The Trinity Paradox Read online

  But if the Americans had succeeded in creating a self sustaining chain reaction using graphite and uranium, then Bothe’s results must be wrong. Wrong!

  Esau squinted and rubbed the scar on his lip. The car honked again below the window, but now he no longer heard it. What if Bothe had not used pure enough carbon? Graphite had a tendency to be contaminated with boron— and other results had plainly shown that boron acted as one of the most voracious neutron swallowers. What if carbon was indeed an efficient moderator, but Bothe’s result had been masked by boron contamination? The pile would then defeat its own reaction, not because of graphite—but because of the boron poisoning.

  Carbon was trivial to obtain. Absolute purification would be somewhat difficult, but vastly simpler than manufacturing heavy water or finding some way to separate the uranium-235 from the rest of the natural uranium.

  This changed everything.

  Esau read Fox’s letter again. This also meant the Americans were far ahead of them. Despite a German head start at the beginning of the war, the Americans had already achieved a self-sustaining chain reaction. That, too, changed everything.

  Reichminister Albert Speer did not take either Esau or his nuclear program seriously. But perhaps this news would make him pay attention. If the Americans had jumped headfirst into developing an atomic weapon, could Germany afford not to do the same?

  Esau imagined different ways to approach Speer with Fox’s information. Such a simple letter from an old friend, but it would gain him a great deal of respect. It demanded immediate action.

  The two motorcycle guards dismounted and propped their vehicles against the wooden railings. Side by side the two marched up the steps of the Virus House and stood beside the door, waiting for Reichminister Speer and Major Stadt to emerge from the staff car. The driver opened the doors for them. Esau followed Speer, hurrying to keep up with the man’s pace.

  Speer was a tall, quiet man, soft-spoken but highly intelligent. He had staged and organized Hitler’s spectacular Nurnberg rallies and had become one of the Führer’s closest companions. Speer bore a superior air, a frowning disregard for Esau. But that would pass. Esau had earned a new reputation for himself.

  The guards tracked mud inside the barracks as they led the way. The academics had bemoaned the presence of Nazis in the institute years before. This time, though, the visit would have a different flavor.

  Esau stomped his shoes on the mat, then hurried as Major Stadt led them on a snap inspection of the facilities. At first glance the Virus House had an acceptable appearance of austerity, as all good war projects were to have. The physicists and lab assistants, startled from their routine, scurried about, trying to understand what the guests wanted, trying to hide whatever they suspected might be considered wrong. No one actually greeted the visitors.

  Stadt opened random doors and peered inside rooms. He seemed uninterested in what he saw, which made Esau realize that the Gestapo major knew nothing about nuclear physics and simply expected to intimidate the researchers into showing some sign of guilt or collusion.

  They found blackboards, equations, men arguing about a crude pencil sketch. In one part of the building they found a brick-lined pit two meters deep and filled with water. One abandoned experimental area left its laboratory equipment sitting idle. Idle! Esau fumed. It would reflect badly on his own credibility if his people weren’t even bothering to make a sham of ongoing research. Speer raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

  “This is not the only facility where our experiments are being conducted,” Esau said. “Dr. Diebner has another group working at Göttingen.”

  “Indeed,” Speer replied quietly. “And is he getting any work done?”

  “That is the problem!” Esau tried to master his impatience. “They are scattered and they can play games like this because I cannot watch them all. One of Diebner’s men, Dr. Paul Harteck, wanted to do an experiment with uranium oxide moderated by dry ice. He had secured an entire trainload of dry ice and needed as much uranium oxide as possible—but at the same time Heisenberg insisted on having half of it himself for a different experiment here at the Virus House.” Esau scowled and met Speer’s gaze. The Reichminister didn’t seem to understand.

  “You see, with this nuclear physics, it is all or nothing—you cannot have a partial reaction. You cannot split the resources in half. The result was that both experiments failed due to lack of materials.” He cleared his throat and straightened. “That was before I became Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics.”

  “And now everything has been straightened out completely, I am sure,” Speer said with a maddening lack of sarcasm.

  “It will be,” Esau muttered. He now had a blackmail

  grip on Heisenberg. After bringing the Nobel Prize winner

  in line, he could begin to get other things done.~

  As they approached, Dr. Werner Heisenberg emerged from the door of his main office. He bore a false expression of welcome on his face; Esau could see he had made a quick attempt to straighten his clothes. His reddish hair glistened with dampness, as if he had just combed it.

  “Welcome, gentlemen,” Heisenberg said, rubbing his hands together, then turned to Speer. “You are the Reichminister? I have seen photographs of your Nürnberg rallies. Most impressive.”

  “Will you be offering us tea next?” Major Stadt said. “After all, you don’t appear to have anything better to do.”

  Heisenberg froze, as if it had finally occurred to him that he might be in some sort of trouble. Esau wanted to watch him sweat for a moment. It would be good to diminish that ego.

  “What can I help you with, Herr Major?” Heisenberg’s voice had a slight edge. Esau felt immediately left out of the conflict.

  “We have received some troubling information about your activities, Herr Professor,” Reichminister Speer said. He removed his overcoat. Heisenberg reached out to take it, but Speer handed it to one of the motorcycle guards instead.

  “We would like to inspect all of your experimental records,” Major Stadt said. “You will provide them, please. Professor Esau will scrutinize them to determine the accuracy, or lack thereof, in your results.” The Gestapo major’s voice began to grow louder. “We wish to find out if your inability to make progress is a result of simple incompetence or plain treason.”

  This appeared to astound Heisenberg. “But Herr Major, I assure you—”

  “You can assure us with your records. If you are innocent of trying to sabotage German nuclear research, you should have nothing whatsoever to hide, eh?”

  Heisenberg did not answer; there was nothing he could have said.

  The silence lasted too long. Esau had just begun to clear his throat when Heisenberg seemed to crumple. “Certainly. Follow me and I will get everything for you.”

  In the hall, Esau watched other researchers standing indignant but afraid to say anything. He recognized Dr. Karl Wirtz, the man who had built the Virus House, and Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker, Heisenberg’s brilliant young assistant; the other technicians were unknown to him.

  Back in Heisenberg’s office—Esau noted with satisfaction how inferior it was to his own new office—the renowned physicist hesitated beside a scarred safe that looked as if it had survived an Allied bombing raid. He acted more troubled with each passing second.

  “Is there any work in particular you wish me to produce?” he asked.

  “Everything,” Major Stadt said. Speer gestured vaguely at the safe.

  Heisenberg set his mouth and opened the safe. He withdrew stacks of lab reports, handwritten journals, and letters between himself and the other researchers. Major Stadt nodded to one of the guards, who snatched the records from the physicist’s hands.

  “Give those to Professor Esau,” Reichminister Speer said. “He will search for inconsistencies, errors, or omissions.”

  Heisenberg’s voice carried only a hint of his complaint, but he flashed Esau a look of pure outrage. “I do not believe Dr. Esau is quite of the same
… caliber as myself. I doubt his ability to question my competence.”

  “In such grave circumstances, Professor Heisenberg,” Major Stadt said, “you would be wise to keep quiet unless specifically answering a query put to you by either Reich-minister Speer or myself.”

  Esau took the stack of papers, and Speer dismissed him with a casual motion. Esau said, “I shall need all of his derivations for cross-section calculations—”

  “Then find an office for yourself. Take the one next door, in fact. Meanwhile, Major Stadt has some other information he would like to discuss with Professor Heisenberg.”

  One of the guards opened a leather satchel and withdrew a sheaf of papers bound with a red ribbon. “The Gestapo has compiled its own file on you, Herr Professor,” Stadt said. “Dr. Esau’s new information was the last straw.”

  Heisenberg looked truly baffled. “Am I accused of something?” He reached up with a hand to run it through his bristly red hair, but stopped himself.

  “Accused? No. Guilty? Most likely.” Major Stadt sat down in Heisenberg’s chair behind Heisenberg’s desk, brushing aside notebooks without regard to what they contained. “You will sit in front of me and you will answer my questions. To cross-check the record, my guards will take notes. Reichminister Speer will ensure that none of your coworkers leave the Virus House until we have completed our investigation.” He snapped a glance over at Esau, still listening by the door. “We would like you to begin today, Professor Esau!”

  Esau hurried out of the room as the Gestapo major began his questions….

  He found it difficult to concentrate on Heisenberg’s tight, narrow handwriting. Half of Major Stadt’s interrogation was discernible through the walls and through the half-open door of the adjacent office. Esau imagined Reichminister Speer sitting in silence, watching the Gestapo officer ask his questions.

  “We have on record your attempts, time and again, to defer scientists from active service in the military. For the betterment of the Reich, you say! To keep technicians working rather than shooting the enemy, you say! And who are you to decide how best we can implement our armed forces?”

  Esau took out sheets of clean paper and used a fountain pen to check calculations, trying to unravel Heisenberg’s chain of reasoning. Several times Esau lost the thread of what the physicist meant, what he was trying to show. He paused between written lines, puzzling over how Heisenberg had made an intuitive leap. Back in Cambridge, in the coffee shops, Esau and Graham Fox had played similar games, trying to out calculate each other. It had been so long since he had seen Fox….

  Stadt raised his voice in the next room. “But he is a Jew! I don’t care if he is one of your colleagues—we aren’t interested in Jewish physics here! You were ordered to ignore Jewish physics.”

  Heisenberg began to answer, but Major Stadt interrupted him. “We have your attempt on record. Look, here are your own letters, signed by your own hand, requesting that the parents of one Samuel Goudsmidt be released from a concentration camp. Who are you to decide these things? We decide! Himmler decides! You have only one task—to develop a new weapon. And you cannot even manage that!”

  Heisenberg mumbled something Esau couldn’t hear. Esau tried to maintain his concentration as he tallied a column of figures. Heisenberg himself had scratched out one answer and written another on top. An attempt to camouflage results? Or a simple mistake?

  Reichminister Speer said one word, clearly heard: “Bohr.”

  Major Stadt immediately spoke up. “Yes, that brings us to an interesting situation, one of the most damning we have about you. Witnesses say that you left Germany, went to Copenhagen, and met with Niels Bohr, a half-Jew with known Allied sympathies. In fact he is even now believed to be in hiding in America, working on their atomic bomb project. Yet you had a private conversation with him, you were seen together, talking. We have everything on record. Now tell us—what were you doing there?”

  “I had a troubled conscience.” Heisenberg’s voice sounded shallow and defeated. “I wanted to ask—”

  “Ask? No doubt you wanted to tell him everything about our program, so he could share it with the Americans! We know you are falsifying your own experiments, disrupting progress on our nuclear program, trying to make us lose the war.”

  “That is not—”

  Major Stadt cracked something hard against the desktop, then lowered his voice below hearing again.

  The interrogation went on. Distracted, Esau continued his inspection. He stared at the numbers, at the comments jotted down in the laboratory. He tried to find flaws in Heisenberg’s work. He was too afraid even to get up and find a cup of tea for himself. None of Heisenberg’s fellow scientists were likely to be in a helpful mood at the moment.

  Hours later he felt hunger biting at his stomach. The other scientists paced the halls in silence, unwilling to talk to each other. They did no work the entire day, and it had passed the time when they usually went home to their families. Some had trains to catch, but they could not depart until Reichminister Speer allowed them to leave.

  Otto Hahn appeared at the door, scowling but looking dapper with his intense and bright eyes set under bushy eyebrows. His graying moustache was clipped so close as to seem a mere smear of stubble on his lip. “Excuse me, Dr. Esau. We were wondering if some sort of dinner might be provided? My technicians have not eaten all day.”

  Esau looked up at him, amazed—Otto Hahn had discovered nuclear fission in the uranium atom, and now he stood timid, asking a simple favor of Esau.

  “You have no food here in the laboratories?” He had wanted something to eat as well.

  “Not with all the uranium we keep, Herr Professor. Many of the things here are highly poisonous. We thought it best to prohibit eating in the area.”

  Reichminister Speer and Major Stadt had closed the door to maintain privacy in their endless interrogation. Esau did not dare interrupt them to ask for permission. Then he realized his own foolishness. After all, wasn’t he the Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics? Didn’t he have the authority to make certain decisions? Hadn’t he been the one to point out Heisenberg’s intentions?

  “Gather some of the workers in the hall,” he said. “I will select one at random and he will go to the commissary of the institute to get enough food for all of us.” Otto Hahn looked relieved and nodded as he backed out the door. Esau had just proved he could be reasonable. That was good, since he would have to make these people work with him.

  Later, as he worked red-eyed and far into the night, sipping on the cold dregs of a cup of tea, Esau sat up as Heisenberg’s door snapped open. One stack of laboratory records sat to Esau’s right; a few more, scattered in front of him, still needed to be checked. In front, on a sheet of his personal stationery, Esau had written a list of errors he found. The fountain pen left blobs toward the bottom of the page, when he had been too tired to worry much about penmanship.

  Major Stadt stepped out. His black SS uniform looked no worse after his hours of interrogation. “Professor Esau,” he said, “have you finished? What do you have to report? You have found a substantial number of errors?”

  Esau stood up and peeled the scratch paper from the desk blotter. “Yes, Herr Major. Here is a list of inconsistencies I have found. I cannot tell if these are malicious mistakes or simple sloppiness.”

  Or because my own eyes are so bleary from staring at them so long, Esau thought. He couldn’t tell if he’d made the mistakes or if Heisenberg had.

  But that was enough for Major Stadt. His lips made a tight smile. Reichminister Speer came out of the office beside Heisenberg. The great physicist looked defeated, confused. When he stumbled, Speer made no move to touch him.

  Heisenberg splayed his fingers on the desk in front of Esau, brushing his own damning lab records aside. Esau could smell the sweat on the man, could see how rumpled his clothes had become.

  Major Stadt found a ruler from the desk and smacked it against the wood, then against the doorjamb. He raised his voice
to be heard throughout the halls. Speer flinched from the racket.

  “Attention! Attention!” Major Stadt called. The two motorcycle guards reappeared, blinking and bleary-eyed, anxious to see what was wrong. The other scientists, no doubt unable to sleep, emerged from their rooms, Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker beside Otto Hahn and Karl Wirtz. They continued to stare at the floor; the other lab assistants studiously avoided drawing attention to themselves.

  “We will assemble in the courtyard. We have important business to conclude this evening, and I am certain you will all be anxious to return to your research immediately. You have been idle all day!”

  The scientists went back to their lockers to get overcoats, to close their offices. Major Stadt grasped Heisenberg’s left arm and ushered him to the door. Esau swallowed the remains of his cold cup of tea.

  Reichminister Speer stopped next to him. “Things must change around here, Professor Esau. I am hereby instructing you to consolidate all German nuclear research in this one place. No more competing with separate groups. No more sharing of minimal resources. I want everyone here, everyone working, and everyone cooperating. You will supervise them directly, and you will be housed here yourself, as well.” Speer looked around the unattractive barracks. He scowled in distaste, but made no comment about it.

  Esau felt a rush of triumph. He had been pushing for this all along. Now he could get things done. Now he had the authority to make great strides in nuclear research. Perhaps they would even beat the Americans in developing an atomic bomb.

  “I will need that in writing, Herr Reichminister,” Esau said. “Von Ardenne should be no problem—in fact, I think he will be glad to be under more appropriate auspices than the Postal Ministry. It will lend legitimacy to his work. But Diebner will not cooperate. He insists on working independently with his own men. I have had trouble with him before.”