VIII
Then there were the Alsos people, a quite different sort of learned folk. Many were young, like the Monuments, but they were less burdened with family and social traditions and dignities. Some had been farmboys who had got their education the hard way; without exception they were serious-minded persons, and growing more so every day under the pressures of this war. At first it had seemed a marvelous idea, to have all the world’s resources at your disposal, to have A-1 priority on everything; but by now they had discovered several flies in this ointment. For one thing, you couldn’t ramble, you couldn’t follow strange ideas which might flash into your mind; you had to keep yourself pinned down to one special thing which had been assigned to you. And this business of secrecy, not being able to talk freely with anybody but a very small group whom you knew too well, not being able to publish, or to read other people’s publications!
So far all scientific progress had depended upon the free and rapid exchange of ideas. A woman in Copenhagen made a discovery, and it was telegraphed all over the world, and within a few days a hundred different men in laboratories from Tokyo to Chicago were at work on the idea, testing it, and speculating as to its corollaries. But now all that was over; everything was hush-hush, and there was a man standing over you with the threat of a jail sentence if you dropped the least hint of what you were doing. Not even to your wife could you tell it, and some wives got cross about it and were harassing their men.
Worst of all was the realization that all your discoveries were being turned to ends of destruction. If you came upon some idea for the production of health and wealth and happiness, you were told, “Yes, that’ll be fine, but only after the war.” And then you began to wonder, Would there ever be any “after the war”? Suppose this one went on, and another got started, and another? Talking with these young physicists, Lanny discovered that a new and strange set of ideas was beginning to burgeon in their minds. So far they had been entirely wrapped up in their specialty, which they proudly called exact science, with emphasis on the adjective; they had thought that was enough, and some had even thought it was everything and would solve all the problems of mankind. But now they were beginning to doubt, and to confront the horrid idea that they might have to meddle in some of the sciences which were so far from exact that they were hardly worthy to be called sciences at all. Politics, and economics, and ethics, and even religion—for what was the good of giving men tremendous new powerful tools if the only thing they could find to do with them was to kill one another?
“So far in history,” said young Professor Oppenheimer, “wars have been fought by soldiers, and it was they who died; the people at home went on working and living. But now war has been brought to the women and children, and we are providing the military men with the means of wiping out the human race.”
It was the new weapons that were frightening the physicists out of their wits. Morse’s phrase, “What hath God wrought!” had been changed to “What Satan hath wrought”—and the nuclear scientists were Satan, or at any rate his imps. They had gone and done it, by this summer of 1944 they were sure they had done it, and their minds were torn, one-half pride and eagerness to finish, and one-half horror at the thought of what it might do.
You had impulses to turn back and throw the whole thing into the middle of the ocean. But you couldn’t, because the enemy might get it. You were in a trap; the brass hats had got you and would never let you go. You had harnessed the power of the sun for them, the power that had kept it blazing for a billion years and would keep it blazing for a billion more, at a temperature of twenty or thirty thousand degrees Fahrenheit. And now the brass was going to use it to shrivel up this pitiful little planet and make it uninhabitable for the rest of time.
IX
In a room of the Physics Laboratory of Columbia University the P.A. had a meeting with four of the Alsos men. They were not the top-flight physicists, but had been chosen because they were young and vigorous and had asked for the adventure. Washington had told them that Budd shared the most crucial of all secrets, so they talked freely in his presence. Like the Monuments people, they looked up to him because he was older and had been all over the territory they were planning to visit. Nobody ever expressed any doubt that they would go there—the only question was how soon. Lanny told them how he had spent two months at Princeton, being tutored by Dr. Braunschweig under the supervision of Professor Einstein, in order that he might know what questions to ask about nuclear fission in Germany. They were immensely impressed and did not lose this feeling even when he added that he had forgotten nearly all the formulas in three years.
The traveler told how he had made contact with Professor Schilling in Berlin. This very important man was just waiting for the Americans to come and get him: he was old and tired, but his head was full of knowledge, and he hated the Nazi gangsters. No doubt he would know others, whose names he had not been free to mention to a secret agent. Lanny told about Plötzen, another top man, whose home he had visited; Lanny had posed as an American traitor, a Nazi sympathizer, but it was possible, of course, that the physicist had guessed something different. Espionage and counterespionage made a complicated game, and you could never be entirely sure of the ground you were standing on. Plötzen was wealthy and elegant, and Lanny’s guess was that he would know how to get along with his conquerors. Give him a laboratory and he would go to work cheerfully and make jokes about what had happened under the grotesque Nazis, the Spitzbuben.
Salzmann was a different proposition; a grim old Junker, and no doubt a patriot for any German government however barbarous. But he would be sure to hate the Russians, and if he saw he had to choose he would prefer the Americans. Nine-tenths of the educated Germans would, Lanny was sure—for the Russians lived near by, while the Americans lived a long way off and the habit of disliking them was not so deeply rooted. There would be a race for Berlin, and a hunt for scientists even more eager than that for the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire. The nuclear physicists had something that would melt all the jewels in the world to a glaze!
It was not only the atom bomb these Alsos men were after; they wanted every scientific secret in the Axis world, and every kind of scientist who might be willing to work for our side. And they were doing the same thorough job as the art people; they had every sort of catalogue and photograph and scientific record, index and card file and map and program. They didn’t need Lanny to tell them about the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, or Peenemünde, or Rjukan.
What they did was to ransack his mind as to every personality he had met and every hint he had picked up as to secrets. All about V-1 and V-2 and V-3; about Red Erickson and the oil refineries, and about Dr. Stoffel and the new process of making wood into sugar—had they heard of that? These particular men hadn’t, but if the report had been turned in to OSS, no doubt somebody would be working on it. And then there was Bernhardt Monck, alias Braun, alias Vetterl, and Half a dozen other names; he was now in Stockholm, and had once helped to smuggle out a new type of airplane supercharger for Robbie Budd; he had known a whole chain of anti-Nazi people in Germany, and probably most of them were dead by now, but you couldn’t be sure. Monck was certainly a man who ought to be taken on by Alsos.
There was also the old watchmaker who had helped Lanny to escape from Germany the last time. He was a Socialist, and Americans had the habit of thinking of a Socialist as some kind of “nut”; but it would be well for the Alsos people to realize that the German Socialists had a philosophy a century old and were the people upon whom any democratic government would have to rest. No production or even scientific work could be carried on without workers, and these workers learned about what they were doing and often understood it better than the bosses. Lanny suggested that one of the first aims of Alsos should be to get in touch with the Socialists wherever they went in the Axis lands, tell them what was wanted, and see how quickly it would be produced. He had given this same advice to the Monuments outfit, for you couldn’t move thousands of paint
ings without workers, and those workers might have no sympathy with the job or the masters and would enjoy revealing the secret hiding places of jewels and objets d’art.
X
Laurel wrote once a week as she had promised; and here was another person whose mind was torn. She was witnessing terrible scenes in the hospitals; her heart was wrung and it made her hate war worse than ever. But, on the other hand, she wanted this war won, and it couldn’t be won except by fighting men, and they couldn’t fight unless you kept up their courage and faith, and your own. Laurel wrote, “I hope the censor will let me say this,” and the amused censor had written in the margin, “OK.”
The letters came by a delightful new process, called V-mail; they were photographed on microfilm, which was shipped across by airplane and printed on this side. The addressee received a queer little envelope with the address printed on one side and the letter inside; it was folded and sealed by machinery, and the process was quick and saved an enormous lot of transportation. The same thing was done for letters in reverse direction, and it was a great booster of morale; nothing pleased a man in a foxhole or a hospital so much as to get prompt word from the people he loved.
Laurel sent her stories a few pages at a time and left it to Lanny to put together—a great mark of confidence. The most marvelous stories, and all true. She could never know whether somebody had got some particular episode and cabled it, so she asked Lanny to cut out anything he had already seen in print or heard over the air. Episodes both horrible and humorous, the way they are in war. There was one concerning D-day on Omaha Beach, the code name for a landing place where the invasion ran into severe German resistance. The swells were high, the confusion great, and the enemy fire incessant. One GI was clinging to something in the water and a landing craft came drifting by. “Throw me a rope!” he shouted, and the men on the craft shouted back, “You don’t want to come on board, we’re sinking!” The reply was, “I don’t care what you’re doing, throw me a rope! I’m sitting on a mine!”
Lanny wrote back and acknowledged every letter. He couldn’t reveal what he was doing, only that it was useful and that he expected to return soon and would look her up if possible. He told about the baby and about various relatives and friends; that, of course, was the sort of thing the censors wanted you to write about. He could say that the war appeared to be going well and that he hoped she wasn’t in any danger. It was better not to mention what the danger might be. Plenty of love and kisses—but don’t make “X” marks for the kisses, for they might be code.
XI
Lanny got together with Jim Stotzlmann, and they talked war and then politics. The Republican convention had been held just after Lanny’s return from England; they had nominated Governor Dewey of New York as their Presidential candidate—a cold, self-centered gentleman of whom it had been said that you had to know him well in order to dislike him. Jim said that F.D.R. knew him that well and would take great pleasure in thwarting his cherished ambition.
Now, the third week in July, the Democratic convention was due in Chicago, and Jim had been given leave so that he might attend. He urged his friend to come along, but Lanny said he might have a date with destiny. They discussed the prospects: there was no doubt that Roosevelt would be nominated for a fourth term, so the excitement centered about the vice-presidency. A great many persons, both friends and enemies, doubted that Roosevelt would be able to stand the strain of another four years, so it was possible that in naming a vice-presidential candidate the Democratic party would be choosing a future President of the United States.
The P.A. took in the show by way of the radio, which reported it entire. Nominating conventions are a curious and fascinating aspect of the democratic process; this one lasted three days and nights, with something over a thousand delegates and alternates attending, and an immense concourse of spectators who had come from all over the land, and who spent their time singing and shouting for four years more to add to their twelve. The various state delegations placed their “favorite sons” in nomination and then turned out and paraded through the aisles behind canvas placards bearing the names of their states. To one who had been brought up in Europe it seemed a strange method of determining the future of the richest and most powerful country in the world; but that was the way it was done, and if you didn’t like it you could go back where you had come from.
The fight centered about the then vice-president, Henry Wallace, a man who had made for himself a host of friends and an equal host of enemies. As Secretary of Agriculture in the days of the great depression it had been his sad duty to order the plowing underground of crops and the slaughter of millions of little pigs; and millions of people took that as a sign that he was insane. They could not understand that they were living under an insane economic system, which produced enormous quantities of food but didn’t give the people enough money to buy it; so farmers and merchants would go bankrupt, banks would close, and that would be called “hard times.” After a few years people would regain confidence, they would borrow money and bid up the prices of goods, and that would be a “boom.” Every boom was automatically followed by a bust, but you would be unpatriotic if you mentioned that historic fact.
Also, Wallace had said that it ought to be possible for every person in the world to have a pint of milk every day. His enemies took that as evidence of his impractical mentality; they picked out the Hottentots as the most unlikely folk they could think of and said he wanted to give a pint of milk—presumably. American—to every Hottentot. The statesmen from the South bethought themselves how awkward it would be if every colored person got the idea of having a pint of milk every day, so they didn’t want Henry Wallace to have a chance of becoming President of the United States. They were astonished and a little frightened by the clamor of the workers in Chicago, who did want Wallace and came to the convention hall and said so. All the same, the delegates cast their votes for Senator Harry Truman, whom they knew and liked, and of whom they could feel certain that he didn’t have any eccentric ideas. In so doing they were making more history than they dreamed—something which happens frequently to humans, who are fated to live in the present, to forget the past quickly, and have no means of penetrating the future.
It was just at this time that excited reports reached America, to the effect that a bomb had been exploded in Hitler’s headquarters, injuring him. How seriously no one could be sure. The man accused of the attempt was a Colonel Graf von Stauffenberg, a name not known to Lanny. He read eagerly every word he could get, fearing that the name of Oskar von Herzenberg might come up; but it didn’t. Lanny couldn’t even be sure if it was the same group of Army conspirators; it was entirely possible that separate groups were working to the same end. Many executions were taking place, and of course that would weaken the Wehrmacht and bring the defeat nearer.
XII
The break-through in Normandy came in the latter part of July. The British didn’t gain much ground in front of Caen, but by constant pressure they held six out of the nine armored divisions which the enemy had, and that helped to make things easier for the Americans. Fifteen hundred heavy bombers saturated the lines in front of the latter—ten bombs to the acre—and after a couple of days of heavy fighting narrow gaps were opened up, and the tanks poured through. The Germans close to the sea had to fall back to avoid being surrounded, and the tanks got among them and cut them up. In a few days the German line had been forced back to a place called Avranches, at the entrance to the peninsula of Brittany. The Americans were out of the bocage country at last, and in places where freshly landed tanks could operate freely.
It was the American Third Army, headed by that war-loving old Episcopalian with the two pearl-handled revolvers. Georgie Patton was in his element now, doing the job for which he had been preparing all his life; he was wild with impatience, dancing with excitement, bellowing at his officers and men to keep moving, to get the supplies up, to keep hitting the enemy so that he wouldn’t have a chance to recover his balance.
The correspondents told about it over the radio, and the whole country listened, the non-Axis world listened, and saw that this was something new, this was the beginning of the end. American industrial power was at last making itself felt, and it was hard not to share the sense of glory—even though you had a traitor pacifist hidden in your heart!
The way of the public throughout this long war had been to alternate between depression and exultation. During the tedious periods of preparation you heard people say it could never be done, we could never conquer the whole of Europe; as for the business of “island hopping,” had anybody ever taken the trouble to count the thousands or tens of thousands of islands in the South Seas and how many troops it would take to occupy them? They would watch the mounting public debt and talk about inevitable national bankruptcy; they would look at the casualty lists in the papers and make themselves ill with grief. But then would come a time of action, a landing in North Africa or Tarawa or Normandy, and everybody would cheer up suddenly and begin to figure out a timetable to Berlin and Tokyo.
Lanny had trained himself to resist those mass moods; he had realized from the outset that it would be a long war. But he had a map, and stuck little pins in it, and soon realized that this was a serious breakthrough. The armored columns, supported by planes overhead, were racing south across Brittany, to seal off that peninsula and its important harbors. Other columns were turning eastward, and that was the way to Paris, not more than a couple of hundred miles away. So Lanny called up the OSS man in Washington and said, “It looks as if it might be time for the first half of my job.” The answer was, “Your papers will be ready tomorrow. Come prepared to leave at once.”