God's Formula (3 page)

Walter Friedeman had no trouble passing through the guarded gates of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s Building A, which contained the laboratory where the Institute’s director, Peter Debye, made liquid hydrogen for his experiments in superfluidity. He and Debye were good friends and visited each other’s work quarters regularly. The guard simply nodded him in. If the bright-eyed young soldier, in his Wermacht gray, had searched him, as he certainly did with all other visitors, he would have found the matches in the physicist’s lab coat pocket, and, smiling at Herr Professor’s absentmindedness, confiscated them. Inside the empty lab, Friedeman looked at his watch and was certain that, German efficiency being what it was, Conrad’s train was underway.

Building A stood isolated some one hundred feet from the institute’s main complex. Friedeman knew the properties of liquid hydrogen. Building A should have been at least a thousand feet from the main building, where the institute’s chemical warfare research was conducted under the man who discovered nerve gas, Gerhard Schrader. Once ignited, the steel rack holding a dozen two hundred gallon tanks of highly flammable liquid hydrogen on the lab’s far wall would explode so fiercely that the shower of fire and heat produced would easily reach, and completely destroy, the main building and all of its contents, including the Nazi’s stores of the deadly tabun and sarin gases.

Friedeman searched along the grid of piping that fed the tanks and found the ingress and egress ports at eye level and their backup levers along the floor. Clear-eyed, his face grim, he opened both ingress valves fully and waited a moment for the air from the room to flow into the tanks. Then he opened both egress valves by a quarter turn, to promote a certain amount of circulation. He had chosen a matchbook with a bright crimson swastika on it’s cover, one of Conrad’s, part of his official Hitlerjugend camping gear. He took this out of the pocket of his white lab coat and started counting. Thirty seconds should do it, or so he had been told. At three there was a sharp rapping on the lab’s reinforced steel door. At ten, angry voices, followed by loud banging of hard metal against hard metal.
A gun butt,
Friedeman thought. At twenty, a burst of machine gun fire and the door came crashing in. As it did, Walter Friedeman lit a match and placed it next to the ingress port. His last thoughts were of Conrad and of Albert Einstein, to whom he had sent a cryptic telegram at six a.m.:
The Dance of Surtr Begins:
CO=2200x
BSP
√.

“Professor Diebner, what are we looking at?” asked Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Schutzstaffel, the much feared
SS
, an organization that had grown under his command from three hundred men in 1929 to over a million in ten years, including a military wing, the Waffen SS, whose three hundred and fifty thousand soldiers answered only to him.

“It looks like a chemical formula to produce enriched uranium,” Professor Kurt Diebner replied. “A portion of such a formula. There would be more than the three pages we just looked at.”

They sat in the dark at one end of Himmler’s spacious office at SS/Gestapo Headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, looking up at a slide screen on which was projected a page of pencil notes on lined paper, the last of three they had looked at. The room’s floor-to-ceiling plush drapes were closed tight against the early morning light.

“What does that mean?”

“We have determined that by separating the two isotopes found in uranium, we can produce a fissionable material, which is known as U-235, or enriched uranium.”

“Fissionable?”

“It means splittable. Splitting U-235 will cause a chain reaction and the release of immense amounts of energy. Normally, the separation process would take years. Thousands of centrifuges would have to be built, they would have to spin at immense speeds, probably over one hundred thousand revolutions per minute. The rotors and bearings would have to be built to withstand these forces. No one knows exactly how much enriched uranium would be needed to make one bomb. Perhaps one hundred kilograms. Enough for one bomb might be made, working around the clock, in four or five years at best.”

“Get to the point, Herr Professor, please.”

“If these notes are correct, it means an atomic bomb—several, actually—could be made in a few months.”

“Can that be possible?”

“I would not have thought so.”

“Until you saw this.”

“Yes.”

“Why? What makes you think so?”

“These notes contemplate a chemical solution to promote enrichment. There would be no need for centrifuges, for elaborate, highly precise equip.m.ent, for huge physical plants. I see where the author is going and it is quite intriguing.”

“If we were to obtain the entire formula, could you make this solution?”

“That depends. I don’t know what the other components are. If they were readily available, then yes, I could do it.”

“Are you familiar with Army Ordnance’s Uranium Club? Geiger, Bothe, that group?”

“I know of its existence.”

“I want you to start a second Uranium Club. You will report to me. Pick your own people.”

“Yes, of course, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“I believe I can get you the rest of this formula. Your task will be to use it to build Germany’s atomic arsenal.”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer, it will be done.” Diebner was beaming. “May I ask,” he said, “who’s notes these are?”

“No, you may not.”

Now Diebner cringed.

“I am going to make you an officer in the SS.”

“I—”

“You know we have several special purpose corps? Doctors doing experiments, historical research. Camp security.”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“You will be a captain in charge of our atomic energy program.”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“And one more thing, Herr Professor.” Himmler switched on the lamp on the end table nearest to him. He looked the nuclear physicist directly in the face.

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer?”

“You will not be allowed to fail. Success will bring great glory. Failure will bring your career to an unpleasant end. A very unpleasant end. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer. I understand.”

“Good, talk to my aide, Major Hoffman. He will assist you with uniforms, office space, staffing, budgeting, and the like. You will take an oath. Here.” Himmler retrieved a sheet of paper from an inside tunic pocket and handed it to Diebner. “The questions and answers are quite simple,” he said. “I wrote them myself. Study them. I will personally administer it tomorrow.”

“I am honored, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“You should be. You are excused.”

Himmler’s mole, the beautiful Marlene Jaeger, had told him that, though she could not be certain, she believed that Walter Friedeman had seen the camera in her hand when he surprised her in his office two nights ago. The SS Chief had decided to proceed with caution. Friedeman was German, that is to say, not a Jew. He had served honorably in the first war and was now a brilliant scientist, a nuclear physicist, who would be useful to the next war effort. Popular among his colleagues, he could not be arrested without good cause. A random, mistaken arrest would frighten them, perhaps stir up dissent, which Germany could not afford among its top scientists. Not now. He had ordered the Berlin Chief of Police, Hans Becker, an old Prussian who had succumbed meekly when Himmler and his SS took over all law enforcement departments throughout Germany in 1936, to have his men ready.

Diebner had now provided the necessary good cause, in spades. A formula to build an atomic bomb in three months, developed in clandestine late night sessions at his lab at the KWI. Astounding. No one would object to Friedeman’s arrest. No one would care what happened to him afterward.

After talking to Jaeger, Himmler had been up late studying dossiers on what he was told were Germany’s top nuclear physicists, those, that is, whose politics were pure. Removing his wire-rimmed spectacles and rubbing the spot on the bridge of his nose where they pinched his skin, he recalled how disappointingly small was their number. Scientists were a tricky lot to decipher, devoted as they were to science, and seemingly uninterested in ideology. Kurt Deibner was a refreshing exception, proud to be a member of the party, and clear-eyed when it came to the remaining Jews masquerading as German scientists. And to Jews in general. A man after his own heart.

When Diebner quietly closed the office door behind him, Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, congratulated himself on a good night’s work. He closed his eyes and rested his balding head for a second on the back of his plush chair, then abruptly sat up and looked at his watch—it read 7:15. He rose and strode confidently across the long, richly carpeted room to his desk at the opposite end. There he picked up the phone and dialed the four numbers that would connect him to Hans Becker. When the chief, now an SS colonel, answered, Himmler said simply, “Are you ready?”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer. My men are in place.”

“Where is he?”

“In the rear building.”

“Arrest him,” Himmler said.

Himmler rarely said goodbye or anything remotely cordial when greeting or taking leave of an inferior. Nothing else to say, he set the phone’s handset back in its cradle. He then turned and swept open the drapes behind his desk. As he did, a blinding flash appeared in the distance, followed a second or two later by a sharp
kaboom.

Himmler knew that the bomb alert at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute two days earlier was not real. Goebbels had concocted it as part of the elaborate pretense the Fuhrer believed was necessary to invade Poland. What could this be then? The fire now raging on Berlin’s eastern perimeter, in Dahlem, the section of the city in which the KWI was located, looked very real. Was this Goebbels work? Or was this a real attack by an enemy? No matter, tomorrow Poland would fall, and the second world war of the twentieth century—the German Century—would begin. That is, if the English and the French were to keep their word, which they might or might not. It didn’t matter to Himmler. His portfolio was filled with the Fuhrer’s most cherished priorities. Eliminate the Jews, confiscate their money and treasure, bleed them in labor camps, repress all dissent. And now he had a new one, one that would make up for the Franz Shroeder fiasco. He would hand the Fuhrer an atomic bomb in three or four months, several of them in fact. The so-called world war that was about to start would be over before it really began. London would be in ruins, and perhaps Paris as well. The Thousand Year Reich would officially begin.

It was rare for all four of Professor John Ronald Tolkien’s children to be home at once. He was pleased, and, more important, he could see how quietly happy Edith, his wife of twenty-three years, was as she worked in and around the kitchen of their modest home on Northmoor Road. If any home with eight bedrooms and a study as spacious as this could be considered modest, the professor said to himself, looking up from his desk and pulling on his pipe. He had had the wall between his old study and the drawing room removed in the spring to accommodate his growing library. Looking around, he felt a familiar tinge of guilt creeping up his spine. Edith had encouraged this expansion, and the rambling old house was certainly no less rambling as a result. Still, he fought regularly with what some modern thinkers were calling the ego, but what he knew as pride and selfishness. Edith accused him of going obsessively to confession. Perhaps she was right. He loved his books; alas, and the pleasure they gave him, and therein lay the rub.

He knew that Edith, an orphan like him, had been abandoned by the little family and few friends she had extant when she converted to Catholicism before their marriage; that the one, perhaps the only, source of true joy in her life was her children. And him, if he might dare think it. She did love him, he was certain. And he loved her, so much so that his mind always turned to Edith, the beauty he met when she was nineteen and he only sixteen, as the model for a half-elven, half-human princess he was beginning to describe in the book he was writing. A book he had turned to with renewed energy when he returned from his travels in Germany the year before.

He neatly stacked the pages of this book that he had written that afternoon, sharpened the pencil he was using, and placed it on the top page of the manuscript on his desk, his ritual for ending his writing for the day. Sitting back, he listened to the sounds of his home—the clatter of china and silverware as Edith and Priscilla set the dining room table, the soft whirring of the lawnmower as John pushed it back and forth across the front lawn, the muted chugging of the model railway he had built for Michael and Christopher in an empty bedroom upstairs. Don’t touch the wiring, he had admonished them, but who really knew what penetrated the heads of eighteen and fourteen-year-old boys.
Don
’
t blow the house up
might have been the thing to say.

He had written all throughout the late summer day, relishing the presence of all of the Tolkiens under one roof, not minding the least the one or two times Edith had come into his study to jiggle a window that was stuck. It was a hot, humid day, and she wanted as much air as was possible circulating in the house, especially in his study where pipe smoke tended to gather in the corners. He was about to relight his pipe, but decided against it when he heard her footsteps approaching.

“Dear one,” Tolkien said, when Edith appeared before him, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Ronald.”

“None other.”

“Arlie Cavanagh is here.”

“Arlie Cavanagh?”

“To see you.”

Silence. Then Tolkien said, “I was going to take Chris to see the Cheltenham Flyer on Saturday.”

“Today’s Thursday. Surely…”

“My dear Edith, you know what happened the last time Arlie appeared out of thin air.”

“Oh, Ronald. He’s probably just stopping to say hello. Shall I…?”

“Of course. Send him in.”

Edith nodded, then said, “I’ll invite him to supper. We have plenty.”

Professor Tolkien nodded and smiled. Edith turned and left the room. While she was gone, he pictured the tall, waif-thin, fair-haired Arlie Cavanagh, his former student, now a spy, standing in the foyer in his seersucker suit and repp tie, straw hat in hand, twiddling his thumbs. To Tolkien’s right was a large window, open to the late afternoon sun. Well, he said to himself, gazing out of it, I’ve had one glorious day in my cozy, well-provisioned home in the shire, all the Tolkiens buzzing about. One day at least. What now?