Magnitogorsk
February 1934
None of these men ever bothered to introduce themselves—a failure of manners irksome to whatever was left of Aurora’s “sense of bourgeois propriety.” She tried to put it all in perspective by reminding herself that a couple of hours earlier they’d been torturing her, and so if she were going to get indignant about something it should probably be that.
Shpak had told her, at the beginning, that he’d been ordered to leave no marks on her body. She had to give him credit for the successful completion of that task. When they’d cut her free from the bed frame there had been red wrinkles wherever the torn bedsheets had been wound around her limbs, but by the time the car had delivered her to Magnitogorsk’s Central Hotel, these had faded. When she inspected herself in the mirror after a hot bath she saw practically no sign that anything had happened, other than red eyes that she could have concealed with makeup, had there been any makeup. Her throat and lungs felt as if she had gargled battery acid, but no one could see those. Her voice would be hoarse for a while.
A private room with a bathtub was a luxury she had not enjoyed since entering the Soviet Union. Someone had packed up all her stuff from the cottage where she’d been staying in Berezka and moved it here. She could have just sat in bed for a day, enjoying the solitude, but the man with the glasses had been insistent that she show up for dinner, and she got the clear sense that she belonged to him now. So she did what she could with her hair, put on a skirt and blouse, and went down to the hotel’s restaurant. No one was there. But in the back was a private dining room where pre-dinner drinks were in full swing.
Seated around one end of the long table were three men smoking cigarettes and speaking in an alien language. She recognized one of them from photographs as Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the head of the Commissariat of Heavy Industry for the entire Soviet Union. Across from him was Vissarion Lominadze, who reported to Ordzhonikidze; never mind his official job title, he ran Magnitogorsk and everyone knew it. She had seen him a few times around town, but even if she hadn’t, she’d have guessed who he was based on his fatness, which was infamous. He was indeed the fattest man she had ever seen. If the Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolution got crushed by the forces of capitalism, he’d be able to get a job as a circus freak. In Magnitogorsk, what passed for powerful, important men revolved around him like electrons around a massive nucleus, and he was accustomed to being the dominant man in any room. But here he cringed and fawned before Ordzhonikidze.
Seated between those two at the head of the table was the man with the round eyeglasses.
She knew that Ordzhonikidze and Lominadze were, like Stalin, Georgians. So the language they were speaking must be that. The man at the head of the table was speaking it too. Also a Georgian, therefore. But he must be of higher rank even than Ordzhonikidze, for he was at the head of the table, and anyway it was clear from clues in how they treated him that he was the top dog. But of course he wasn’t Stalin.
This man had to be Lavrentiy Beria. She’d heard of him but hadn’t recognized his face, since he generally didn’t appear in papers.
Seated next to Lominadze—therefore, given Lominadze’s girth, rather far down the table—was Shpak, stuffing tobacco into his pipe and gazing inertly into a glass of water, since he had no idea what the Georgians were saying. He avoided meeting Aurora’s eye—as well he might. She didn’t imagine this kind of situation was covered in Emily Post. It must happen a lot, though, in the Soviet Union: bumping into persons who had tortured you or murdered members of your family.
Speaking of family: at the foot of the table was Dr. Oleksandr Fizmatov. Flanking him were two young men. These had to be Proton and Elektron. Proton, the older brother, though only a bit taller than Aurora, was broad-shouldered and handsome, straight out of a Komsomol poster. Elektron wasn’t a complete disaster to look at but suffered by comparison. He better fit the profile of an unathletic youth who spent a lot of time squinting at his slide rule. Where Proton had green eyes and neatly brushed, honey-colored hair, Elektron was brown on brown, his hair hanging down over his ears and brushing the collar of the ill-fitting jacket he’d thrown on for the occasion.
The gist, socially, was that two parties were going on at this table: at one end the three Georgian bigwigs, making the most of the opportunity to smoke and drink and converse in their own language, and hardly deigning to acknowledge that Aurora was in the room. At the other, the Fizmatovs, soft-spoken and polite. In the middle Shpak, the odd man out. He was seated with his back to a row of triple-glazed windows supplying a view over what would one day be Magnitogorsk’s town square. The sun had set hours ago, but she knew what was out there: a squat plinth in a sea of rutted and frozen mud, awaiting a monumental statue of Stalin. Behind that, the factory gates—a mere formality, since most of the material and the workers came in from the other direction. Rising up beyond that were the blast furnaces and the rolling mills, leaking orange heat and dense fumes into the winter night.
Aurora was no closer to understanding what was, and wasn’t, considered bourgeois than she had been when she’d stepped off the boat with Engineer Overstreet in Vladivostok. It seemed that one of the few forces in the world that could rival the power of Marxist-Leninist thought was men’s craving to be respected. And, to be fair, women’s. For hadn’t she just spent half an hour fussing with hair and clothing in front of the mirror in her room? In Magnitogorsk—less a city than a city-sized factory infested by humans—it was de rigueur to dress like a worker. A few days earlier, when she’d first laid eyes on Shpak with his suit and his overcoat, she’d known he was important. Not because he was dressed as a bomb-throwing firebrand but because he wasn’t. He looked like every other man in a suit. Lenin and Stalin could get away with distinctive proletarian-inspired clothing but Beria, only one notch below Stalin, wore a suit. The Fizmatovs had gone out of their way to look respectable—even Elektron smelled faintly of pomade—and they were defaulting to bourgeois, pre-revolutionary etiquette. Perhaps it was the case that when you were Dr. Oleksandr Fizmatov, a slave in all but name, liable to be shot at any moment and looking right down the table into the bottle-bottom glasses of the man who would give the order, it simply didn’t matter.
Some social conventions had to be observed. It hardly mattered which. So Aurora shook the hands of Proton and Elektron and said how pleased she was to meet them. Proton announced he was enchanté and Elektron bobbed his head in the manner of one who had read old novels in which men were described as bowing. They waited for her to sit. In the corner of his eye she could see Oleksandr trying to communicate wordlessly with Elektron, urging him to assist the young lady by scooting in her chair like a proper gentleman, but Elektron was oblivious. In the end Proton and his father just exchanged an amused look with each other and took their seats in turn. Proton reached across and filled Aurora’s water glass from the provided carafe.
Both of the Fizmatov boys were studying at Moscow University and so this provided grist for the conversational mill in the early going. You could always ask students how they liked their classes. It seemed they’d been warned not to ask difficult questions about what Aurora had been up to in the past few days. She caught the father’s eye when he was studying her, and he gave a look expressive of immense relief.
Her arrival was apparently the signal for the kitchen staff to begin bringing food out, and so before long Beria was dinging his mother-of-pearl caviar spoon on his crystal vodka tumbler and calling the dinner to order. They toasted Comrade Stalin. They toasted the recently concluded 17th Party Congress. They toasted the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, represented by Ordzhonikidze. The Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex (Lominadze). The Sword of the Revolution (Shpak). The Mining and Metallurgical Institute (Dr. Fizmatov). Our comrades in America (Aurora). The future of Soviet science and technology, as embodied by Proton and Elektron. The City Dining Trust and the City Food Processing Complex, which were providing dinner. And when that was all done and Beria looked like he might actually sit down and let people eat, Ordzhonikidze flung his napkin down, scrambled to his feet, and made them all toast Beria. Aurora was completely exhausted, and had no wish to pour grain alcohol down her scorched throat, so she faked it by dumping some water into her vodka glass. Shpak had got his pipe going and the smoke was wafting toward her. She knew that for the rest of her life she would associate its fragrance with what had been done to her on the ice of the Ural River.
There was small talk through soup and salad, mostly about the younger Fizmatovs’ studies, but when the meat was trundled out, Beria finally let them know what the real agenda was. The reason he had brought all of these people together to break bread around a table: balloons.
Fucking balloons again, Aurora thought, and made an effort not to shake her head. As the only woman here, people tended to look at her when they had nothing else to look at. Even Shpak met her eye for a moment.
“I believe that some of our guests share an interest in this topic,” Beria said, once he’d broached it. “Comrade Artemyeva was present in Chicago for the launch of the failed American probe, and Proton and Elektron are engaged in similar work in Moscow—are you not?”
Elektron was already nodding vigorously enough to make his lank hair swing over his cheek, and even risked a curious glance at Aurora. Proton looked like he was choking on his beef—given its toughness, not an unrealistic scenario. His father reached out and rested a hand on his forearm, then stared at Beria quizzically.
“My compliments to the Fizmatovs,” Beria said, “for being mindful of the correct security precautions around this sensitive topic.”
Elektron audibly gulped and stopped nodding.
“Please know,” Beria continued, “that Comrade Shpak and I have recently concluded a thorough investigation of Comrade Artemyeva’s background and issued the necessary security clearances. You may speak freely in her presence on this topic.”
In spite of herself Aurora blushed, pleased to have been made aware of this—though some clue should have been detected from the fact that she was sitting here eating caviar instead of being gnawed by fish at the bottom of the Ural River. Sensing Shpak’s eye on her she glanced across the table at him, to be met by what she could only describe as a murderous glare.
He’d been overruled. Beria had pulled rank on him.
“Perhaps the young lady might share her recollections of the Chicago probe and why the Americans expended so much on this debacle,” Beria continued.
“Of course,” Aurora said through raw vocal cords. She faltered for a moment, still a bit distracted by the realization that Shpak wanted her dead. That Beria, the pervert, had saved her life. Looking at Beria helped a bit. Looking at Proton helped a lot. He was looking back, that was for sure, and with more than merely scientific curiosity. “The Fizmatovs will know more than I,” she began, “but I did happen to make the acquaintance of a physics student there who tried to explain to me the experiments performed on these balloons and why they are of such interest to the capitalists. I can try to relate that to you if you like—the Fizmatovs can correct my mistakes, of which I’m sure there will be many.”
“Please proceed!” Beria said with the satisfied air of a polo player showing off his new prize pony.
“Well, everyone knows about radiation—the experiments of the Curies and Joliot in Paris and so on. It comes from heavy elements like radium that are out at the end of the periodic table. Apparently when the nucleus gets too big it’s unstable. When it flies apart the rays come out. As scientists created better devices for detecting radiation, they began to see very powerful rays whose origin was mysterious. They were not produced by radium or any of the other heavy elements. What could explain these rays? They are present everywhere, all the time, passing through us without our knowing it. Some supposed they came from processes deep in the earth. Others that they came from space. Experiments performed on mountain peaks showed more of them, suggesting a cosmic origin. They are attenuated by the atmosphere. The higher you go, the more there is to learn. The highest mountains in America are only a few thousand meters above sea level, and in inaccessible parts of the country. A balloon, properly outfitted, can go much higher, and can be launched from anyplace that is convenient. Soldier Field is only a few kilometers from the University of Chicago, and it’s right in the middle of Century of Progress—the world exposition where Niels Bohr spoke last summer. So they made such a balloon and launched it. But it failed because of a defective valve.”
At Beria’s prompting she went on to supply more details: the seven hundred steel cylinders of hydrogen gas, the magnesium sphere, the folds of rubberized fabric.
The Georgians, who up to this point had merrily ignored everyone else in the room, listened to all of this with an intensity that Aurora found a bit unnerving. “You’re saying,” said Ordzhonikidze, “that all of this effort and expense was just to put up an airborne laboratory. An observatory for these rays?”
Beria said something in Georgian and then added “Kosmicheskie luchi,” cueing Aurora as to the Russian terms.
“Yes,” Aurora said. “At those altitudes it is intensely cold and there is not enough oxygen to breathe, so the gondola containing the aeronauts is a sealed capsule, pressurized with air. Inside it are certain instruments, such as ‘cloud chambers’—I don’t know what they are called here—”
“Kamera Vilsona,” muttered Elektron.
“Kamera Vilsona, thank you—that the aeronauts can use to study these rays when they are drifting along at the outer limit of the atmosphere—the threshold of interplanetary space.”
“But it failed?” Lominadze asked. “The Americans did not obtain the knowledge they were seeking?”
“That is correct, Comrade.”
“In a few days, though, we’re going to steal a march on them, aren’t we, Comrade Proton?” said Beria.
“Indeed we are, Comrade!” said Proton. “We are making preparations to launch a more advanced balloon that will succeed where the Americans failed. I have the very great honor of being one of the aeronauts.”
After a brief pause, this elicited a round of applause and a raising of glasses. Proton blushed in a way that Aurora, even through all of her exhaustion, found ridiculously fetching. Of course they’d have chosen this magnificent boy to be one of the aeronauts.
“It is all a fine testament to Soviet science and engineering,” Ordzhonikidze said, “but I am a bureaucrat who builds steel mills. Can anyone explain why it matters? Or do we do it simply because the Americans couldn’t?”
“Scientifically—” the elder Fizmatov began, but Ordzhonikidze silenced him with a wave of the hand.
“Scientifically, I know how a blast furnace works. By stripping oxygen away from iron oxide to give us pig iron.” He extended one arm in an Ozymandian gesture toward the colonnade of glowing blast furnaces marching off into the night. “Pig iron begets steel, and from steel we make rails and tanks. These cosmic rays you’re talking about—can they give us something like this?” Waving his arm again and nodding out the window. “Or is it like collecting butterflies?” Silence fell, and he added, “Collecting butterflies is perfectly fine, by the way. I just need to know.”
For some reason Proton and his father both turned to look at Elektron, who had been staring fixedly at his half-eaten meal through all of this. Aurora wasn’t the only person in the room to notice it. Though he didn’t look up, he seemed to be aware that attention was on him. After clearing his throat he said one word: “Neutrons.”
“The word means nothing to me,” Beria volunteered after he and the other Georgians had exchanged baffled glances.
“There’s no reason it ought to,” Elektron reassured him.
Shpak threw him a look. Oleksandr Fizmatov saw it, and stepped in: “Lek is talking about a new kind of elementary particle that was only discovered in the last year or so,” he explained. “Outside of university physics departments, there’s no reason anyone should ever have encountered this term.”
“Lek” nodded.
Lominadze didn’t mind playing the clown. “For those of us who are not even within a thousand kilometers of such an institution, what’s the connection to balloons?” he inquired. His tone was all forced merriment, but he was casting nervous glances at Beria and Ordzhonikidze.
Elektron ran his hand through his hair, combing it back from his face. He looked to be wrestling with the weighty problem of trying to explain these matters to steel makers and secret police. Watching him in some bemusement was Proton, who put in: “As Comrade Aurora has very clearly explained, radiation of extremely high penetrating power enters from above into our atmosphere. The upper atmosphere is the best place to study it.”
“Does it come from the sun?” Ordzhonikidze asked.
“These rays are observable at night,” Elektron said, “and during total solar eclipses.”
Silent chewing for a few moments. Aurora, not unwilling to play the dumb blonde, said, “Oh, I see. When the Earth or the moon is in the way—blocking any rays that might originate from the sun.”
“Obviously,” Elektron said. Not unkindly. Just pointing out that it was obvious.
“So, by process of elimination, it must come from astronomical phenomena farther away—stars, galaxies—”
“Supernovas, probably,” Elektron said. “Where elements are forged. There’s your blast furnace. When smaller atoms are smashed together in a star to make heavier nuclei, amounts of energy are released that are so far beyond that”—he waved dismissively at the industrial colossus outside the window—“as to be beyond comprehension. Supernovas spray these heavy nuclei into space, where they condense into planets like droplets of water from steam. The really heavy elements like uranium slowly sink to the bottom and decay—the energy they release in doing so keeps the Earth’s core hot and churning, sometimes bringing a trace of uranium or radium to the surface. We live in this intermediate layer of medium-sized nuclei that are stable enough to form complicated molecules that support life. Below us, massive nuclei are decaying in a hellish sea of lava. Above us, light nuclei are combining to make starlight—but every bit as hostile to life. To know more we have to dig down or fly high—getting just a tiny bit closer to those terrible places of energy release and radioactivity. Flying high is easier.” He nodded deferentially at his brother. “Which isn’t to suggest it’s easy, or safe.”
“My compliments, Dr. Fizmatov,” said Beria, looking down the table. “The boy speaks well once he gets warmed up. Like starting a tractor’s engine on a cold morning. But what’s this about neutrons? That was the first word that came out of his mouth, was it not?”
“You are very kind,” Fizmatov said. “As might be guessed from the names of my two boys, protons and electrons were all we knew about just a few years ago. In those days there was no way to measure the mass of a nucleus. More recently that has become possible. But then a problem of arithmetic reared its head.”
“Arithmetic? I should have thought that was settled in the days of the ancient Greeks!” Lominadze said jovially.
“We know,” Fizmatov said, “that hydrogen has but one proton. It must therefore have but one electron as well, to balance out the charge. One positive, one negative, sum zero. Helium has two of each. So you would think helium would have double the mass of hydrogen. But it does not. In fact, the helium nucleus weighs four times as much hydrogen. Since electrons weigh practically nothing, the only way to account for this is to assume that helium’s nucleus has four rather than two protons. Yet we know that its electrical charge is only two.”
“It does seem like a large discrepancy when you put it that way!” Ordzhonikidze blustered. He had been stung a little by Elektron’s dismissive attitude toward the energy output of his blast furnaces, and was now inclining more and more to the view that these physicists were all just butterfly collectors.
“The Curies and Joliot looked at it at the Institut du Radium in Paris. Rutherford and Chadwick in England. Compton and Millikan in America. Fermi in Italy. Hahn and Meisner in Germany,” Fizmatov said. The Georgians all directed their gazes on him, and Aurora perceived something, which was that they were all afraid that the Soviet Union would fall behind. Fizmatov understood as much. And he knew that by playing upon that fear he could force their hand—prevent these powerful ignoramuses from dismissing him and his boys out of hand. “There were theories that a couple of extra electrons might be hiding inside the nucleus somewhere, for example. But Rutherford has proved, and others have confirmed, that this third particle, the neutron, really exists.”
“It was hard to see,” Lek said, “because, lacking charge, it passes through matter undetected.”
“What is its significance?” Ordzhonikidze asked, “other than making the arithmetic work out?”
“It’s the key to everything,” Lek said.
“Can you be a little more specific?” Shpak asked sharply. At last his skills as an interrogator were finding some practical application here.
“Alchemy,” Lek said. “What the ancient alchemists merely dreamed of is happening now. In Cambridge, Paris, Chicago.”
“He means transmutation of elements,” said Proton, looking at his little brother with a mix of concern and affection.
“Until now—right now!” Lek said, slapping the table. “We believed it could only happen in two ways. In the interior of stars—not very useful! Or simply by waiting for a nucleus of uranium or radium to decay. But Curie, Joliot, Rutherford, Fermi—they are finding that when neutrons are directed at ordinary nuclei, transmutation happens easily.”
“I thought you said it passes through matter undetected,” said Shpak, ever alert to contradictions in a story.
“Because we were looking in the wrong place. We should have been looking in the nuclei themselves. The neutrality of this particle is what gives it the ability to strike home and re-order a nucleus—turning it from one element to another.”
“And what does that give us?” Ordzhonikidze demanded, “other than an arithmetical curiosity?”
“Energy,” said Elektron, “the power of stars.”
At last they had the attention of Sergo Ordzhonikidze. And so keen was his interest that the elder Fizmatov felt the need to moderate it: “Many of these same authorities—at least in their public statements—are saying that it might never happen on the surface of the Earth. To engineer just the right set of conditions to bring about these alchemical transmutations in an industrial facility might be physically impossible. Perhaps the cores of planets and the interiors of stars are the only places in the universe where conditions are right.”
“Can ever be right,” Elektron said. “Even in theory. But my professors at the university are saying that, every month, Joliot-Curie or Fermi or one of those others is finding some new isotope that they can produce simply by exposing everyday substances to neutrons. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of them waiting to be discovered.”
Drawing Ordzhonikidze’s eye, Proton said, “It is as if a few scientists discovered a new continent with thousands of hitherto unknown species of butterflies. Catching them all and drawing pictures of them is going to take awhile. But the possibility exists that at least one of them might be a magic butterfly that gives its discoverer powers we thought were reserved to wizards and gods.”
“That’s the unsaid bit,” his father emphasized. “Talk to any of those scientists and they’ll pooh-pooh the ‘wizards and gods’ bit and insist they’re just butterfly collectors.”
Whether or not it was the case that Oleksandr Fizmatov was really being that clever—that devious—the fact of the matter was that this sort of explanation jibed perfectly with the way men like Beria and Ordzhonikidze were wont to view the world. Namely that the outward pretenses maintained by important men—scientists, in this case—concealed subtle and hidden motives, and that to understand as much was to be sophisticated and therefore strong. They exchanged a few words in Georgian and it was obvious from their tone that in their minds it all added up. Shpak watched them impassively, but it seemed to Aurora that even he was buying it.
“Well,” Ordzhonikidze said, after lighting a cigarette and blowing out a long plume of smoke, “it is all a good way to enjoy some conversation over dinner. But if you had any idea of the shit we have to put up with just to make a blast furnace—”
“Dr. Fizmatov knows,” Aurora put in. “We know. We have volunteered for Workers’ Shock Brigades. We have been up on those things. Seen people die.”
“Good! Then you’ll understand that even if this is all as important as you say, it will never be a matter for the Commissariat of Heavy Industry. At least, not during my tenure.”
“I agree,” Beria said. “My suggestion, Comrade Ordzhonikidze, is that you build your steel mill and leave the butterfly collecting to me.” And for some reason he looked at Aurora.