Oh Pure and Radiant Heart - Lydia Millet (ebook reader online TXT) 📗

SECURITY GUARD: Why can’t you be a good American?

SZILARD: Like who?

SECURITY GUARD: Well, like me.

SZILARD: Ugh.

Fermi, by contrast, wanted very much to be a good American. After he emigrated to the U.S. he chose to register Republican because he had the impression that Republicans were more American than Democrats. After the war, he moved forward almost unbroken in his stride except for something he told Oppenheimer: I have lost confidence in the validity of my judgment.

Fermi was an honest man who walked the straight and narrow no matter how treacherous the path. Yet he was not without insight into his own foibles. —With science, he said, —one can explain everything except oneself.

Until he gave up hope completely, Oppenheimer too had great faith in the intelligence and resourcefulness of his fellow men.

The following Friday Ben got home from work to find Szilard established comfortably at his kitchen table, a granola bar in his right hand and a can of Coke in his left. There were books open on the formica tabletop in front of him, and Ann hovered at his shoulder.

When Ben set his water bottle on a chair she came over and put her arms around him. He held them and kissed her lips and they were pliable and firm, local as home. She was so known, the sweet smell of cheeks and the nubs of elbows, rough skin over the smooth and nosy bone. Between them was a real border, yes, but he could barely believe it. He knew exactly the span of her wrists, the angle of her chest and shoulders leaning in to him, how her weight felt different from others and no other weight could ever feel like hers by mistake.

The same as ever, except for her insistence on the impossible, everything as ever except what screamed never before.

—When I died I was older, said Szilard. —You see?

He leaned over in his chair, tugged at Ben’s shirtsleeve and beckoned him over to tap impatiently at a frayed-looking black-and-white picture in one of the books. In it an older, grayer, fatter Szilard was beside a woman in thick glasses, white flowers on her lapel.

—He’s with Eleanor Roosevelt! said Ann eagerly.

—It was taken in 1961, said Szilard, reading off the page.

—And there’s one from ’64, with Jonas Salk.

—Right before I died, said Szilard. —I was practically dead!

One day, when Oppenheimer was on a boat full of world-renowned physicists, he was asked what would happen if the boat were to sink.

“It wouldn’t do any permanent good,” he said.

Over dinner Ben subjected Szilard to a battery of informal tests. It would have been easier had he remembered more from Advanced Physics and less from Intro, but he had to give it a shot. If the man was, for instance, a vagrant with a mental disorder, the façade of erudition would crumble instantly.

Over the salad, as Szilard dropped a large dollop of dressing onto a two-inch piece of lettuce, Ben forced himself to ask: —So how did you first get into, uh, chain reactions?

—I was already interested in the ’30s, but I refrained from working on fission myself. I knew what the repercussions of fission would be. In ’39 I wrote a letter with Einstein to President Roosevelt. You’ve probably seen it in a museum?

—Not per se, no.

—Teller picked me up in his Plymouth. He drove me to see Einstein in his cottage on Long Island and that was where I got him to sign off on the letter. In it we warned Roosevelt the Germans might be getting close to a self-sustaining reaction.

Ben was distracted by a smear of dressing on Szilard’s chin. It did not please him.

—You know, because here are the Nazis, and we all knew what bad news they were.

—Sure. But uh, you’ve got a—

—And they had Heisenberg, a very bright guy, working with a friend of mine in Berlin, von Weizsäcker. We couldn’t let those goose-stepping morons get a weapon like that. That was the politics. We were alarmed. I knew what those people were capable of. We needed funding for the work. The government was the only place we could go. It was the last gasp of pure science in this country, uncorrupted by commerce. You know, before the corporations owned the universities.

—Sorry, said Ben. —Did I miss something?

—Then there was the research itself. In a nutshell, I had my work cut out for me convincing Fermi uranium fission was serious business, but he came around after a while. We started for real in 1940. It was January 1940 when I made the first design for what they call nuclear reactors. The first specific design, that is. It was rudimentary, of course, but quite detailed. We called them piles then, uranium piles. What’s the whitefish?

—Halibut, said Ann.

—They grow halibut in the desert these days?

—They flash-freeze it and fly it in, said Ben. —Cargo freight.

—Anyway. Mailed the design to myself so I had proof of the date. After that I went to work with Fermi at Columbia. Started off with a paper on graphite-uranium systems. The Germans were stuck on heavy water, using heavy water in their piles as a moderator, you know, to slow down the neutrons. But heavy water was in short supply, plus all the Nazis’ heavy water was lost when Claus Helberg and some other commandos blew up a plant in Norway. Whereas we, here in the States, we got the idea to use graphite, which meant we didn’t need heavy water. Graphite without impurities such as boron, which eats up neutrons. I saw to that. What’s in the sauce?

—Lemon, said Ann. —Butter. Garlic. Simple.

—It’s not bad. We were getting our graphite from an outfit called the National Carbon Company, and out with these guys for lunch one day, thinking of the worst possible elements that could have been contaminating our graphite, I said “You wouldn’t put boron in your graphite, would you?” Purely as a joke. But it turned out they were letting traces of boron get into their samples!

—I