The Berlin Project, Page 4

  Mattie and Lewis exchanged looks. “Just read it, Mother,” said Mattie dryly.

  Rae cleared her throat. “I’ll just skip to the important part, and you can read the rest after dinner. It says, ‘We sure Nazis take rest country soon. Want come America. We have very few hundred dollars in currencies. Need help to get there. Documents we pay for. Can America Paleys help?’ Pretty desperate.”

  “I’m just starting out,” Karl said. “Marthe and I are getting by, but—”

  Rae nodded, but her lips were rigid, meaning she was going to stick to her guns.

  “Maybe ten dollars a month for a while?”

  Still the stiff face. “These people need it right away. I’m asking everyone in the family. If enough give, maybe in a while we can get something wired to them.” His mother paused significantly. “Mattie and Lewis have already agreed.”

  Karl hesitated, thinking that both of them were employed, while his was the sole salary for two. He looked at Marthe, but her expression was carefully blank. All of her family was still in France, and everyone thought a German attack would come there first.

  “Okay, ten a month. But not for long.”

  Rae beamed.

  “Of course the firm is going to help, but it’s not like the old days when we had the army contract,” offered Jack. “Max told us about the letter a few days ago.”

  Rae went on. She was still frightened and furious about the Kristallnacht in Germany only two months before, with shops, synagogues, and homes smashed, thousands forced into camps, all by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party government finally taking off the gloves.

  “I got Marthe out in time,” Karl said, “but I’m damn sure Hitler’s going to go after the Jews more and more. That’s what I heard everywhere I went in Europe last year.” Rae nodded, head down.

  Dinner went well, and when they came back into the living room, Walter Winchell was barking out his rapid-fire news on the radio. Several relatives hunched over it, listening to the notorious gossipy newsman with an audience in the tens of millions attack the Nazis, calling them “Ratzis.”

  Karl ignored all that. He had been a follower of Marx and Engels since his freshman year at Columbia, where it was the locally received wisdom. His Soviet tour, especially ten days on the train up along the Volga River to Moscow had vaccinated him against the disease of such politics. He had wanted to see the territory the original Paleys and Cohens came from in the Ukraine. But the tales of starvation carried out by the Cheka, and the summary executions against the walls of the Kiev city center, had cured him of Marxism. There was no better, original homeland back there for the Paleys and Cohens, and now he knew it.

  Karl winked at Marthe, who went into the side room. Soon enough Walter Winchell’s hectoring tone shifted to a dance band playing for the delight of the radio audience from the rooftop of yet another sophisticated supper club broadcasting from a midtown Manhattan hotel—a world he lived near yet had never seen, and didn’t want to.

  Rae was happier now that she had unburdened herself about the Czechoslovakian Paleys. She told a long joke that got a lot of laughs, about a doctor who mixed his laxatives and an aphrodisiac. In the corner the child ate her ice cream very seriously, spoonful by savored spoonful, in the slow, careful way children have. Karl admired how the little girl ignored the adult babble around her. He wished he could.

  Then Rae came over to Karl and Marthe and gushed a bit about the “high French cooking.” Karl did not point out that Marthe had had no culinary skills until after she had walked off the boat with him last September 26. Her ability to learn so much, so fast, was yet another endearment.

  His sister, Mattie, edged over to where Karl stood against the wall and whispered, “Rae’s trying to make up for opposing your marrying her. She still thinks it’s maybe a mistake, but hopes you’ll stick with it.”

  Karl smiled. “Some mistakes are too much fun to make only once.”

  Marthe heard this and beamed. She sidled up to him, looking out at the party. She patted his rear and gave him her signature sideways eye roll that always made him laugh. Such grace notes, especially near the end of a trying day, had made him realize for the first time that he loved her more than anything else in life.

  A knock at the door. Karl answered. A messenger in uniform handed him a telegram.

  “It’s from Harold Urey,” he said after tipping the man. “It says, ‘Got funding for meeting Washington next week. Fermi Bohr will unveil fission experiments. Prepare for it. We go by train together.’ Wow.”

  I’m in, Karl thought, and his pulse quickened.

  Enrico Fermi

  4.

  Tuesday, March 21, 1939

  Karl and Marthe arrived at noon sharp for the lunch at the King’s Crown Hotel. Harold Urey had issued the invitations. Under pressure from his wife, Frieda, the wives were invited too. Urey greeted them with a broad smile, waved Karl to a round table and Marthe to another a few yards away. Karl now knew how to read Urey’s round face, and this smile was a surface effect. Beneath that, beginning to show lines at his mouth and around the eyes, was concern.

  “Ladies separate?” Marthe said with her lilting French accent, coming through her still wobbly English. Her mouth twisted just enough to convey displeasure.

  “I imposed this upon Harold,” Laura Fermi said as she rose from the ladies’ table. She was a sturdy woman with a commanding manner; more so than her husband, Karl realized. “Please sit; I need advice on housekeeping.”

  Urey had turned away to greet others, so Karl sat beside Marthe for a moment, after introducing himself to Fermi’s wife in the formal European way he had learned in Paris. He was beginning, with Marthe’s help, to see that knowing the families of the men he wanted to work among was smart. Karl had attended the Washington meeting in January with Urey and was easing his way into the uranium work, a lesser figure among the big guys. So be it, then.

  This meeting was unusual, away from Columbia and with wives present. Karl whispered, “I think Madame Fermi wants to know the other ladies, and Enrico wants a meeting with some privacy from Columbia, and this is the compromise.” Marthe nodded, eyes calculating.

  He reflected as Laura Fermi went on that the Italian accent always had a softening surplus of vowels, especially adding an a at the end of verbs. Laura and Marthe exchanged advice on the groceries, tearooms, dime stores, ladies’ ready-to-wear, and hair salons in the ten-block zone between 110th Street and 120th Street, the “Columbia village” as she termed it. Laura Fermi said, “We are-a about to move to a furnished apartment—for-a of course we could bring no furniture from home, and so-a by the Fascists be detected—”

  Karl let the vowels run by while he estimated what the purpose might be of this odd luncheon meeting. Szilard had just come in, with Irving Kaplan and the physicist John Dunning, even Bohr. Fermi, Bohr, and Szilard had their best suits on today. Something was brewing.

  “We went on a canned-food spree in the shops,” Laura Fermi said, “trying new foods. Pudding powders, even foods frozen—I have never seen!” Karl listened to her describe the Neapolitan and Sicilian dialects of the Italians in grocery stores, whom she had sought out until she found it was easier to understand their-a rich English. “Still,” she said, “Enrico wishes to have a home where our children’s knees carry brown dirt, not the gray city dirt here.”

  Karl caught Urey’s signal to come join the physicists, as more arrived—a dozen around a big circular table. Though I’m really a chemist by my PhD, they don’t care, he reflected, still surprised to be accepted. Urey’s a chemist too, but he has a Nobel.

  As they all ordered lunch, mostly sandwiches, Szilard hunched over, head bobbing, and introduced the meeting theme: money and secrets.

  “Enrico has confirmed the fission process, the neutrons coming out—maybe better than two per splitting!” Szilard’s voice rose expectantly toward the end of his sentences, like a salesman. “So there is energy to be had, if we can make a chain reaction sustain.�
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  Fermi nodded somberly. “I would like to try that. The neutrons, though, they are-a too fast. They do not resonate with the uranium, I think.”

  “So we have to moderate them?” Karl ventured to ask, since he knew that physicists used “moderate” for “slow” for some reason. Usually he followed a minimal strategy—show up but shut up.

  Around the table, as the sandwiches arrived, heads nodded. “Maybe water can do that?” Urey asked. Fermi considered, nodded.

  Karl took a bite of his ham sandwich. It was nowhere near as good as the ones he’d had daily in Paris. Plus too much mayonnaise. New York had a lot to learn.

  Between bites, a discussion began of ways to slow the neutrons. Bohr spoke slowly, as if thinking aloud, but now he sped up, catching the edgy excitement of the table. He thought that at higher energies the neutrons just plowed through a nucleus, maybe throwing off a few neutrons without shattering it. His liquid drop analogy to the uranium nucleus was controversial, and Fermi did not quite accept it. Karl did not know enough yet to have an opinion.

  “Slowing neutrons is an old idea but tricky,” Fermi said. “Paraffin, water—we know those work, from our Rome experiments.”

  “For what use?” Urey said mildly, and they all knew his point.

  “To make heat, power,” Fermi said. “That is my interest here.”

  Szilard cast narrowed eyes around the table. “This war that is coming—we do not have much time.”

  In a public restaurant, Karl saw, no one wanted to use the word “bomb.” So as the discussion moved forward the men said “bang” or “critical mass” to describe putting together enough uranium so the neutrons would smack into nuclei, make them oscillate as the Bohr model said they would, spitting out lesser elements and several more neutrons. All that had to happen through maybe a hundred steps, each one doubling the number of neutrons in play, before neutrons started escaping through the skin of the uranium mass.

  “So how big does this chunk of the stuff have to be?” Urey asked.

  “To make-a power, very much,” Fermi said.

  “To make a bang, less,” Karl guessed.

  “How do we calculate this?” Urey asked.

  “Surely we need to know more from experiment—cross sections for collisions, say, to start with,” Bohr said. “Enrico, can you do that?”

  “I will need more help,” Fermi said, and they all knew he meant people and money. But being Fermi, he would lead the experiment and do a lot of the hands-on work himself. The man was a legend for his versatility, as well.

  Karl said mildly, “How much metallic uranium—not the oxide, that’s common—is there in the USA?”

  Some puzzlement, then Dunning said, “Maybe a few grams, tops.”

  “How about Europe?” Urey asked.

  With a dry, slow diction Bohr said, “A letter today says the regime in Berlin has established a new study center at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on . . . uranium.”

  “So they’ll buy up what they can,” Urey said, blinking. “That’s where Hahn and Strassmann are, so they—”

  “Saw the obvious,” Szilard said firmly. “My point, exactly.”

  Fermi turned to Bohr. “Niels, do you think they can make a power reactor?”

  Bohr’s mouth twisted in a startled grimace. “They will not bother. They will go for a more useful, more quick . . . device.”

  Still, nobody would say “bomb” in public. Karl said, “So what should we do now about publishing results?”

  “Restrict it,” Szilard said. “Agree to say nothing in print.”

  “Cat’s out of the bag,” Urey said. “Hahn and Strassmann have published, Lise Meitner and Frisch are about to as well.”

  “We can ask others to desist,” Szilard said calmly. “I doubt the Germans will be saying anything in print.”

  Bohr nodded. “They have controls through government. Americans do not.”

  Karl could see a brimming conflict over self-censorship. To deflect an open dispute, he said, “First we have to have something to publish. Dr. Fermi, will you send your paper to a journal?”

  “I might, to help the careers of my colleagues”—a nod at those around the table—“but it simply verifies the earlier German work. To do more I need money. I am starting up like a graduate student!” That provoked some chuckles. Then Fermi handed around a letter. “I asked George Pegram, your dean of faculty, who wrote-a to an admiral this letter.”

  When it reached Karl, he noted in the March 16 letter a phrase of introduction, Fermi’s new professorship at Columbia, the Nobel, “no man more competent in the field of nuclear physics,” and so on. But after stating that “uranium might be used as an explosive that would liberate a million times as much energy per pound as any known explosive,” Pegram immediately backtracked. “Look,” Karl said, “Pegram says, ‘My own feeling is that the probabilities are against this, but my colleagues and I think the bare possibility should not be disregarded.’ Some support!”

  Fermi frowned, looking uncomfortable at this attention. Karl went on, “Plus, he mentions you’ll be in Washington anyway to give a talk, so you will call his office to see if ‘you wish to see him’—puts Enrico in a weak position, a supplicant.”

  Fermi said, “Ah, supplicant, same word as in Italian. Pegram was, you say, hesitant. Pegram said to me he hopes such explosives will be impossible, that he would rather gunpowder did not work either.”

  “How does he feel about the airplane or the tank?” Karl shot back.

  “He did not say,” Fermi said mildly, eyebrows aloft, and Karl saw he had overstepped his position.

  “Sorry, but how did it go with the admiral?” Karl asked.

  “We met. No result,” Fermi said. “There is little proof, after all, that we are not pursuing a chimera. That is an English word?”

  “Yep, it is,” Urey said. “Did you show him the paper you and Dunning and the others published just this month?”

  “He glanced at it,” Fermi said, with a shrug that told how little the admiral thought of academic papers.

  “So what can we do next?” Urey asked.

  John Dunning said, “Understand how the neutrons propagate, that Enrico and I have now verified in detail. Then try experiments with U-235.”

  Karl knew him for the Dunning Optimism Factor, because he always minimized problems and stressed what was to be gained in an experiment. As the man went on into details, Karl saw that Dunning was a salesman, engaging everyone’s eye as his gaze swept the table, emphasizing points with his hands, voice rising at the high points. He had dogged Fermi’s work for years, finding new effects the Rome team had not. But Fermi won the Nobel. While Karl and Fermi and others were at the DC meeting, Dunning had shown that fairly slow neutrons came from hitting a uranium oxide disk with neutrons, driving some fission.

  Szilard described the experiment for those who had not been there. “Unfortunately, the new cyclotron in the Pupin basement was behaving poorly. So we brought from the thirteenth-floor laboratory a radon and beryllium fast-neutron source—the type Dr. Dunning used for most of his previous work—and placed it next to the ion chamber containing a tiny speck of uranium. In great excitement, we saw about one big pulse on the oscilloscope every minute. The rate was so slow, we had doubts at first whether it was real or maybe a poor electrical connection. But when Dr. Dunning put the neutron source in a paraffin vessel—you Americans called it a slow-neutron ‘howitzer,’ very funny—the rate went up to seven or so huge pulses per minute. We turned the switch and saw the flashes on the detector screen. We watched them for a little while and then we switched everything off and went home.”

  John Dunning said, “We understood the implications and consequences, too.”

  Szilard sighed. “That night, there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.”

  Fermi said, “Hitler has already made that inevitable.”

  Fermi had followed up on the experiment, refining measurements. Since then, three ot
her American groups had verified the effect, and a first paper had appeared in Physical Review on March 1. The cat was out of the bag, but now the question was, how much more should anyone publish that the Germans would see?

  “I prefer to try natural uranium,” Fermi said. “The U-238 is over ninety-nine percent of the natural and may be the isotope that fissions.” He leaned forward, intent. “These big energies, they tempt us. More moderate is to assume the common isotope, U-238, is the cause of the big energy results. Can we not agree?”

  “I do not believe it is U-238,” Bohr said. “My theory predicts it must surely be U-235.”

  “We will have a contest, then,” Fermi said. “To see which it is.”

  Karl decided to push the issue. “Whichever isotope it is, a big result”—he raised his eyebrows to show he meant a bomb—“would require fission by fast neutrons, not slow. A chain reaction using slow neutrons might not proceed very far before the metal would blow itself apart, causing little, if any, damage.”

  There it was, out in the open. Urey looked around the table and cut into his steak. Fermi was having one too. The food had arrived without Karl noticing. He had fish and wished he had the courage to order a glass of white wine. But this wasn’t Paris, and physicists would frown at anyone who had wine with lunch. Urey chewed and said deliberately, “So does a possible war take precedence, or a new source for power?”

  Fermi relished his steak. “We cannot get such beef in Italy,” he said, and then halted, perhaps realizing that it might be a very long time before he ever saw his native land again. Shaking that off, he said slowly, “The conservative thing to do is to play down the possibility of a chain reaction at all. We do not know it be absolutely true.”

  Szilard bristled, a spoonful of soup halfway to his mouth. “Surely Enrico, you must agree the conservative stance is to assume a chain reaction can happen, will happen, and so to take necessary precautions.”

  Fermi frowned, mouth twisted. “If a nuclear pile can work—we do not know this, only guess that we can slow the neutrons so the reaction is maybe stable—then perhaps we can understand these, well,” he whispered, “these bombs. Pile comes first.” A brisk nod.