Copenhagen

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn Read Free Book Online

Book: Copenhagen by Michael Frayn Read Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Frayn
Germany, not even our families. But the war’s over. What’s happening? Perhaps, as in a play, we’re going to be quietly murdered, one by one. In the meanwhile it’s all delightfully civilised. I entertain theparty with Beethoven piano sonatas. Major Rittner, our hospitable gaoler, reads Dickens to us, to improve our English .… Did these things really happen to me …? We wait for the point of it all to be revealed to us. Then one evening it is. And it’s even more grotesque than the one we were fearing. It’s on the radio: you have actually done the deed that we were tormenting ourselves about. That’s why we’re there, dining with our gracious host, listening to our Dickens. We’ve been kept locked up to stop us discussing the subject with anyone until it’s too late. When Major Rittner tells us I simply refuse to believe it until I hear it with my own ears on the nine o’clock news. We’d no idea how far ahead you’d got. I can’t describe the effect it has on us. You play happily with your toy cap-pistol. Then someone else picks it up and pulls the trigger … and all at once there’s blood everywhere and people screaming, because it wasn’t a toy at all .… We sit up half the night, talking about it, trying to take it in. We’re all literally in shock.
    Margrethe   Because it had been done? Or because it wasn’t you who’d done it?
    Heisenberg   Both. Both. Otto Hahn wants to kill himself, because it was he who discovered fission, and he can see the blood on his hands. Gerlach, our old Nazi co-ordinator, also wants to die, because his hands are so shamefully clean. You’ve done it, though. You’ve built the bomb.
    Bohr   Yes.
    Heisenberg   And you’ve used it on a living target.
    Bohr   On a living target.
    Margrethe   You’re not suggesting that Niels did anything wrong in working at Los Alamos?
    Heisenberg   Of course not. Bohr has never done anything wrong.
    Margrethe   The decision had been taken long before Niels arrived. The bomb would have been built whetherNiels had gone or not.
    Bohr   In any case, my part was very small.
    Heisenberg   Oppenheimer described you as the team’s father-confessor.
    Bohr   It seems to be my role in life.
    Heisenberg   He said you made a great contribution.
    Bohr   Spiritual, possibly. Not practical.
    Heisenberg   Fermi says it was you who worked out how to trigger the Nagasaki bomb.
    Bohr   I put forward an idea.
    Margrethe   You’re not implying that there’s anything that Niels needs to explain or defend?
    Heisenberg   No one has ever expected him to explain or defend anything. He’s a profoundly good man.
    Bohr   It’s not a question of goodness. I was spared the decision.
    Heisenberg   Yes, and I was not. So explaining and defending myself was how I spent the last thirty years of my life. When I went to America in 1949 a lot of physicists wouldn’t even shake my hand. Hands that had actually built the bomb wouldn’t touch mine.
    Margrethe   And let me tell you, if you think you’re making it any clearer to me now, you’re not.
    Bohr   Margrethe, I understand his feelings …
    Margrethe   I don’t. I’m as angry as you were before! It’s so easy to make you feel conscience-stricken. Why should he transfer his burden to you? Because what does he do after his great consultation with you? He goes back to Berlin and tells the Nazis that he can produce atomic bombs!
    Heisenberg   But what I stress is the difficulty of separating 235.
    Margrethe   You tell them about plutonium.
    Heisenberg   I tell some of the minor officials. I have to keep people’s hopes alive!
    Margrethe   Otherwise they’ll send for the other one.
    Heisenberg   Diebner. Very possibly.
    Margrethe   There’s always a Diebner at hand ready to take over our crimes.
    Heisenberg   Diebner might manage to get a little further than me.
    Bohr   Diebner?
    Heisenberg   Might. Just possibly might.
    Bohr   He hasn’t a

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