The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  Szilard told the story. “Debye was naive, but he was smart enough to get out in 1939. So Albert Speer, Hitler’s can-do man, turned to Werner Heisenberg to oversee the project. Heisenberg is an easy target for the Nazis, with a big ego and the insecurity that hides behind it.”

  “You know these people well,” Karl said carefully.

  “Well enough to know their limits, yes.” Szilard smiled without mirth. “Planck feels he has to carry on his duty to Germany, so he takes some nominal interest, though it is not his field. Once at an official gathering he had to try three times before he could force himself to say ‘Heil Hitler’ in a whisper. The Nazis wanted Debye as director to rename the institute, but he knew they wouldn’t approve of giving it Planck’s name. So he had ‘Planck’ carved into the stone over the entrance. The Nazis didn’t like that, either. Ordered to remove it, Debye covered it with a wooden plank—a pun that works in both German and English.”

  3.

  December 7, 1941

  “You’re working too hard,” Marthe said while she cleaned up food their burbling daughter had spilled. Martine babbled in her wobbly French. They had elected to introduce English in a year or so more.

  Karl looked up from his notepad. He had stayed up late working again. They had finished breakfast at noon, but now the baby demanded more, a good sign. “I think well at night, but sometimes I dream up new calculations, so—”

  “You take Sunday morning to work them out, yes. I know there is more pressure on you. These military people, they demand more and more.”

  “Mostly more paperwork. Every day brings signs of the program moving from research, straight into the engineering and construction phases. So I squeeze in some thinking on weekends.”

  Their attempt to arouse the government to the military potential of uranium fission had finally succeeded. The chain reaction group at Columbia, headed by Fermi and Szilard, was moving to the University of Chicago. Karl would miss working with Fermi. Szilard was staying, though.

  “It is affecting our love life.”

  “You didn’t think so”—he paused; how long had it been?—“last . . . Tuesday.”

  “That was the week before last,” she said dryly.

  “Oh. Uh . . .” A knock on their door saved him from his own confusion.

  Marthe gave him an eye roll and a wry twist of her well-lipsticked mouth—she had planned romance when Martine went down for her nap, he saw—and flung open the door with impatience. “Ah! Rae!” His mother’s mouth worked, eyes anxious.

  “I came right over to see what you thought of all this, Karl.”

  “Uh, what?”

  “Don’t you listen to the radio?”

  “Slept late. What’s up?”

  “The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor.”

  Karl rummaged through his geographical memory. “Which is . . .”

  Rae shot back, “In Hawaii! They’ve bombed us! ”

  In the next hour the radio played Roosevelt’s short speech over several times, followed by excited coverage of the damage from a broadcaster on the ground near the navy docks. Marthe observed wryly, “And after we shipped them all that oil and scrap iron too.”

  Karl caught her sense and laughed. “You’re always ahead of us on politics.”

  Rae frowned sternly. “This is war, not politics.”

  “War happens when politics fails,” Marthe said.

  Rae sighed. “So now we’re in for the whole tzuris.”

  They spent the bulk of the afternoon walking, witnessing the aimless energies that ricocheted in the streets and the parks. Excited chatter, cars grinding gears, boys running underfoot, blustering hot-eyed arguments on street corners, plenty of noisy business in bars reeking of sawdust and beer. Everyone wanted to do something, but Sunday was a day designed for leisure. Nobody could volunteer. They watched an argument between two young black men about the army versus the marines that turned into a fistfight. The stench of burning oil somewhere blended with a smell of anxiety. Some knots of men were even smiling.

  Once Rae had gone and Martine was asleep, Karl talked to Marthe about what this might mean. He described how the centrifuges were proceeding, how he might have to travel more.

  “You are not tempted?” Marthe asked hesitantly.

  “Uh, by what?”

  “Volunteering.”

  Marthe’s father was a French army officer, now staying on a farm in the south of France, out of the action. Marthe’s infrequent letters from her parents made it clear that her father disliked de Gaulle and would not work for Vichy, either, so he had opted out. Still, her upbringing was in the military culture.

  “Not really.”

  “My father was at Verdun in the Great War.”

  “And nearly killed, as I recall.”

  He thought. Millions of Americans would soon march off for foreign ports they could not find on a map. No rifle would lie idle, no gap in the ranks, if he did not volunteer. He was more effective against the Germans and Japanese with a slide rule and a pencil than he would be with a rifle. Just look how you did in that soccer game. . . .

  “It could be a great adventure for you.” She said this slowly, as if thinking it through for the first time. “Men like war. You heard the excitement in the streets today.”

  This surprised him. He had never thought of war as adventure, but maybe he should. He paused before saying, “When the bugles blow, the drums play. . . . Nope, this is a panzer war, a technology war. I’m more good here.”

  He had expected a flicker of disapproval, but instead she beamed. “Before Rae came through the door, I was going to say that Martine and I need more of your time. We’ll get none if you go off to war.”

  “Then why ask . . . ?”

  “I reverted to being my father’s daughter. Support the fighting man—I got that from my mother. But I am not that now. I am your wife. A woman with an odd husband.”

  In the end, he knew, this was not a matter of rational calculation. It was about what felt right. A small part of him sent a sardonic thought. About my feelings, my emotions—me, me, me? But he suppressed that, too. “How odd?”

  “Always thinking, calculating. Feeling, yes, but not speaking of it.”

  He tried to rescue this day with a mathematical joke. “I’m pretty complex, but then most are. Maybe I’m odd, but at least I’m not a square. I’m rational, positive—”

  She put a hand on his open mouth. “Stop. Arrête.” And kissed him.

  4.

  February 3, 1942

  Ernest Lawrence had made the trip from California with big news. He was known worldwide for his “atom smashing” particle accelerators and had snagged the 1939 Nobel Prize for the work done at his UC Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. He was tall, with a subtly commanding bearing that made you listen to his flat, midwestern voice. Karl watched him unveil a new element, with slides, data, equations.

  They had built up the brand-new element by bombarding the element neptunium, heavier than uranium, with neutrons, hoping they would stick. The neutrons did, and then threw off an electron, leaving a new thing on Earth, element 94.

  “I remind you that uranium was named for the planet Uranus, and the next element up, neptunium, for Neptune. We considered the name ‘plutium,’ but later thought that it did not sound as good as ‘plutonium.’ We chose the letters ‘Pu’ as a joke—you know, the sound you make when something stinks.”

  Lawrence paused, but the joke fell flat. “Okay . . . Alternative names we considered were ‘ultimium’ or ‘extremium’ because we think maybe this is as far as anybody can go in building new elements, just by hitting them with slow neutrons, the way we did.”

  He showed slides of plutonium’s nuclear decay modes, and Szilard asked, “You are to publish this?”

  “I didn’t do the primary work here. The guys who did—well, they decided to call back their paper from Physical Review.”

  A stir in the audience. “Because of security issues?” Urey asked.

&nb
sp; Lawrence nodded. “They already had it accepted, but the phone rang. It was the government, the army. A general, no less.”

  “This plutonium,” Karl asked, “you’re sure it decays like uranium, spits out enough neutrons?”

  “Like you guys found with uranium? You bet. That’s why we’re not talking. Except to you guys, of course.”

  “So there’s another path to a bomb,” Szilard murmured. Everyone in the room found this encouraging, Karl saw. Smiles and congratulations all round.

  He didn’t feel that way. Another damned element! This new fissionable nucleus could split their effort, slow the hard-won momentum of the program. But the physicists found such discoveries inherently exciting. He realized that most of this audience, men and women alike, was focused on the physics. He was focused on the war.

  • • •

  Edward Teller stopped Karl in a basement corridor and thrust a paper at him. “Look, Bohr sent this by courier.”

  It was a rough drawing of a rectangle. There were round cylinders partly embedded in the rectangle. An arrow showed that the cylinders could move in and out.

  Teller said, “Bohr says that Heisenberg showed this to him, on a visit to Denmark. What do you think?”

  Karl had worked with Fermi enough to see that it was a sketch of a nuclear reactor with many control rods. He said so.

  Teller’s mouth twisted, his eyes narrowed. “What did Heisenberg intend to say with this?”

  “Maybe just ‘Look, this is what we’re trying to build. You’ll recognize that this is a reactor, not a bomb.”

  Teller considered this, shuffling his feet. “If so, he overestimated Bohr’s knowledge of atomic power. Bohr says he doesn’t know what it is, wonders if we do.”

  Karl studied the sheet. “Pretty crude. Maybe he was trying to get Bohr to be a messenger of conscience?”

  Teller gave an exasperated snort. “Szilard said that when I showed him. He thinks Heisenberg wanted Bohr to persuade us to refrain from working on a bomb.”

  Karl chuckled. “Send it up the ‘command chain,’ as they call it these days. Then forget it. Nobody’s going to stop this, now that we’ve got some momentum. Plus more money from Kornbluth’s investors.”

  • • •

  Urey paused outside the apartment of Rabbi Elon Kornbluth and said, “Look, pretend you don’t know what’s going on. These guys, the investors, they had to sign off on the patent payoff, so they’re grateful. But they don’t know why they’re getting rich.”

  “Rich?” Karl was mystified.

  “Their attorney held out for a lot of money to let Westinghouse make full, free use of the centrifuge patents. Plus, Columbia was in on the deal and saw their chance. The military, they needed to work with Westinghouse and farm out some centrifuge work to other companies. Big kerfuffle. It got messy, so the army solved it by buying the patents outright.”

  “That’s what this party is about?”

  “They want to thank you. They want to know what’s up, who needs centrifuges this much, and they’ll ask you. Say nothing.”

  “That’s easy. I know nothing.”

  They went in, and six men in tailored business suits rose to greet them, clapping their hands. Karl was startled; Urey beamed. Rabbi Kornbluth pressed glasses of sweet wine into their left hands as they used their right hands to shake those of the investors, who peppered them with compliments. Kornbluth now sported a beard to match his brush mustache of thick gray hair, giving him more authority as he swept through a tribute to the vast financial insight of one Karl Cohen.

  For the next hour, amid the thick rugs and burnished oak paneling, they plied Karl and Urey with darting questions. How had Karl known there would be such a demand for industrial centrifuges? It must be related to the war, yes? Maybe a new way to make food for the troops? Or something more . . . important, say?

  Karl hated the cloying sweet wine that somehow managed to be worse than the horrible Manischewitz. He managed to look like he was sipping it as he nodded, smiled, and dodged questions. Urey artfully got them to believe in the food idea, complimenting the astute businessmen on their insight. Karl found a way to hide his wineglass behind the Torah scroll open on its mahogany stand. Soon they were back on the street.

  “How much did they make on the deal?” Karl asked as they headed for the subway amid honking traffic.

  “Better than ten to one,” Urey said merrily. “A million! Your tax dollars at work.”

  “Seems like war profiteering.”

  “Hell, I’d have put some of my leftover Nobel money into it, but it would be a conflict of interest.”

  Karl thought, So going to Kornbluth, the Jewish money, may have made all the difference. . . . “Something’s up, isn’t it?”

  Urey stopped at a newsstand to buy an afternoon edition of the Times and some chewing gum. He was a demon for war news. “You bet. They’ve decided upstairs”—a lift of eyebrows to mean Washington—“to go hot and heavy with centrifuges. It’s cheaper in the long run to own the patents, then do more engineering to improve on them. Don’t have to go back to the original patent holders that way, every time you want to add a grommet.”

  Karl stopped walking. “What happened?”

  “There’s a military head of the whole thing, now, about to get officially crowned. He listened to all sides, in a big meeting we had about which paths to follow. He mulled it over, decided. He’s a quick type.”

  “He should be. The Germans have surrounded Stalingrad. If they—”

  Urey held up his hands. “I know. Look, Karl, I can’t tell you what the big guys above me are thinking. But your little speech at that Dunning talk helped.”

  “How?” Karl could barely recall that.

  “There was a guy who liked your points.”

  “The one in the back. Big guy.”

  “Yep.”

  “Who is he?”

  “You’ll meet him in time.” Urey chuckled and went down the subway steps.

  PART IV

  * * *

  THE MANHATTAN ENGINEER DISTRICT

  Leslie Groves’s ID

  I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,

  I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,

  About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’ news,

  With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.

  I’m very good at integral and differential calculus;

  I know the scientific names of beings animalculous:

  In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,

  I am the very model of a modern Major-General.

  —Gilbert and Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance

  1.

  November 22, 1942

  Oak Ridge was a sea of mud.

  Sticky, rank, turd-brown. The entire valley had been churned up and buildings slapped down in hasty fashion. On good advice, Karl had worn heavy rubber boots, and so made his way down slippery pathways to the construction shack center, a series of Quonset huts with rippled galvanized steel skins. He paused outside one, sniffing smells new to him. This was another part of the old South, leafy and hilly, awash in fragrances of rich loam. Teams labored to tilt up walls of fresh nailed pine, trucks and tractors roared. The war was pulling people out of their comfortable niches and thrusting them into the world. Maybe that would have a good effect.

  Plywood walls sealed the ends of the tubular huts, and the floor inside was pressed wood smelling of adhesive fumes. Inside, Karl caught inquiring glances from men who were taking their seats in the pocket auditorium.

  On the report board was a single name: BRIGADIER GENERAL LESLIE RICHARD GROVES JR. The man himself was pacing on the platform, impatient to get started.

  Karl stopped, staring. It was the man who had sat in the back of a Dunning seminar. He was big, his khaki uniform fresh, muscular in shoulders and stomach, face stern and focused. Karl recalled that Groves’s experience overseeing the building of the Pentagon had led
to his getting this project leadership.

  Karl and Marthe had read about the appointment in the Times. There had been a picture, but somehow Karl had not made the connection. Now here the man was. When she read about Groves, Marthe had said, smiling, “So you’re not in the army but are working for a general anyway.” Karl had not even chuckled.

  Karl took a seat, and Groves began the meeting at ten a.m. sharp. Then the general sat beside a card table with something on it, beneath a draped cloth. Karl ignored the first logistics discussions droning on in jargon-packed sentences from some colonels. Minutes crawled by. Logistics did not bear on why he was here—to see the first big centrifuge plant. The Uranium Committee was now cryptically called S-1, a disguise for security purposes, with a pyramid of offices and executives—meaning, layers of paperwork. Karl tried to keep his distance from all that.

  The eighty million dollars allocated focused on Oak Ridge’s sprawl, under construction now. The project’s goal was a hundred grams of U-235 a day. That would take a year to attain, Karl estimated, since the first building was just now lurching into operation. He and Urey had worked through the complicated network necessary to make a kilogram of highly pure U-235, long weeks of work—and found it demanded forty thousand centrifuges, at a cost of about a hundred million dollars. “A lot of battleships,” Urey had remarked.

  Then Groves rose and in a flat baritone said, “The president pressed this job on me because I built this in less time than anybody thought.” With a quick turn he snatched the cloth from the table, revealing a huge cake with white icing. Everybody rose to get a view. Karl saw it was shaped like the Pentagon. Something of a showman . . .

  “My staff just gave me this, kind of a tribute, I guess. You guys can have it after this meeting. Me, I don’t much like cake.”

  This got a laugh and everyone relaxed, and sat back down. Groves said, “We’re calling this project S-1, but informally, in-house, it’s already got the name of Manhattan Project. But I’m headquartering it here, where the heavy lifting has to be done.”