it has been four months now. Another two, then.”

  “We would like you to dictate a letter we could work on, for your later signature,” Teller pressed.

  Einstein sat silent for a long while. Karl found it remarkable that the man of great fame would focus intently and, when Szilard said something, not respond, not seem to notice. A pause. Birds made their melodies in the distance. Finally he said, “Very well. You know, when I renounced my German citizenship, the Nazis took and sold my boat and land. They turned my cottage into an Aryan youth camp. Before I had even left the country in 1933, they circulated a booklet with a photo of me, labeled ‘Noch ungehängt’—not yet hanged. Then they put a bounty on my head—twenty thousand marks! I did not know it was worth so much. So I suppose it is time to be sure they do not gain any more advantage against our cause.”

  “There is another issue,” Karl said. “You know they are rounding up Jews everywhere.”

  “Ja, I have heard.”

  “If the war—and yes, there will be one, we all know it—is short, fewer Jews will die.”

  “Fewer everyone,” Einstein said, nodding. “It has become obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”