The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  “It is hard to patent a weapon, usually. The army likes to own those—”

  “So they may buy such patents?” The rabbi leaned forward.

  “Well, yes.” Karl saw that Leo was reluctant to say this, but his salesman instincts quickly covered his momentary puzzled look. “But the eventual money will come from the electrical use, I would bet. There are details—”

  Abruptly the rabbi clapped his hands on his knees. “I know enough. I will speak to my friends. They are interested in such avenues.”

  “Two avenues,” Karl said. “The war will come before the electricity.”

  Kornbluth nodded gravely. “And soon. I hear every day, in letters and even telephone calls, pleas from people in Europe. You can give me some phone numbers to talk to these scientists? Fermi, Urey, Einstein?”

  Szilard wrote some phone numbers, while Rae mentioned the fear of Germany on the march again. The men listened patiently, but Karl could see she had no effect. She lived in a world where people did things because they were good or bad. Karl lived in a gray world where people did things because they had to. Kornbluth inhabited a world where people did things in pursuit of profit. Few bulletins passed between those worlds.

  They left with a good feeling. On the street outside, Szilard said, “He seems serious. I will alert Urey and Fermi for the rabbi’s call. Einstein I know never answers his telephone himself.”

  “I was surprised he wanted those,” Karl said.

  Rae said, “Hey, boys—nobody tests the depth of the water with both feet.” They all laughed.

  Karl took them into a coffee shop for a little snack, glad that his mother and the rabbi had gotten through the meeting without using more typical Yiddish words like “gonif.” Reform Jews had some intellectual pretensions, at least, beyond the schlepping tradesmen and kosher butchers. Nobody among their Jewish friends had beards, wore old-world-style clothes, or even skullcaps, except at temple. Karl couldn’t read Hebrew lettering, never picked up the Forvertz Yiddish daily, and spoke in a clear, unaccented, East Coast tenor.

  To Szilard, using Yiddish was a lower-class mannerism; best to not show any, then.

  Karl knew he was still a very minor player in this. But the sum they had discussed, up to a hundred thousand dollars, was more than he had ever expected. A fortune, really.

  PART II

  * * *

  THE URANIUM COMMITTEE

  There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.

  —Albert Einstein, 1932

  1.

  Friday, September 1, 1939

  The knock at the door was a surprise. Even more startling was his mother’s face as Karl impatiently opened it. Plus a man behind her. Not a boyfriend, much too young—

  “Here’s our Paley relative!” Rae said grandly, sweeping into the apartment. “Fresh off the boat.”

  Karl shook the embarrassed man’s hand as he said, “Anton Paley, I am, yes, doctor, sir, yes, thank you for . . . your—” And there his English stalled.

  “Welcome, happy you finally made it,” Karl said, and introduced Marthe. “Maybe other Paleys can, too, later.” He hoped his mother would not notice that they had just cleared away breakfast. It was nearly eleven a.m. He had worked late, as usual.

  Anton’s clothes were rumpled and worn, a gray cloth jacket with baggy pockets and a thin, inadequate shirt. They would have to buy him new clothes for the big city. Rae and Anton came in as Rae said, “There was something the newsboy was shouting about, down the block. About Poland.”

  “Oh?” Marthe straightened her dress with one hand and clicked on the radio with the other.

  “—German troops reportedly have penetrated fifty miles beyond the Polish border, their tanks leading the way,” a man’s crisp voice said. “The British foreign office just issued a statement that this clearly violates—”

  Karl switched it off. “So it’s started. In Poland, not France.” He needed to think now.

  Rae looked at Anton with eyes narrowed and, to Karl’s surprise, frightened. “You got away at the last minute.”

  “I am sor—sorry. Delay in Italy, took long. Had to pay.” A shrug.

  “After the German-Soviet Pact,” Marthe said, “this is not a surprise. They will divide up Poland.”

  Karl did not want to talk about all this. The news did not even surprise him, but he felt a deep sense of dread begin. The pact of “nonaggression” between the Soviets and Nazis was barely nine days old. That had shocked most of the New York left wing out of their illusions about the Soviet workers’ paradise. Friends of his had made excuses for Stalin, saying it didn’t matter, just a maneuver in the struggle against Fascism. But quite a few had left the Young Communist League. Karl saw in this clash the real meaning of the ideals he had talked about through the 1930s. He had always leaned toward the kind of ill-defined socialism or Kropotkin-style, accent-on-the-commune, small-c communism. That now floated away like a cartoon fantasy. A symptom of his naive teenage years. Now the issues were hard, dark, immediate. He decided not to bring up this latest news with his other friends. These days, politics just wore him out.

  Then Rae said, “But how could the Soviets agree to overrun—” She stopped, seeing that there was no easy answer to her question except the obvious.

  Marthe offered some tea to Anton, ushering him to a chair. She moved heavily now and wore big housedresses to give herself easy movement around her growing belly. Softly she said, “We must introduce you to others in the, ah, Paley and Cohen families.”

  Karl was thinking hard but smiled at this, her steady way of integrating with Rae. “We must host a dinner,” he said abstractly.

  Anton had been silent but now sipped some tea and asked softly, “This war is, ah, to be worse, yes?”

  “You bet,” Rae said.

  • • •

  There were more people moving in next door to Karl’s office, bangs and clatters, so he shut the door after Urey came in.

  Harold frowned at the write-up Karl had made of his calculations. “Tell me what this means.”

  Karl knew by now that Urey wanted what he called “the straight scoop,” not a whole detailed description of the work. “Your double-flow model, it works. I wrote down the basic equations and got analytic solutions.”

  “Closed form?” Urey leaned forward and looked at Karl’s thick document, handwritten.

  “Yes.” Karl tried to keep pride out of his voice. Centrifuges had been around quite a while, and Urey was the world’s expert on their uses. But nobody had tried to deal with the complex theory beyond useful approximations.

  Urey scowled, mouth twisted skeptically as his eyes raced through the first few pages. He had a right to doubt. Generally, flow equations were notoriously hard to solve, so Karl had recast them for this case, using mathematics he had learned in Paris. He plunked down a drawing he had made to show the simplified problem. He had learned while writing his PhD thesis that showing a picture made for easier going before skeptical eyes.

  Urey had devised the countercurrent idea and asked Karl to work out the equilibrium time equations for countercurrent columns. Uranium is a metal, but it could be locked up in uranium hexafluoride, a gas called “hex” by chemists. Fresh gas entered at the center of the rotor. Rotation then slammed it outward, where the wall forced it into a downward flow of gas at its periphery. Since inward rotational forces act more strongly on heavy than on light molecules, the concentration of the U-238 increased toward the outer wall of the rotor. Vents then took it away, keeping the U-235. That gas got recycled, on and on.

  Urey studied the diagram. “Um. Didn’t know you could draw. You left out the rotor, though.”

  Karl blinked. Indeed, he had. The essential element!

  Urey tapped the inch-thick paper stack. “I’ll have to read this one slowly.”

  Karl knew Urey was not strong at mechanics, so he said, “You worked with these fast rotors b
efore. An electromagnetic motor drives it. How much can that be improved?”

  Urey grimaced. “You put your finger on it. The bearings, that’s gonna be the trouble. Plus—say, did you analyze the instabilities?”

  “Some.” They looked like trouble too, but Karl did not want to give away that fact. It might not turn out to be a fact at all, once studied.

  Two-Flow Centrifuge

  “I mean, that’s an engineering problem par excellence, as your lovely wife puts it.”

  “The perimeter will be spinning at about three hundred meters a second, pretty close to the speed of sound.” Which spells trouble.

  “Right. We need somebody like Jesse Beams down in Virginia to do that. I’ll call him.”

  “How can we afford to do anything here?”

  “I don’t think we can!” Urey slapped his desk. “So we get Beams to use his Washington connections for it.”

  Karl smiled. “I like this grantsmanship you do. Never seen it before.”

  “The companies have more money for research than anybody else. We should hit them, too.”

  “I may have a lead into another . . . source.”

  Urey leaned forward. “So . . . ?”

  “Working on it with Szilard. Private capital. Interested in patents with commercial applications.”

  To Karl’s surprise Urey stood up, excited. “Exactly the right idea! There’s plenty to be made in a good isotope separation plant. Lawrence, out in California, is using radioactive isotopes in medicine. But he has trouble getting them separated out. Some have short lifetimes, so it’s important to grab them right away and get them to the patients.”

  Karl blinked. “I never thought of that. Can I get some references on that?”

  “Sure, got some in my files, pretty fresh. To show who—?”

  “Some people I know.”

  • • •

  He took charge of Anton the immigrant for Rae, a man introducing another into a strange culture. Best to go with the Jewish angle, Karl realized, and show him streets with such shops. The Soviet invasion of Poland had darkened the Europe they both knew, and Jews were reportedly being taken away in large numbers, getting on trains to “camps.” Karl took the young Anton’s mind off that by helping him learn how to look for jobs as a clerk, and when he got one, Karl bought him a good working suit in gray gabardine.

  So for a celebratory lunch, Karl took Anton to the Carnegie Deli for a corned beef sandwich. He suspected Anton needed some neighborhood gemütlichkeit—a word English speakers did not usually have, meaning warm good cheer. Instead of warm welcomes, the waiters yelled at you if you were confused. Anton struggled with the menu in English. An older waiter with a worn face addressed him in Yiddish, and that solved the menu problem. Anton had come to them through a family connection through Seymour Lipinski Paley, and young man had grown up in a shtetl far from Prague. His father drove a horse and wagon that carried baggage from the railroad station. The horse was such an important family member that he got the best place near the stove in winter.

  “I have letter from friend,” Anton said. “Others from home, Prague, escaped across river. German soldiers shot at them from a bridge. Water was cold. Drowned, some. Germans shot and laughed. Many did not make across river.”

  Karl sensed a pressure in Anton’s fidgeting hands and compressed lips, and so let him talk about tales heard from other refugees. Of babies snatched away from mothers and swung like baseball bats, smashing their heads against a wall. Of men pitched out of high office windows onto the pavement below, sometimes crushing pedestrians. Of roundups taking whole neighborhoods and villages. Of bodies seen in fields, no explanation, witnessed by people hastily moving on, heads down. Of trucks seen on city streets, people standing mutely in them with fearful eyes, and never seen again.

  After a while, as the pressure seemed to ease, he changed the subject to sports or politics, anything to get Anton away from the inward gaze these tales cast the young man into.

  It took a while, but by asking leading questions, Karl got Anton out of his darkening mood. Anton’s eyes began dancing, talking about his family, and in the middle of a story, a waiter yanked his plate away with some meat left on it. Anton sprang up and grabbed it back. Yiddish sprayed through the air.

  When he got Anton settled back down, Karl explained, “You pay extra for the abuse. Reminds people of their origins.”

  Anton nodded, laughing. He had grasped that this was the charm of New York, brassy and true. Things got easier after that.

  • • •

  A day later Karl was back in the Carnegie Deli again.

  “The rabbi will let us meet with them, yes.” Leo Szilard’s round face wrinkled with puzzlement. “But only after seeing about some engineering uses?”

  “That’s what he says. They want to be sure this is not just some professor’s dream.” Karl put down his tea and tried to block out the Carnegie Deli noise. This eastern European atmosphere had worked with Anton, but Szilard ignored all the atmospherics and everything but Karl’s diagram of the centrifugal design.

  “Then we must give them what we can.” Szilard sat back, nodding decisively. “Though they should know these patents will most likely be classified.”

  “Maybe. Too early to tell.”

  A barking chuckle. “I know what happens when you assign a patent to a government. Nothing.”

  “That may not happen this time.”

  Szilard frowned, bit into his pastrami sandwich. “I think it must. But to go ahead we must, ja, we go back to the rabbi.”

  • • •

  This time they did not take Rae.

  Rabbi Kornbluth held a sheaf of paper, which turned out to be lawyerly assessments of the prospects Karl had shaped up, derived from Urey’s sources. A convoluted chain, and Karl had no idea how this would turn out. Still, Kornbluth smiled.

  “Thank you, Dr. Szilard, for sending by messenger those summaries. I have met with my several friends, and they assigned due diligence work on this to their assistants.”

  Szilard replied with questions about the feedback, and Karl stayed out of it. Just listening to them edge forward, gain a concession on a seemingly minor point, then pivot it to engage another issue—priceless instruction in the negotiating art.

  Kornbluth leaned forward. “Are you quite confident that this method has applications beyond this armaments interest?”

  “Commercially, yes. Particularly the medical.” Szilard said this precisely, equal weight to each word, as though it were an evident fact. Karl wondered if cancer treatments would become so common, but he held his tongue.

  Kornbluth nodded. “Then I believe the next step is a meeting between my investor friends and some of your Columbia people. They can do the contractual details of”—a delicate pause as he let them savor it—“a donation.”

  2.

  October 14, 1939

  Karl told Rae about this latest advance while they waited in the hospital for news of Marthe. She was in a long labor, and the nurses gave no news. Karl almost wished he had acquired the habit of smoking, to give himself something to do with his hands. They twitched and wandered, trying to express the anxiety he kept out of his frozen face.

  “Don’t worry,” Rae said, “women do this all the time.”

  “But they aren’t my woman, carrying my child.”

  “Go get us some tea, then.”

  When he returned to find there was no news, he brought up the good rabbi Kornbluth and the possibility of substantial funding. At least it was something to talk about. Rae wanted to know more and Karl tried to simplify it, failing. They went around in a conceptual circle, and he realized his mother had no clear idea of how things in the physical world actually worked. Everything was an unconsidered miracle to her, from chemistry to planets to atoms. When a nurse appeared, he sighed with relief.

  “It’s a girl,” the brusque woman said. “Mother and child doing fine.”

  “What about—” Rae began, but the nurse was out
the door.

  Karl didn’t care. He and Marthe had brought into the world another person, one who would see the world as fresh and bright and new, while to him now, it was quickly darkening.

  • • •

  To Karl’s surprise, during the investor talks Urey and Szilard hit it off and worked well together. They came from vastly different backgrounds—Urey from Montana, Szilard from Budapest. But Urey had been chairman of the University Federation for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom and a champion of loyalist Spain. As early as 1932 he espoused an Atlantic Union plan for a world governmental federation. He often spouted antifascist rhetoric and militantly supported the New Deal programs. Like Szilard, Urey was a fountain of ideas but hard-nosed about getting support, too.

  Karl was surprised when, in the middle of a strategy meeting on how to spend the investor money, Szilard said no more theory work was needed. “Karl’s model is all we need. Now we need Dunning’s team, this Beams fellow, hands-on people to roll up their sleeves.”

  Szilard was trying to pick up American slang, so he added, “We have the moxie now.”

  Urey liked this, but Karl slowly shook his head. He argued that they needed to figure out how centrifuges could work in gangs together: “To get the mass for a single bomb, we’ll need to link together hundreds, maybe thousands.”

  Urey sided with Szilard. “This is a proof-of-principle program, Karl.”

  “Somebody’s got to think how big this could get,” Karl replied.

  Szilard gave him a pensive look, then said, “There is evidence that the other side is thinking similarly.”

  “Oh?” Urey asked.

  “A friend I left behind in Berlin sent me a letter, through another friend in Switzerland. Nothing addressed to me can escape Germany now. This friend, he says there are rumors at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of an Uranverein—a Uranium Club.”

  “Ah,” Urey said. “With money from where?”