Leo Szilard chose to live in a hotel. Hotels supplied him with something that struck at the heart of the refugee sensibility—room service.
For tea, he chose the nearest thing he could find to a patisserie in the vicinity of Zette’s apartment—on Columbus Avenue between Seventy-first and Seventy-second streets.
“They have this überphrase—” he told Szabo.
“Überphrase?”
“A catchall. It is diner. It can mean several things. At one extreme ham and eggs . . . ‘sunnyside up’ I understand—it’s logical, graphic—‘over easy’ baffles me . . . at the other extreme diner might mean cake and tea. Never presume what diner means until you see their menu. That, and don’t cross against the lights are all you need to know about life in New York.”
“Really?”
“Oh, I was forgetting their coffee. I think it violates one of the laws of physics. One cannot see through real coffee down to the trademark on the bottom of the cup. It ought not to be possible, any more than one can see through the Large Magellanic Cloud. Yet the Americans have done this. After years of patient experiment they have made coffee so thin one can see through it. Who knows what America might yet achieve? With our help they might bend light or fuse hydrogen atoms.”
“But we’re here for tea. Why am I suddenly apprehensive about a pot of tea?”
“Don’t be. I have trained them to make tea. Pot to the kettle—”
“—Not kettle to the pot? Leo, you’re beginning to sound almost English. The very people from whom you just rescued me. Isn’t it time you told me why?”
It was typical of Leo to move effortlessly between the flippant and the serious.
“Eighteen months ago, I went to see Einstein and the two of us composed a letter to President Roosevelt urging the development of a United States atomic project. We were quite clear about our belief that the Germans were doing the same. It was months before we received any reply, and while the reply was positive, we still have next to no funding. Hence the convenience of Columbia University. At Einstein’s request, you and Zette are on salary until I do have funding. Meanwhile, I have raised money . . . privately . . .”
“Privately?”
“Begged, borrowed, scrounged . . . the last word fits best—that is what I have become, a scrounger . . . scrounging to begin industrial production of graphite and uranium.”
“Then you’ve raised a fortune.”
“Shall I say modest production. I intend to build a reactor.”
Szabo thought better of pressing Leo too far on this. He could not conceive of the building of a nuclear reactor as a modest enterprise.
“What’s my role?”
“Help Fermi build the reactor. It will take a while before we can do anything off the drawing board. Meanwhile, you have an office . . .”
“I’ve seen it. It’s empty. I don’t have a drawing board. A desk, a chair. Not so much as a speck of dust or a paper clip.”
“I love empty. Empty is beautiful. The beauty of empty is you get to fill it. We may be short of money, but we are rich in talent. We already have an ad hoc coalition of minds. Arthur Compton at Chicago, Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi here at Columbia, Hans Bethe at Cornell, Eugene Wigner at Princeton. All us meddling foreigners. And of course we have Teller. I couldn’t keep Teller out of this if I tried.”
“And long-term?”
“Long-term? Long-term we need uranium in quantity. I hear rumours of huge stockpiles of uranium oxide out on Staten Island, but that’s Staten Island for you. It’s very existence is a rumour. I’ve never met anyone who’s been there. It may be mythical. And, of course, we need plutonium, too.”
“They called it plutonium?”
“I’m not sure they had any choice. At least fifty different people suggested it. And who would ever call an element seaborgium? So . . . while you build us a graphite reactor, others will go down the parallel routes. Build more cyclotrons, plants for chemical diffusion, perhaps a heavy-water reactor to make plutonium-239.”
It was almost the last thing he expected. A heavy-water reactor. The very thing he had deemed a waste of time in the extraction of deuterium was now the bottle that held the genie of plutonium.
“You know, Leo, I recall the English had a phrase to describe what you are doing. They call it belt and braces.”
“Oh? What does it mean?”
“It means a man in deep fear of his trousers falling down.”