The Company of Strangers Read Online Free PDF

fly. ‘ And the chemist Otto Hahn. You think I don’t stick my ear out in that corridor every now and again.’
    ‘I won’t bore you then.’
    ‘So what’s it all about? Atom bombs.’
    ‘Forget it, Weber.’
    ‘It goes in easier when I’m drunk.’
    ‘All right. You take some fissionable material…’
    ‘I’m lost.’
    ‘Remember Goethe.’
    ‘Goethe! Fuck. What did he say about “fissionable material”?’
    ‘He said: “What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown.’”
    ‘Gloomy bastard,’ said Weber, snatching back the bottle. ‘Start again.’
    ‘There’s a certain type of material, a very rare material, which when brought together in a critical mass – shut up and listen – could create as many as eighty generations of fission – shut up, Weber, just let me get it out – before the phenomenal heat would blow the mass apart. That means…’
    ‘I’m glad you said that.’
    ‘…that, if you can imagine this, one fission releases twohundred million electron bolts of energy and that would double eighty times before the chain reaction would stop. What do you think that would produce, Weber?’
    ‘The biggest blast known to mankind. Is that what you’re saying?’
    ‘A whole city wiped out with one bomb.’
    ‘You said this fissionable material’s pretty rare.’
    ‘It comes from uranium.’
    ‘Aha!’ said Weber, sitting up. ‘Joachimstahl.’
    ‘What about it?’
    ‘Biggest uranium mine in Europe. And it’s in Czechoslo-vakia…which is ours ,’ said Weber, cuddling the schnapps bottle.
    ‘There’s an even bigger one in the Belgian Congo.’
    ‘Aha! Which is ours, too, because…’
    ‘Yes, Weber, we know, but it’s still a very complicated chemical process to get the fissionable material out of the uranium. The stuff they’d found was called U 235 but they could only get traces and it decayed almost instantly. Then somebody called Weizsäcker began to think about what happened to all the excess neutrons released by the fission of U 235, some would be captured by U 238, which would then become U 239, which would then decay into a new element which he called Ekarhenium.’
    ‘Voss.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘You’re boring the shit out of me. Drink some more of this and try saying it all backwards. It might, you know, make more sense.’
    ‘I told you it was complicated,’ said Voss. ‘Anyway, they’ve found a way to make the “fissionable material” comparatively easily in an atomic pile, which uses graphite and some stuff called heavy water, which we used to be able to get from the Norsk Hydro plant in Norway – until the British sabotaged it.’
    ‘I remember something about that,’ said Weber. ‘So the British know we’re building this bomb.’
    ‘They know we have the science – it’s in all these magazines you’re throwing around my room – but do we have the capability? It’s a huge industrial undertaking, building an atomic pile is just the first step.’
    ‘How much of this Ekarhe—shit do you need to make a bomb?’
    ‘A kilo, maybe two.’
    ‘That’s not very much…to blow up an entire city.’
    ‘Blow up isn’t really the word, Weber,’ said Voss. ‘Vaporize is more like it.’
    ‘Give me that schnapps.’
    ‘It’s going to take years to build this thing.’
    ‘We’ll be rolling in sherbet by then.’
    Weber finished the bottle and went to bed. Voss stayed up and read his mother’s part of the letter, which contained detailed descriptions of social occasions and was strangely comforting. His father, General Heinrich Voss, sitting out the war in enforced retirement, having made the mistake of voicing his opinions about the Commissar Order – where any Jews or partisans encountered in the Russian campaign were to be handed over to the SS for ‘treatment’ – would add an irascible note at the bottom and a chess move. This time his move was followed by the word ‘check’ and the line: ‘You don’t know it yet but I’ve