The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  Silence again.

  • • •

  Harold Urey looked worn, gray, tired. Even his suit was wrinkled. “Karl, I’ve just gotten new data on plutonium. They’re making tiny bits of it out at Hanford, following Fermi’s plans. Enough to get a look at how it reacts to neutrons.”

  Karl sat in a stiff-backed chair beside Urey and they worked through the papers, stamped SECRET in red on every page. “The bottom line is, plutonium reacts fast, spilling out neutrons.”

  Karl sat back, mouth aslant. “Most people seem unaware that if you have separated U-235, it’s a trivial job to set off a nuclear explosion. If only plutonium is available, making it explode is the most difficult technical job I know.”

  Urey got up, picked up some chalk at the blackboard, jotted a few symbols, apparently thought better of it, turned back. “That’s my conclusion too. But Groves likes those big reactors. Thinks plutonium production in them is a good backup, in case we don’t get enough U-235.”

  Karl remembered when Fermi’s team had gotten the first reactor to work in September of 1942. An observer had called Urey, saying obliquely, “The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.” Urey asked, “How were the natives?” and the observer laughed, saying, “Very friendly.”

  Karl pointed to a plutonium reaction time. “You’ll get a fizzle if you use a shotgun bomb. I’d bet that to make plutonium work, we’d have to implode a shell.”

  Urey went to the blackboard and started calculating. He and Karl worked out a basic implosion equation, both trying to imitate Fermi, who famously made simple estimates to get a grip on a problem. Maybe when Fermi was young he could jot ideas of surpassing insight on cocktail napkins, but Karl had no such gift. Process led to progress. Solid, steady systematics were the path. But he joined in as Urey sketched out a way of estimating how symmetric an implosion had to be, to crush plutonium to a critical mass, without getting so asymmetric that the heating metal would make lopsided jets jutting out, and spoil the burn—a fizzle.

  After a half hour, with missteps and puzzles resolved, Urey said, “Hell, we might have to synchronize the implosion to an accuracy of a microsecond!”

  Karl said, “That’s very hard, right?” He knew little about advanced electronics.

  “You bet.” Urey collapsed into his chair, scowling. “We’ll have to persuade Groves that U-235 is the way to go, and all our money should go into more centrifuges.”

  “That guy Oppenheimer, with the team he’s shaped up down in Los Alamos—he must know this.”

  Urey’s mouth twisted into a canny, cynical curve. “Sure, but he’s keeping quiet. They’ll have to work hard to beat this implosion problem.”

  Karl considered. He hadn’t told Harold about his meetings with Groves and Moe Berg, because of Groves’s strict security rules. The research organization at Columbia University under Urey’s direct supervision had been growing rapidly. In 1942 and 1943 Urey had attracted many eminent scientists from academia and industry to assist in the centrifuge work. There was Columbia work, but most of the effort was at Oak Ridge. A small team was trying to make U-235 by gaseous diffusion through barriers, with little progress. By the end of 1943 Urey had about six thousand working on centrifuges, mostly the women who ran the ganged groups of “spinners,” as everybody called them. These were crucial, because men were terrible at keeping careful track of the ebbs and flows in the vast system. It had turned out that ordinary women from farm country had the focus and fervor to further this tedious war work. They easily outperformed the PhDs, though they had no idea what it was all about. In all this, there was also the calutron, a big mass spectrometer separating uranium by brute magnetic force.

  Details and paperwork galore. But Urey had little taste for administration, and the burden weighed heavily on him.

  A sigh. “Karl, how’d you like my job?”

  “What?!”

  “Groves doesn’t like me. He puts off seeing me, even about urgent business.”

  “Uh, so?”

  “He likes you better. I’ll bet he’d like to see you running this whole swamp I’m in charge of.”

  This rocked Karl. “I’m not qualified.”

  “Sure you are. You can fill out paperwork with the best of ’em.”

  He decided to treat this as a joke and laughed dutifully. “Ah, but paperwork gets more attention if a Nobel winner’s signature is at the bottom.”

  Urey sighed. “You’re right. You’re sure having more fun than I am.”

  • • •

  Karl distracted Elisabeth and Martine as Marthe spread the letter from her mother out in full, its thin pages crackling like cellophane. Her eyes raced over it, eager for news.

  The normal letter exchange through the Red Cross, often with side trips through Geneva, took about eight months. You got only twenty-five words on a Civilian Message Form. Marthe had sent Elisabeth born April. Karl, Martine, baby, I, in best health. Everything all right. Hope you keeping well until reunion. Regards to family. Answer through Red Cross.

  That had been dated April 19, 1943. The reply came on December 6, 1943. Welcome Elisabeth. Happy good news. Family and we good health. Madeline 2 boys. Living well with garden. Will live after war 2 apartments. Affectionate sentiments.

  This latest letter had arrived with stamps along the way from Geneva and Washington, DC.

  Marthe sighed, buried her head in her hands. Karl put a hand on her shoulder and felt her weeping silently, not to disturb the children. Karl could see the pages were nearly black. This latest Civilian Message Form letter said, Times hard here. The rest had been censored out.

  5.

  March 7, 1944

  Harold Urey held up a report. Karl saw it was yet another TOP SECRET mimeographed data summary. “They’ve got a new estimate of the ‘crit,’ the latest value for a critical size of U-235: about fifteen kilograms.”

  “We’ll have that much in about three months from Oak Ridge,” Karl said. “But I think we should overshoot some, maybe even by a factor of two.”

  “Then the yield, Oppenheimer says, should be five to ten thousand tons TNT equivalent.”

  Karl went to the blackboard, made a few notes. “Sounds right. So maybe we can hit the Germans before the Allies go into France.”

  “Barely possible,” Urey said, sitting back in his rocker-style wooden chair.

  “If we just had more spinners—”

  “I know. Prob’ly shouldn’t tell you this, but our budget won’t get expanded. This radar program at MIT is soaking up all available cash.”

  Karl said, “Damn! Don’t they understand this can stop the war?”

  Urey stood, patted Karl on the back. “Look, a half-perfected radar is still useful; half-perfected atomic bombs don’t work.”

  Karl nodded ruefully. A knock at the door.

  “Dr. Urey?” the ordinary-looking man in a business suit asked. “I’m Arthur Riley, an investigator from the Counter Intelligence Corps of the War Department.” He flashed an ID. “I need to ask about a suspicious occurrence.”

  Without pause he put a magazine with a gaudy cover on Urey’s desk. “Note the passages I have marked.”

  Harold and Karl read them, heads together.

  “U-235 has been separated, in quantity easily sufficient for preliminary atomic-power research. . . . They got it out of uranium ores by new atomic isotope separation methods; they now have quantities measured in pounds. By ‘they,’ I mean Seilla research scientists. But they have not brought the whole amount together, or any major portion of it. Because they are not at all sure that, once started, it would stop before all of it had been consumed—in something like one micromicrosecond of time.” . . .

  “Two cast-iron hemispheres, clamped over the orange segments of cadmium alloy. And the fuse . . . a tiny can of cadmium in a beryllium holder and a small explosive powerful enough to shatter the cadmium walls. Then—correct me if I’m wrong, will you?—the powdered uranium oxide runs together in the central cavity. The radium sh
oots neutrons into this mass—and the U-235 takes over from there.”

  “Um,” Urey said. “There’s more? And who’s this author, Cleve Cartmill?”

  “We’re more interested in the editor of this Astounding Science Fiction. General Groves sent me to ask that someone who knows more about this work you’re doing interview this”—he glanced at a card—“John W. Campbell.”

  “The technical details are quite wrong,” Karl said, shaking his head, “and the method, ‘radium shoots neutrons into this mass’—wrong too. Still, the scheme is pretty close.”

  Urey looked bemused. “Karl, you take care of this.”

  “Ah . . .” Karl suppressed his groan. “I’m not a literary type—”

  “Do it.”

  • • •

  Agent Riley took Karl to lunch the next day to get his opinion of the story. Riley paid; the security boys had good budgets. He got them a private room at the back of the Carnegie Deli to avoid being overheard and had Eric, Karl’s constant guard, sit at the other end of the table.

  “Cartmill’s bomb would not have worked,” Karl said as he munched through a pastrami sandwich. He even had a glass of beer. “We don’t inject radium and so on. Still, he did stress that the key problem was separating nonfissionable isotopes from the crucial uranium 235, and that controlling the neutron emission rate was key.”

  “So how is it as a, well, a tale?”

  “I prefer real science to fiction about it. And this—some evil alliance called the Axis—oops, no, the Sixa—who are prevented from dropping the A-bomb, while their opponents, the Allies—no, oops, that’s the Seilla—refrain from using the weapon, fearing its implications. The story relates the experience of somebody with a prehensile tail—really!—named Ybor on the planet Cathor. Aliens. But they all talk like crew-cut, wisecracking, cigar-chewing, competent guys. Good grief.”

  Riley nodded with a sour smile. “You think it might be a leak?”

  Karl smiled as he shook his head. He recalled Szilard’s meeting about another story in this same magazine, in 1941, by Anson MacDonald, “Solution Unsatisfactory.” “Death dust,” that was it. Then a Pan Am Clipper had crashed with yellowcake . . . and FDR had denied the existence of any project to use uranium. He asked Riley about these connections.

  “I saw something in the file. So what? No bomb in it.”

  Karl deployed his advantage. “I checked with others yesterday. Leo Szilard—you know of him?—he brought the attention of some of us to this story. My understanding is that Szilard’s friend Eugene Wigner from Princeton did investigate the idea of death dust at the end of 1941, after reading that Astounding story. They concluded that fission products could make a large area uninhabitable, but they did not recommend the use in weapons of these particularly vicious radioactive poisons. In 1943 Fermi suggested that radioactive isotopes might be used to contaminate Germany’s food supply. Teller then proposed strontium 90 as the most effective isotope. Oppenheimer out at Los Alamos rejected the proposal, saying, ‘I think we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill half a million men.’ Urey showed me the letter—classified, of course. Urey sees many interesting things.”

  “Wow! So that story had an impact on you guys?”

  “Not me. I forgot about it.” Until that Pan Am crash . . .

  “I hope no Germans read that MacDonald story.”

  “I do too.”

  John W. Campbell

  • • •

  They went to Street & Smith Publications right away. Sitting at 79 Seventh Avenue was a brick facade mass with creaky elevators. The office door down a musty corridor said CAMPBELL on it, and inside was a woman named Kay Tarrant, who looked like an irritable schoolmarm. She peered at Karl and Riley as if they were prose that needed editing. Riley showed his ID and she nodded, with a face that said her long-held suspicions had finally come true. She led them into a messy office dominated by a broad desk. Tables of pulp magazines featuring garish colors, fresh from the printer, filled out the office.

  John W. Campbell was a blond, six-foot-one man with hawklike features and a crew cut. Riley explained why they were there, identifying Karl with a nod, and plunged into an interrogation. Campbell watched Riley warily until the agent ran out of steam. He diligently never let his FDR-style holder go for more than a few seconds without a cigarette in it.

  Campbell opened with gusto, the tone of a man who loved to launch into lecture. “Look, Cleve Cartmill proposed writing a story about a superbomb. I told him I had hardly any stories in inventory. Lost most of my best guys, went to the war effort.” Campbell leaned back and talked around his cigarette. “Now, Cartmill is partly paralyzed, ineligible for military service, so I tried to egg him along. I needed stories. I sent him ideas about using atomic weapons in warfare, telling him it was fact, not theory, about fissionable U-235. I read about it in Physical Review.”

  Campbell turned his intent, challenging stare to Karl. “You know Urey?”

  “Um, yes.”

  “Then you know more. I’d love to hear what you say about this.”

  “I know nothing, really,” Karl lied. It was the easiest way to stay out of conversations that might wander into secret territory. He used it all the time.

  Campbell brushed this aside with an airy wave of his cigarette hand. “Look, I figure they have quantities measured in pounds by now. I’ll bet they have not brought the whole amount together, or any major portion of it. Because they are not at all sure that, once started, it would stop its reaction until all of it had been consumed. Bang!”

  He slapped his desk, spilling cigarette ash onto it. “I bet they’re afraid that that explosion would be so incomparably violent that surrounding matter would be set off—and that would be serious. That would blow an island, or hunk of a continent, right off the planet. It would shake the whole Earth, cause earthquakes of intensity sufficient to do damage on the other side of the planet, and utterly destroy everything within thousands of miles.” Campbell’s eyes were afire, jumping between the two men, as if he were interrogating them. “Right?”

  Karl wondered if Campbell was drunk or something. Riley was unfazed. He said calmly, “Where were you educated?”

  Campbell beamed. “Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

  “So why are you editing a magazine?” Karl couldn’t resist asking. This was his scientist’s version, he realized, of a question old ladies sometimes asked him on the subway: Young man, why aren’t you in the service?

  “I care about big ideas. Science fiction, gentlemen, does not aspire to take over literature, but rather, reality.”

  “Where does Cartmill live?”

  Campbell handed Riley one of his letters to Cartmill, from a file, and Riley said, “Cartmill’s address—in Manhattan Beach, California?”

  “Yeah.” Campbell apparently did not catch any implication. “Needs money. His story was kinda marginal, but we’d gone through three drafts, so I used it. And”—a canny look—“why do you ask?”

  Riley automatically said it was part of a background check. Karl asked, “What about that 1941 story, ‘Solution Unsatisfactory,’ by MacDonald?”

  Campbell beamed. “That’s really Bob Heinlein. I bought so much of his stuff, he used pseudonyms to keep our table of contents from looking like a one-man show.”

  Karl said, “Do you really believe radioactive dust could be used well?”

  Campbell puffed on his cigarette, and a wary look came into his eyes. The smoke was getting to Karl, who sneezed. “Maybe you boys know more about that?”

  Riley gave Karl a sidelong glance. “Where’s this Heinlein now?”

  “Working at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Something secret, I hear. Along with some of my best writers, de Camp and Asimov.”

  Riley took another magazine from his briefcase. “How about this? I got a librarian to check back on this Mr. Campbell, found it.”

  Riley spread the digest-size Pic magazine out on the desk. To Karl it looke
d to be a rather middle-brow publication about entertainment. But in the July 1941 issue, Campbell had authored an article, “Is Death Dust America’s Secret Weapon?” with a sensational drawing, for some reason printed in dark blue.

  “It’s a story about radiological warfare, as you call it,” Riley said. “One illustration has a caption, ‘Even rats wouldn’t survive the blue, luminescent radioactive dust. Vultures would be poisoned by their own appetites.’ Did this idea come from the Heinlein story?”

  Campbell smiled, eyes dancing. “Sure, Bob gave me the idea. I wrote that caption. Used to be a writer myself.”

  “You were publishing even before you flunked out of MIT in your sophomore year, 1931,” Riley said with a thin smile.

  Silence.

  “I chose to leave due to financial difficulty.” Campbell’s voice was stiff, flat. “Plus, I failed German, so MIT dismissed me. The damned dean said German was the greatest scientific language, and no MIT grad should be without it. After this war, I predict the greatest scientific language will be—English!” He jabbed a finger at the ceiling. “After one year at Duke, I graduated with a bachelor of science in physics in 1932. You checked that?”

  Riley ignored this. “I need addresses for Heinlein and those other writers at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.”

  “Ah . . . okay.”

  Campbell was subdued as he wrote out the addresses. He sat back, giving them a calculating look, and said, “Y’know, I keep track of our subscribers—over a hundred and fifty thousand of them. We’ve been getting a lot of changes of address these last few years—to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, plus Hanford, Washington.”

  Riley shot back, “Which means?”

  “Most of our readers are scientists and engineers. They’re going places I never heard of, lots of ’em.”

  For the first time Riley looked uncertain. “Means nothing to me.”

  “You sure, gentlemen?” Campbell peered at Karl, then Riley.