The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  Freeman murmured at his elbow, “Let him go. I’m working on an even bigger nuclear rocket, called Orion. We might take a cruise out to Saturn on it by the 1980s or so.”

  Karl blinked at this, said nothing. The future was coming at them like a freight train. Szilard had eventually gotten his limits on nuclear weapons use, all right, so there would be no world with hydrogen fusion threatening civilization. A-bombs were menace enough, the world had realized.

  A Paris Match reporter interjected, “Do you feel the Einstein-Russell proclamation makes sense? To let only the United Nations hold all A-bombs?”

  The question came to both of them, but Karl stepped forward, for once. “No, bad idea. The UN won’t agree on when to act, and with A-bombs, you’d better be fast. And who’s to stop the UN from using them against, say, us?”

  A French reporter said, “We feel the same, but what do you—”

  “I hope we can keep conflicts regional, like our quick blocking of the Soviets in Mongolia.” Karl was learning to turn the question the way he wanted it. “Chinese Republic troops did that job, with just our airpower as backup. We’ve got the Soviets bottled up, and now they won’t have H-bombs to shake at us.”

  Karl stepped back quickly. Shouts followed him, so drawing on his command of the French language, he said nothing.

  He hadn’t said anything that substantial in years in public—the real discussion, as always, was in private, secret meetings. But sometimes he couldn’t resist. And anyway, further agreement might come from the meeting of Nixon and Khrushchev, here in Paris next month.

  Szilard whispered to him, “They really want you to tell your war stories.”

  “Not gonna.”

  Joy sprang in Szilard’s face. He turned with a broad smile to the press. All this time, and even with his fame, Szilard envied Karl; a minor scientist, after all, who had stumbled into chance roles—the Berlin bombing, Heisenberg, Canaris—events still only partially known to the public. Sour grapes, the champagne of the intelligentsia. Karl turned away and put it out of his mind.

  “Karl!” And here was the general.

  Groves had an arrest-photograph air about him—looking like someone who, with as much dignity as possible, had smoothed his hair and straightened his collar after knocking someone in the head. “Those Frenchies out there thought they could gang up on me. Ha!”

  His rumbling, weathered voice now sounded like a grinding mixture of gravel and goo. Karl gave him a quizzical smile. “They’re still railing on against the bombings?”

  “Yeah, you’d think they’d shake my hand about Berlin. Or better”—he shook Karl’s energetically—“yours.”

  Karl went through the reintroductions of Marthe and the girls, thinking that others, never to be here, had died before they got their deserved honors. Fermi, Oppenheimer, many who had worked on the centrifuges and reactors. He missed Fermi especially. A regrettable thing about death was the ceasing of a personal brand of magic, never to be regained.

  “Damn good you’re getting this,” Groves said. Karl nodded, bad at taking compliments. “You should be on this government judges panel I’m on, giving out prizes for innovation.”

  Karl admitted, “I always duck that stuff.”

  “Me too, but Eisenhower made me.” Groves scowled. He wore a sleek suit, now that he was in industry, but retained the brusque manner. “So who accepts? Midgets. So who do they choose for the prize? Another midget.”

  Karl suddenly felt an impulse and said, “Did you have any idea back then how this, the bomb and all, would work out?”

  Groves shrugged. “Who could? Think—an ordinary Joe in 1900 might’ve predicted the rise of the automobile, say. Some smart guy could’ve seen the interstate highway coming, sure. A good scientist could’ve predicted the traffic jam. Only a genius could think of backseat sex at the drive-in movie while watching King Kong.” Karl laughed.

  He helped his family steer through the throng. Most here had the casual, lofty ease of those spending someone else’s money. This was just another state ceremony. The air of business-as-always struck him still. His postwar experiences of Germany and Japan had differed from his visits to Britain and France. Germany and Japan had to start from scratch, thanks to the bombing’s obliterations, but they had not suffered the long, horrible battles over their own lands. So they could grow faster than Britain and France after the war. Ironically, the Allies had won, so they had to labor on, encumbered by prewar institutions—and economic sclerosis. So now too, the eastern Europeans were outdistancing the former Allies, especially the senile Stalinist-style Soviets.

  “Ah, monsieur,” said another fellow in a set of formal tails. “Apéritif? Monsieur, madame, mademoiselles?”

  The girls went first, Elisabeth with a Sancerre, Martine with cognac, and oddly, Beatrix eyes wide at the crowd, taking a Coke. He would have to teach her about alcohol, yes, in time. Marthe and he asked for a Bordeaux. He swirled his in its glass, reflecting on the equations that described its elliptical gyrations, and sipped. To steady the nerves, he thought, a phrase that seemed somehow British—so he clinked glasses with Freeman.

  “The ceremony, it begins.” A formal man beckoned, brisk and bossy.

  “Not without us,” Karl said. He nearly laughed as the man’s mouth shrank like a sea anemone poked with a stick, and he slunk away. Seats in an auditorium, calls to order, hub and bub. The press hovered. Karl could feel the cameras licking up his image, his words, and flinging them at light speed around the gaping world, which would scratch its head and go on. He stopped sipping the wine; more of the glaze of alcohol would make him see the slow, stagy proceedings as if beyond a glass wall.

  A host proclaimed the majesty of the moment with a flutelike flavoring in his speech, which only French could do. Yet he had careful, opaque gray eyes, perhaps wondering if there would be a political demonstration in the crammed bowl of hushed faces.

  There was another American here, a woman novelist he had never heard of. She seemed to be receiving this prize because she had not published anything since the Truman administration and so had achieved the most meaningful silence. Some French seemed to prefer their Americans that way, especially Sartre, whom he saw in the distance standing and smoking, ignoring the ceremony, and arguing with a woman in black who cocked an eye at the line of Cohens in the front row as if they were vagrants out of place. Jews, yes, right up front.

  In French so swift he could barely follow, the host said the American writer lady had brought forth like a dutiful waiter the rich tureen of thick soup, made from the tortoise upon whose back the universe rested, in legend. Karl frowned. The novelist herself appeared from a nearby seat, hunched and gray. Her face had been tugged into deep crevasses by the drawstrings of some older sorrows. Writing seemed like rugged work to Karl. Maybe easier than fission? Her sad eyes, the narrow, thin-lipped smile, seemed to say so.

  Her voice was whispery and left no impression on him. More flowery French talk poured forth, gone the instant he heard it. Then he heard his name, and applause rose like a flutter of loud birds. He took the stage, stomach tightening.

  He instantly recalled a similar feeling. He had been standing in a line of shivering wet children, inching up a ladder to the top of the great water slide at Coney Island—a shaky iron platform a vast height above turquoise depths that continued to churn after swallowing their last victim, a slim yellow-haired girl. The child behind him nudged the backs of his legs and he staggered forward slightly, off balance, while all Karl had wanted was to think about it a bit—and then he was off, head down, into the fray of frothy life.

  So he went—striding forward to the podium, notes forgotten in his jacket pocket, into the wave of solid applause. Words echoed in the big bowl and he could not fasten on them, remember them for later. The host presented the sash, the square tribute award. Words flitted by him.

  “—his tireless labors in the dark days of the early war—”

  The official, formal award was written in rolling
, flourished language on a framed document with a sateen finish and counterstamped embossing. The Order of the Légion d’Honneur was the highest decoration in France, with a Republican cross and a sash they made a fussy show of fitting on him.

  He looked out at the expectant crowd. Europe had, until that greatest of wars, the ability to shrug away its history and remain whole in its angers and agonies, consigning them to flags and monuments, like flecks of pyrite weeping rusty tears down the face of a granite escarpment. But this occasion was different. The Big War, as some called it—though not him—could not be weathered away. The future would have to be different.

  Légion d’Honneur

  He had to make his speech now. He stepped forward, taking in the bowl of faces. Here was a heaven of sorts, more compact and less tragic than Moe Berg’s Yankee Stadium, stretching for some eternity, defined by baubles and crimson cloth.

  He began. “Peace . . . doesn’t usually come from being peaceable.” A worrying murmur rolled up from the faces. “The only future that can justify a Big War is one with a Big Peace. If that takes the raw fear of fission weapons, so be it. That tens of millions died means that more millions or billions should live better, now, from the same science that now makes electrical power. That lights our future, so people of all nations can see before them expanding horizons.”

  Silence. Maybe they were thinking it over. He wanted to speak to them of those war years, a landscape in a turbulent time, a timescape dangerous and now curiously haloed by triumph, its spectrum shifted through the years into a rainbow land it never was. They were all now living in a Berichte aus der Parallelwelt, a better world than perhaps they deserved.

  He wanted to tell them something of that. “Remember, in an astonishingly short while, this will be a long time ago. We hear that struggle as World War Two. I think it should be World War Through. No large scale conventional war can occur again, because it can be trumped by the bomb, or the ‘death dust.’ World War is Through.”

  He gave them a little smile. Should that be his concluding line?

  Suddenly out there in the bowl a face seemed to suddenly clear, to stand out from the crowd.

  He was in the fifth row, and when he turned aside, as if listening intently, there was his look: something about the chin lifted up, expectant, a flinty certainty in the eyes, a tilt of his head in a hopeful slant . . . Anton.

  Karl blinked and felt the tears running down his face, coming without warning, then his throat tightening as he tried to murmur, and failed. The man smiled and he saw it was not Anton, of course not, after nineteen years. The unknown young man’s jut of chin called forth something that was still in this world, something elemental, a forward thrust undiminished by even death, that dwelled in the secret hearts of all now.

  Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man.

  —Mark Twain

  In order to know the truth, it is necessary to imagine a thousand falsehoods.

  —H. G. Wells to Oscar Wilde

  History is not merely what happened. It is what happened in the context of what might have happened.

  —Hugh Trevor-Roper, historian

  I had the mistaken idea, based on what happened in World War I, that we would stay out of the war, and it is very unfortunate that I felt like that. If I had been more convinced, as Wigner and Szilard were, that we were going to get into the war, I would have pushed harder to begin making the bomb. I figured out that roughly half a million to a million people were being killed a month in the later stages of the war. Every month by which we could have shortened the war would have made a difference of a half million to a million lives, including the life of my own brother. If someone had pushed the project harder at the beginning, what a difference it would have made in the saving of lives.

  —John Wheeler

  AFTERWORD

  Alternate history provides a way to think about the fragility of our past. Its fictional devices let us see what might later seem inevitable as the outcome of many unpredictable forces, and chance too—and so to learn from it.

  World War II is the source that keeps on giving, for it touches on many problems we have today, especially the role of all-powerful weapons like nuclear, biological, and chemical ones.

  Nearly everyone portrayed in this novel existed. Four of the named characters are still alive: Freeman Dyson, and the Cohen sisters, Beatrix, Elisabeth, and Martine. The only completely fictional major figure, standing for many, is Anton. This is an alternative history novel from a specific premise: that the errors in judgment at the beginning years of the Manhattan Project might well have gone differently, yielding a very different World War II.

  Such a mixed nuclear and tactical war could lie in our future, so this thought experiment has implications for our real world in the twenty-first century. The next war that sees nuclear weapons used will probably also involve substantial ground forces. Think of Pakistan-India and the deep angers of the Middle East, where resorting to nuclear weapons seems inevitable among demons posing as religious purists.

  Characters

  Nearly all the people depicted here existed. Many I knew.

  The invented refugee Anton is a composite of European Jews helped into the USA in the war’s early years.

  Rabbi Kornbluth is a fictitious investor-leader who supplies the funds needed in the crucial early years of centrifuge development. (Kornbluth is the name of a major early writer of alternative history stories.) This act gives the momentum needed to find the new engineering methods that solve the basic stress and mechanics issues that, once overcome, make the method superior to the gaseous diffusion method. Indeed, we knew by the early 1960s that the centrifugal method would have proved even better than the calutron machines that did supply the uranium for the Hiroshima bomb. Karl Cohen led the review that proved this.

  In this novel, Rudolf Peierls and John Dunning failed to make gaseous diffusion prevail; in reality they won. Gaseous diffusion cost more money than any other separation process in the Manhattan Project, but had no major effect on the war. The story’s swerve away from real history most obviously appears here, where the choice of separation method yields the different path the plot then follows.

  Any portrayal of real people in fiction is an interpretation. I knew personally many figures in this novel: Harold Urey, who greeted me at the grad students reception at UCSD in 1963; Karl Cohen, my father-in-law; Edward Teller, my mentor as his postdoc at Livermore Lab; Maria Goeppert Mayer, for whom I graded the homework and exams in her graduate nuclear physics course at UCSD; Freeman Dyson, whom I met at the UCSD daily coffee in 1963; Leo Szilard, another coffee break savant; Luis Alvarez, whom I invited to give a colloquium at the University of California, Irvine, because I wanted to meet such a fabulous character, and whose account of the Hiroshima bombing I used here; Richard Feynman, an idol to all of us; Sam Goudsmit, raconteur extraordinaire; Paul A. M. Dirac; John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding; Fred Reines of UC Irvine; Arthur C. Clarke, who was a radar officer in the war and then a science fiction writer, and many others. I have tried to echo their manner of speaking and thinking. Indeed, I included my own father, James Benford, who went into Normandy on the fifth day of the invasion and fought across France, Luxembourg, Germany, and Austria.

  Further, every document quoted here is authentic, though some have dates altered to conform to the plot.

  The central idea for this novel came from the protagonist I chose to follow through it, Karl Cohen, who wrote this about the war:

  When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the effect on the US atomic program (Manhattan Project) was a one-year delay. The US Army was preoccupied with the new war in the Pacific; they failed to appoint a person to head the Manhattan Project with enough power. In 1941 the people in charge favored Urey’s centrifuge approach to producing the fuel. By 1942, General Groves was in and Urey was out of favor. Building the gaseous diffusion plant took longer than expected, and the result was a one-year delay in the project. The delay meant that the t
arget changed away from Germany. The object of dropping an A-bomb over Germany was to prevent an invasion.

  How many more concentration camp victims would have survived if the war had ended one year earlier? For one, Anne Frank. Most CC victims succumbed eventually to the rugged conditions. . . . The difference between 1944 and 1945 as the end of the war is probably quite significant in terms of lives.

  So in Karl’s thoughts the bomb might have removed the need for a D-Day. In this and many other ways I have necessarily given interior thoughts no one knows, but his views I have echoed.

  Edward Teller I worked with and came to know. In his autobiography, Memoirs, he takes up the issue of this novel:

  What if we had the atomic bomb a year sooner? The easiest and least expensive method of separating isotopes, a method used throughout the world today, is based on a centrifuge procedure that Harold Urey proposed in 1940. General Groves chose the diffusion method instead. Karl Cohen, Urey’s able assistant during that period, believes that Groves’s decision delayed the atomic bomb by a year.

  If Dr. Cohen is right, atomic bombs of the simple gun design might have become available in the summer of 1944 and, in that case, would surely have been used against the Nazis. Atomic bombs in 1944 might have meant that millions of Jews would not have died, and that Eastern Europe would have been spared more than four decades of Soviet domination.

  Teller goes on to argue that “those same bombs would have done irreparable harm to central Europe.” But of course, no one would have targeted anything but Germany. This novel shows how widely read the fear of the bomb was, even when it beckoned as a solution to the growing savagery of the war.

  His words made me think, because in the last year of war, whole societies collapsed. A million died each month, the Soviet Union captured many countries into subjugation, and the devastation of the Axis powers took decades to repair.