“Elizabeth.” He stepped toward her. “Where are you going to watch the test from?”
“The test? I don’t know. I’ll be with Feynman, I suppose.”
“Please watch it with me. I’ll be in a safe place.”
“No, I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
He shuffled his feet. “Well, don’t go to the bunker during the test.”
“Why not?” She sounded tired, was tired—of putting up with him, of listening to his reasons why she should help him, because they sounded too close to what she wanted to hear. In a way, he reminded her of the people she had known in Santa Fe who were all talk and no action.
“Just… don’t, that’s all.”
Elizabeth balled her fists and stepped up her pace.
24
Berlin—the Virus House
November 1944
“I believe the reason why we didn’t do it was that all the physicists didn’t want to do it, on principle… If we had all wanted Germany to win the war, we could have succeeded.”
Professor Abraham Esau stood by the flyspecked window in Heisenberg’s old office. He felt numb; only the nervousness and terror in the pit of his stomach reminded him that he was alive.
He stared out into the courtyard. Shrubbery dotted the barren spots. The gravel walkways looked more permanent now after a year and a half, different from that dark, wet night when Werner Heisenberg had been executed. If Heisenberg were still alive, perhaps he could think of some way to salvage the situation. They would never develop their atomic weapon now; they could not even use the radioactive dust again.
Esau watched the black staff car sit where it had parked. Shadows moved inside as the driver shut off the engine then emerged from his door, hurrying around to open the back. Reichminister Albert Speer stepped out, moving stiffly, like a puppet. He had aged a great deal in only two years. He stood, staring at nothing, and removed his hat. He pulled off his black gloves and stuffed them in the pocket of his uniform jacket.
Speer glanced around at the buildings of the Virus House, the chain-link fences, the wooden construction. Nothing had been improved since the establishment of the nuclear physics research group under Esau. The rest of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute looked imposing and Prussian, with tall buildings, stone edifices, and ornate facades. The Virus House, though, looked like a place where “ugly” research was conducted.
Speer turned and gazed straight toward Esau’s window. Though the glare from the sunshine would drown out any shadows of himself inside the room, still Esau cringed back. Speer had come for him. Esau hadn’t thought it would happen so soon.
On weak legs Esau walked back to the desk and set to work, straightening the papers on it. He closed the drawers of his file cabinet with a sense of finality, locking away all the failures, all the ideas they had developed.
From the top corner drawer of his desk, he removed his remaining stack of engraved stationery that proclaimed him as Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics. Tilting his hand, he let the buff-colored paper slide a few sheets at a time into the waste can.
He recalled hearing Major Stadt’s voice snapping an order for his two guards to shoot. In the darkness, under the glaring floodlights, Heisenberg crumpled to the mud. His shock of brownish-red hair looked dull compared to the bright red splotches on his chest.
Esau ran a hand over his own heart. He wondered if the same fate waited in store for him. He had failed. All of Germany was falling. They would put him to death.
The meltdown disaster and fire at Dachau had wiped out nearly everyone in the concentration camp. Those who had survived the initial massive dose of radiation were sure to die soon. This included the guards, all the Jewish prisoners, the camp staff, and a large fraction of the population in the surrounding towns. Within twenty-four hours Kurt Diebner had died in a small local hospital where the doctors had no idea how to treat his sickness.
The disaster had ruined all of their processed uranium, all of their purified graphite. They had nothing left of the entire reactor, and it would be a long time before they could gather the material to make a replacement.
Dr. Otto Hahn had insisted on going to the site himself, armed with a Geiger-Müller counter to mark the spread of the radioactive contamination. Hahn had kept a careful journal, recording every reading. He had toured the ruins of the Dachau camp, remaining less than an hour as he looked at the unburied bodies struck down by radiation sickness.
Many of the prisoners had fled the camp and wandered away, searching for an escape—but they were walking dead. And they died scattered across the countryside.
Otto Hahn had seen all this, and he had also found the people dying in their homes in the surrounding villages. He had seen horses lying dead in barns. He had seen vehicles stopped as their drivers, too sick to continue, crashed into trees.
Perhaps Hahn had been reminded too much of the deaths caused by his own development of poison gases in the Great War. Gas warfare had been his idea, after all. All those people had died because of his invention—and now he saw a slaughter of even greater magnitude. Perhaps it had been too much for his conscience to handle.
Hahn had left his journal behind and he had fled. Nothing had been seen of him for more than a week, and Esau did not expect him to be found ever again.
Now, without Heisenberg and without Hahn, Esau had been deprived of his two brightest stars. When times were more desperate than ever, he had no hope. The nuclear physics solution to this war, the awesome secret weapon Hitler would spring on the world, was no longer viable. They had gained time, with the successful attack against New York, but they had lost all their progress.
He heard footsteps in the hall. Esau remained with his back to the door, staring at the file cabinets. The footsteps stopped, but the visitor said nothing. Esau spun around to face him. “Reichminister Speer, how good of you to visit,” he said in a flat, uninflected voice.
Speer’s pale blue eyes widened at the cold tone of the greeting. “Herr Plenipotentiary, I am sorry I could not inform you of my coming. It is better for you to receive this in person.”
Esau felt a cold twist in his stomach. He wanted to wince and cringe backward, but he held himself firm, as all his party training had shown him. “What is it, Herr Reichminister?”
Speer reached inside his breast pocket and withdrew a folded letter. With one hand he waved it in the air to unfold it. “I have in my hand a personal letter from the Fuhrer himself.”
Esau held his breath.
“It is a letter of commendation. The Fuhrer has seen photographs of all the deaths in New York City. He is very pleased with this radioactive weapon of yours that kills people—that kills the enemy, but does not damage property. I must admit that I am fond of this too. You know of my own interest in architecture. It pains me to see how the indiscriminate bombs dropped on Berlin are destroying some of our greatest historical landmarks.
“Your radioactive dust weapon does not do this. The Fuhrer wants to implement a large program, and he wishes to have dozens of these radioactive bombs after all. We will scatter them over Great Britain. We will wipe out London, we will wipe out Coventry and Birmingham.”
Esau stammered, unable to believe his ears. “But that isn’t possible! Such bombs will contaminate the whole area for years, decades, perhaps even a century.” He lowered his voice. “You saw what happened at Dachau.”
Speer nodded. “The Fuhrer perhaps does not understand this, but these are his orders. He believes that within a year or two the winds will blow the contamination away, leaving the cities free for us to inhabit. Ready-made lebensraum, he thinks. We will not even need to build new places for ourselves. Everything will be there for the taking.”