Under the piercing gaze, Riley said officiously, “I’d like that issue of your magazine to be removed from the newsstands. Now.”
Campbell stood suddenly, military-straight, eyes narrowed. His challenging stare shifted to an amused scowl. “By removing the magazine, you guys will be advertising to everyone that such a project exists. And that it’s aimed at developing A-bombs, ones that work like Cartmill said.”
Riley stood too and shook his head, lips twitching. “You haven’t heard the last of this.” He and Karl left.
On the street outside, Riley said, “He knows something. That Cartmill story’s theoretical use of boron indicates quite recent information.”
Karl said, “We thought boron might be useful, sure, years ago. But it doesn’t work.”
“Manhattan Beach, California. The link to the Manhattan Project, Campbell’s little poke about Oak Ridge, Los Alamos—too obvious to overlook.”
“He was showing off. People with things to hide don’t do that.”
Riley was unsettled in his gray suit. “Look, we got the first lead on this from one of our agents. He overheard people at that Los Alamos place, talking about this Cartmill story.”
Karl wondered how many scientists read this science fiction stuff. Maybe they couldn’t get good books out in New Mexico? “So you think there’s something suspicious?”
“Sure looks that way. I didn’t quote a line from Campbell’s piece in that Pic magazine—I should have. Look—”
Standing in the street, Karl read:
For more than a year, there has been no news of the results attained in the most important scientific research in the world today—the research on Uranium 235. Behind this censorship of news that patriotic scientists have imposed upon themselves, there are moving events of immense importance—for this war will be won or lost in the laboratory.
Karl said, “In bold, too. He’s overbearing even in print!”
Riley laughed. “Yeah, I nearly belted him.”
Karl laughed too. “He likes to needle people. But really— If the war were truly to be won or lost in the laboratory, shouldn’t he have had the patriotic sense to shut up?”
• • •
Three days later, right in the middle of a complex calculation, Karl got another visit from Riley, who didn’t even sit down. “The Counter Intelligence Corps sent word to the California branch office of Intelligence. I had Cartmill placed under immediate surveillance. Plainly he knows too much. So who tipped him off? Campbell is being tailed too.”
Karl shrugged. “I don’t think there’s anything there.”
“Maybe.” Riley paced impatiently. “We’ll see. They’re pressing Cartmill’s letter carrier into service, see if he lets anything slip. The carrier said he’s a science fiction fan and on good terms with Cartmill. But the real eye-opener is this—”
He tossed a list onto Karl’s desk. “I went to Street and Smith, showed them ID, and they coughed up the Astounding mailing list in minutes.”
Karl noted the circled entry: W. von Braun, Deutsche Botschaft, 47 Stuckplat, Stockholm, Sweden. “Um, so?”
“Deutsche Botschaft, that means German embassy. That von Braun—that’s the name of the technical head of the German rocket program. I went through four layers of foreign intelligence people to track that down.”
Karl frowned. “So this von Braun now knows about Cartmill’s story. And the radioactive dust one too?”
“Damn right. I checked all the way back. This von Braun has had a subscription since 1933, just after the Nazis took over. He was in some kind of rocket society then, too. It went to his home when he was in school. Now he has the clout to get it sent through a diplomatic pouch from Stockholm. So von Braun knows. Dust, bomb—rocket.”
Karl stared at the name for a long time.
6.
March 9, 1944
At Anton’s good-bye party, people tried to discuss anything but the war. The Brits and Americans were slugging their way up the Italian boot. The Soviets had nearly pushed the Germans out of the Ukraine. The Japanese were getting hit on tiny islands hard to find on a map.
Karl made the rounds, refilling glasses, tending to his two girls, who had their own tiny table, passing canapés Marthe had deftly made from what was available in markets where ration books ruled. Even the Ureys, who had come to know and like Anton, turned and left any conversation that veered toward the incessant drum of war news.
So talk turned to the latest modern art openings at the Met. To Karl this was mostly abstract blob art or string-bean statues of people with big flashing teeth. None of such fads interested him. He liked the impressionist school, the pointillist techniques certainly, but if he wanted abstractions, he preferred mathematical models of physical processes, thank you.
One of Karl’s cousins was painting on a bottle, one the man had earlier emptied before into himself, apparently as part of the creative act. Of the First World War (which his father tried to join by lying about his age), he said, “We went off to war and we didn’t get anything. The Brits coulda given us Canada, at least. I think the motto after World War I should have been, ‘How about Canada this time?’ ”
Some minutes later the same guy was pointing a finger at a woman friend of Anton’s and saying, “Thing is, see, you’re not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion, sure. But nobody’s entitled to be ignorant.” Well, at least I can agree with that, Karl thought, and as a good host avoided the conversation.
Karl stood near Anton, letting other people wish him the best, and intently aware that this was the last time he would see Anton for, probably, years. He was to report at seven a.m. sharp tomorrow to the Navy Recruiting Office on Times Square. Anton had been rushed through his basic training at Newport, and now would ship out.
“They say will send me to Pacific, as I asked,” Anton said. “I want to be deck gunner. Shoot down Japs!” His eyes danced at the idea, and he knocked back some Cabernet Sauvignon from Karl’s dwindling stock.
Anton had invited not one but two girlfriends to the party. They were bright and chatted nonstop, and it took a while before Karl understood what was going on. “They’re competing,” Marthe pointed out, “for who gets to spend the last night with him.”
“My . . . ,” Karl said, genuinely at a loss for words. “He’s not . . . engaged? To either of them?”
Marthe hid a small laugh. “The war has changed a lot of things.”
Anton showed off Moe Berg to his girlfriends when the big man arrived, bearing a big smile and two chilled bottles of champagne. This provoked a ripple of chattering joy in the party, with Karl’s mother, Rae, popping the cork with an expertise he didn’t know she had. Anton’s girls caught the foaming overflow in their wineglasses, laughing. Both eyed Moe with a certain appraising gaze.
Moe stood at a distance, enjoying it all, including the attention that followed him everywhere in the room he towered over. Rae asked him to dance to a waltz playing on the family phonograph. He moved with fluid ease as the whole room watched. Then Anton danced with one of his girlfriends, and the other chose Moe.
Karl and Marthe joined them. “This would never happen at a physics party,” Marthe whispered to him. He nodded ruefully. The war had funneled men and women into familiar channels. Anton’s girls were performing their impressions of what girls were supposed to be like. This was what men—people, everybody—seemed to think they should be: beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl had to be, to be fallen in love with. Plus working in the war effort, of course. Then she’d become a mother and be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever.
Well, maybe that can change, in time. . . .
Later Moe joined Karl in the cramped kitchen, sipping the Cabernet. Karl whispered, tipping his glass in a salute, “We just got word. Oak Ridge has just about enough of that, ah, tube alloy to make the right mass.”
The big man beamed. “About tim
e. Y’know,” Moe said, nodding, “I calculated something from all my reading. Compiling all the foreign news, I’d say somebody’s dying in this war every”—he tapped his watch—“five seconds.”
This remark, framed by the swing-band trumpets now playing in the living room, seemed to Karl to frame the evening. Celebration against a grim, gray backdrop—which the party was trying to forget for a short while.
After the party, cleaning up, Karl mused on the family that had gathered here to wish Anton well. He would fight for a country he had first seen only a few years before.
And me? Karl asked himself. When his father had died in 1930, he could then see Joseph Cohen’s life in full, from start to finish, and that carried a kind of godlike perspective Karl had never experienced before. It released him—free of his father’s unrelenting pressure to become a medical doctor, at last.
Only by majoring in chemistry at Columbia had he escaped Joseph’s skeptical frowns; after all, chemistry was a plausible way to prepare for medical school and show that Karl could handle difficult subjects. But now he could see his father’s life as forever contained—made final, flattened as if within the pages of a diary, whose author did not know how it would end, but Karl now did. Joseph had died of Crohn’s disease, and no one knew if it had a genetic source. Karl was seventeen when Joseph dwindled away, and somebody told him that was Hamlet’s age when his father died too. Karl had felt bitter rage and disgust at the medical profession for failing his father. He would never join such a profession.
So he had gone on to get his PhD in chemistry with a dark cloud of uncertainty hanging over him. His father’s life now seemed to him like a smaller, defined thing, a life that would be forgotten in a few generations. Joseph had striven hard, tried to give his own life meaning—and now it was Karl’s turn. Amid the biggest war in all history. Somehow.
• • •
A big meeting in New Jersey assembled again the small group that had begun the Manhattan Project in 1939, when it had no name: Fermi, Urey, Dunning, Teller, Szilard, the other big names—and Karl, the youngest of those who had started all this. Plus Groves, in uniform as always, sitting at the back and visibly working on papers while he monitored the technical talks. Plus several hundred engineers, officers, and assorted scientists.
Karl spoke first, on the purity of the centrifuge-made U-235, which he and others had monitored every week through over a year of Oak Ridge’s steadily increasing production. “Easily pure enough to get a detonation of the, ah, gadget,” he concluded, using the code term to avoid using “bomb” or any synonym, as practice had drilled into him.
Otto Frisch, leader of the Critical Assemblies group, reported on the combined theory/experiment team that had worked out the critical mass necessary. Though young like Karl, he had a certain authority because he and Lise Meitner had first fathomed that fission occurred in uranium. “When a pound—that is, 0.45 kilograms—of uranium 235 undergoes complete fission, the explosive yield is eight kilotons. To get a sixteen-kiloton yield of the gadget in our design, which we term ‘Little Boy,’ we must fission about two pounds—0.91 kilograms—of uranium 235, out of the hundred forty-one pounds—sixty-four kilograms—in the final assembly. The remaining hundred thirty-nine pounds—98.5 percent of the total—will contribute nothing to the energy yield. But the reaction will not happen unless we have that hundred thirty-nine pounds. Most of the mass is like a catalyst.”
Murmurs of dismay from the audience of about a hundred men and Maria Goeppert Mayer. She nodded thoughtfully. Her work had helped Karl a lot, but she never liked the spotlight. Karl, on the other hand, had learned something of body language and positioning. He sat in the front row.
Groves sprang to his feet and strode to center stage. “Listen, we knew the shotgun design wasn’t the best. Point is, we can’t get the timing sharp enough to do an implosion gadget.”
A voice from the back called out, “So we delay until we can do better!”
Karl saw Oppenheimer rise nearby. The willowy man blew out a blue column of pipe smoke and said, “We’re making plutonium now in the reactor out in Washington. I think our Los Alamos group can figure out how to make it implode enough.” Oppenheimer’s baritone firmed. “And my team calculates we’ll only need maybe twenty pounds of it.”
A pause as eyes remained on Oppenheimer. Karl rose. He made his voice loud, not his usual habit, and roughened it. “This war is costing plenty every day—and people are dying faster every damn day of it. The issue here is speed, not cost or pounds.”
Murmuring, uncertain glances among the audience. Karl and Oppenheimer eyed each other.
“The best is the enemy of the good!” Groves barked. “Enough debate. We go with this bomb. I’ve talked to Eisenhower on this, and he agrees.”
Karl smiled; Groves phrased it as though Eisenhower were forced to agree with Groves. Words tumbled out in the discussion. Go for a target, maybe Berlin? Smash it, and not invade France—not just yet, anyway. Groves went on to tell about an idea, a “one-two” punch of the gadget, then the invasion.
Karl made a point of remaining standing and never taking his gaze away from Oppenheimer. The audience listened to Groves but watched the two men giving each other hard stares. To Karl it seemed to go on forever. Then at last Oppenheimer sat.
Karl did too. He felt a flush of embarrassment. Like schoolboys challenging each other on a playground. But . . . it had worked.
Teller spoke next, outlining how driving together two uranium 235 masses would work. They had to smash hard and fast. The total U-235 had to be bigger than the minimum to get a runaway explosion going—the critical mass. One of the two pieces was hollow, the other a bullet. It was tricky, but Teller’s team was sure this would work—without testing.
Groves beamed. Karl could feel a decompression in the room, a rustling sigh. Karl felt a brimming joy. This was what it was to see a moment when history pivots.
Harold Urey sat next to Karl in the front row. He whispered, “Y’know, at first, way back then, I thought we’d have to implode the whole thing from pieces that were lots smaller than a critical mass.”
Karl nodded and Urey grinned. “Wonderful, when one’s ideas prove wrong. Disconcerting, sure, but ultimately liberating. Preconceptions are dull gatekeepers, yes? Only a fool resists the delight of contradiction by nature.”
Karl thought ahead to the battles to come. “The universe bats last.”
• • •
The major meeting about the “gadget” assembly made him think, as he played a piano piece that evening. The keys rippled beneath his fingers, light and quick. Marthe was filling their apartment with aromas that quickened his appetite. Elisabeth was big enough now to totter around the living room, tapping everything curiously with a red wooden building block. She listened to the sound, head cocked in wonder. With the block she picked up his rhythm. Then she tapped each object she came to, sofa to chair to rug to window, listening to the impact. A scientist, he thought. She may become one of us. . . .
The first time he had heard Bach in a live chamber performance he had realized that the instruments, cello and violin and harpsichord, were chambers that resonated from plucked or stroked strings. So they were chambers vibrating within a larger chamber, the room that contained him as well.
At the “gadget” meeting he had been one of many who made the strange music of nuclear physics sing a new song, creating a chamber for “tube alloy” that would make the first such explosion this world had ever seen. Chambers within chambers.
Chamber music worked through coupled vibrations, since the sound vibrations were comparable in size, in wavelengths, to the human body itself. Bach had somehow drawn forth great sonorous songs from embedded chambers, and so reached into the final chamber of the human heart.
What the gadget would do to human hearts remained to be seen.
• • •
Leo Szilard came into Urey’s office, where he and Karl were working on a calculation, with a paper in his hand. �
�I have a petition for you to sign,” Szilard said. “We must, right away.”
Karl and Urey read it in silence.
A PETITION TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
Discoveries of which the people of the United States are not aware may affect the welfare of this nation in the near future. The liberation of atomic power which has been achieved places atomic bombs in the hands of the Army. It places in your hands, as Commander-in-Chief, the fateful decision whether or not to sanction the use of such bombs in the present phase of the war against Germany and Japan.
We, the undersigned scientists, have been working in the field of atomic power for a number of years. Until recently we have had to reckon with the possibility that the United States might be attacked by atomic bombs during this war and that her only defense might lie in a counterattack by the same means. Today, with this danger apparently averted—though we cannot be sure—we feel impelled to say what follows:
We believe that the United States ought not to resort to the use of atomic bombs in the present phase of the war, at least not unless the terms which will be imposed upon Germany and Japan after the war are publicly announced and subsequently both nations are given an opportunity to surrender.
If such public announcement gave assurance to the Germans and Japanese that they could look forward to a life devoted to peaceful pursuits in their homeland, and if Japan and Germany still refused to surrender, our nation would then be faced with a situation which might require a reexamination of her position with respect to the use of atomic bombs in the war.
Atomic bombs are primarily a means for the ruthless annihilation of cities. Once they were introduced as an instrument of war it would be difficult to resist for long the temptation of putting them to such use.
The last few years show a marked tendency toward increasing ruthlessness. At present our air forces, striking at the German and Japanese cities, are using the same methods of warfare which were condemned by American public opinion only a few years ago, when applied by the Germans to the cities of England. Our use of atomic bombs in this war would carry the world a long way further on this path of ruthlessness.
The Berlin Project Page 18