Goudsmit had been to Berlin, of which the American Army had taken over a sector in July. He drew a depressing picture of the center of that great capital, almost entirely destroyed; the Russian artillery had done even more damage than the British and American bombs. That huge New Chancellery, which Hitler had built for a thousand years, was partly smashed and completely looted; the garden, in which the Führer’s body was said to have been burned, was trampled and littered with junk, and the underground Führerbunker was now a place for souvenir hunters. Only the main thoroughfares had been partly cleared of debris, and the wind bore clouds of plaster dust and the smell of burned wood and rotting bodies.
The Alsos men, of course, were interested mainly in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, especially the building known as the Max Planck Laboratory. Several years ago Lanny had gone there as a pretended friend of the Nazis, in peril at every moment. He had talked with a grim old Prussian physicist, Salzmann, and had revealed to him secrets deliberately designed to mislead him as to what the Americans were doing. It was a large building, two-and-a-half stories high, with a rounded corner and a tower, and having a basement with steel-barred windows opening to the street. Goudsmit reported that the place had been completely plundered by the Russians; they had taken even the electric wiring and the plumbing. They had dumped a lot of trash into the back yard, and there Alsos had found blocks of pressed uranium oxide, probably the most valuable property that had ever been in the place.
In charge was the “Director of Intelligence of the U.S. Control Council,” and he told them that there was in the sub-basement what appeared to be a swimming pool. Goudsmit recognized it as the “bunker laboratory” of which the German physicists had been so proud. The “swimming pool” was the sunken pit in which they had built their atomic pile, thinking it might become a bomb; the metal frames which were to contain the uranium cubes were standing near by. Goudsmit called it “the physicists’ symbol of the defeat of Nazism.”
II
Hardly less interesting was the story the Alsos head had to tell about the fate of the German scientists whom Lanny had helped to find and intern. They had been delivered to the American military, and apparently these non-scientific brass hats hadn’t known quite what to do with them. The British had kindly offered to take them off our hands, and so were getting the benefit of the best German brains. These brains were housed in a fine estate not too far from London, with a radio, a piano, a tennis court, newspapers and books, and the best of food.
Goudsmit hadn’t seen the place, or even been told where it was, but he had talked with an English scientist who happened to be visiting them at the time the news of Hiroshima came over the radio. The reaction of the Germans was of utter incredulity: the American claim was absurd. The Germans were the people who knew better than anybody else in the world, for they had been trying and had made sure how difficult it was, impossible in that short space of time. The Americans had no doubt invented some new and more powerful chemical explosive, and they were calling it “atomic” in order to frighten the Japanese. Dr. Goebbels’ fellow countrymen were familiar with that method of carrying on warfare.
No, the so-called “atomic bomb” could have nothing to do with nuclear fission or with uranium—“oo-rahn,” as it is in German. The ten were so certain of it they could eat their dinner with enjoyment. But later in the evening came a more detailed report, and the effect upon the Germans was devastating; their own little world came to an end. For six years they had been working, and they had failed, while the despised Americans, the Jew-ridden upstarts, had succeeded. How dare the radio claim that Lise Meitner, a Jewess, had discovered uranium fission when everybody knew it was Otto Hahn, a pure Aryan German?
Most depressed of all was Walther Gerlach; he had been in charge and was the one who would carry the blame for all time. He sat with his head in his hands and talked as if he were contemplating suicide; his colleagues had to gather round and argue him out of it. They tried to interest him in the problems that were tormenting them, the statements over the radio that made no sense at all. What was this talk about heavy water, and the pride the Allies took in having destroyed the Rjukan plant in Norway? Heavy water could be used in making an atomic engine, but surely not a weapon!
To the Germans the word “bomb” meant the thing they had been trying to build in the Max Planck Laboratory’s sub-basement, an atomic pile. What was it the Americans used in place of heavy water, and how on earth had anyone managed to get an atomic pile into the air? The stuff was heavy, heavier than lead, and had to be protected with heavy lead shields. No plane ever built could have carried such a load. Could they have used fast neutrons in pure uranium? But that would have made it even heavier. Or had they been able to separate uranium-235? But how was this possible in just a few years? And what was this nonsense about plutonium? There was no such element as plutonium. Did the ignorant newspaper and radio people perhaps mean protoactinium? This would make a bomb, but there wasn’t enough of the substance in the whole world.
Hour by hour the ten listened to the world-shaking news, and little by little their leading theoretical man, Heisenberg, was able to solve the mystery. The atomic pile wasn’t the bomb; it was merely the means of splitting uranium atoms and making new and more highly radioactive substances. That must be what the talk about plutonium meant. A new element! And new isotopes! How had the Germans ever failed to discover the clue, and how could their science stand such a blow to its prestige? It began to dawn on these renowned gentlemen that they were safe and comfortable where they were. If they went back to Germany it might occur to some of the frenzied werewolves to punish them for the humiliation they had brought upon their native land!
III
There came a letter from Beauty with interesting news. The Army’s wonderful sleep-talking machine had brought back Marceline’s memory almost completely. They had got her a set of dental plates, and she was able to eat normally and had regained her strength. They had refrained from asking her questions about painful events, but the day had come when she chose to talk to her mother about them.
There had been several different plots against Hitler’s life, and hundreds of Reichswehr officers and officials of the old regime had known about them. Every now and then Himmler’s agents would stumble on a new clue, and there would be new arrests and shootings of the guilty, and often of those whose ill luck it was to be related to the guilty or acquainted with them. All Marceline knew was that she had been sitting quietly one afternoon in front of the cottage she had rented on the grounds of what had been a girls’ school and was now a hospital for wounded officers. She was enjoying the sunshine when she heard a low whistle and saw an elderly war cripple who worked as gardener on the place beckoning to her from the doorway of her home. She got up and went inside, and the man whispered the dreadful news that the Gestapo was coming for her; they had stopped in a near-by village café to have lunch, and a waitress had overheard their talk. Being the daughter of this old gardener, and having heard of Marceline’s kindness to him, the girl risked her life to telephone her father.
Marceline stopped only long enough to put on her hat, snatch up her purse, and pay a sum to the old man. Being fond of walking, she knew the paths about this neighborhood and was able to get away unobserved. She got to a town and phoned Lanny at the Berlin hotel where he was staying; then she sought refuge in the home of friends, and they kept her in their attic for a couple of weeks. A servant must have betrayed her; the Gestapo men came and took her and the whole family to the old red-brick jail on the Alexanderplatz in Berlin.
At first they pretended to be friendly. They told her they had arrested her lover and had him in this same jail; he had confessed everything, including the fact that she and Lanny had known about the plot. Of course the statements about Oskar might be true or not, Marceline had no means of knowing. They told her they realized she had taken no active part in the conspiracy, and all they wanted of her was to know the whereabouts of her half-brother. She said she
had no idea and had not heard from him for weeks. They traced her telephone call and confronted her with that, and all she could say was the truth, that she had no idea where Lanny would go.
Of course they didn’t believe her and tortured her near to death in the effort to wring the secret from her. They told her that her lover was being tortured too and that there would be no respite for either of them until she gave up. “Perhaps I might have,” Marceline said, “but I couldn’t tell what I didn’t know.” So in the end they quit and put her in with the herd of women who were driven every day to the underground munitions plant in Leipzig, to slave until they died.
Such was the answer to the riddle that had been troubling Lanny’s mind for two years. He did not get the last detail of it until another year, when he had access to the Gestapo’s voluminous records and learned that Oberst Oskar von Herzenberg had been taken to Lichterfelde. There in the courtyard of the old military cadet school, scene of the Blood Purge of 1934, the handsome, arrogant Junker had been hanged.
IV
Rick’s talk in the Rand School and his article in the New Leader served the purpose of launching him in that movement for social change which it is difficult to name because it has many different groups and labels. The two Budds and the two Nielsons sought the advice of older and more experienced campaigners for peace and social justice, and found that the town was full of them. All appeared pleased to be asked for their opinions and would start to pour out ideas, always with positiveness. The only trouble was the ideas differed so much and often were contradictory.
However, certain types emerged, the most common being the “tired radical.” Always he was the idealist who had grown gray in the service of his cause, and the high hopes with which he had started had failed of realization. Perhaps he had hoped for too much and in his disappointment was unable to realize to what extent his program had actually been accepted. The social climate of America had changed, but so slowly that the day-by-day observer had no way to notice it; there was no social thermometer by which you could get the exact measure of progress.
It was amusing to notice how each of these war-worn veterans advised you to eschew the activity in which he himself had made his career. The writer of pamphlets said, “Don’t write pamphlets, there is no way to get them circulated.” The writer of books said, “People don’t read serious books any more; the radio and the week end at the farm have put an end to reading.” The orator said, “People don’t come to meetings any more; they stay at home and drink gin and listen to imbecile shows.” The editor said, “For God’s sake, don’t try a paper. The slicks and the pulps have all the stock and the advertising and circulation; you’re licked before you start.”
Yes, there was need of a thermometer, a clock, a Geiger counter, a device of some sort to register the effects of propaganda and to help social-reform writers and publishers and editors keep up their spirits. Somebody was needed to point out to them that even though they had had to quit, they had not failed entirely. If they had published sound ideas and had found readers, their ideas would live in other minds and spawn and reproduce themselves after the manner of ideas.
Alfred Bingham, sensitive and high-minded son of a former governor of Connecticut, had published a little monthly called Common Sense. Now he said, “A dozen years as editor and publisher left me with a feeling of futility. No magazine in my line has had a noticeable effect on events, except perhaps for Henry Luce’s.”
To which Laurel answered, “But I read your magazine and learned a lot from it. Why do you assume that I have forgotten it?” This cheered the good soul not a little.
It wasn’t so different with the New Leader, a twelve-page weekly paper that was still speaking for the Left Wing New Dealers and Right Wing Socialists in and around New York. The four newcomers invited the staff to a dinner in a private room and told them about the problem they were facing. The editors were generous in their attitude; they had no fear of competition—the harvest was plenteous and the laborers were few. But on the whole they were discouraging as to what could be accomplished. William Bohn, most amiable of veterans, expressed himself: “Anything really good in the way of a movement or publication will require much more than a million dollars.” When Laurel referred to the so-called “Garland Fund,” a million dollars which a young man had donated to the cause of social justice, the editor gave his verdict: “The world would be just as well off if young Garland had spent his money on chorus girls.”
V
In all these researches the “Peace” group, as they had taken to calling themselves, were careful to preserve the roles they had agreed upon. Sir Eric could be himself, and so could his wife: he the writer and old-time Socialist and she his loyal partner. Mary Morrow was the lady of mystery and money; a popular writer, eccentric in that she refused to wear high-heeled shoes or to smear red grease on her lips—but then writers are allowed a certain amount of oddity, and so are rich persons. Mr. Budd was her gentleman friend who sat quietly listening, now and then asking a question but never arguing, and leaving you to assume that he wasn’t much of a personality. Rick was the brains and did the talking; it was natural that, having never been in America before, he should be trying to understand the country and its ways.
Talk about him spread, and before long it reached the press. When reporters came Sir Eric was tactful, as ever. He had recognized the fact that New York had become the intellectual as well as the financial center of the world, and he was feeling out the possibility of getting together a few friends of international order, to speak and write on behalf of progressive and humanitarian ideas. It would be a program of co-operation and agreement, along the lines of the United Nations—which had made up its mind to settle somewhere in the United States, if the country would have them.
Such interviews brought more letters and more visitors, and already a card file was accumulating; a secretary and a temporary office had to be engaged. Rick and Nina did the interviewing, while Lanny went to the library and continued his research. He wanted to know all there was to know about the collectivist ideas and movements in the past of his country. There was little about it in the regular histories, but there was a vast special literature, now mostly forgotten. At the turn of the century there had been a Socialist monthly, Wilshire’s Magazine, which had achieved a circulation of three or four hundred thousand. It was run by a “billboard” man from Los Angeles who had made a fortune and then been converted to the new-old religion of human brotherhood. The experts in the publishing field had told him that if he got a circulation of that size he would meet expenses; he found it wasn’t so. Big advertisers would have nothing to do with a publication whose slogan was “Let the nation own the trusts.” Wilshire’s died when its owner’s money was gone.
There had also been a weekly paper, Appeal to Reason, with a circulation of more than a million. This paper had been started by a real-estate dealer named J. A. Wayland, who had fifty thousand dollars to spare and bought a press. He built up the paper by the policy of supporting the cause of labor, right or wrong, and of never asking for donations but only new subscriptions. World War I wiped it all out, and the “little old Appeal” was remembered only by a few old-timers.
It took the researcher no little trouble to find out that the former editor of the Appeal, Fred D. Warren, was living in Kansas, a retired owner of oil leases. Rick wrote to him, expecting to get advice as to the launching of a paper in these new times. The reply he got was, “As an old newspaperman I can see no possible chance to build up a circulation of a weekly or monthly that would reach the folks we need to reach. Only by the media that are now established can we do the job quickly. I would buy space in such widely circulated magazines and newspapers as would accept the things I wrote. I would use material from the columns of the old Appeal, because I am convinced that Wayland had the right ideas as to what was wrong and what should be done.”
When Nina read that she remarked, “In other words, we turn our million dollars over to the capitali
st press and increase its power!”
Lanny added, “Whatever we have, it must surely be our own.”
VI
For many years a presidential agent had been dealing with men of action, those who held power and determined immediate events. Now he was meeting with men of ideas, who were trying to determine the future. Very certainly Franklin Roosevelt would never have been able to launch his New Deal if men such as these had not been sowing the seeds of collectivist thought for a couple of generations. When you met the sowers, and discovered what a variety of seeds they carried, you were better able to understand the confusion and groping of the early New Deal. It might be true that in the multitude of counselors there was safety, but there was also an appalling amount of waste.
The four called in a quiet and conscientious thinker who had been troubled by this confusion. After publishing a number of Socialist books, Stuart Chase had taken up an English notion called “semantics,” and spent an evening explaining to the quartet the importance of knowing the meaning of the words you used in talking about social problems. Early in the century the Russian revolutionists had invited the soldiers to shout for a constitution, and they had done so gladly, having the impression that Constitutza was the Tsar’s mistress. And now the sons of these same men were shouting for a thing they called “Democratzia,” understanding by it that they voted a ballot which had only one set of names on it.