Elizabeth lowered her shoulders. “Things aren’t going all that well, are they?”
Feynman cocked an eye at her. “Why do you say that?”
“The calculations you’re giving us. The theory group, that is. I mean, everything used to be so straightforward, calculating small variations of one design. But now the designs are changing radically, they get much smaller or bigger. And you haven’t got the right idea yet.”
Feynman looked alarmed. “You picked all that stuff up just from the numbers we were giving you?”
Elizabeth swallowed, wondering how much of the “dumb girl” charade she should keep up. “It wasn’t hard. Not if you pay attention to the lectures at the beginning of the day, and if you watch the parameters change.”
Feynman jammed his hands in his pocket. “My, my. What’s G-2 going to do when they discover we’re teaching a bunch of housewives how to build atomic bombs?”
He remained silent for a moment, while Elizabeth resented being called a housewife. Glancing around, Feynman seemed satisfied that no one was looking in their direction. He lowered his voice. “Yes, we are having some difficulty. We can’t use our main design for a plutonium Gadget, and Oak Ridge is having trouble with the isotope-separation process for uranium-235. “He looked glum.” There’s got to be a simpler way to do things.”
“Then what about the implosion scheme?” The one you’re going to use for Fat Man, she added silently.
“Uh?” Feynman frowned. “Which design was that?”
Elizabeth closed her eyes and swallowed, all too afraid of what she might be doing. “Implosion—you know, take a spherical shell of plutonium that’s subcritical, then crunch it together into a solid sphere that is critical. You can use symmetrical high explosives to do the compacting.” You’re going to do it anyway! she thought.
Feynman spoke slowly. “Betsy, where in the hell did you hear that? And what makes you think an implosion would work?”
Elizabeth opened her eyes, acting innocent again. “You’re the physicist, you tell me.”
Feynman’s eyes widened. He took his time thinking things through. Finally, he nodded to himself. “This is right up Neddermeyer’s alley.” He reached out and squeezed Elizabeth’s shoulder. “We’ll look into it. You’re pretty bright. Uh, thanks. And anytime you want a new job—”
“Right. You’ll break into the Admin building and doctor the papers for me.”
“No. Really.” Feynman put his hands on his hips. He looked serious for the first time she’d known him. “I can get you transferred out of Johnnie’s group just as easy as I got you transferred in. You’re too bright to be a cog in a wheel. I can use a good math assistant, someone to help me on these analytic solutions. Or maybe just to keep track of my notes.”
“Ah, surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” She paused, then mumbled, “Never mind, you wouldn’t understand.”
“No, I’m serious. You know, helping me with my research, the stuff Oppie wants recorded?” She waited for him to drop to his knees or something. “Won’t you at least think about it?”
Embarrassed, Elizabeth set her mouth. “Why me? I’m not that good.”
Feynman let a smile spread across his face. “I don’t know. Maybe I believe in luck too much—but you’ve got something special going for you, and until I figure it out, I want to tap into it. Maybe you can really help the Project.”
Elizabeth thought quickly. Things were moving so fast. She felt she had to jump onto the bandwagon before it rolled on and left her in the dust. This wasn’t a time she wanted to be left behind—not with the timeline turning out so differently from what she remembered. “Okay.” She stuck out a hand. “See you tomorrow?”
“I’ll clear it with Johnnie. Just report to the design group tomorrow morning, my office.” He shook her hand and was off. “Implosion!”
Elizabeth watched Feynman as he ran back toward the Tech Area fence. She didn’t know whether to feel like a savior or a traitor.
16
German U-Boat 415
May 1944
“It is the sad, terribly ironic truth… that toward the end most of them knew that their cause was lost. The heroism of the warrior, who is generally naive, young, honorable and incorruptible, can never make up for a bad cause.”
“It is an awful responsibility which has come to us, and we thank God that it has come to us instead of to our enemies. We pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”
Captain Hans Werner gripped the iron rail on the edge of the deck, steadying himself though the sea remained calm. Wrapped in an old sheet, the corpse of First Watch Officer Tellmark looked like a shapeless blob of bread dough.
Two of the remaining men coughed; they appeared to be waiting for something. Werner realized he had said no eulogy yet, and he tried to concentrate, pulling his mind away from the agony in his body. In the past handful of days, he had exhausted all of the eulogies he could imagine.
“May the sea take this man and keep him. Let the currents carry him to a grand reunion with all the other brave submariners who have died in this miserable war. And may God have mercy on the rest of us.”
The other two men rolled the sheet-covered body off the edge of the deck. Tellmark made a deep, soft splash as he struck the water, then bobbed on the surface, slowly sinking. The knocking diesel engines carried the U-boat away from where the corpse disappeared.
Captain Werner had delivered sixteen similar eulogies in the past week. Another twenty of the crew lay deathly ill, retching and crapping blood into the bilges. The U-boat did not have enough bunks for them all—the men were supposed to alternate shifts, some sleeping while others worked. But out of his crew of fifty, only fourteen remained functional enough to perform their duties.
They were all dying, trapped in a metal drum the size of two railroad cars. Below, the air smelled with a fantastic stench of sickness and death.
By the time they had begun to chart their return journey across the Atlantic, away from New York harbor, the crew members all looked alike, smelled alike, acted alike. Being imprisoned in such close quarters for so long, many mannerisms, curses, and facial expressions had become identical. Each man’s individual habits became known intimately among the entire crew—how they snored, how they laughed, how they ate. They were a close team; only two had felt sick with what seemed to be a severe flu.
On previous voyages, Werner had enjoyed that supernatural rapport, that sharing of secrets no other human beings could understand. But now it worked against them, because the entire crew knew, to a man, that they were doomed. The sickness ran rampant in the great iron coffin of U-415.
Werner descended into the submarine, using each rung of the aluminum ladder. His trembling legs would not let him slide down to the deck plates as he had always done before. Inside the conning tower, three men shared a cigarette, keeping it protected from the breakers and spray that too often extinguished a smoke. The acrid smell of burning tobacco struck Werner as refreshing compared to the fetid air inside the boat.
He removed his white cap and found that clumps of his beautiful dark hair had stuck to the sweat inside. Werner had given his mother a lock of hair before departing on this voyage; she had pasted it in her keepsake book…. Most of the crew had patchy baldness, skin sores, nausea, and terrible dysentery.