The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  He said softly, “Hardship, war—extraordinary stresses lead us to do extraordinary things. Maybe that’s what they’re for.”

  Rommel nodded enthusiastically, eyes glinting, and Karl saw the fire that had led an army Korps. To be the first chancellor of the brand-new German Republic, yielding to Adenauer the same year Eisenhower became president—the greatest achievement by any German general, ever. “We have now lived nearly as long under the American nuclear umbrella, which keeps the major nations from war, as the gap between the world wars. The second one I call the Big War not just because of its size. It has given us an extraordinary thing—a fear so great of what happened then. To avoid repeating anything like that, we in the advanced world will not risk another big war.”

  Rommel gave a wan smile and sipped more wine. “So the horrors we fighters brought served to make the aftermath . . .”

  “Better,” Moe said. “Maybe better than we deserved.”

  More than once in his brush with real fighting troops in France, Karl had thought, I must remember these men when I am safely in the future. And now he was.

  He felt in the silence that followed among the men a sense of something coming to completion within him. Unnoticed until now, he saw those Big War events through the precious wrong end of a mental telescope, sharp and toylike, as once he had seen the world of nuclear physics as grand and wonderful, with the telescope pointed the right way. Only now was the war finished, for him.

  They talked awhile as Canaris described the parallel world he had imagined, one with Soviets ruling most of Europe, even China. H-bombs were common, and the arms race was to develop rockets to carry them. Europe was frozen into this locked, nose-to-nose future. Depressing.

  “There is a word for such exercises we Germans do,” Canaris said. “Vergangenheitsbewältigung—coming to terms with the past.”

  Karl rose. “I believe your culture will take a long while to do that. Now, I’ve got to prepare for the evening,” he said, and left.

  In the lobby a woman approached him with a broad smile and in a thick French accent said, “I made an appointment through your embassy, Dr. Cohen. I am to do a feature on your wartime experiences—”

  “Nope.”

  “Means—no? But your embassy—”

  “I don’t work for them. I’m a nuclear power guy now.”

  “You don’t want to disappoint the reporters from Paris Match and the like, do you?”

  “I do.”

  “Maybe later, then?”

  “Later. Much later.”

  After all, World War III might intervene, and he would be off the hook.

  2.

  Slender as a fish, Marthe flitted nude in the window’s pale aquarium glow. His eternal femme fatale bride’s tinkling laughter ended a short, eloquent lovemaking. They had learned to “squeeze in a squeeze” as she put it, and indeed it drained his building, vexing unease about the evening to come.

  He let a trickle of contentment flow for just a moment more, from the reliable springs of their marriage, with its routine, its affection in long silences, its calming warmth: love’s logistics. It seemed they had been married forever now. He was too young to feel old, a mere fifty, here to celebrate the War. People called it that now, as though there were no others. Nobody spoke much of the Great War, because there was a newer, bigger one, huge still in the world’s mental rearview mirror, in many ways still here. People still spoke of the lesser wars since, but not much—and of the numbers of dead, called “tolls” as though they were payments to travel somewhere.

  By the time he had on his tuxedo, Marthe was in her elegant silvery dress, dark hair elaborately done, her profile as cool as the head of a silver coin. He could stay in the background, cheerfully let her draw the eyes. His thin hair failed to conceal the sunburned skin of his domed head, a look he hoped implied cerebral energy, and no lasting interest. Maybe he should wear a hat?

  This evening would be mostly about the war, not him. Scientists had limited appeal, even if their work had been decisive in the Big One. Years before, he’d given a talk at UC Berkeley on nuclear power when a dog somehow wandered across the stage behind him. The floppy-eared dog faced the audience and wagged its tail. The crowd clapped and shouted with greater enthusiasm than they did when he finished his speech.

  In the hotel lobby stood the American Embassy’s dutifully sent escort. He had a solid, square-shouldered voice from some rectangular Midwest state and eyed Moe Berg uneasily. The girls arrived and the family marched past the escort. They had decided to walk to the old France Academy of Sciences building rather than take the embassy’s limousine, and Moe strode along as a shield between the family and traffic. Moe tucked a small book that Marthe recognized into his jacket pocket. “You are learning Arabic? I learned some when I was living in Lebanon.”

  Moe gave an elusive, sliding smile. “I gather it is the next theater of ‘interest’ in matters diplomatic.” The quote marks came through clearly. He and Marthe exchanged some traditional greetings in Arabic, and Moe complimented her dress, using the traditional form, which first requests the husband’s permission to even mention such a thing. This Marthe explained to a bewildered Karl as they passed through a throng of Chinese tourists. That the Chinese Republic was prosperous enough to export tourists was still a surprise to Karl, who recalled the ferocious fighting that had cast out the Communists there. In 1959 he had gone with Marthe to see the first Chinese nuclear reactor, built by General Electric outside Shanghai, and these tourists looked both happier and taller than the crowds he had seen then.

  “What’s up that you can talk about, Moe?” he asked to deflect conversation back into English.

  Moe said, “Newspapers today detail the anti-Soviet riots in Latvia, Estonia, and eastern Poland. They’re getting more ingenious at sabotaging the tanks. Sand is mysteriously showing up in the gasoline.” His eyes twinkled. Karl knew that after the Wolf’s Lair, Moe had done some fancy parachute work in the Balkans, at the very tag end of the European war, bringing Tito over to the Allied side just in time to block the Soviets there. That adventure had led to a full career in what was now the CIA, where Moe was some sort of director.

  “Looking good,” Moe allowed with a skeptical tilt of his head. “I am on such matters the agency’s go-to goy. Though the Israelis are our principal source for hard data.” He grinned. “Just the situation I like. Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.”

  At a traffic light Marthe’s parents appeared, intersecting their route to the ceremony. Glad cries, with now-retired Colonel and Madame Malartre, he sporting a lush gray mustache that made him seem, in his striking old-style military uniform, a festooned gift from the nineteenth century. The still-sturdy couple now lived in Paris, and they greeted Moe with happy yelps. The colonel’s broad white smile split the weathered face below eyes in sockets as wrinkled as walnuts. Karl heard Moe inquire into the fate of the German soldier they had captured, and the colonel twisted his mouth with sly disdain, saying, “Best not to dig up the past.” Karl took this to mean the man had met a subterranean fate. He did not mention that for him, in the months after that, every dropped spoon or slammed door sounded like the German’s shot.

  Their company was now a gabby knot, moving slowly along a boulevard beneath clouds that leaned forward as if in a hurry, losing shreds of themselves to their haste. No need for humans to echo them; the reception came first. He wanted to simply take in the warm Paris ambience.

  Change sprouted everywhere. Since his return in 1944, the America he knew had become one with commercialism as an outright ideology, plus an implausibly booming economy. Too many people were busy spending money they hadn’t earned to buy things they didn’t really want, to impress people they didn’t like, Karl thought.

  Music had charged off in new directions, so his daughters knew names like Buddy Holly, telling him excitedly that Holly currently had two great songs in the Top Ten, whatever that meant. Eastern Europe was partly small, eccentric countries and
the rest gray, dull Commieland. His few visits there he recalled for the grim, gray scowls of the state chauffeurs in their clunky Zils and the cardboard food. Maybe consumerism wasn’t so bad, in comparison.

  The family had moved to California in the 1950s, where Karl managed the General Electric nuclear power plants in the west. He liked the mild climate, the Sierras making it something like Colorado with a seashore. It took him several years to overcome the natural though secret belief of true New Yorkers, that people living somewhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding. Now Americans, with their homes of untrammeled scale and long, lush lawns, were spilling out into the world, bringing nuclear power into the cramped landscapes of Europe, China, even Japan—who, despite the two warheads used on Okinawa and Hiroshima, embraced nuclear as an answer to the high oil prices the Arab cartel had enforced.

  As he enjoyed Paris, he let his mind wander through the tributaries that had led to this parade of family and friends. Through all the nineteen years since the war, the larger world balanced the little known about his war work, a strength of sorts, by taking away a scientist’s chief asset, his privacy and time to do more research. In a personal world sliced in thin sheets now, he contented himself with running General Electric’s nuclear program, keeping to the physics, ignoring the swamps of cost-effective parts-sourcing.

  His airy rise had been propelled by Admiral Rickover’s knowing what he had done. Rickover had brought him in on the submarine nuclear reactor program, now powering nearly a hundred vessels. That the subs were mostly launchpads for missiles bearing fission bombs was a sign of the times. Once the Bomb had been extraordinary, gee whiz. Now it was a tool in preserving the peace and avoiding the far worse H-bomb.

  “I say, Karl, this is your day,” said a familiar voice, and he turned in surprise to greet Freeman Dyson, on another line converging on the Académie building. It now had a neighboring building, one so ugly it might have been designed by the Soviets, who were looking for foreign projects to get some western currency for their starving economy. “I had to see this.”

  Freeman looked eternally young, hair the usual random walk, and Marthe hugged him. “I take it this is not an official GE meeting?” she asked. Indeed, Karl realized, Freeman and others likely to be here today were on the General Electric Reactor Safeguards Board, of which Karl was chairman. Maybe he could get the company to pick up their travel expenses, retroactively? The girls were all smiles to see Freeman, and to Karl’s surprise, Freeman clapped him on the back.

  He recalled that when he’d left the air base, Freeman had done the same, also surprisingly, and had said, “Also, of course, this violates the famous British reserve, with our introverted love of privacy, which leads us to wall and fence our front gardens, curtain our windows, and sit next to complete strangers on public transport and tell them all about our extended families.” He had laughed then and he did so now, too.

  “Glad to see this, Karl. You’re much whispered about. My principal claim in Princeton is that I worked with you.”

  “Not just a claim, Freeman—you did the data mining.”

  “Ah, I see your point. I did assist on the Okinawa drop, as the British representative. Quite simple, after we’d seen the Berlin effects. Another ground-pounder drop near the top of that mountain, killed the army inside, without too many of the villagers on the mountain’s other side. Precision, rather.”

  Plus Hiroshima a few weeks later, Karl thought, and so the war ended in crimson blisters.

  Their crowd grew. Karl saw parading at the head of a column of tourists a Bavarian girl in the traditional garb of apron and knee-length white socks. The Germans were anxiously amiable, voices ringing high in the sweet warm air. If they had been dogs, their tails would have constantly wagged. The swirl and charm of these streets still caught at his heart. As good as it gets, a phrase he had heard somewhere, rang in him. Yet he knew that beyond these blithe provinces the world called the West, the world’s pain played out in the presence of God’s unimpeachable policy of No Comment. The silence of these skies . . . , he thought, and wondered if maybe he needed a glass of something delicious and reassuring. Red, yes. Maybe a Burgundy.

  The eighteenth-century facade of the Académie had a modern side addition, a rhomboid of the new steel-glass-cage fashion, apparently some sort of John D. Benefactor Memorial Bowl.

  A shouting throng outside had the now-obligatory younger people in their thuggish denims, bristling beards, sandals, necks free of ties and even collars and, he suspected, a washcloth. The avant were here, best to be on garde.

  A placard in red said NO MORE BOMBS and another, DISARM, with, illogically, a hammer and sickle. The knotted faces didn’t seem to register who the Cohen mob might be, but Moe was hard to miss. A Frenchwoman in a beret challenged him, grabbing his arm. “You! Americain! You afraid of the Soviet truth?”

  “If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree.” Moe gave her a look that made her hand drop away.

  As they pressed through the howling crowd, someone gave Moe a shove, apparently trying to get toward Karl. Moe turned the shove into a sprawl, headfirst, and the man lay still. “Still just apes beneath the velvet,” Moe murmured, and ushered them forward. The angry shouts and sweaty bustle faded behind them. Karl recalled his moments with Moe and Heisenberg and thought, Maybe this explains Berg’s mysterious aura. He keeps prying eyes away, so they can’t define his position and thus change his own momentum.

  Within, the reception had a receiving line for those to be honored. The leading figure was the French president, a man with hair as thin as Karl’s, plus a gap-toothed grin like a pumpkin’s riding below berry-bright eyes. Marthe’s soft French deftly shoehorned them all through the receiving line of academy toffs. With his amateur French, he made his way through these Continental intellectuals, knowing that his crisp, short sentences would imply a lack of a certain sliding subtlety, of the qualities they liked: ironic, conflicted, without the steady footing that science could give. The men could arch a skeptical eyebrow the size of a rat.

  But no matter; the Académie would today confer honor on a smattering of those who’d brought about the A-bomb’s ending of the war, establishing something of a new tradition. In 1945 the Physics Nobel had gone to Hahn, Strassmann, and Lise Meitner, for discovering fission. Then the 1956 Peace Prize went to Eisenhower and Khrushchev for agreeing not to build the hydrogen bomb. That agreement was now also called the Szilard Treaty. Today the H-bomb was a threshold no one dared cross without exciting hostile moves by all other powers. That wall had been building since Eisenhower’s Man of War, Man of Peace campaign in 1952.

  Such views had accelerated after the grave gray giants of the world, such as Bertrand Russell and even Einstein himself, had pronounced profoundly in the mid-1950s that hydrogen-bomb war between the USA and USSR was inevitable unless some higher body held all such weapons. Russell had even predicted that the death of civilization, under a myriad of the H-bomb’s crimson blisters, was inevitable and would happen before 1960.

  An official host escorted them forward through a side entrance. The man was dressed rather like a butler and moved like a dancer in a Hollywood movie of the 1950s, in tie, creamy tails, and wing collar, all with matching toothy smile. He led Karl and Marthe, with his family all around, into a large, bowl-like room for the reception. Plenty of press people moved through the crowd, looking for prey.

  The noise clasped them. A man presented to him with European formality a copy of The Theory of Isotope Separation as Applied to the Large Scale Production of U235, the McGraw first edition. Not exactly a title to see on drugstore racks and in airports, but Karl signed happily—perhaps the tenth time he had ever done so.

  He caught sight of Leo Szilard, who was chatting happily with a crowd of press around him. Good, they’ll ignore me, Karl thought. But Szilard caught sight of him and embraced Karl in the French manner, with flashbulbs popping.

  Szilard had moved up in the world and sported today a dark blue blazer with a
silk handkerchief tumbling from the breast pocket like a paisley orchid. “We are different ends of the spectrum,” Szilard said. “He had his own way of ending the war.” This got a puzzled laugh and more questions in French, which Szilard fielded, luckily.

  “How do you feel about the continuing trade bans on the Soviets?” a reporter asked.

  “It has been—what? Seven years now!” Szilard’s broad smile gleamed; were those false teeth? “And we have done so much damage to the Soviet economy, they have learned what collective economic power can do. So keep it up.”

  “Do you trust them?” a Los Angeles Times reporter shot back. “They handed over their hydrogen warheads to be dismantled, but just one could—”

  “Yes, yes, we, the British, French—all have fission warheads. We could do great damage to any Soviet attempt, if they used just a single hydrogen fusion warhead. So, no, not a true threat.”

  The L.A. Times man turned to Karl. “Did you support the Szilard Treaty? The USA has not built an H-bomb. Does that make us weaker?”

  Karl kept his voice level, dispassionate. “No, stronger. We don’t have to spend money on weapons we can’t use.”

  “But we say we won’t use fission, that is, A-bombs—”

  “They’re limited in yield, so a lot less scary than H-bombs—which can be a thousand times more powerful.” Karl found himself slipping into the vice Marthe had long warned him about, Lecture Mode. But the damned man had asked—so: “Next is to limit A-bomb numbers.”

  He had rehearsed that and stopped short of saying what the max A-bomb yield was, a heavily classified number. Instead he stepped back to let Szilard hold forth on the new nuclear rocket programs. It had taken him years to learn that trick, and Szilard loved the spotlight anyway, his smile creasing his cheeks, in danger of turning into a smirk.