Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  “Joachim von Niehauser,” he said, under his breath, as much to himself as to anyone. And then, a little louder, “They sent you?”

  “Yes, me.”

  . . . . .

  They went to von Niehauser’s room, which perversely enough was just a few doors up the hall from the room Lautner regularly took when he was entertaining Jenny Springer. He had been nervous at first and would have preferred conducting their discussion out of doors, but von Niehauser hadn’t been impressed by his caution.

  “You have a great deal to tell me,” he had said, “and we could freeze to death. Besides, do you suppose that sitting on a park bench would render you invisible? If they knew enough to be watching us, we would both already be under arrest.”

  It had its own brutal logic, which von Niehauser articulated with the same dispassionate clarity which had characterized his lectures on particle physics when Lautner was an undergraduate. The voice was the same, but the man had changed. They were in mortal danger with every second, but von Niehauser seemed to have lost the capacity to feel. It was as if the man had died, leaving behind only the intellect.

  But, of course, as he had explained with such precision when Lautner asked how he of all people had happened to become a spy, Germany was fighting a war.

  “I’ve been in Russia,” he said, as if that should have made everything clear.

  Still, Lautner, whose blood hadn’t, as it happened, been replaced with ice water, felt entitled to worry about the police.

  “They have people everywhere,” he said, as they walked down the corridor. Von Niehauser hardly seemed to be listening as he took his room key from the pocket of his overcoat. “The FBI. . .”

  “The what?” Von Niehauser glanced up, his eyes wrinkled with an instant of perplexity. And then he seemed to understand. “Oh, them—is that what they call themselves? They dress like haberdashers’ dummies and lounge around like gypsies. I think I’ve managed to stay clear of them.” Once again a faint, contemptuous smile flickered across his face and then disappeared into his inhuman calm.

  But for the most part they talked about the weapon, and there von Niehauser was still the Privatdozent from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, the man whom everyone had said would be a professor before he was forty, the brightest of the junior men.

  Perhaps that was what had undone him. Perhaps a less intelligent, less sensitive soul would have managed to come through the war without losing touch with the desire for life.

  “What process have they used to refine the uranium?” he asked, leaning forward slightly as he sat on the edge of the bed. Always the Prussian gentleman, he had given up the room’s only chair to Lautner. “Have they found a filtering material?”

  “Yes, nickel. But they aren’t depending on gaseous diffusion alone; they’ve built a cyclotron to separate the isotopes.”

  “It must be huge. Where can they be getting the copper for the electromagnet?”

  “They aren’t using copper.” Lautner allowed himself a short, soundless laugh and shook his head. “They’re using silver—six thousand tons of silver, melted down and drawn into wire.”

  He had expected von Niehauser to be impressed—or surprised, or something—but in that he was disappointed. Von Niehauser merely stared at the floor, as if he were trying to puzzle something out for himself.

  “We don’t have the copper—or the silver,” he said finally, without looking up. “And such an undertaking would require an industrial plant of considerable size.” Lautner nodded in agreement, but if von Niehauser noticed he gave no sign. “There is no part of the Reich or the conquered territories free from enemy bombing, and therefore there is no possibility of building such a plant. The Allies would have it flattened before we could even paint the walls.”

  “Then build a reactor and make the bomb with plutonium.”

  “What?” Von Niehauser glanced up and his eyes narrowed, as if he imagined Lautner might be having a joke at his expense. “What in God’s name is plutonium?”

  “Element 94—you bombard uranium with neutrons and some of it will be transformed into a new substance, reasonably stable and extractable by ordinary chemical means.” Lautner smiled, and threw his hands out to suggest an explosion. “It will go critical just as well as U-235. You will get just as big a bang.”

  Von Niehauser shook his head.

  “The possibility has been explored; they have been trying to construct a reactor at the Institute for some time, but there is a shortage of heavy water. We must have it to control the reaction, to keep it from going critical all at once, and ten weeks ago the British bombed the heavy water facility in Norway.”

  The expression on his face was utterly despairing, as if he had seen the end of everything. He stood up from the bed and walked across the room to the door and back, and then remained standing next to Lautner’s chair, his arms folded across his chest. He looked like a man awaiting death.

  “That was why they sent me,” he said, all at once, speaking as if to himself. “We must build a reactor, and we have no heavy water.”

  “Then use graphite.”

  “Graphite?”

  “Yes—graphite.” There was real excitement in Lautner’s voice. “Fermi constructed a reactor that went critical in December of ‘42, using graphite.”

  “Bothe calculated that graphite would absorb too many neutrons.”

  “Then Bothe was mistaken.”

  Von Niehauser sat down again. “Yes,” he said. “Then it would be easy, wouldn’t it.”

  “Yes.”

  After that it became like an interrogation. Von Niehauser was brilliant. He knew exactly which questions to ask, what was important, what lines of research were leading in the right direction. He wanted to know about everything, about theories of critical mass, triggering mechanisms, speculations on the probable qualities of this new element plutonium, everything. It seemed to go on for hours. Finally, Lautner happened to glance toward the window and saw that it was dark outside.

  “It’s late,” he said, like a man offering an apology. “I have to get back, or the security forces. . .”

  “Could you leave tonight? We could be in Mexico by tomorrow morning.”

  But Lautner shook his head. “It would be safer to leave tomorrow. Tomorrow will be Saturday, and Sunday is our day off. I could think of some excuse for coming back into Santa Fe tomorrow, and then no one would notice I was even missing until Monday morning.”

  “Good.” Von Niehauser clapped his hands together. For the first time he seemed genuinely pleased. “Then it shall be tomorrow.”

  “Do you know what Fermi says about this bomb?” Lautner asked. He hadn’t risen from his chair, and his eyes were playing nervously over the carpet. It was as if the question had just occurred to him. “He says that it is theoretically possible that this bomb could ignite the atmosphere—possibly of the whole world—that it could burn away the sky in a few seconds. Can you imagine such a thing, von Niehauser?”

  “Yes, perhaps it’s nothing more than we deserve.”

  The light coming in through the room’s only window threw sharp, black shadows across von Niehauser’s face, giving it a faintly demonic cast. The skin seemed stretched tight over the bone, and the eyes were blind hollows.

  “Do you know what they are doing in Europe, Lautner?” he asked, the ghost of a smile on his lips. “Do you know what we are doing?”

  He didn’t seem interested in whether his questions were answered or not. He looked at the other man as if he were an inanimate object, just something occupying space in the room. There was a long silence, during which he remained perfectly still—he might have died, because he didn’t even seem to be breathing. And then suddenly he adjusted the set of his shoulders and came back to life.

  “I saw something once,” he said. “An internment camp in Poland—at least, that was what it seemed at first. Actually it was a kind of anti-chamber into oblivion, where people’s lives were taken away from them a piece at a time so that t
hey hardly seemed to care when they were herded half naked through the snow on their way to extermination chambers where they would be packed together so that they wouldn’t even have room to fall down, and then gassed with cyanide. I watched it being done—those chambers were made of heavy iron plate, and you could still hear the people inside screaming. So perhaps the desire for life wasn’t quite dead yet—what do you think, Lautner?”

  He leaned forward until his face was only a few inches from Lautner’s, his cold, mirthless smile still in place, like a mask. He seemed to be studying his former colleague’s reaction, waiting to see some sign of comprehension, but Lautner wasn’t sure enough of his command of speech to risk opening his mouth. Finally, after what seemed hours but was probably no more than a few seconds, von Niehauser drew back, apparently satisfied, since his tone, when he began speaking again, was calm and friendly, almost confidential.

  “I couldn’t describe to anyone what that place was like, so I won’t try. You wouldn’t believe me—why should you? I’d seen enough terrible things in Russia—men with half their heads shot away so that their blood runs out onto the snow in a filthy dark smear, men too shocked and cold and weak to do anything more than sit down somewhere out of the wind and die. I’d seen everything that war could do, but war is madness and you expect nothing better from it. But this—this was orderly and quiet and quite according to plan. The enemy were women and children and old men, and they went to their deaths just the way I’ve said. Like cattle. And the SS guards stood around and smoked cigarettes.

  “I wonder how much those people will care if your bomb sets the sky on fire and turns the whole planet into a cinder. I don’t suppose very much. They’re mostly Jews—did you know that, Lautner? Or perhaps I hadn’t mentioned it. The SS is making good on its word.”

  “Then why are we going back?”

  The words seemed to cling in Lautner’s throat like pieces of sticky paper, but he finally managed to ask that one question. Von Niehauser simply stared at him for a moment, as if he wondered whether the poor soul had suddenly gone simple minded.

  “For Germany,” he said finally. He was a man stating the obvious. “All of Europe is dying. If the Allies invade, they will be resisted, and everything east of Calais will end as a charred desert, without one brick standing on another and without a single living soul to see. There won’t be any fine distinctions left to be drawn in the coming massacre, so don’t ask me to pause over the fate of a few million Jews whose deaths are only remarkable for their pointlessness. It has all gone beyond that.”

  . . . . .

  In the clarity of the winter darkness, Lautner could hear music as he walked back toward his car. He didn’t have any idea where it came from—it wasn’t more than a faint tinkle of sound. But it was Friday night and somebody was having a good time.

  Probably, back at Los Alamos, there would be a party going in the bachelor dormitories. There usually was, almost any night during the weekend, even if people had to get up at six-thirty in the morning to go back to work. People would be drinking beer or anything else they could find, and if any women were unwary enough to have come they would probably wake up the next morning with saddle sores. The record players would be turned up as loud as possible, and probably two or three young men would be keeping time to the music by pounding garbage can lids against the plywood walls.

  Lautner dreaded going back. He didn’t object to those kinds of parties—in fact, he rather enjoyed them—but the thought of having to face another human being on that particular night filled him with dread. He had seen von Niehauser, and that was enough.

  Because, of course, von Niehauser was mad.

  “How is Professor Schleiermacher?” he had asked. “Is he up there with you working on this device? I can’t imagine it would be very much to his taste.”

  “Schleiermacher died two years ago, at Princeton. It was influenza.”

  And von Niehauser, who had been to Russia and the extermination camps of the SS, who had seen the future and could describe it all in a calm, steady voice, had looked stricken.

  “He was like a father to me,” he had said. “He was one of the great men of science.”

  And then, when their meeting was over, he stood in the doorway of his hotel room and put his hand on Lautner’s shoulder and smiled.

  “And tomorrow,” he had said, “tomorrow we will go. Tomorrow, perhaps, we will settle the war between us.”

  He was mad. The man was simply mad.

  And Lautner knew he had to find some way out. As he walked along the deserted sidewalk, his lips kept forming the words, over and over again. “I have to get out, I have to get out.”

  But how, when he had shaken hands with the devil?

  22

  George Havens came over the border from El Paso, driving a dark green, unmarked car that belonged to the Army and wondering if he wasn’t being suckered. He didn’t trust Suñer—he wasn’t sure he had thrown enough of a scare into him—and he didn’t like staking everything, the whole operation, on this one pitch. If von Niehauser got away from them now, and managed to lose himself in Mexico, where the Bureau had no jurisdiction and people under any circumstances weren’t wildly partisan about the gringo war, then they would never catch him.

  It had not occurred to him to doubt that von Niehauser would find a way to get whatever information it was that he was seeking—they could build a steel wall around Los Alamos, and it wouldn’t be enough to protect their secrets. Von Niehauser would find a way; the concentrated forces of Military Intelligence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were simply no match for him. He could be betrayed, but he couldn’t be outwitted.

  And now Havens was on his way to meet the nasty little specimen who was going to do the betraying, conscious that the war, and perhaps even the history of man on this planet, was probably going to turn on this one act of treachery. We wish to lure down the eagle, so we bait the trap with a fragment of rotting meat.

  The border policeman on the Mexican side, a huge, swarthy man, almost as black as a Negro, pursed his lips under his Pancho Villa mustache, looked at Havens’ vaccination book—probably without seeing it—folded it neatly inside the pages of his passport and thrust them both back through the car window. He grunted and made a sweeping gesture with his arm, as if the idea was to shoo you over the line like a barnyard goose. It was perhaps all the reception to which he felt you were entitled.

  “Don’t call in the local authorities unless you have to,” General Groves had said, “but I don’t care who you have to offend, so long as you get our spy. Remember, you’re not there to be nice to people.”

  It was a few minutes after eight in the morning, and the flight from Washington had been just bumpy enough to guarantee that no one on board got any sleep. Havens hadn’t been out of his clothes in twenty-four hours. He needed a shave and a hot bath. He needed some rest. He needed a few hours of escape from the idea that the fate of the world had somehow become his personal responsibility. He would settle for a couple of aspirin and maybe a good cup of scalding Indian tea. There wasn’t a chance he would get any of them any time soon. He dropped the car into gear and shot across into the crowded, narrow streets of Juarez.

  Suñer had said he would meet him in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel—he had said it without a trace of embarrassment, the Ritz. He would wait all day if necessary, he said. He made it sound as if he were doing the biggest favor imaginable.

  It was cold outside. The clouds were heavy and the color of pewter; there was the threat of a storm in the air. No one would be outside on such a morning if he could avoid it, so the only people on the sidewalks—where there were sidewalks; mostly there was only the cobbled street, or the odd strip of crumbling asphalt—were heavy, middle-aged peasant women, wrapped up to their eyelids in Indian blankets. Havens parked his car in a vacant lot beside what purported to be a French restaurant and dropped the keys into his jacket pocket. If the car got stolen, that was the Army’s headache. The Ritz Hotel was
in the next block.

  The lobby was a huge, high-ceilinged room with fake columns running up the sides of the walls and lots of gilt paint. You could hardly move around for the potted palms and the smoking stands and the heavy, voluptuous sofas that looked like they had come out of some Edwardian whore’s boudoir. The waiters drifted noiselessly around in morning coats and stand-up collars, but if you looked closely you could see that the carpet hadn’t been cleaned in so long that even the coffee stains were faded.

  Suñer was nowhere in sight, but it was only half-past eight in the morning, which to that gentleman was probably still the middle of the night. Havens flagged down one of the morning coats and ordered some breakfast—a pot of tea and a couple of croissants and, yes, he would like to be served right there in the lobby, thank you. The waiter sniffed and disappeared, but Havens got his breakfast.

  He waited for two hours. He read the newspaper, he ordered another pot of tea, he paced around the edges of the room, he scowled at the day manager who came to inquire if he could be of service. Two hours was a long time.

  “He isn’t coming,” he said finally, apparently out loud because a couple standing nearby turned around to stare. Suñer was either dead or had pulled a fast one on him.

  The second possibility was the one that bothered him more. If all this, the summons to Juarez, the appointment in the hotel lobby, the references to an uncovered conspiracy, was just so much camouflage, then von Niehauser was probably already halfway back to the Fatherland.

  Because Suñer would have to be buying something with his deception. Even if by then he had put himself out of reach of el Presidente’s firing squads, he would still be giving up an enormous amount to keep faith with his Fascist colleagues—how much of your life can you actually carry away with you in a suitcase?

  Of course, it was possible that he had simply panicked, that he had discovered nothing and had taken himself off to keep from having to own up, but Havens dismissed that possibility almost immediately. It was too early for that—Suñer simply didn’t strike him as the type to skip out on wealth and power and comfort quite that easily.