What an interesting old man! Yes, once you get inside the nucleus of the atom, the forces of attraction begin to act on you as powerfully as the centrifugal forces.
They drove out through the camp gates and Liss forgot Mostovskoy.
Early next morning he arrived at the Voss engineering works. After breakfast, Liss talked in Voss's office with the designer, Praschke, and then with the engineers in charge of production. The commercial director gave him a cost estimate for the equipment that had been ordered. He spent several hours in the din of the workshops themselves; by the end of the day he was exhausted.
The Voss works had been entrusted with an important part of the order and Liss was satisfied with their work. The directors had devoted considerable thought to the project and were keeping precisely to the specifications. The mechanical engineers had improved the construction of the conveyors, and the thermal technicians had developed a more economical system for heating the ovens.
After his long day at the factory, the evening he spent with the Voss family was particularly agreeable.
His visit to the chemical factory, on the other hand, was a disappointment: production had reached barely 40 per cent of the scheduled quantity. Liss was irritated by the countless complaints of the personnel involved: the production of these chemicals was a complex and uncertain process; the ventilation system had been damaged during an air-raid and a large number of workers had been poisoned; the supplies of infusorial earth – with which the stabilized product had to be treated – were erratic; the hermetic containers had been held up on the railways…
The directors, however, seemed to be fully aware of the importance of the order. The chief chemist, Doctor Kirchgarten, assured Liss that the order would be completed on time. It had even been decided to delay orders placed by the Ministry of Munitions, something unprecedented since September 1939.
Liss refused an invitation to observe the experiments being conducted in the laboratory. He did, however, look through pages of records signed by various physiologists, chemists and biochemists. He also met the young researchers responsible for the experiments: a physiologist and a biochemist (both women), a specialist in pathological anatomy, a chemist who specialized in organic compounds with a low boiling-point, and Professor Fischer himself, the toxicolog-ist who was in charge of the group.
Liss found these people very impressive. Although they were obviously concerned that he should approve of their methods, they nevertheless admitted their doubts and made no attempt to conceal the weak points in their work.
On the third day Liss flew to the site itself, accompanied by an engineer from the Oberstein construction firm. He felt good; the trip was proving entertaining. The best part of it – the visit to Berlin with the technical directors of the construction work – was still to come.
The weather was foul – cold November rain. It was only with some difficulty that they managed to land at the central camp airfield – there was mist on the ground, and the wings had begun to freeze as they reached a low altitude. Snow had fallen at dawn; here and there, in spite of the rain, grey frozen patches still clung to the clay. Impregnated with the leaden rain, the brims of the engineers' felt hats had begun to droop.
A railway track had been laid down, leading directly off the main line to the construction site. The tour of inspection began with the depots alongside the railway line. First, under an awning, was the sorting depot. This was filled with component parts of a variety of machines, tubes and pipes of every diameter, unassembled conveyor belts, fans and ventilators, ball-mills for human bones, gas and electricity meters soon to be mounted on control panels, drums of cable, cement, tip-wagons, heaps of rails, and office furniture.
Non-commissioned SS officers guarded a special building studded with softly humming ventilators and air-extractors. Here were housed the supplies that were beginning to arrive from the chemical factory: cylinders with red taps and fifteen-kilogram canisters with red and blue labels that looked from a distance like pots of Bulgarian jam.
The last building was partly below ground level. As they emerged, Liss and his companions met Professor Stahlgang, the chief architect of the project, who had just arrived by train from Berlin. He was accompanied by von Reineke, the chief site engineer, a vast man in a yellow leather jacket.
Stahlgang was having difficulty breathing; the damp air had brought on an attack of asthma. The engineers began reproaching him for not taking enough care of himself; they all knew that there was an album of his work in Hitler's personal library.
The site itself was no different from that of any other gigantic construction of the mid-twentieth century. Round the excavations you could hear the whistles of sentries, the grinding of excavators, the creaking of cranes as they manoeuvred, and the bird-like hoots of the locomotives.
Liss and his companions then went up to a grey rectangular building without windows. The whole group of buildings – the red-brick furnaces, the wide-mouthed chimneys, the control-towers, the watch-towers with their glass hoods – was centred on this faceless rectangle.
The roadmen were just finishing laying asphalt over the paths. Clouds of hot grey steam rose from beneath the rollers to mingle with the cold grey mist.
Von Reineke told Liss that recent tests had revealed that the hermetic qualities of number one complex were still inadequate. Then, forgetting his asthma, Stahlgang began outlining the architectural principles of the building; his voice was hoarse and excited.
For all its apparent simplicity and small dimensions, the ordinary industrial hydro-turbine is the point of concentration of enormous masses, forces and speeds. Within its spirals the geological power of water is transformed into work.
Number one complex was constructed according to the principle of the turbine. It was capable of transforming life itself, and all forms of energy pertaining to it, into inorganic matter. This new turbine had to overcome and harness the power of psychic, nervous, respiratory, cardiac, muscular and circulatory energy. And in this building the principle of the turbine was combined with those of the slaughterhouse and the garbage incineration unit. His task had been to find a way of integrating these various factors in one architectural solution.
'Even when he's inspecting the most mundane of industrial installations,' said Stahlgang, 'our beloved Hitler, as you know, never forgets questions of architectural form.'
He lowered his voice so that only Liss could hear him.
'An excessive mysticism in the architectural realization of the camps near Warsaw – as I'm sure you know – caused our Fuhrer grave annoyance. All these things have to be taken into account.'
The interior of the building corresponded perfectly to the epoch in which it was built, the epoch of the industry of mass and speed.
Once life had entered the supply canals, it was impossible for it to stop or turn back; its speed of flow down the concrete corridor was determined by formulae analogous to that of Stokes regarding the movement of liquid down a tube (a function of its density, specific gravity, viscosity and temperature, and of the friction involved).
Electric lights, protected by thick, almost opaque glass, were set into the ceiling. The light grew brighter as you walked down the corridor; by the polished steel door that closed off the chamber, it was cold and blinding.