“Of course, Professor Alston.” Lanny gave a sort of gulp inside him, remembering things that had happened to him in Germany, to say nothing of France and Spain; things that this quiet little “fixer” had no idea of. Lanny hadn’t enjoyed them then, and didn’t enjoy remembering them ever.
“Let me make it plain—you don’t have to accept this commission. I don’t put the slightest pressure upon you. The Governor agrees with me that what you have done for him is plenty; and if you have other things that you want to do, you have only to say so. All I tell you is that you may have a chance to do more than any other one man to help in knocking out the Nazi-Fascists. I don’t say it will work out—nobody on earth can say that—but I say there is a first-class chance.”
“That is enough, Professor Alston.” Lanny said it quickly. Perhaps he was afraid that if he hesitated at all he might nesitate too long.
“Think it over and be sure,” said the tempter.
“If it was anybody but you and the Governor, I might want time, because it would seem too much to be true. But I know you well enough, and don’t have to delay. I am ready for the job. I’ll do my best.”
II
Before Alston had a chance to continue, Lanny got up and opened the door of the suite and looked outside into the passage. Then he looked about the room. There were doors which might lead into closets or into an adjoining suite. Lanny said: “Have you searched this place thoroughly?” When his friend replied in the affirmative, Lanny asked: “Do you mind if I turn on the tap in the bathtub?” He turned the cold water at full force, without the stopper in the tub. “That is a trick my father taught me,” he said. “It makes things a little less easy for a keyhole listener.”
Alston drew his chair close to Lanny’s and began, in a low voice: “A half-dozen trusted men share this secret, and others know only parts. You will know only such parts as are necessary to your own job. Every person who is entrusted with even the smallest detail has had to give his word of honor never to speak of it to anybody else, except to others who know, and then nothing except what is necessary to the work they are doing in common. It is absolutely the most hush-hush matter in the whole world.”
“I understand, Professor. You have my word of honor.”
“Not to your father, not to your mother, not to your dearest friend, not to the woman you love. Tell me, Lanny, have you married again?”
“No.”
“Are you in love?”
Lanny couldn’t keep from smiling. “I’m in the uncomfortable position of not being sure which of two women I should like to love; and I can’t love either, because I couldn’t explain my job to them.”
“Well, leave it that way for the present. Have you anything of your own that has to be done?”
“A couple of picture deals to be closed, but that can be attended to by mail.”
“Keep your picture business going, because it is an essential camouflage. The point is, are you free to go and stay for a while in a place I name, and then to go into Germany as you did before?”
“The first part is O.K., but getting into Germany may not be so easy. It was Rudolf Hess who invited me last time. I don’t suppose anybody is blaming me for what has happened to him—I certainly made it plain to him that I was afraid of his scheme. But still, I can’t be sure how matters will stand. If the Wehrmacht goes on advancing into Russia as it is now, the Number One will be feeling fine; but nobody can guarantee how it will be in a month or two. My best bet is Göring, who always likes to talk about paintings, no matter what is happening to his Luftwaffe. He has promised to put me at the head of his art museum which is quite literally to end all other museums in Europe.”
“And now tell me this: do you know anything about modern physics?”
“I have read a little of Jeans and Eddington—just enough to know that the subject is a thousand miles above my head.”
“That’s just about my measurement, too,” said the ex-geographer; “but still I have to help with this project. In the present emergency we have to crowd whole graduate and postgraduate courses into a few weeks. So you will have to boost yourself up that thousand miles. When some very learned physicist gives you a formula, it must make sense to you, and you must be able to learn it and repeat it a week or two later. This secret of all secrets—”
Lanny broke in. “Listen, Professor—I don’t feel happy talking in a hotel room. It is something I have never done if I could help it. There are such tricky listening devices nowadays, and you are a person whom everybody knows. I have a car, and I take the trouble to make certain that nobody has installed any recording device in the trunk. Motoring is the one way to talk with real security. We can drive as long as we please in Central Park; or we can go out into the country, hare lunch in some small place where nobody knows us, and come back whenever you say.”
The mousy little man stood up. “All right. Let’s go!”
“I’ll go first,” said Lanny. “Give me five minutes to get the car. Then you walk north on the east side of Park Avenue and I’ll slide by and pick you up.”
III
“Out of the city,” said Alston; so they proceeded north, and across one of the bridges into Westchester County. The sound of a purring motor is much better than water in a bathtub for the covering of a human, voice, so now they could talk freely about the secret of all secrets. “Do you know any higher mathematics?” inquired the ex-geographer, and Lanny replied: “It seemed frightfully high to me at St. Thomas’s Academy, but it was only algebra and trigonometry. Today I’m sure I couldn’t solve the most elementary problem.”
“This time you will begin at the top. You are going to Princeton and cram the mathematical formulas and experimental techniques of nuclear physics. You will have a competent teacher, and your work will be under the personal direction of Professor Einstein.”
“Oh, my God!” exclaimed the P.A.
“It sounds rather mad, but this is the situation we face: there are many physicists who know the subject, but they are known to be physicists and they don’t happen to have access to Nazi Germany at war. We can’t advertise for such a man, we can’t even talk about the problem except among a very few persons. The only solution we could think of was to pick out a man who does have access to Germany and then make a physicist out of him.”
“But, Professor, an utter ignoramus, an illiterate in the subject—and a man who has never applied himself to study!”
“You are surely wrong about that, Lanny. I saw you apply yourself to the world situation in 1919, and work at it faithfully for six months. Also, I am sure you didn’t learn to play the piano as you do without applying yourself.”
“Yes, but those were things that I loved!”
“All right; you will learn to love the nucleus of the atom, because you will know that it may afford you the means of blowing Nazi-Fascism off the face of the earth.”
“Of course, if you put it that way, I’ll work like a man possessed; but I can’t promise that I’ll be anything but a dud.”
“This, is the situation, Lanny. We have in Germany one absolutely priceless man: a physicist, one of the greatest in the world, who is believed to be a loyal Nazi and is trusted as such, but who is really an anti-Nazi. This man is working in the very heart of the most important war project now known to science. It is a race between the Germans and Italians on the one side, and the British and ourselves on the other. Whichever side wins this race has won the war. I am not speaking loosely, but precisely; whoever solves first the laboratory and then the production problem will wipe the other off the map of the world. This man I speak of is willing to tell us everything the Germans have learned and are doing on the project; the only difficulty is how to contact him. If he puts it on paper the formulas are instantly recognizable and point directly to him, with only two or three colleagues as alternative possibilities. If he entrusts it to a messenger in Germany, there is the problem of how that messenger is to get out, and the possibility that he might prove to be a
Nazi agent. You must get it clear that the Nazis realize the importance of this secret exactly as we do and are taking every precaution they can think of.”
“Have you any idea how I am to meet this man—assuming that I get there?”
“That problem is one which will tax all the ingenuity you possess. But first you have to prepare yourself, so as to be able to understand what is being told to you. It is conceivable that a man with a remarkable verbal memory might learn mathematical formulas and repeat them ad litteram, but the slightest error might be ruinous to the whole thing, and anyhow, there are questions you will have to ask, and you must understand the answers so as to know what additional questions may be necessary. There seems no way out of it but for you to cram like the devil.”
“You’ve got me badly scared, Professor. All I can say is, I’ll do my best. I have read somewhere that Einstein said there were only half a dozen men in the world who understood his relativity theory.”
“That was some time ago, and a lot of men have been studying it since. But you don’t have anything to do with that; what you have to understand are certain definite problems and their suggested solutions. You will be told exactly what you need to learn, and there will be somebody to answer your questions.”
“Well, that sounds a little better,” sighed this suddenly grown-up playboy.
IV
Alston talked for a while about the practical aspects of his proposal. “You will go to Princeton, prepared to live for a month or two. Professor Einstein will talk with you and assign somebody to take charge of your studies. Your mode of living will be arranged. It will be better for you not to take any part in social life—you won’t have time, and you don’t want to attract attention. I suggest that you do not speak about your past life at all. You know French and German, which will be useful; but don’t mention how you came to know them, or the fact that you have been in Germany, or know any of the Nazis.”
“All that is reasonable enough, and I’ll conform to it gladly. But I am troubled about the idea of a place like Princeton, which is so well identified with Einstein, and probably with this project. Have you considered the possibility that the Nazis may be watching the laboratory, or wherever it is that he works?”
“His work is entirely theoretical, and his office is in the Institute for Advanced Study. You are not to be seen there. I have an appointment late this afternoon with a gentleman of Princeton who has an elaborate estate, and I am going to ask him to take care of you. He is an art patron, and you may possibly have heard of him—Mr. Alonzo Curtice.”
“I know him by reputation.”
“My idea is for you to go there, ostensibly to assist in preparing a catalog of his collection. No doubt he has some cottage or retired place which he can assign to you. His servants will attend to commissions for you, and it will be better if you do not go off the estate. As to your mail—how do you get it at present?”
“It comes in my father’s care.”
“Then you might ask your father to put it in a second envelope and address it to Mr. Curtice. I suppose it will be all right to tell your father that you are doing a cataloging job?”
“Certainly, if the gentleman is willing to be put to all this trouble.”
“In times like these, Lanny, we put things up to people in such a way that they cannot refuse; at least, so far we have never encountered a refusal. You must understand that I am no longer the crackpot college professor, the boondoggler squandering public funds and undermining the American business system. I am a man who is helping to save the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force—and I deal with persons who consider that a worth-while enterprise.”
V
They stopped at a roadside place and had a light lunch, and then turned back toward the city. Having settled the practical details and made certain that they were acceptable, Alston talked for a while about the man who was to take charge of Lanny’s mind.
“Albert Einstein represents one of Hitler’s worst blunders—perhaps it may turn out to be a greater blander even than the invasion of Russia. Einstein was deeply absorbed in his duties as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute; but, since he is a Jew, Hitler deprived him of his post and thus gave him to America. It appears to be a stroke of divine justice that this would-be pacifist is the man who, in the course of keeping watch over the progress of physical science, made note of the fact that two professors in a certain laboratory were on the verge of an achievement of enormous importance in military affairs. He wrote a letter to the President, pointing out that these men ought to have the immediate and full support of the government in their work. He sent this letter to F. D. by a friend; and it is part of the kindness of fate, or perhaps of Providence, that we have at the head of our government a man who understands the importance of scientific knowledge, and who saw to it that the advice of Einstein was immediately heeded.”
“Oh, lovely!” exclaimed Lanny. “If we had had the making of world events we could not have devised anything more pleasing to the moral sense.”
“It has now come about that a dozen of our greatest laboratories are working day and night on this project, and there is a supervising group, known as the Advisory Committee on Uranium. Does that suggest anything to you?”
“I’ve been trying to guess what I am getting in for, and it occurred to me that it must be what is known as splitting the atom.”
“That is the point. Do you know much about it?”
“Only what I have read in the papers.”
“You have noticed, perhaps, that you haven’t read anything for some time. The subject has dived underground. But those who are in on the secret know that both sides in this war are straining every resource they possess. Among ourselves we speak of it as ‘the battle of the atom.’”
“Tell me what you can about it, so that I may not be an utter ignoramus when I meet this learned man.”
“When we are dealing with a man like Einstein, the difference between what you know and what I know is hardly noticeable. However, I have had to learn the A-B-C’s and I can tell you that much. You are familiar with Einstein’s discovery that mass and energy are the same?”
“I have read the statement.”
“He worked it out mathematically, as a matter of pure theory, and it was left for the physicists to substantiate it, which they have done. All forms of matter, which appear so solid to us, are manifestations of electrical force. Einstein’s formula reads E = mc2, which tells us that the energy locked up in matter is equal to its mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light. The speed of light being 186,000 miles per second, you multiply that figure by itself and have something close to thirty-five billions. Thus it appears that we have in the atom a degree of energy almost beyond comprehension; wholly outside and beyond the scale with which we usually deal, of coal and oil and water power.”
Lanny said: “I am familiar with the idea, but vaguely.”
“We are approaching a time when it will no longer be vague. I stopped trying to learn the figures because they increase every time I talk with one of the uranium men. It appears that the heavy atoms are the easiest to split and the heaviest of all is this rare metal, uranium, which we get from pitchblende ore. The energy of the atom is contained in the center, which is called the nucleus, and when the nucleus is split, a part of the energy is released; but until lately the amount of energy expended to split the nucleus is greater than the energy obtained. What I have called the great secret is the fact that laboratory workers have found a way to release two hundred million electron volts of energy by the expenditure of one electron volt.”
“That certainly sounds like a good business deal,” commented the listener.
“It is less simple than it sounds, because laboratory conditions cannot always be reproduced outside, and as the scale of the work increases so do the difficulties and dangers. These are the problems upon which our best scientific brains are working, and they will be explained to you in detail by someone who really u
nderstands them. Give him your best attention, and while you listen bear in mind that upon your understanding may depend the question whether we shall wipe out Berlin or whether Berlin shall wipe out New York.”
“God help us!” said Lanny Budd. “And especially me!”
VI
They came back to the great city, which Lanny saw with new eyes; a scene of ruin and desolation such as he had observed in London, only thousands of times greater. He delivered Alston to the neighborhood of Alston’s hotel, and was told: “If Mr. Curtice comes on time, I’ll be ready to phone you at your hotel in about an hour.”
Lanny replied: “Meantime I’ll visit a bookstore and see what I can find on the atom.”
This he did, and when his telephone rang he had already learned the difference between electrons and protons and deuterons and neutrons, and was beginning to tear his hair over some of the formulas. Alston said: “The matter has been arranged, and our friend is telephoning to his home to have everything made ready for you. How soon can you leave?”
Lanny replied: “In fifteen minutes.”
Two hours later he drove his car past the gates of one of those dignified estates which tell you that the owner and his father and his grandfather before him had money. It was an old-fashioned two-story house, painted white, with tall columns going up to the height of the roof; wings had been added, and one of these, as Lanny discovered, was the art gallery. There were old shade trees, and lawns which made him think of England; peacocks, some of them snow-white, and lavender-gray lyre birds strutted on them, and there was an enclosure with deer ready to nibble bread or lumps of sugar out of your hand. In short, it was an entirely suitable place for an art expert making a catalog.