Karl blinked. “How can we stop that?”
“Faster progress. I want you to work out how to gang all the centrifuges together.”
“We’ve only got the one from Westinghouse—”
“And I’ll go to DC to get us some money for more. But first, I want to put you to work at Kellex Corporation. They’re doing the study on what method we should use to separate out U-235.”
“I don’t want to leave Columbia.”
“I’ll get them to pay you more than I can.”
“Look, I’ll go talk to them, that’s all.”
• • •
The next day, as Karl stood outside at 223 Broadway, the Woolworth Building loomed large. Covered in veined marble, it was one of the first skyscrapers—an ugly term Karl hated. Inside, he studied the ornate, cruciform lobby ceiling, framed by mosaics and stained-glass illuminations brimming with light, all of it setting off thick bronze fittings. Ugly name, but beautiful interior. Over the balconies of the mezzanine murals depicted earnest LABOR and COMMERCE. The Kellex private offices on the thirty-third floor boasted more marble and a snooty secretary in high heels, who ushered him into a meeting room.
He was back out in thirty minutes. He took the subway uptown and marched into Urey’s office. “They want me to work on how to scale up a gaseous diffusion plant, not centrifuges.”
“Ah. So Dunning’s already sold them?”
“Looks like. They’re starved for technical people, but they won’t even consider anything but Dunning’s work, the British stuff, and something from Lawrence in California.”
“Ah, that hyper-cyclotron idea. Calutron, they call it. Where is Kellex getting their people?”
“No idea. Maybe they don’t know either. They opened by asking if I knew anybody else they could hire. Your committee must’ve gotten a good chunk of money for them.”
Urey nodded. “It was an insider deal, with help from the War Department. Plus that Brit guy Peierls.”
“Really? He didn’t say anything to me about it.” Karl wondered how a guy with a loudmouth wife could be involved in diplomacy.
“Seems Peierls brought with him a letter from Churchill. He went straight to the White House with it, turns out. That got ’em this extra money. Plus, he offered to ship us some good people to help. Some are Germans, even, who got out in time.”
“Like who?”
“Never heard of ’em, but he said one was really sharp, could come to Columbia.”
“I want to stay here too, and push the centrifuges. Nuts to this California idea, and diffusion. Okay?”
Urey smiled. “Glad you didn’t like ’em at Kellex. I had to send you for an interview, part of the deal. The German? Name is Klaus Fuchs.”
2.
October 15, 1941
Karl walked from the train in the lush, fragrant air of the old South. The bus station right beside the tracks had a long gray bus idling and he noticed the whites were in front, the blacks in the rear. He could sense a difference already in the very air of the South, a region that deserved its capital letter.
A ticket taker told him the university was an easy walk, so he strolled down a street of old brick buildings and small diner-style places wedged between, smelling of fried food. The movie theater was showing a Laurel and Hardy, Great Guns, with big posters. Admission, forty cents. Below the sign was a smaller one: COLORED ADMISSION, 20 CENTS, SEATING UPSTAIRS.
The University of Virginia had a grand prospect laid out by Thomas Jefferson, a reminder of a greater past. Arcades connected buildings around the vast sweep of the central lawn, embraced by curving brick walls that surrounded the campus, giving a reverent hush to his approach to a pantheon-like rotunda. He wondered if the looming, independent pavilions, formally arrayed in a neoclassical composition, were an analogue for the federal union as Jefferson saw it—self-governing states working together for the common national good. In any case, it set him at ease.
For two days he had been down to Oak Ridge in Tennessee to get an idea of the electrical capacity there, and how to arrange a huge centrifuge array. It was a nexus of the Tennessee Valley dams FDR built to invigorate the area. Now he looked forward to seeing some results from the lab here, also funded by the Uranium Committee. He had joyfully called home to wish Martine a happy birthday, her second. Her tinkling laugh rang through the fuzzy telephone connection.
Karl made his way along quiet walks shaded by oak trees, savoring the birdcalls and soft rub of moisture. All this calm jerked away when he saw men pacing around the Engineering Department lab in blue-gray uniforms, carrying old World War I rifles with fixed bayonets. Karl approached close enough to see that their arms carried Virginia Protective Force badges, some kind of state guard. He stopped, wondering what to do, when a big man came out of another Engineering Department building and hailed him. Karl realized that in his suit he was conspicuous among the casually ambling undergraduates.
“Hi there—Karl, right? I’m Jesse Beams. Got your questions. Good ones. Got some answers, too.” The broad-shouldered man was affable, relaxed, but not when he discussed his first love—centrifuges.
“We’re sure happy your Dr. Urey handed us the money to try out my ideas. Mighty glad to get it, I assure you.” Beams’s eyes were quick, analytical, belying his soft, rounded vowels. “I couldn’t get enough industrial support to do this magnetic suspension idea the right way.”
They went into a big, barnlike laboratory made of broad wood planks. Beams brought out his staff and students, who formed up in lines like soldiers. Perhaps they already knew more than they should, and thought of themselves as in the war effort. Maybe beneath these broad oaks they sensed the immense carnage sapping lives every day.
Karl had learned to keep quiet when engineers threw their chests out and launched into their birdsongs. Normally inarticulate, they would trill and soar when singing of their dreams. Beams had designed a strong magnetic field to serve as a frictionless bearing, to let centrifuges spin faster.
Beams introduced his students and staff and showed Karl a cross section of the bearing, standing in air. The steel spindle stood on its invisible magnetic base, secured at the top with a twin magnetic clasp. Beams urged Karl to touch it, and he could not budge the steel rod out of place. Then Beams hit a switch and the vertical spindle spun up, hurling its crossbeam rotor around at such speeds that it was quickly a gray blur.
“Impressive,” Karl said. “How about in a vacuum?”
“Gotcha!” Beams smiled. He flicked another switch as his staff watched, faces alive with anticipation. Karl realized he was the visiting bigwig, representing Urey and the Uranium Committee, their funding source.
A tall centrifuge he had not even noticed began spinning up with a high, shrill whine. It was inside a bigger metal cylinder with windows into the lit interior. A vacuum pump labored away to keep air out. They had the rig properly shielded by big stacks of sandbags. The story of the Columbia explosion had spread. Beams asked him about that as they followed the big centrifuge’s spin-up on an oscilloscope. “How bad was it?”
“Knocked us down pretty well,” Karl said. Southerners tended to clip the articles off sentences, and sometimes the subjects as well, so he followed suit. “Ended up on the floor, some cuts, no hearing. Deaf as a post for a day or so.”
They all nodded sagely. Karl had brought a report from the big-time battlefield of science.
The centrifuge was running now with a thin, cutting sound that he imagined was like a million screaming insects. That image came to him because in Jesse Beams’s lab there were pesky flies that buzzed by his ears and pricked at his neck. He focused on the oscilloscope and saw that Beams was running the rotor at speeds a lot higher than the Columbia lab had managed. This “spinner” was broader, taller, and had none of the little rattles he was used to.
“Can you try hex in it?” Karl said mildly.
“Got to do that, yes. I’ll be glad to! We can talk over all the connections and joints, the flow points—you sent
a pretty big set of requirements.”
Talk they did. Beams had a natural feel for engineering that Karl could admire but never copy. He had picked up some skills from the Columbia engineers, but their worldview was not his. Intricacy, detail, pattern were second nature to him. He was somewhat hands-on in a chemical lab and could frame a decent differential equation, but the spiderweb of tradeoffs in making a working machine was another country, with a language all its own.
He had a long, lazy dinner with Beams and his large, somewhat raucous family. There was cool bourbon and branch water before, southern fried chicken for the main course, and pecan pie to finish. Somehow this first immersion in the soft southern style reassured him that these people could solve the puzzles of fast spinners. He knew there was no logic to this, but he could read the competence of the Beams group through the many little details that made all the difference.
Over an after-dinner drink, he told Beams that Westinghouse and now Union Carbide stood in the wings to build hundreds of them, if not thousands—centrifuges that could spin hard and fast for weeks and months and years if necessary, ganged together. All to harvest a dark black metal that until now had been mostly used to color ceramics. Assemble the rare kind, the U-235, into a sphere weighing as much as a small woman, and it could flatten a major city.
At his small hotel he got some follow-up details from Urey in a tightly worded but long telegram. He read it before falling asleep.
The British effort proved to be ahead of the Columbia work, plus they had the Churchill letter to spur FDR. The president had somehow gotten the uranium work in under the Lend-Lease funding, though it made no logical sense; but much in Washington, DC, these days didn’t, Karl thought.
The Uranium Committee was now reorganized. A new Office of Scientific Research and Development was created by executive order of the president as the center for the application of science to national defense. Urey was a member of its Section on Uranium, given responsibility for uranium isotope separation by any methods that worked. He still had to compete with Dunning, though, who favored pushing the hex through some hypothetical membrane that could stand up to the punishment.
Karl got up in the morning and worked with Beams through the day, liking the man and his deft, sure methods. They had pork chops with a luscious brown gravy for lunch, with a mellow zest he had never tasted before. He got on the train at five p.m. to head back home and the ticket taker whispered to him, “Get on back, now, to Jew York.”
The man was thin, maybe in his fifties, a scarecrow in his worn uniform. The eyes were narrow, black, the face hard.
The man’s slithering, thin voice slapped him back into the real world. Millions like Karl were facing this all over Europe and Russia now. Karl sighed and cast a dry gaze at the ticket taker. “Grow up.”
• • •
Urey filled Karl in later on the British angle. He had gone to Washington to ferret out the story. Dr. and Mrs. Peierls were the second ones to come. Next a Marcus Oliphant flew to the United States, ostensibly to discuss a radar program, but actually to find out why the United States was ignoring the MAUD Committee’s findings.
“What the hell?” Karl fumed.
Urey leaned back, feet on desk, a hole in his shoe sole again, and said, “The minutes and reports had been sent to Lyman Briggs, the director of the Uranium Committee, and Churchill was puzzled to receive no comment. Marcus Oliphant called on Briggs in Washington, only to find out that this inarticulate and unimpressive man had put the reports in his safe and had not shown them to our committee. So he went back, amazed and distressed. Churchill sent an outraged letter to Roosevelt’s people—all out of official channels. That shook up things plenty.”
Karl found this hard to believe. Urey said, “Welcome to reality. The Brits sent us a later report too. Their intelligence people say there’s talk at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of a new term, Urantrennarbeit. It means how much uranium they can get from a practical working machine.”
“I have suspicious about Mrs. Peierls.”
Urey nodded. “So do others. They’ll keep watch on her.”
“So the Germans are sprinting ahead. We don’t have a working machine, not yet.”
“We will. Back to work.” Urey waved him away. Karl was relieved to have brought up Mrs. Peierls, only to find others had it covered. He did not like suspecting people. Maybe Americans were more innocent about others than Europeans?
• • •
Anton waved at the field of the Yankees and said, “So explain. I want understand national pastime.”
“The Red Sox hate the Yankees,” Karl said, “and that’s why the noise is so loud. It’s mutual.” Then he detailed the rules as the Yankee pitcher struck out three Sox in a row.
When the Yankees were up, Karl said, “See the Sox catcher? Name’s Moe Berg. One of the few Jews in baseball, and he even played on an all-star team. Can’t hit well, though.” He sat back and waved to the hot dog guy, having exhausted nearly all the knowledge he had gotten from a guy in the Columbia machine shop the day before.
“Your Babe Ruth was Sox once, I hear?”
“They traded him to the Yankees before the World War and haven’t won a series since.” There went the last of the lore he could remember. He handed Anton a hot dog slathered with mustard. When he bit into his, the greasy joy of it reminded him of boyhood and long, lazy summers with his father. That brought a pang; he seldom recalled his dad now as he moved through his focused days. He had been gone over a decade. Karl wondered what Joseph would have thought of these terrible days.
Anton’s smiling immersion in the national pastime brought a joy into a part of Karl he had not felt in years. Something beyond the simple pleasure of family. Anton had become like a son.
Moe Berg came up to bat two innings later and struck out. The crowd around them, Yankee fans, cheered. Moe threw a scowl in their direction, then removed his cap and bowed. That got a laugh.
• • •
One morning, walking to work, Karl saw Leo Szilard coming out of the entrance of the Pupin Physics Laboratories. The man who had first envisioned a sustained nuclear fission reaction came striding toward him in short, stabbing steps. Szilard was half a block away on 120th Street, making for Broadway, head down and apparently thinking. He wore a steel-gray three-piece suit. Karl noticed a man in a brown suit and broad-brimmed hat step out of an alcove and quite deliberately fall into step behind Szilard, twenty meters back, making a note in a small book as he set off. Karl was a block away and instinctively stepped into an alley. In the purr of traffic, nobody noticed him.
Szilard went by, still ferociously staring at the pavement, and his tail man followed, eyes on Szilard’s back—until Szilard whirled around, arms spread. Karl was close enough to hear Szilard say, “We meet again! Let’s have a coffee, yes?”
The tail stopped, startled. Szilard stepped up, shook the man’s hand. “I know you follow me, see what I do. Why not I fill you in, as you Americans say, so your notes will be better?”
The tail stood paralyzed, then slowly nodded. They went off to a coffee shop. Karl admired Szilard’s open audacity with the security blanket that had fallen around their work. He started back to the Pupin Labs, smiling at a story he could tell Marthe.
• • •
“Rabbi, Columbia University does not take any ‘commission’ for negotiating these patents,” Szilard said carefully. They were sitting in Rabbi Kornbluth’s study, genteelly sipping tea. The chairman of physics, George Pegram, sat beside Karl, eyes a bit puzzled but staying quiet, letting Szilard carry the ball.
“Then why this ten percent fee?” Kornbluth demanded. He was proving a hard-nosed negotiator, Karl thought.
“Those are legal fees, one time only.” Szilard cast an appealing look at the chairman of the physics department, but got no help. “If the program goes to full production of centrifuges, using the patents the Fermi team and this Beams fellow developed—well, naturally, you will get further royalties.”
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Karl felt out of place. He sat beside Rabbi Kornbluth because he had helped interest the man, but he had no great concern about the first payoff from the scheme. “I should point out that with the Beams team results, this magnetic ball bearing, the efficiency has greatly increased. You profit from all uses of that. All.”
Kornbluth cast his skeptical gaze over all faces in the room, a tactic Karl had noticed worked well. Everyone seemed to sit up a bit straighter when the rabbi considered them. “I want to be sure civilian industrial methods are being pursued too. My investors did not really contemplate just war work.”
“The money is the same, I would think,” the chairman said.
Kornbluth gave them his measured scowl. “These documents just incidentally allow Westinghouse and Union Carbide to make as many of these spinning machines as they like.”
“You implicitly agreed to that in your original funding,” the chairman said.
“We never thought—”
“It could move so fast?” Karl said quickly. “But that just means you get royalties sooner, on what we might as well admit is a very good payoff for your group.”
“I am obligated to protect their interests,” Kornbluth said mildly, giving Karl a gimlet eye that seemed to say, Support me, you’re a Jew.
Karl had always disliked that kind of clannishness, but he compromised by staying silent.
“Believe me,” Szilard said with a reassuring pat on the rabbi’s knee, “this could be a very good thing for your group. We are considering building large plants, filled with these devices.”
And you might just save millions from the Nazis, Karl thought. But as usual, it was smarter not to get out ahead of the parade. But how else to lead it?
• • •
Intelligence knew that the center for some nuclear work was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, founded by Peter Debye, a famous physicist, as director. The Nazis kept pressure on the Nobelist Max Planck to oust Jews who worked there. Word about this got out through Switzerland.
The Berlin Project Page 11
