The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  Luis Alvarez leaned back, stretching, and said, “Any successful team needs one rational guy who thinks this thing is sure as hell not gonna work. I guess that’s you, Karl.” Luis gave him a raised eyebrow.

  Karl grinned at this insight. He did indeed think of himself as Groves’s tame skeptic. Karl had pushed for this outcome with a fervor that often got him into arguments. His skepticism came from his sense of urgency. He nodded. “Somebody’s got to ask questions, is the way I see it. Lift the hood, watch it run. Plus, I’ve got to be sure it doesn’t run up costs, either. This whole damn war has been done on a budget.”

  Moe Berg said easily, “Congress can only print so much money.”

  “Time’s money in a war,” Luis said.

  Karl had kept costs down in running the centrifuge program out of his stingy instincts. When he had gotten his PhD done, Columbia required seventy-five copies of his thesis. That would mean three hundred dollars for printing, so he delayed filing for his degree. When the paper based on it got published, he bought copies from the publisher at a quarter apiece and bound them up as the thesis.

  Karl considered the two men on either side of him. “I feel promoted beyond my abilities, guys. Just six years ago I was grateful to just get a job with Urey, after coming back from marrying in Paris. Now . . .”

  Luis yawned and said, “I’m a few years older than you Karl, I’d judge—and I feel the same way. This is a major transition in human history. We’re harnessing an energy that drives stars—nuclear. A long way from burning wood and coal.”

  Karl recalled what Harold Urey said when they made their good-byes. “Not surprised he picked you to go. You know why Groves likes you, and not me? Because you’re rock-solid certain. Me, I have doubts. The difference between ‘Do it!’ and ‘Maybe this will work’ is huge for Groves.”

  Maybe that was it. He still felt like an imposter, though, a midget on this immense stage.

  • • •

  London swam out from beneath cotton-ball clouds. They droned down onto a vast system of runways, bounced on landing, and stiffly worked the kinks out of their legs as they gathered up their bags.

  Across the landing field, in midday sun, they passed through a murmuring military sorting hall. There were issues of Stars and Stripes with a Bill Mauldin cartoon of a beat-up GI sitting with his bare feet in his helmet, which was filled with water. He was saying to another soldier, Tell th’ ol’ man I’m sittin’ up wi’ two sick friends. Among photos and vague articles about pounding the Germans in Italy was a quotation from Eleanor Roosevelt framed in a border: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, that’s why they call it the present. True enough, Karl supposed. As he looked out the window at army trucks and muddy fields, he wished he could find a New York Times.

  They took a bus into a forlorn London. There were grimy machine sheds and block-wide warehouses and smoky chimneys. Above these he saw a wan yellow break in the grim clouds. Trucks filled with sitting US soldiers rumbled along, and airplanes glinted in the sky. Their bus crossed a bridge, and he saw men fishing in a river beside a boat club that seemed to be made of random boards nailed together. The stained roads had the rank oil smell he recalled from his time here with Marthe. That had been 1937, and they had nipped off for a weekend in the heady days of first love, when their world was bright and brimming.

  Streets here now buzzed with life, but whole blocks were smashed to rubble. Men in overalls worked in yards, many women wore trousers, and crowds pressed through the streets in shabby clothes. The women were shopping, holding wicker baskets and standing in lines they called queues outside the few shops that were open. The men were thin, grizzled, smoking cigarettes. Everywhere faces were lined, somber. He rolled down a window and breathed in damp air carrying gasoline fumes and smoke that made his nose itch. On a passing field he saw GIs playing softball. Somehow he had expected cricket.

  Gray barrage balloons hung above on thousand-foot cables. They were supposed to snag bombers. Karl estimated the typical German bomber wingspan and the number of balloons per square mile, did the calculation. Given a random walk by an adroit pilot, an enemy had maybe a 50 percent chance of crossing London below a thousand feet. If that pilot flew above the balloons, the radar-controlled antiaircraft guns—a collaboration of the Brits and the USA, he had heard—had a damn good chance of shooting him down, because the guns could track and aim fast enough. The Battle of Britain was over, but the Germans kept up some pressure.

  Their bus chugged through thick traffic of trucks and buses, then finally hauled up into a big courtyard. They filed into a tall, barnlike place full of cots separated by hung sheets, as though on clotheslines. Someone handed him an assignment slip. Karl found his bunk and stuffed his luggage under it. He was suddenly very tired and had trouble finding the “john,” as somebody called it, which had on its door a mysterious WC. A shower helped, but the soap was rough and raw, smelling like floor cleaner. He came out of the steam with a towel around his waist and peered around in the dim glow of lamps in the high ceiling. The big room full of cots smelled of damp clothing. Snores echoed like angry birds. He did not look for Moe or Luis. He sat on his cot and slowly let himself collapse onto it, pulling up the sheets that smelled of some harsh detergent. Without a moment’s thought, he fell into fitful dreams.

  Freeman Dyson

  2.

  The next morning Karl came up from sleep as though drugged. He had gotten no instructions on what to do once here, so he lounged a bit, listening to a chorus of coughs and murmurs. When he finally lurched up, he found that Moe Berg had gone somewhere already. Fair enough; Moe had slept easily on the flights. Luis Alvarez was gone too. Karl had barely pulled on clothes and combed his hair when an orderly handed him a note to appear at the entrance to meet escort. The escort was a short, sinewy man with strawlike filaments of excitable hair that made him resemble an upside-down broom. His attire was frowzy, worn pants and tweed jacket with a dull school tie. “Hello,” he said as they shook hands. “I’m Freeman Dyson, to brief you. Might I ask if you have had breakfast?”

  He and Karl found the officers’ mess and got in the cafeteria line. “This is better fare than we get in Bomber Command,” Freeman said, helping himself to scrambled eggs and pancakes and syrup. “I’m in the ORS, Operational Research Section. You lot have handed us quite a problem.”

  Karl had the pancakes too. They were only a distant dull echo of Marthe’s light, fluffy confections. Smothering them in maple syrup seemed a just execution. The scrambled eggs came from powder shipped from the USA, brought to zombie life with water and milk. “Problem?” More like a solution.

  Freeman looked around. “Quite a problem, delivering your, um, package.”

  “Got to assemble it first.” Karl bit into a brown sausage that squirted hot fat into his mouth, and made a face. Freeman told him they were by law at least half meat. Judging by texture and taste, Karl took the other half to be sawdust. The toast had already long cooled off too. And the coffee seemed to have mistakenly included machine oil.

  “Bomber Command is quite busy. We’re redirected from Germany to the German defenses in France. They sent me, a quite junior figure”—Freeman bowed his head in a humble nod—“to get some idea of what to expect. And in reverse, to tell you of the delivery problems.”

  “Um.” Freeman was not quite what Karl had expected, not a rock-jawed military type at all. “As far as I know, no target selected yet.”

  “Indeed. I rather feel that the obvious is not necessarily wrong.”

  “Go for the amateur painter?” Karl was careful not to say anything that could be picked up as information to prying ears.

  “Exactly.” Freeman’s smile was the real window into him, a delighted beam that appeared to float free from his face, strangely dynamic with its electric ears and perky nose.

  As they walked toward a nondescript brown concrete building nearby, there came a loud rumbling. “Buzz bomb,” Freeman said, and there it was flying over
head, zooming away from them. Sirens wailed. “Launched from sites along the French and Dutch coasts.” Winged death stood out black against an eggshell-blue sky, marred by smokestack coal plumes. They stood by a flattened area of rubble and listened for the abrupt silence when the engine stopped. Sudden quiet. It was still in view when the slender tube with stubby wings began its exhausted fall. Karl spent anxious seconds waiting—then a muffled bang came. A silence. Then everyone around them moved on. Quite plausibly, someone had died. For the first time he felt that he was in the war.

  “Simple pilotless airplanes,” Freeman said. “Ingenious. More effective than bombers because they’re much cheaper. Our pilots can tumble them by flying alongside and flipping their wings a bit—destabilizes their gyros.”

  “I heard something about the German who runs their rocket program,” Karl said.

  “Von Braun. He’s behind these buzzing devils, yes. I hear that Bomber Command surveys show some bigger rocket being tested too.”

  Karl decided to go no further. He recalled the eccentric, blustery Campbell at that science fiction magazine saying that von Braun was a subscriber. So if von Braun had noticed that old Anson MacDonald story about death dust, could he send it up the Nazi pyramid to get the attention of people in their bomb program? Best to keep such speculations down, he judged. Meanwhile he let himself savor the range of accents and voices in this city so plainly under pressure. Voices were louder, speech faster, eyes dancing.

  They went into the brown concrete blockhouse that Freeman said was the Admiralty Citadel, a bomb-proof operations center for the Admiralty and RAF. To Karl its brutal functionality was a rude sore thumb amid the centuries-old brick and stone of old London. Freeman said it had a very practical purpose. “In the event of a German invasion, this building would become a fortress, with loopholed firing positions provided to fend off attackers.”

  Down they went, staircase after staircase smelling of damp plaster, deep into the bowels of a bombproof citadel with foundations thirty feet deep and a concrete-steel shell twenty feet thick. Broad tunnels ran radially away on each floor, to government buildings in Whitehall. On one stairwell landing a German propeller was mounted on the wall. It was twisted and blackened, a victory badge.

  Freeman said, “Churchill doesn’t like this place, prefers the Cabinet War Rooms. He calls it”—here Freeman lowered his voice into a bulldog bass—“a vast monstrosity which weighs upon the Horse Guards Parade.” Karl chuckled.

  Uniformed Brits and Americans moved everywhere, intent, eyes hollow. Freeman had a cramped office. He offered tea brewed on a hot pad, but Karl waved it aside and said, “You’re pretty young.”

  “I’m twenty. Plenty of those I went to school with are serving. Some are already dead. The government asked me to join the group studying bombing strategy. I felt I should come. We’re civilians, employed by the Ministry of Aircraft Production and not by the air force. I’m straight out of Cambridge, fresh from an abbreviated two years as a student.”

  By now Karl had learned that the best way to get cooperation from people was to share some history, become something like a friend. “Why Bomber Command?”

  “At Cambridge I attended all the advanced mathematics lectures. It was a wonderland of beautiful thought. I climbed roofs at night during blackouts to glimpse the flashes of bombing toward London. I can remember so vividly lying in bed at age fifteen, the start of the Blitz. I enjoyed hearing the bombs go off with a wonderful crunching noise. I thought it was the sound of the British Empire crumbling. I thought it exciting, new. Much has changed. Perhaps I can do a bit to prevent that crumbling.”

  “Ah. What’re you doing now?”

  “Finding how to murder most economically another hundred thousand people,” Freeman said with a sad, wry smile of resignation.

  “We have a better way, I hope.”

  “I know what you’ve done, from Rudolf Peierls. Good show, your team stuck with centrifugal. Rudolf now admits that in the gaseous diffusion method, they still haven’t found the membrane to separate out the, ah, tube alloy. I gather you sprinted ahead.”

  “More like a steady walk. It took some doing.”

  “Bomber Harris gathered our team together and set us to thinking how to use your, ah, gadget.”

  Karl’s forehead wrinkled. “Bomber . . . ?”

  “Sir Arthur Harris, usually seen by us mortals in his air force limousine, passing us on our bikes. Our mammoth force of heavy bombers, which he commands, was planned in 1936 as our primary instrument for defeating Hitler, without repeating the trench warfare horrors of World War I. Bomber Command, by itself, absorbs about one-quarter of our entire war effort.”

  “This new, uh, gadget of ours will be enormously different.”

  Freeman nodded. “So I gather from the reports. Wizard, absolutely wizard. But . . .” A long pause, eyes distant. “Allow me to tell you a bit of history. My first day of work was a day after one of our most successful operations, a full-force night attack on Hamburg. For the first time, the bombers had used the decoy system, what you Americans called chaff. That’s still classified, I think—packets of paper strips coated with aluminum paint. One crew member in each bomber was responsible for throwing packets of it down a chute, at a rate of one packet per minute, while flying over Germany. The paper strips floated slowly down through the stream of bombers, each strip a resonant antenna tuned to the frequency of the German radar. The purpose was to confuse the radar so it could not track individual bombers in the clutter of echoes from the chaff.”

  Karl realized there was much he did not know about how to deliver the gadget. “So you think . . . ?”

  “That day, the people at the ORS were joyful. I never saw them as joyful again. It had worked! The bomber losses the night before were only twelve out of seven hundred ninety-one, or 1.5 percent. Far fewer than would have been expected for a major operation in July 1942, when the skies in northern Europe are never really dark. Losses were usually about five percent and were mostly due to German night fighters, guided to the bombers by radars on the ground. Chaff cut the expected losses by two-thirds. Each bomber carried a crew of seven, so chaff that night had saved the lives of about a hundred eighty of our boys.”

  “Ah, you think using it can shield a single bomber too?”

  “Yes. Hamburg was a lesson that might apply here also, to your gadget. There was a firestorm. People were asphyxiated or roasted inside their shelters, terrible deaths. The number killed was more than ten times greater than similar raids. After that, every time Bomber Command attacked a city, we were trying to raise a firestorm. We never did.”

  Despite the deluge of war news, this he had never heard. “So it was harder than they thought?”

  “I think I’ve learned why we so seldom succeeded. Probably a firestorm can happen only when three things occur together: first, a high concentration of old buildings at the target site; second, an attack with a high density of incendiary bombs in the target’s central area; and third, an ability to create an atmospheric instability.”

  “So it takes all three at once? A tall order.” Karl grimaced at thinking of mass murder as a technical problem. “Well, let’s see. Our gadget gets number two. Berlin certainly fits for number one. Atmospheric instability means what?”

  Freeman shrugged. “No swift wind, mostly. Certainly lack of rain. With all three requirements, we may ignite a firestorm larger than Hamburg. In the capital city that runs this war.”

  “So . . . it might be too effective?”

  “There must be someone left with the authority to surrender.”

  “The generals will be out in the field. The amateur painter will be . . .” Karl stopped, realizing that he had assumed Hitler would rule from Berlin, but that could easily be wrong.

  Freeman nodded sympathetically, his eyes clear and caring. “My point is that we don’t know.”

  Freeman went on with more examples. The early Berlin air raids failed. Sir Arthur ordered fifteen more heavy attacks,
expecting to destroy that city as thoroughly as he had destroyed Hamburg. All through the winter of 1943–44, the bombers hammered away at Berlin. The weather that winter was worse than usual, covering the city with cloud for weeks on end. Photo reconnaissance planes could bring back no pictures to show how poorly the bombers were doing. As the attacks went on, the German defenses grew stronger, British losses heavier, fighters got more deadly, and the scatter of the bombs worse. Finally, losses per raid rose to nine percent. Sir Arthur admitted defeat. The battle over Berlin had cost 492 bombers with more than three thousand aircrew.

  Dyson concluded, “For all that, industrial production in Berlin continued to increase, and the operations of government were never seriously disrupted.”

  “I had no idea.” Karl felt whatever assurance he had evaporate before Freeman’s calm, measured reciting of facts.

  “All I’ve told you is classified, top secret.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Morale. We’re beaten down over here.”

  “I can see it in people’s faces.”

  “That, plus apprehension about the invasion about to start.”

  “I saw a joke repeated in the New York Times. That the English are saying the trouble with Americans is that they’re overpaid, oversexed, and over here.”

  Freeman reacted with a laugh so hearty it shook him. This softened his formality, making him into a sage and friendly elf. “I hadn’t heard that one. At my part of Bomber Command we have no American contacts.”

  “So the failure of your bombing campaign is secret, to keep up public support?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “And now we plan to change that with one bomb.”

  “If possible. There were two main reasons why Germany won the battle over Berlin. First, the city is more modern and less dense than Hamburg, spread out over an area as large as London with only half of London’s population; so it did not burn well. Second, the repeated attacks along the same routes allowed the German fighters to find the bomber stream earlier and kill bombers more efficiently.”