Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  He had known her then for about a year. He used to come and visit her a couple of times a week, taking her out to a movie sometimes but mostly just sitting there with her on her parents’ big porch swing. Sometimes she’d tell him that he shouldn’t come around so often, that he ought to give the other girls a chance, but she didn’t seem to mind so much—at least, not enough to warn him off for good and all. Not that he would have listened to that. He wouldn’t always stay very long, usually just an hour or half an hour, just long enough to establish a kind of claim without seeming to force himself in.

  He had thought it all out, and what he wanted to do was to become a fixture, somebody that everyone was used to. If that happened people would get the idea that he and Jenny were a settled issue, and then the other guys would stay away. It had worked up to a point—one or two he had had to warn off by shaking a night stick in their faces, and some just wouldn’t take a hint. But she was his girl, whether she knew it or not and whether she liked it or not. Nobody was going to beat his time.

  But he had to be careful, because Jenny just didn’t seem to warm up the way he had expected. She seemed to think he was okay—he was tolerated, but she wasn’t exactly falling into his arms.

  So they had sat there on the porch swing that morning. He remembered that she had worn a filmy green summer dress and held her arms crossed over her chest while he tried to talk her into marrying him. May was always pretty in that part of New Jersey. She had liked the uniform.

  “Do you know yet where you’ll be going?” she had asked, looking up at him with interest—more interest than he had ever seen in her face, in all those months of trying. Jenny was very big on the war.

  “No—Europe, I suppose.” He had smiled, wondering whether she could tell that he was lying. “You hear rumors all the time, but. . .”

  Probably he would wonder until the day he died what she would have said if he had told her the truth. But he hadn’t wanted to take the chance, and he had pressed his advantage. He already had his posting, and the military police insignia were in his suitcase, just waiting to be stitched on. It had been the luckiest break in the world—the idea of combat turned his guts into ice water—but Jenny wouldn’t have seen it that way. So he had smiled and lied.

  And now Jenny was his wife and sat alone in his house in New Mexico, feeling cheated because her husband hadn’t gotten his head blown off in Sicily. And nothing made any sense anymore.

  That morning, when the alarm went off, he had put an arm out in the bed to find her, but she was already up. He lay quiet for a moment, and finally he could hear her; she was in the kitchen making breakfast. She always beat the alarm. He wondered sometimes whether she didn’t go back to bed for an hour in the middle of the day, just so she wouldn’t have to be there with him when he woke up.

  “Good morning,” she said when he came in. She was just putting the eggs on his plate, and she hardly looked at him. There was only one place setting; Jenny never ate breakfast, just drank a cup of coffee while she was standing by the stove.

  He wondered what it was like with other couples the morning after making love, if it was the same with them, as if it had never happened. Didn’t any private smiles pass between them, any unspoken recognition of a more cheerful world? Or was it like yesterday’s crossword puzzle in the newspaper, something that passed out of memory because it was too insignificant to remember?

  So he ate in silence and left, letting the screen door slam shut behind him as he set out on his walk to work. They hardly ever spoke at all anymore.

  And what plagued him the most was that he knew that Jenny was doing the best she knew how by him. She attended to his needs—kept his clothes and his house clean, made the best use of his money, never let him sit down to a cold meal, let him have his way with her in bed. She was trying, almost painfully hard, so he could accuse her of nothing except that she didn’t love him. It was like there was something wrong with her.

  “I suppose you’ve got a boyfriend or something, somebody you like better than me.”

  That had been back at Fort Monmouth. His voice had been angry, but that had been a lie too. He hadn’t even believed it himself.

  But perhaps she had. She had been sitting on the edge of the bed, in nothing but her slip, combing her hair, and her arms had stopped moving and her back had assumed a kind of rigid stillness. And then she had begun combing her hair again. What had passed through her in that moment was as closed to him as everything else she felt or thought. As far as he could know, she might be dead inside.

  “You haven’t got anything to complain about,” she had said, without turning around. He hadn’t chosen to pursue the subject.

  The jumble of mail on his desk—envelopes of various shapes and colors, postcards, even a few advertising circulars—seemed to mean nothing. He swept his hand carelessly over the pile, spreading them out, and picked a couple up to look at. A letter with the address written out in a sprawling, feminine hand, an overdue notice from a library in New York City—the usual unintelligible garbage.

  The war seemed a long way distant.

  13

  The morning wind was just beginning to pick up as Erich Lautner started out on the eleven-minute walk from his room on the second floor of Bachelor Quarters J -6 to the desk he occupied in the cavernous building that housed the Bomb Physics Division. Like everyone else at Los Alamos that winter, he complained about the ghastly weather and the lack of heat, but largely out of nothing more than an instinct to conform. Until he was eighteen and had gone to Berlin to pursue his studies, he had lived with his mother and father in an apartment over a paint store in Hamburg, so he was used to cold rooms and damp, windy streets. Besides, he had a heavy tweed coat that he had bought in England in 1939 and a pair of fur-lined gloves. Nothing bothered him.

  The roads were only thinly covered with asphalt, and along the edges they were already crumbling like pie crust. Wisps of snow, as dry as sand, snaked their way across the black surface, driven along by the harsh, fitful wind that blew over the mesa all day long, only changing direction in the early afternoon.

  Lautner was almost alone as he walked by the side of the main artery that led to the lab compounds—he had slept late and everyone else was already at work. Nobody would mind; there weren’t any time clocks at Los Alamos. They put in fourteen- and sixteen-hour days, six or seven days a week, but the scientific staff still adhered to the customs of the various European and American universities from which they had been gathered—people set their own schedules. They were like the Hitler Youth in their wretched enthusiasm, but at least there was a certain measure of disorganized freedom.

  “It’s the desert,” Oppenheimer had said, glancing around in that preoccupied way of his, as if with half his mind he were casting about for some avenue of escape. And then he would glance at you with his strange, startled eyes and smile. “Beautiful country, but a wilderness. And we’ll be working for the Army. Would you like to come?”

  That had been at Princeton, where Oppenheimer had come recruiting. No one had needed to be asked twice. It was going to be a run for the grand prize—there would never be another chance like it in the history of the world. And if they failed. . .

  All the brightest stars would be there: Fermi, Teller, Bethe, von Neumann, finally even Niels Bohr. So Lautner had signed on. He had applied to his department for a leave of absence, had bought his railway ticket for Lamy, where a corporal in sport clothes had picked him up for the drive into Santa Fe, and he had turned himself over to Oppie’s brilliant dream.

  And in the evenings they could try to get drunk, or listen to Teller play Beethoven on the hopeless little upright piano in the common room and describe in excruciating detail his idea for a super “fusion” bomb, or return to the endless task of trying to get the sand out of their bedclothes, but Lautner did not complain. After all, wasn’t he supposed to be an anti-Fascist refugee in good standing? Wasn’t he expected to do his part toward seeing that Hitler didn’t develop the bo
mb first? One fulfilled the role assigned.

  He stepped out of the road for a moment as a couple of MPs in a jeep drove past, heading for the perimeter wire. They were always doing that, checking the fences as if there were the most imminent danger that the Wehrmacht might mount an assault right there in New Mexico. One wondered what particular variety of fool these Americans must be.

  “You will find you have little or no difficulty making yourself believed,” Heydrich had said. “The Yanks are the most trusting people on earth.”

  And then he had smiled, showing his teeth, and his blue eyes had glittered like pieces of broken glass. Everyone in Germany had heard the stories about him and, standing on the other side of his desk at the Berkarstrasse, watching him smile, one was tempted to believe that they all had to be true.

  “Your story will be that you are following your teacher into exile—now that Schleiermacher has lost his professorship, he will certainly follow the others. First to Bohr in Copenhagen, then to England, then to the United States. It will be the same with you—this business with Schleiermacher has simply been the last straw; you want to wash your hands of the New Germany. It is precisely the sort of sentimental claptrap that will appeal to the Jews, and once they have accepted you the Americans will welcome you like a hero.”

  And, again, it had been a question of fulfilling one’s role in life. The SS controlled everything, didn’t they? You couldn’t expect a decent career in the universities if you didn’t go along with them—they owned you. So when Heydrich had summoned him on that February afternoon in 1939, there hadn’t been any question of refusing.

  “They say that this new discovery of Hahn’s—what are they calling it?” He raised his eyebrows in a gesture of contemptuous inquiry. The light from the window behind him formed a kind of demonic halo around his head, and the expression on his face became strangely blurred.

  “Uranium fission, Herr Obergruppenführer.”

  “Fission? Yes, exactly. They say there is considerable potential for weapons development to come out of this, and now so many of the best brains have gone over to the enemy. War is inevitable now; you know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Herr Obergruppenführer.”

  “Inevitable. And I shouldn’t imagine the Americans, when they come in, will be at all backward about working up one of these fission bombs. They will come in, you know—this idea that they’ll simply stand aside and let England go down the drain is just a lot of whistling in the dark. What does that suggest to you, Lautner?”

  “Herr Obergruppenführer?”

  “We will need to know what they are up to,” he answered, showing his teeth again. Suddenly Lautner realized what made the man’s smile so oddly sinister—the lower lids of his eyes were unnaturally thick, giving him an almost Oriental appearance. “We will need to place a spy in their midst. Someone who will be trusted, someone with the requisite technical background. Someone like you.”

  He could hear the dull hum of an automobile engine and the sound of tires on the loose gravel, and he turned around to see a tan prewar Dodge swerving over toward his side of the road. The side window rolled down, and Louis Slotin stuck his head and thin shoulder out through the opening and grinned.

  “You want a lift?” he asked, his glasses flashing like railway signals as he shook his head. “When are you Europeans ever going to get used to taking cars to work?”

  It was a joke. Lautner laughed politely and walked around the front of the Dodge to get in the other side. It was nice to come in out of the cold. Slotin, who was a Canadian and therefore put a premium on his physical comfort, had the heater turned up almost to the last notch.

  “We’re supposed to be saving gasoline, to aid the war effort.”

  “That’s terrific. If we build the gizmo, they won’t have to worry about gasoline.”

  “That’s very true.” Lautner closed the door, and the car jerked forward and back onto the road. Within a few seconds, it seemed, they were out of sight of the residential compound.

  By the middle of the morning, which came early at this altitude, the sky over the mesa was always luminous. It didn’t seem to matter what the weather was. Already the clouds were gathering around the Jemez Mountains, and they glowed with a dark, pearly luster. They would have snow by evening. Lautner closed his eyes and sighed; tonight, by the time he was finally able to get away from his desk, the roads would be a sodden horror.

  “We have been impressed with your agility,” Heydrich had said. “I don’t believe you have ever actually joined the Party, have you, Lautner?”

  “No, Herr Obergruppenführer—my position. . .”

  “I quite understand.” The Obergruppenführer had smiled his peculiar, sinister smile and shrugged. “You have not wished to offend Schleiermacher. As things have turned out, it is just as well. And yet I have read reports to the effect that you attend meetings of the Student Organization—I assume, then, that your allegiance is clear?”

  “Yes, Herr Obergruppenführer.”

  In the moment of silence that followed, Heydrich had regarded him with what was probably meant to be understood as tolerant contempt. The man was very far from being stupid, and he doubtless knew an opportunist when he saw one. But, in this instance, who but an opportunist would serve?

  “Good, then.” He picked up a pen that was lying in front of him on the desk, looked at it for a moment, and set it down again. “Then we understand one another. The Party, of course, will see to your career when you come back. I suppose we can guarantee you a professorship—you won’t have to wait until you’re sixty. And there will be plenty of money; we know how to take care of our friends. As a protégé of the SS, you will lead a very comfortable life. All you have to do is to go to America and learn all you can. When the time comes, we will make arrangements to get you out.”

  He had made it sound so seductively easy, sitting there in his office in Berlin, smiling his lazy, contemptuous smile. And now he was dead, shot down by Czech partisans the summer before last—there had even been a movie made about it; Lautner had seen the thing in Chicago just before coming to Los Alamos. He might have hoped, under the circumstances, that the SS had forgotten all about him, but it would seem not.

  When the time comes, we’ll make arrangements to get you out.

  The Obergruppenführer had made it sound as simple as jumping aboard a tramcar out to the suburbs.

  “Do you think we will ever actually build the gizmo?” Lautner heard himself asking. He was a little surprised at the sound of his own voice.

  “Oh yeah.” Crouched over the steering wheel, Slotin was nodding vigorously. One almost had the impression that he was addressing someone on the other side of the windshield. “Why not? By the time Fermi can make us enough plutonium we’ll have the triggering mechanism worked out. What’s left but a few technical problems? I figure it should be ready by the end of the year. Make a nice Christmas present for Hitler, don’t you think?”

  He turned to Lautner and grinned. It was a joke—everybody at Los Alamos talked about the bomb like that. It was the gizmo and would end the war, but nobody thought about it, really thought about it, as anything except an interesting theoretical exercise and a great laugh on the Germans. When it finally went off—if it finally went off—and some city somewhere simply vanished from the face of the earth, the bright young men of the Project were going to have a frightful surprise. But in the meantime they slept well enough.

  They drove on in silence, and a few minutes later the car slowed down in front of Bomb Physics. Slotin worked in Ordnance, which was several blocks farther along.

  “You going to the party on Saturday?” he asked. It was the sort of question that could only be answered in the affirmative, so Lautner nodded and smiled.

  And it was true that the parties at Los Alamos were among the saving graces of life there. Saturday night on the Hill tended to be a weird hybrid between an orgy and a seminar. Strange concoctions out of the available liquor supply would be mixed
together in wastepaper baskets and drunk down by the beakerful. Where else in the wide world could you see so many Nobel laureates, so sodden, in a single room? There would be singing that drowned out the record player, and wild, manic dancing. And around one-thirty in the morning, Enrico Fermi, grinning and rolling up his shirt sleeve to show off his muscles, would probably issue a general challenge to arm wrestle. And all the time, in little groups of five or six, people would stand around in corners and whisper about the endlessly fascinating theoretical problems of achieving nuclear rupture.

  And everywhere there was Oppenheimer, looking like a cross between a film star and an Indian holy man. Everyone was as fascinated with Oppenheimer as they were with the Project—he had the magnetism of royalty.

  Lautner waved as the car drew away. He stood there for a long moment, and when his hand came down it settled over his heart where, even through the heavy fabric of his overcoat, as if it were of steel and heated to the burning point, he could feel the outline of the postcard he had received in the mail that morning. On the back was the printed form, filled in to indicate that he owed the New York Public Library seventy-two cents in accumulated fines for a book titled The History of Florence by Francesco Guicciardini. He hadn’t been anywhere near New York in more than eighteen months.

  When the time comes, we’ll make arrangements to get you out.

  It appeared that the time had come.

  14

  It was an obvious enough piece of deception, but Schellenberg had described it in a manner that suggested he thought perhaps you might want to break out into spontaneous applause. The SS were always very easily impressed with themselves.

  It was a book code. The details had been agreed upon in Berlin in 1939. When Lautner knew where he was going he was to transcribe the location into Guicciardini’s History, underlining a single letter on every seventh page. And then his “travel agent”, as Schellenberg called him, would send an overdue notice to his academic address, on the perfectly reasonable assumption that it would be forwarded by whatever circuitous route the American military authorities might think best, and he would know to make himself available. Everything had been settled.