conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled The Escape Artists about South, America, Fresno with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author is a guidebook author living and working in South America. He grew up in Fresno, CA, a city that produces raisins and methamphetamine. "The Escape Artists" is his first novel.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Escape Artists
  ON FEBRUARY 14, 1940, Jacques Allier, a middle-aged, nattily dressed banker, hurried through the doors of the Hotel Majestic, on rue la Pérouse. Situated near the Arc de Triomphe, the landmark hotel had welcomed everyone from diplomats attending the Versailles peace talks in 1919 to the influx of artists who made the City of Light famous in the decade that followed. Now, with all of France braced for a German invasion, likely to begin with a thrust through Belgium, and Paris largely evacuated, a shell of its former self, conversation at the hotel was once again all about war. Allier crossed the lobby. He was not there on bank business but rather as an agent of the Deuxième Bureau, the French internal spy agency. Raoul Dautry, the minister of armaments, and physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie were waiting for him, and their discussion involved the waging of a very different kind of war.
  Joliot-Curie, who with his wife, Irène, had won the Nobel Prize for the discovery that stable elements could be made radioactive by artificial or induced methods, explained to Allier that he was now in the middle of constructing a machine to exploit the energy held within atoms. Most likely it would serve to power submarines, but it had the potential for developing an unsurpassed explosive. He needed Allier's help. It was the same pitch Joliot-Curie had given Dautry months before, one made all the more forceful by the suggestion that the energy held within an ordinary kitchen table, if unlocked, could turn the world into a ball of fire. Allier offered to do whatever he could to help the scientist.
  Joliot-Curie explained that he needed a special ingredient for his experiments—heavy water—and that there was only one company in the world that produced it to any quantity: Norsk Hydro, in Norway. As an official at the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, which owned a majority stake in the Norwegian concern, Allier was ideally positioned to obtain whatever supplies Norsk Hydro had at its Vemork plant as quickly and discreetly as possible. The French prime minister himself, Édouard Daladier, had already signed off on the mission.
  There was one problem, Allier said. Only a month before, the chief lawyer for Norsk Hydro, Bjarne Eriksen, had visited him in his Paris office. According to Eriksen, the Germans were also interested in the production at Vemork. They had placed a number of orders and had suggested that they might need as much as two tons of heavy water in the near future. Startled by the demand for such vast quantities—and denied any information about how the material might be used—Norsk Hydro had yet to fulfill more than twenty-five kilograms of these orders.
  This report troubled Dautry and Joliot-Curie deeply. The Germans must be on the same track with their research. Allier needed to move—and fast—to secure the stock before the Germans did. If there was trouble in bringing it out of Norway, he was to see that the heavy water was contaminated, thus rendered useless for experiments.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In December 1938 two German chemists, the pioneering Otto Hahn and his young assistant Fritz Strassmann, proved that a neutron colliding with a uranium atom could do more than chip away at its nucleus or become absorbed within it. The neutron could split the atom in two—a process called fission. By early January 1939, word of the discovery had spread, bringing great excitement to the field of atomic research: Why, how, and to what effect had the uranium atom split?
  Springboarding off an observation by the Danish theorist Niels Bohr, physicists realized that the uranium atom's nucleus had acted like an overfilled water balloon. Its "skin" was stretched thin by the large number of protons and neutrons inside, and when a neutron was shot into it, it formed a dumbbell: two spheres connected by a thin waist. When the tension on the skin finally became too much, it snapped, and the two spheres—two lighter atoms—were flung apart with tremendous force, an amount equal to the energy that had once held the nucleus together (its binding energy). Researchers were quick to come to a figure, too: 200 million electron volts—enough to bounce a single grain of sand. A tiny amount, perhaps, but given that a single gram of uranium contained roughly 2.5 sextillion atoms (2.5 x 1021), the numbers alone obscured the potential energy release. One physicist calculated that a cubic meter of uranium ore could provide enough energy to raise a cubic kilometer of water twenty-seven kilometers into the air.
  The atom's potential power became even clearer when scientists discovered that splitting the uranium nucleus released two to three fast-moving neutrons that could act as detonators. The neutrons from one atom could split two others. The neutrons from these two split four more. The four could cause the detonation of eight. The eight—sixteen. With an ever-increasing number of fast-moving neutrons flinging themselves about, splitting atoms at an exponential rate, scientists could create what was called a chain reaction—and generate enormous quantities of energy.
  Which prompted the obvious question: To what purpose? Some conceived of harnessing the energy release to fuel factories and homes. Others were drawn to—or feared—its use as an explosive. Within a week of Hahn's discovery, American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer sketched a crude bomb on his blackboard.
  Fermi, who had immigrated to the United States, trembled at the thought of what might come. Staring out the window of his office at Columbia University, he watched students bustling down the New York sidewalks, the streets crowded with traffic. He turned to his office mate, drew his hands together as if holding a soccer ball, and harked back to the words of Rutherford. "A little bomb like that," he said solemnly before looking back outside, "and it would all disappear." Given the aggression shown by Nazi Germany by the end of summer 1939, such a bomb, if it could be built, might be needed in a world on the precipice of war. Plans to obtain it were rapidly put together on both sides.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Once they were sure their baggage was loaded onto the Amsterdam-bound plane and its propellers began to spin, they readied to board. At that moment, a taxi drove onto the tarmac. Its passenger, Jehan Knall-Demars, another of Allier's team, had pleaded with the gate agent to let him through in the taxi so he could make his plane to Amsterdam. The spy had the taxi park between the two Junkers, out of view of the Fornebu terminal. From the trunk, he unloaded several suitcases, together containing thirteen of the heavy-water flasks. These were hauled into the baggage hold of the Scottish-bound plane, which Allier and Mosse boarded, instead of the one to Amsterdam. Knall-Demars left in the taxi, hiding in the back as he passed through the gate.
  Minutes later, the plane to Amsterdam barreled down the runway and lifted into the sky. As it headed south over the Skagerrak, the strait of sea between Norway and Denmark, a pair of Luftwaffe fighters drew alongside. They ordered its pilots to divert their course to Hamburg. When the plane landed in Germany, Abwehr agents busted open the cargo hold. Rummaging through the suitcases, they found a few that were particularly heavy. Inside them? Granite rubble.
  Meanwhile, Allier and Mosse landed safely in Scotland with their stash. The following day, Knall-Demars arrived with the other thirteen flasks.
  By March 18, all twenty-six flasks were stored in the old stone-arched cellars of the Collège de France in Paris. The first battle of heavy water was won. The next, however, was all too shortly to begin.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: At that moment, a taxi drove onto the tarmac. Its passenger, Jehan Knall-Demars, another of Allier's team, had pleaded with the gate agent to let him through in the taxi so he could make his plane to Amsterdam. The spy had the taxi park between the two Junkers, out of view of the Fornebu terminal. From the trunk, he unloaded several suitcases, together containing thirteen of the heavy-water flasks. These were hauled into the baggage hold of the Scottish-bound plane, which Allier and Mosse boarded, instead of the one to Amsterdam. Knall-Demars left in the taxi, hiding in the back as he passed through the gate.
  Minutes later, the plane to Amsterdam barreled down the runway and lifted into the sky. As it headed south over the Skagerrak, the strait of sea between Norway and Denmark, a pair of Luftwaffe fighters drew alongside. They ordered its pilots to divert their course to Hamburg. When the plane landed in Germany, Abwehr agents busted open the cargo hold. Rummaging through the suitcases, they found a few that were particularly heavy. Inside them? Granite rubble.
  Meanwhile, Allier and Mosse landed safely in Scotland with their stash. The following day, Knall-Demars arrived with the other thirteen flasks.
  By March 18, all twenty-six flasks were stored in the old stone-arched cellars of the Collège de France in Paris. The first battle of heavy water was won. The next, however, was all too shortly to begin.