The Proteus Operation Read online

  "That sounds strange."

  Ferracini shrugged. "Italians, Sicilians—they like being surrounded by things they know. They like the ways and customs they're familiar with. So, when all the immigrants started coming over, people from the same villages started clustering together. Pretty soon, you could see Italy coming together again like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Well, my father said he didn't come all that way to find he was back in Italy again—he'd come here to be an American. So, they moved across the river."

  "When did they come over to the States?"

  She was fishing. They stopped to cross Seventh Avenue. He didn't want to have to lie or be led into contradicting himself. "Look," he said, "I thought we were going to get dinner, not start a cross-examination. Questions bother me. That was all a long time ago. It doesn't matter anymore."

  "I didn't mean to be nosy," Janet said. "Just curious." She was silent as they crossed the avenue through a gap in the traffic. When they reached the other side, she seemed agitated by whatever was going through her mind, turning her head every few seconds to glance at Ferracini uncertainly. As they reached the restaurant—a small, but well-kept place with a large, colorfully lettered menu and list of take-out items in the window—she could contain herself no longer. "Who are you?" she asked, drawing Ferracini aside from the door just as they were about to enter. She kept her voice low to avoid attracting the attention of a couple talking nearby, but it was insistent. "All of you—Cassidy, Gordon, Floyd, Paddy—the whole bunch. Jeff told me he's astounded by some of the things Gordon knows about—and in that area, Jeff's nobody's fool. But how could Gordon know all those things and not be a household name among the people at the university? Jeff's asked around, and nobody's even heard of him."

  "And then there's the way you guys took care of Iceman and his apes—Johnny Six Jays told me all about it. There was a lot more to it than got in the papers. Max says you're ex-Army, but I talked to Sid, and Sid doesn't think there's any unit in the Army that could operate like that." Janet shook her head. "Now don't get me wrong, Harry—it's great to see the heat's off Max now, and I'm as delighted as anybody about the account with Bruno getting squared up at last. But you didn't do it just for us. You did it because Bruno tried muscling his way into whatever you're doing in that place in Brooklyn." Ferracini swallowed hard and hoped he didn't look as alarmed as he felt.

  "Bruno told Johnny about it after you and the others left," Janet explained, catching something in Ferracini's expression. "You see—there is something very strange going on. And when people that I don't know all that much about, but who are mixed up with something very strange, start trying to involve my kid brother in things that professors won't talk about and the Nazis seem very interested in, I start to worry. Jeff might be smart in a lot of ways, but sometimes he trusts people too much. So don't tell me it's none of my business, because I think it is my business. You're not just a trucker, Harry. Who are you and those other people, and what do you want?"

  Ferracini eyed her circumspectly while she waited for a response. He had long seen that she was an intelligent girl, and now she expected the fact to be recognized. "You don't buy what Gordon said?" he asked her.

  Janet gave him a pained look. "Businessmen might want to talk to scientists, but they don't hire private armies to go after the likes of Bruno," she said. Ferracini nodded with a sigh. He'd expected that. Selby hadn't known about the Bruno escapade; if he had, he'd have come up with a better story. Janet shook her head. "No, Harry, I don't buy that."

  Ferracini closed his eyes and massaged his eyelids with his fingers. "Do you trust people too much as well, sometimes?" he asked her.

  She shook her head again. "I don't think so. I've been around a bit more than Jeff."

  "Do you trust me?"

  Janet scanned his face. His expression was intense; his eyes, unblinking. "What's that supposed to mean?" she asked.

  "It means I can't tell you."

  In the long silence that followed, their eyes did all the talking that was necessary. She had wanted him to credit her as a person capable of thinking; he had done so, and now was asking for his own frankness and integrity to be respected in turn. Then Ferracini said, "We're not working for any foreign government or other interests, so if that's what's worrying you, forget it. We're strictly for Uncle Sam. That good enough?"

  Janet studied his face for a while longer, then nodded, satisfied. "Let's go get the dinner," she said.

  Winslade knew about the security-consciousness that had spread through the U.S. nuclear community during the first half of 1939, and he was under no illusions about the likely response to strangers trying to gain access to sensitive information through a graduate student. But he hadn't wanted to react negatively to an offer of help from one of the team, even if it was based on exaggerated claims, certainly not at a time when the team had just suffered such a tremendous shock. In fact he had seen the situation as an opportunity to boost morale, especially that of the military contingent, from whose ranks the offer had come.

  To succeed, however, the approach would need some quiet string-pulling from behind the scenes; Winslade was an old hand at that.

  It so happened that Leo Szilard had spent some years in England between leaving Hungary and arriving in the U.S. During that time, he had worked with Professor Lindemann at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford. While Ferracini and the others were sitting down to their meal of chili, tacos, enchiladas, and hot sauces in upper Manhattan, Winslade raised Arthur Bannering on the phone in London and told him to locate Lindemann and have him call back as quickly as possible. The return call came through at Gatehouse just under an hour later.

  "No, there's nothing new on the gate," Winslade told Lindemann. "The situation's still the same. Look, I might be needing both Mortimer Greene and Kurt over on this side for a while, so I'm going to send Gordon Selby over with Anna to update you. He's very knowledgeable, and I think you'll get on well with him."

  "Very well," Lindemann agreed. "But that can't be what Arthur asked me to call you about. It sounded far more urgent."

  "Correct," Winslade said. "I've been thinking some more about this idea we talked about before I left."

  "Getting Einstein involved, you mean?"

  "Yes. It seems worth a try. I agree with you—our best approach would probably be through Szilard. Now, for reasons that I'd rather not go into right now, some of our people are going to try contacting Szilard through Columbia. The trouble is, nobody at Columbia knows them, and everybody there is getting paranoid about secrecy. So, what I'd like is for Szilard to talk to the Columbia group first and make sure they know that when our people try to introduce themselves, it's genuine and it's important."

  "Hmm, I must say it sounds a rather roundabout way of doing things," Lindemann commented. "However, as you wish. What, specifically, do you want me to do?"

  "What I'd like you to do, Professor, is call Leo Szilard from England, if you would, and brief him as follows . . ."

  As Winslade had anticipated, Jeff's first attempts the following day to approach members of the uranium research group at Columbia met with frosty responses. Nobody would talk about the subject, nobody knew anything, and one doctor of chemistry threatened to call the FBI.

  And then, suddenly and for no apparent reason, everything changed. That afternoon, by which time Jeff had reached the depths of despondency, John Dunning sought him out in the Chemistry Department and amazed him with an attitude that had undergone a complete about-face in a few hours. "I'm sorry I was a bit abrupt earlier, but we can't let just anyone come poking around in this kind of work." Dunning said. "Anyway, I'm not sure how, but apparently Szilard has been expecting you to show up, and he's very anxious to meet those people you talked about. He'd like them to call him direct."

  Gordon Selby called Winslade from the Columbia campus with the news. "Let's try calling Szilard right away," Winslade said to Greene, dialing another number as soon as Selby had hung up. "We might just catch him before he goes h
ome."

  "Let's hope so," Greene said anxiously. "There isn't any time to lose."

  There wasn't. They had also heard from Arthur Bannering that afternoon of another failure on the English side of the operation: Eden's offer to meet Molotov in Moscow had been declined. Strang was still being sent, as had happened in the Proteus world.

  CHAPTER 16

  DR. EDWARD TELLER WAS a broad, heavily built man with dark hair and thick, bushy eyebrows, a prominent nose, and craggy features. He had been born in 1908 in the Hungarian capital, Budapest. Gravitating naturally toward a career in mathematics and physics, he had studied at some of Europe's most prestigious institutions through the mid and late twenties, a time that had seen the rise of quantum mechanics and which represented, perhaps, one of the most exciting periods in the history of the physical sciences. He had been taught by such giants as Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich and Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig, worked at the University of Göttingen and Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics at Copenhagen, and attended scientific gatherings organized by Fermi at the University of Rome. Hitler's rise to power had driven him to England, after which, in 1935, he had accepted an offer of a professorship at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. There, he joined a former colleague from Europe, Russian-born George Gamow, in conducting theoretical studies of nuclear processes.

  Teller had been present at the momentous Fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics in January when Bohr announced the Hahn-Strassmann results, and by the summer of 1939 was being urged by Fermi and Szilard to join the uranium fission research group coming into existence at Columbia. Accordingly, Teller obtained a leave of absence from George Washington University and moved with his wife, Mici, to take up temporary residence in an apartment in Morningside Heights. Fermi was methodical and even-tempered, whereas Szilard could be explosive and bombastic at times. The two of them disagreed often and didn't get along well, and Teller suspected that one of the reasons why he had been invited to Columbia, apart from his specialized knowledge, was to act as a peacemaker and help them work together.

  Having seen for himself how attempts to placate the aggression emerging in Europe were merely taken as signs of weakness, he had reluctantly reached the conclusion that only firmness stood a chance of producing a deterrent effect, and that war would probably be inevitable eventually if Hitlerism was to be eradicated. Like his compatriot Leo Szilard, Teller already believed firmly that a uranium bomb was possible, and he entertained no illusions about what the consequences would be if Hitler got his hands on one first. Hence, he viewed the project with a seriousness that went beyond the purely intellectual involvement which, for the time being at least, seemed to be about as much as many of the Americans were capable of showing.

  Around lunchtime on a sunny day in early July, Teller walked stiffly—he had lost a foot at the age of twenty in an accident involving a Munich streetcar—down the broad steps below Columbia's Low Memorial Library on West 116th Street and checked his watch as he stopped to wait on the sidewalk. Szilard had refused to say over the phone what justified his insistence that Teller drop whatever he was doing in order to go with Eugene Wigner from Princeton—yet another refugee Hungarian physicist—to join Szilard at a strange address in Brooklyn, and he had refused to listen to any of Teller's excuses. He had sounded excited, even for Szilard.

  Perhaps Szilard had met with better success from the Navy this time, Teller thought to himself. Despite Fermi and Tuve's abortive attempt last March to enlist official support for fission research, Szilard had used the occasion of the American Physical Society's meeting at Princeton in June to press another appeal on Ross Gunn, an adviser to the Naval Research Laboratory. The Navy's more sophisticated scientists had shown some interest in uranium, though more on account of its potential as a submarine fuel than through any insight to its explosive possibilities, but in desperation Szilard was following any lead.

  No, that couldn't be it, Teller decided. All Szilard was looking for was a grant from Naval research funds of something in the order of $1,500; even if the Navy had agreed, it would hardly have warranted the kind of reaction that Teller had heard over the telephone.

  Teller turned and looked up at the building's rounded outline, formed of incongruously blended Roman dome and classical Greek facade, its massive stonework imposing among the surrounding structures of red brick. It had long been abandoned as a library and now served as the campus administration center. Perhaps there had been a breakthrough in the theoretical work on moderators going on over at Princeton, he reflected; or maybe somebody had come up with a new suggestion for concentrating uranium 235.

  The big problem confronting fission researchers by the summer of 1939 was how to initiate and sustain a chain reaction. No useful release of the energy locked up inside the atomic nucleus would ever be realized if every nuclear fission inside the uranium fuel required a neutron fired in from the outside to trigger it; the energy released by the fissions would represent no useful gain over that expended on injecting the neutrons. If, on the other hand, the neutrons that were now known to be released in the fission event itself could be directed to cause fissions of more uranium nuclei, and so on, then a self-sustaining chain reaction would rapidly be set up and continue without further outside help, releasing more and more energy at an exponentially increasing rate. Clearly nothing of this kind had happened in Otto Hahn's laboratory in Berlin; if it had, nobody would have been left in a suitable condition to report the results that had so electrified the scientific world.

  To cause a further fission, a released "fission neutron" would have to be captured by another uranium nucleus. Fermi had established that the probability of this happening depended critically on the energy that the neutron carried; furthermore, the energy that fission neutrons were released with was too high. For a chain reaction to be feasible, therefore, a "moderator' substance—to slow the neutrons down would be required in addition to the fuel. Szilard had been investigating various candidate substances. Heavy water was a possibility, he had reported, but all things considered, graphite would be a better one to go for; and for once, Fermi had agreed with him. But how much uranium and how much graphite? Nobody knew.

  It was clear too—and fortunate—that not all of the uranium atoms present in the experimental samples were being split. Only a small proportion were, which presumably represented a particularly susceptible isotope. Niels Bohr and Princeton's John Wheeler had concluded from theoretical considerations that fission didn't take place in the common uranium 238 isotope, but was restricted to the comparatively rare uranium 235. After some initial skepticism, the community of U.S. nuclear physicists had generally accepted this pronouncement and begun talking about the possibility of an explosive, fast-neutron chain reaction inside metal consisting of the pure 235 isotope only. To achieve it—assuming it was possible—the U-235 would somehow have to be separated out of the naturally occurring U-235 and U-238 mixture, and concentrated. Now only one atom in every 140 was of the required kind. The two kinds were chemically identical, and they differed in mass by only three parts in over two hundred. How to go about separating them was far from obvious.

  That was not the only problem. Even if the rare 235 isotope could be extracted, how could enough of it be concentrated to make a bomb? Only an ounce or so of metallic uranium existed in the whole of the U.S., and nobody knew how much would be needed to make a bomb, anyway.

  The toot of a horn sounded from behind, and moments later Eugene Wigner's car came to a halt by the sidewalk. Wigner, lean-framed and bespectacled, with a high forehead, thinning hair, and a rounded, open face that split readily into an easy, toothy smile, leaned across to open the passenger door. He was six years older than Teller and unfailingly gentle-mannered and polite. They shared the same political views and had first met at a seminar that Teller and some fellow-students had attended with Heisenberg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1929. Einstein had been present, too, on that occasion.


  Teller climbed in, and the car pulled away. "I hope you weren't waiting long," Wigner said in his high-pitched voice. "I got caught up in a snarl getting onto the George Washington Bridge."

  "Don't worry about it. I had to cancel a lecture, so I'd only just arrived." Teller, by contrast, had a thick, guttural voice.

  "I take it you've no more idea of what this is all about than I have," Wigner said. "Poor Leo sounded as if he were on the verge of cardiac arrest."

  "None," Teller replied. "I've been trying to think of possibilities . . . but we'll soon find out, I suppose. Do you know where this place is?"

  "Only that we go south and get over to the other side of the city." Wigner felt inside the glove compartment and thrust a folded street map and an envelope with directions scrawled on the back into Teller's hand. "You're navigating, Edward."

  "Oh, God—but I don't know this city! I've only just arrived here."

  "Neither do I. I'm not sure anyone does."

  "Oh, well, let's see . . . Brooklyn . . . I think it's down by the bay somewhere, isn't it? Yes, here—we have to cross the river. Okay, Eugene, take the next left, which ought to be Cathedral Parkway. We'll get across town while we're still north of Central Park."

  They reached Second Avenue, followed it down the East Side to Chinatown, and crossed the East River to Brooklyn via the Manhattan Bridge. Then they took a wrong turn and found themselves on the grimy, cobblestone streets of the Navy Yard area, with its flophouses, crumbling tenements, and greasy restaurants. After extricating themselves, they entered the central Fulton Street district, only to get lost once more among bustling downtown streets clogged with automobiles, pedestrians, and clattering streetcars, where neon signs blinked throughout the day in the false twilight below the elevated railroads.

  At last, they came to the sprawling waterfront area between the Atlantic and Erie shipping basins, and slowed to a crawl through the maze of massive, gray loft buildings, warehouses, docks, and railroad sheds, trying to follow the hasty directions that Szilard had gabbled over the phone. Finally, at the back of a jumble of run-down older buildings separated by narrow lanes and alleyways, Teller motioned for Wigner to stop. He pointed at a gloomy brick warehouse with blackened windows and closed doors standing at the end of a dock and overshadowed by a larger warehouse on one side, with a railroad siding and an iron bridge spanning a canal on the other. "That must be it," he said.