The Berlin Project Read online

  They set to work on a draft, Einstein insisting on doing it in German, since his English was slippery. He joked about brushing off people who came up to him on the streets of Princeton by replying in German, saying, “Ich weiß nicht” to whatever they wanted. Pressed further, he’d say, “Pardon me, sorry! Always I am mistaken for that damned Professor Einstein.”

  Edward Teller

  • • •

  Karl did not get to see Einstein again, though he did work on the draft letter. Szilard presented Einstein with the polished letter to sign. Szilard had passed it through Urey, Fermi, and finally Karl for English issues, technical clarity, and persuasiveness.

  When Szilard came back with the signed letter, he told Urey and Karl, “He agreed going to Roosevelt is the best course. Still, he wrote a lesser note, not revealing any physics, to the queen mother of Belgium.”

  “How’s it getting to Roosevelt?” Urey asked, feet up on his desk.

  “I asked Alexander Sachs, the banker and economist to carry it. He is a friend of Roosevelt from long ago.” Szilard shrugged, as if this were a minor matter.

  “You’ve always had a talent for getting to influential people, Leo,” Urey said. “What about the State Department?”

  “I have sent it to them also, asking them to reply within two weeks.”

  Urey said, “Very sharp. I hear from the secretary who typed the letter”—Urey tapped on a carbon copy Szilard had shown them—“that she was sure you were a nut.”

  Szilard sniffed, eyebrows raised. “Perhaps I am! She did not recognize the name Einstein at the bottom, either.”

  Karl saw this was a good time to bring up his idea. “We need support now—funds to move the research along. Seems unlikely this letter will lead to something right away. How about going through Sachs to reach Jews who would support us?”

  They both looked at him blankly. “Huh?” Urey said.

  “Einstein gets plenty of letters from Jews, reporting on what’s going on in Germany and other places the Nazis already have gobbled up. Sachs may know someone who would like the idea of looking into the future, to weapons that might be crucial.”

  “That is a big leap,” Szilard said. “How to tell non-physics people our ideas? Cannot be specific. We give away much that way.”

  “You have to give to get,” Karl said mildly. “Harold and I have been working on using centrifuges to separate uranium. But that takes some engineering help—”

  “And my research dollars are few,” Urey added.

  Szilard considered this, eyes on the ceiling. “I may know someone. A rabbi. You are Jewish, yes?” He looked at Karl. “We may go see him together.”

  “Bring that copy,” Karl said, pointing at the letter. “Let him see it, especially this line.”

  The passage read:

  A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.

  “I’ll bet we can make one lighter than that,” Karl said.

  Szilard’s mouth twisted with skepticism. “You cannot know that.”

  “No, but I’ll bet on it.” Karl smiled, a trick he had learned to use when disagreeing with people senior to him. “Harold and I have worked on the mechanics. Pretty classical, just add a heat term from the fission reaction rate. That’s the back pressure that stops a slug of U-235 from traveling to the end of the hollow U-235 cylinder. You can get the reaction rate from that. From that, a plausible explosive mass—and then the bomb mass.”

  Szilard blinked. Maybe he hadn’t done the calculation in the simpleminded way a chemist turned physicist would. “I will think on that. I cannot ask Einstein to sign another letter, one without the passage about it being too heavy.”

  “Fine,” Urey said, “get it out the door.”

  “That rabbi meeting, good idea,” Karl offered.

  “Very good. I am grateful to you for your illuminations,” Szilard said. He straightened his waistcoat, worn even in summer, like the rest of the Europeans. Maybe that elegance helped him make contacts with Americans, especially the scientists, who wore ready-to-wear suits, baggy and gray, and wide, short ties. Nobody at Columbia looked like money.

  • • •

  Karl’s family had been delighted to learn of Marthe’s pregnancy. The parents-to-be went to Canada to jump through the hoops necessary to change her expiring tourist visa to a resident one, because Marthe wanted to work in journalism. Her January pregnancy ended her search for a job, which had proven fruitless so far anyway.

  Every time they encountered his mother, Rae, they got bombarded with effusive plans for the “blessed upcoming event.” They went to have dinner with her in Brooklyn, the three of them enjoying some brisket. After wine Rae pressed Karl to get a better-paying job than being Urey’s assistant. He reminded her of how he was discriminated against because of his name. Rae’s practiced outrage returned. She told an incident Karl had already forgotten, about his applying for jobs as an industrial chemist, in some cases going for job interviews. Once in Maryland he had overheard an executive refer to him in whispers as another from “Jew York,” and the following guffaws.

  Rae bristled. “Maybe that’s okay in Maryland, but in Brooklyn we say, ‘Go after the schlump.’ ”

  Marthe smiled, a thin puzzled slice of rosy lips. “Catholics would perhaps say, forgive your enemy, but remember the moron’s name.”

  “But my Karl has gotten himself into the center of this new work, right away,” Rae said, beaming. “I want to hear how.”

  Karl shrugged but saw he would have to brag a bit; his mother wanted it. “I noticed an obvious feature of the weekly meetings the fission group holds. The big guys always showed up. Going with Urey got me in. Anyone could ask a question, and when he did, all the audience paid attention to him. If there were several exchanges, all the better. And a questioner who caught the speaker in an error got rewarded with nodding heads and smiles from those around him. So I prepared—”

  “He works at home a lot, stays up nights,” Marthe added.

  “—for them. Read the background papers. Read the competitors’ papers as well. That always generates several questions, shows you know the literature. A question, innocently asked, can puncture a speaker’s ideas like a stiletto.”

  “You turned into a physics mensch,” Rae said. “Even though you’re a chemist.”

  Karl shrugged this aside. “I began by calling out questions from near the back. After a few weeks, I moved forward. The senior guys always took the first-row seats, and pretty soon I was sitting only two rows behind them. They began turning in their seats to watch as I asked a question. Fermi, guys from Princeton, full professors from MIT, they began to nod to me as they took their seats. By now they all know me.”

  “So you’ve mastered a whole new field!” Rae was excited. “Physics, even.”

  Karl smiled; he always enjoyed his mother’s compliments. “I was always more interested in seeing an analytic rabbit pop out of a higher mathematical hat than in a Broadway show.”

  “Yes, he has yet to take me to one,” Marthe added, and they all laughed.

  “This could mean a promotion, then?” Rae noodged him with raised eyebrows. Karl knew that putting her off the scent was the way to avoid conversational ruts, so he mentioned their unsuccessful efforts to get money for experiments, omitting that the work was about centrifugal separation of U-235 from U-238. He explained his idea, still unformed, to get Jews involved, since the Nazis would be the obvious target of such a weapon—though he didn’t even mention uranium to Rae.

  “Try that big deal rabbi I know,” she said immediately. “He has big money contacts.”

  “He’s high up?” Karl said to draw her out; he never kept track of the Jewish community, especially rabbis. He vaguely recalled some talk about one with eastern European contacts and who also knew the banking community. The Europe
an restrictions keeping Jews from owning land had driven them to be merchants, doctors, lawyers. If they yearned for money, banking was open to them. “Work with your head, not just your hands,” Rae had said to him while he was growing up.

  “A big Zionist, this Kornbluth is,” Rae said. “If Hitler gets his way, there won’t be any Jews to go to Zion.”

  Marthe said, “You think then like the Europeans?”

  Rae said, “That there will be a war? Of course! That we should be in it? No.”

  “America could be the deciding factor,” Marthe said, pouring coffee for her mother-in-law. Karl found fascinating the uneasy, delicate dance between the two women, pivoting around him. “As last time.”

  “The big thing will be Hitler and Stalin,” Rae said. “They both hate Jews, so if they fight—and they will—it is fine with me. The only bad thing is, they can’t both lose.”

  “Remains to be seen,” Karl said, wishing this subject would go away.

  “I have friends . . . who have friends,” Rae said mysteriously. “I’ll make some calls.”

  He doubted whether his mother could know much of the rich and powerful of Manhattan, but she had surprised him before. He shrugged and promptly forgot about it. He was focused on Marthe, while dinner-table conversation flowed around him. Slow, deep, muddy, but restful in its way.

  They left early and took the subway back to 123rd Street. Even with her at his side, New York rankled him. After the gentle warmth of Paris and his sojourns through the rest of Europe, New York was a sudden cold shower. It struck him as immense, proud, rich, and ugly. At midnight you could buy a turkey, a morning newspaper, a car, a suit of clothes. Smells of gasoline, molding trash, rank steam from gratings—all swelled up around you. Arrogant skyscrapers—was there an uglier word in the language?—submerged people and their dwellings in shadows nearly all day, then trapped the traffic noise in sound tunnels to numb their ears at night. After the lilting vowels of French, he felt swamped by uncouth accents, slovenly pronunciation, tortured grammar. Faces seemed so various—thick-lipped, curly-haired, hook-nosed, almond-eyed, chicken-necked. People he had known well seemed like strangers. Why? Most were nonentities swallowed whole by their petty affairs. It disheartened him that if Rae had not been his mother, he would have nothing in common with her.

  That’s wrong, he thought, and resolved to do better.

  So once home, he turned his attention to the one touch of France he could hold in his arms, Marthe’s ripening body. It snared his attention every day when he came home. Marthe ran her hands down her dress, as if straightening wrinkles in the fabric that were not there, and he realized this was all show to distract him, enlist his male eye in her cause. Marthe’s dress clung to her hips and thighs, her least movement animating its stylized cloth, setting it dancing with a body concealed but yet revealed through motion.

  The talk of war had made this seem like clear, cool water in a scorching desert. At times, when they were locked in their eager geometry of soixante-neuf, she whispered her requests. Floating on rumpled sheets, they became pure bodies, not just heads trapped in lust, and the worries and words and their two different worlds evaporated into the mere vagrant fripperies they were. He thought of the coming war and yet desire seized him. Eros banished Thanatos.

  Waking to morning sunshine, he found her arm draped over his chest and her head resting on his rib cage. If they had been wrestlers, she could rightfully claim a pin. She had pinned him to her moment.

  • • •

  The rabbi lived well. His apartment was in the upper Park Avenue luxury blocks where Rolls-Royce and Cadillac had dealerships. As Karl and Leo Szilard approached, Leo enthused about the atmosphere and Karl caught some of his newcomer enthusiasm. They enjoyed the scents of warm peanuts on street corners, bay rum and hair oil and Cracker Jack. A social scientist could have written a PhD thesis on the smells alone. Here parking spaces were as scarce as the cardinal virtues and the sidewalk rumbled by subway vents.

  “I will do the technical,” Karl said, “and then keep my mouth shut. You make the pitch.”

  “Your mother who will do the introduction—is that her?” Leo pointed.

  Rae’s long brown hair, styled in a bun, was tucked under a stylish dark felt cloche. She had never cut her hair, and when loose it reached all the way down her back. Her nose and cheeks and chin were discreetly powdered, and on her neat dark-blue wool coat was a large silver brooch. Dressed to the nines, as she had promised. She kissed Karl on the cheek and patted him with trembling fingers. Karl made the introductions and Rae peppered Leo with questions. She got it right; he had coached her to say SIL-ahrd. He carefully outlined their presentation plans. Karl added, “When we get to the money, the arithmetic of what we need, Mother—”

  “I say nothing.” She nodded. “Because it will be a lot.”

  Leo smiled. “We are very grateful for your arranging this introduction, Madame.”

  Karl saw she wanted to ask if this would mean a promotion for Karl, but she didn’t. Leo had a suave charm that moved her effortlessly forward with gestures, eyebrows, his tilted head.

  Rabbi Elon Kornbluth had an orderly brush mustache of thick gray hair, like iron filings lined up by a magnet. His apartment was large and muffled by thick rugs and burnished oak paneling. No Park Avenue traffic noise intruded. The living room had been color coordinated by someone with both money and taste, a rare combination. The only sign of what he did for a living was a seven-candle menorah and a scroll Torah open at the middle on a mahogany stand. Kornbluth made pleasantries, focusing on Rae at first with questions about her family. A woman, the rabbi’s wife, appeared to deliver tea, eyes lowered to her task. Her hands were worn and cracked by work, but she poured the tea with a regal air.

  Rae politely brought up the rabbi’s support for Zionism. Karl knew little of this seemingly antique idea—that almost two millennia after their diaspora, Jews should regain Palestine. The irony was that secular Jews like him, who didn’t believe in God, had cooked up the notion. His family were typical Ashkenazim of the socialist bent, who fled central Europe and knew nothing about the Middle East except what they read. Oddly, their very name held the acronym for the political socialist party that so hated them, the Nazis. This sore fact seemed to his Jewish friends to be so numbing that a friend had once called it pig irony.

  The rabbi seized the bit Rae had given him and ran through an obviously polished little speech on gathering the Jews around such a cause in this time of peril. The rabbi’s grand manner slipped a bit, and he began larding his sentences with words like “kvetch” and even “bubkes.” Leo nodded as if believing every word, as did Rae, but Karl kept still.

  “The Zion we seek, I have seen,” the rabbi said grandly. “I have traveled through our ancestral lands. Between the seas—the Med, the Red, and the Dead. We can return, farm, build a Jewish state.”

  If there are any Jews left after this war, Karl thought. He wondered if the rabbi would bring out photos of Arab shepherds near the Wailing Wall next.

  Then, without warning, Kornbluth signaled a new vector with, “So you have gained the support of the great Einstein, I hear?”

  Leo Szilard then rolled out stories of Einstein, quoting the great man as saying, “People are like bicycles. They keep their balance only so long as they are moving.” Then some Einstein funny remarks, building a picture of an ongoing collaboration between himself and Einstein, and by implication, Teller and Bohr, and with an artful nod, Karl. Onward, casually ingratiating, incidentally telling in soft focus the story of how uranium fission was discovered—“Though I must trust you to keep even the name of this element from your later conversations, as we are obeying a secrecy agreement”—and the prospects for both a power source and a bomb. Szilard was a master.

  “Einstein and I, we have written to the president.” Leo handed the carbon copy over. The rabbi read it raptly, eyes wide.

  Kornbluth’s eyes danced. “Ah, yes. Einstein must be right. Before studying the f
aith, I majored in physics at NYU. I have tried to keep up. I can perhaps follow these issues!”

  “Einstein is very concerned about the fate of the many Jews who might fall under Hitler’s rule,” Leo said.

  Kornbluth said slowly, “Yes, yes . . . Such a sad time it is.” A canny pause. “You . . . mentioned this area as ripe for investment.”

  “Our work at Columbia, if funded properly, can yield patents shared by the investor,” Leo said deftly. Karl was gaining an education in the light touch from him.

  “And this could also lead to America having a future source of energy?”

  “Money for Jewish scientists is especially hard to come by,” Rae added.

  Leo sped forward. “Energy, yes, if we hurry, yes. We are concerned that the original discovery was in Berlin. We recently heard that a special research group is now set up there to study uranium. They must have argued for its potential as a weapon.” Leo had not told Karl this news, but it flowed into his argument easily.

  Kornbluth pursed his lips and frowned. “What is the possible power use?”

  Leo brightened. “This process will produce heat, eventually. We can boil water, make steam, drive turbines, make electricity. All those steps we use now, but the process gives us a million times as much energy per reaction as, say, burning coal.”

  Kornbluth smiled. “I like that. People—my investor friends—can follow that.”

  Karl felt obliged to say, “I think the weapon is more important. We have oil, but we do not have much military strength.”

  Rae added, “There is a moral issue, Rabbi. I believe, with all this war news and fears, we are too worried about what we may lose to care about those who are losing even more.”

  The rabbi took this with a scowl. “So with this nuclear thing, we can prepare for a war, and for a peace with a new kind of energy. And patents for both?”

  This startled Leo. “I patented the basic idea years ago, of the energy release—and gave it to the British. I—”

  “Why do that?” Kornbluth shot back.