Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  It was odd, von Niehauser reflected, but he had never killed a living creature except his fellow men. He had lied to the hardware storekeeper, drawing on what he had heard around the dinner table from his brothers. All the other male members of his family had been wild about hunting, he supposed because the hunt provided the closest peacetime analogue to war. If Kurt had been here he would have spent the whole winter clambering over these rock strewn mountains; the American mode of hunting, without beaters and guides, simply one man alone with a rifle, would have appealed to him. But Kurt had died in Africa, and there was only his baby brother, the instructor of physics, to see the wonders of the place and watch the mountain sheep watching him.

  There were no trails as such, only narrow little animal tracks covered with loose rock. Von Niehauser lost his footing two or three times: once he fell and slid about eight feet down the side of the mountain before he managed to catch hold of an outcropping of bush. His bad shoulder took most of the punishment—he could feel his ribs on that side throbbing as if the nerves had been laid bare. It was after two o’ clock in the afternoon before he reached the summit.

  He found a ledge that was shaded from above by scrub pine. He would be hidden there, and the ledge itself was as flat as a tabletop. He sat down to rest, too tired even to look around, and took one of the candy bars out of his pocket. The Americans didn’t seem to be very good with chocolate, but it was better than nothing.

  There was a vast stretch of flatland beneath him, a mottled tan cut here and there with the dark brown slash of a road, and beyond that the Los Alamos Mesa. He was well above it—even from across that enormous divide he could see the telltale signs of human presence, the vague shapes of buildings and a suggestion of order. He closed his eyes and waited for the weariness to pass off. He didn’t want to look just yet.

  The telescopic sight on his rifle was as powerful as any of the sets of field glasses that had been available in Santa Fe, and it was perfectly adequate for his uses. The top of the mesa snapped into focus; he could even see individual people, although not distinctly enough to have recognized anyone—it occurred to von Niehauser with a stab of very peculiar emotion that if this really was the American fission bomb laboratory there probably were men down there whom he had known for years, old friends some of them.

  But they would not be that anymore. They were the enemy now, scientists and technicians who were preparing the destruction of his country. He remembered what Heisenberg had said in 1939, the first time he had ever heard the possibilities of such a weapon discussed: “It might not be any larger than a pineapple, and could probably destroy a city the size of Stuttgart, simply turn it into a blackened crater. Such a thing must never be allowed to happen.”

  Such had been the arrogance of the German scientific community that it had of course never dawned on Heisenberg that there was any possibility of the Americans perfecting the device first—his only thought had been to keep such power out of the hands of the Nazis. Germany, of course, would be safe enough.

  But it hadn’t worked out quite that way.

  The people in Santa Fe believed that this was an Army base up on the mesa—at least, some of them did. Perhaps there was a military contingent somewhere, but that was by no means the main purpose of so vast a complex.

  The son of a general should certainly be able to tell a military base when he saw one. They were all the same, everywhere in the world. There were barracks and a few administration buildings and vehicle shops and parade grounds. You drilled soldiers; that was what they were for. You marched them up and down and had them fire their rifles and crawl through trenches and under barbed wire. You held tank maneuvers and raised great quantities of dust out on the artillery ranges.

  But there was no parade ground on the Los Alamos Mesa. The place was huge. It was obvious that millions of dollars had been spent here and apparently, if one could believe the locals, all within the last year and a half. Row upon row of new buildings, thrown together in an absence of pattern that suggested a project adjusting itself to unforeseen needs. An Army base reflected the order and discipline of military life; this gigantic complex had as its driving energy some other vision.

  He watched a small group of people walking along one of the roads. They wore civilian clothes; one of them was smoking a pipe—even at this distance von Niehauser could make out the clouds of heavy gray smoke. Every once in a while they would all stop and cluster together, their heads and arms moving in excited little jerks as, apparently, they talked. The wind, which swept across the mesa with hideous relentlessness, pulled at the hems of their coats, but they paid no attention. Soldiers didn’t behave that way.

  How many times in his life had he seen and participated in such discussions? At Göttingen, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. In Rome, when Schleiermacher had taken him on a visit to Fermi.

  These were scientists in the grip of an idea, an intellectual abstraction. They were happy because they had fallen in love with death.

  18

  It was going to be one of those days. Last night they had found the water pipes clogged with ice, and in the morning Hal discovered a badger had crawled in under the bedroom floor and died. And the radio said that there was a storm gathering down in Mexico and that it would bury the whole state sometime within the next three or four days.

  For the last week or so, Hal had been just about unbearable. He had thought the dead badger was hilarious and had made some disgusting joke to the effect that that wasn’t the only reason their bedroom stank. Jenny wondered if it wasn’t somehow possible that he had heard about Erich Lautner.

  The main waterline came up out of the ground behind the house, just to the side of the kitchen door, and about two and a half feet of it was exposed to the air. That was why it froze every time the weather turned snappish, but Jenny had heard from a neighbor woman that you could fix that by wrapping the pipe to a couple of inches thick in old blanket. She didn’t have a blanket to spare, but Hal’s mother had sent him a new bathrobe for Christmas because the old one was ready to be cut up for cleaning rags. A worn out bathrobe would serve just as well. She would go down to the commissary and see if they didn’t have some duct tape, and maybe she could get that particular problem taken care of before Hal came home for lunch. The dead badger was already wrapped up in a burlap sack in the garbage, so that left only their marriage to be attended to.

  Because Jenny had come to a few decisions about the direction of her life—she was going to stop allowing things to get to her so much. She was going to learn to deal with the facts as they were. After all, three quarters of the women she knew claimed not to love their husbands and still managed to muddle through somehow. Illicit sex in hotel rooms didn’t seem to be the answer either, so if she couldn’t have the grand passion she would settle for a little quiet desperation.

  Whatever was wrong, it was almost certainly more her fault than Hal’s. There wasn’t any point in punishing him. He had a few rights, and if she couldn’t work up very much enthusiasm for his weightlifting and his job reading other people’s mail that wasn’t something he should have to answer for. After all, he was her husband. She had married him.

  The truth was, Erich was beginning to scare her. Maybe it came down to the fact that she wasn’t quite the hot number she had thought she was, but having a lover was more than she found she could handle. Erich didn’t care anything about her, and he wasn’t even a particularly nice person. She was just another conquest as far as he was concerned; he wouldn’t have any hesitation about wrecking her life if she gave him the chance.

  “Would it really annoy you so very much if your husband discovered the truth?” he had asked once, smiling that amused, contemptuous smile of his. “What difference could it make to him—or to you?”

  There was always the implied reminder that she had placed herself in his power, that sometime or other, in his urbane disregard for her small minded American scruples, he might just casually let it be known that Jenny Springer was his
mistress.

  And there, of course, was the problem. It was all very well to make resolutions about leading a new life, but how did you disentangle yourself from the old one? It wouldn’t do any good simply to explain the situation to Erich and appeal to his better nature. Where women were concerned, he didn’t seem to have a better nature.

  So she had made up her mind that she wouldn’t see him anymore. On Saturday, when he would be waiting for her in that horrible little room at the La Ventana, she just wouldn’t appear. She didn’t have the faintest idea what he would do about it—or if he would do anything at all; it was possible he would just smile, damn him, and dismiss her from his mind—but she had lost control over her life a long time ago. It was possible he might even go to Hal, and that would probably be the end of everything, but at least she would have stopped being somebody’s weekend whore.

  Really, she couldn’t see anything else to do. It frightened her, the way everything had begun frightening her lately, but there just didn’t seem to be much else that was possible.

  She took Hal’s old bathrobe down from its hook in the bedroom closet and, holding it by the hem, tried to start a tear. It didn’t work; she wasn’t strong enough. She would need a pair of scissors, or a knife. She didn’t have a pair of scissors big enough, but there was a knife in the kitchen. If you thought about it for a moment, you could always improvise a solution.

  By ten-fifteen she had a very satisfying little pile of six-inch strips of dark blue terrycloth on the kitchen table. The house was clean and there wasn’t another thing to think about until twelve thirty, when Hal would be home wanting his lunch. She would go down to the commissary and buy the tape, then, and possibly she would have that all taken care of by noon. It would please Hal when he saw that she had done something about the water pipe; he only needed a little encouragement to believe that their life was everything it should be.

  There hadn’t been any snowfall that day, but it was bitterly cold outside and the wind was steady and strong. It was nearly half a mile to the commissary.

  Jenny put on her coat and a pair of knitted gloves and tied a scarf over her hair, wishing that Hal hadn’t left his car behind in New Jersey. The walk would take about eight minutes, by which time she probably wouldn’t be able to feel the surface of her face.

  The commissary was just inside the front gate of the base; the Project, whatever it was, was another mile farther up on the mesa, well within the Army compound that was supposed to protect it. On an ordinary day the main road would be busy with soldiers’ wives either going to or returning from their grocery shopping—provisions were so haphazard that almost everyone made the trek three or four times a week. The walk back and forth was almost a social occasion. But today, except for the official cars that were almost as regular a feature as the dust they blew up, the road was virtually deserted. Probably there weren’t many other women who would be prepared to venture out in such weather just to pick up a role of duct tape so they could fix a pipe to please their husbands. Probably that was part of the definition of being happily married—not feeling the need for that sort of gesture.

  It really had been stupid to come out. She was wearing her heaviest shoes and already the soles of her feet were freezing—it was like walking barefoot over ice. The wind was blowing from the south, so you had to face directly into it, walking slightly bent at the waist like an old woman. Jenny never even noticed the car that was pulling up behind.

  “MRS. SPRINGER—CAN I OFFER YOU A LIFT?”

  She turned to see who was shouting at her, and at first all she saw was the open side window of a blue 1937 Pontiac. And then, in the dark interior, the framed smiling face of her lover.

  “Get in, Jenny. I want to talk to you,” he murmured. Suddenly she realized that the road wasn’t as deserted as she had imagined. “Get in—don’t force me to make a scene.”

  Before she realized what she was doing, she had her fingers inside the door handle. Perhaps a hundred feet in front of them was Mindy Applewhite, pushing along her two-wheeled shopping basket; Mindy was a terrible gossip, and she was beginning to turn around. There was no way out now—it would look even more suspicious if she backed away.

  Jenny forced herself to return the smile, the way one might with a casual acquaintance, and opened the door. As she sat down, Erich Lautner reached across to close it, and she could feel the pressure of his arm against her and smell his body; it was almost a kind of intimidation. The car pulled back out onto the road, and Jenny forced herself to sit with her eyes straight ahead as they passed Mindy Applewhite. She was quite sure she was flushing a brilliant pink, but that could have been the effect of the cold.

  Even in the darkened interior of the car, it was possible to detect a certain appearance of strain in Erich’s face. The smile on his lips was a little too fixed and the skin stretched a little tightly around the eyes. His jaw line was puffy, as if he had been drinking, and around the edge of his brown hair was traced a thin pale line, giving the impression that the healthy tan was some sort of mask. He was gripping the steering wheel and leaning slightly forward.

  “I’m going into town,” he said, in the tone of someone issuing an order. “Come with me—we could be back by the middle of the afternoon.”

  “I can’t—I. . .”

  It seemed to be the last thing he had expected to hear. His head snapped around, the eyes widening with something between incredulity and anger, and his knuckles slipped a little farther forward on the steering wheel, as if he were trying to brace himself.

  “What do you mean you can’t? Why can’t you?”

  “Hal will be coming home for lunch. He’s. . .”

  “What difference can that make?”

  Somewhere inside of herself Jenny found the resources not to look at him.

  “It does make a difference,” she said calmly. “He expects me. What am I supposed to tell him when I do get home? That on a whim I went into Santa Fe with Erich Lautner? It’s possible he may have his suspicions already; what do you want me to do, give a name to them?”

  For several seconds the only sounds came from the engine and the tires on the asphalt roadway. To the south, even at that hour of the morning, the horizon was lost in a dark line.

  “I was going to the commissary. You can drop me off there.”

  For a moment or two it was easy to imagine that he wouldn’t, that he was planning simply to keep going, right through the camp gates and on to Santa Fe; but then, at the last moment, he twisted the steering wheel to the right and pulled up with a lurch in the commissary parking lot. He was wearing a heavy tweed overcoat, the collar of which was turned up almost over his ears, but that wouldn’t have accounted for the tiny beads of perspiration that were visible on his temple. Even over the sound of the engine dying, you could hear his breath—he actually seemed to be panting.

  “It’s possible I may be leaving here soon,” he said, not looking at her. “In fact, it’s almost a certainty.”

  He smiled again, showing the remarkable evenness of his teeth.

  “Another project—far, far away from this place. It seems they can’t get along without me.”

  He seemed to be waiting. For what? For her to burst into tears? Did he expect her to plead with him to take her too? Jenny continued to peer out through the windshield, as if there were some intensely interesting object on the car’s hood.

  “Do you ever wonder what it is we’re all working at up there, Jenny? Would you like me to tell you?”

  She looked around at him then, probably because now it was possible to face him without seeming to react to the fact that he was leaving her.

  “No.” She shook her head, as if the question were utterly without meaning for her. Why did she have the impression that he had meant it as a threat? “It’s not something I want to hear about. Why should I?”

  “Why should you? Why not?” Yes, it was a threat. “We’re making a bomb—did you know that? Probably two thousand of us up on the hill, and we’re j
ust the point of the spear. There are other installations, just as big, all over the country. Millions of dollars are being spent, so you can imagine the sort of bomb it must be.”

  The smile had turned quite ugly, a kind of mocking challenge. Jenny sat staring at him with undisguised wonder. She was a security officer’s wife, and she was listening to something very close to treason. Treason, apparently, committed for nothing more than its shock value.

  “Don’t—don’t say anything more,” she whispered, shaking her head.

  “No? Aren’t you curious?” His hands caressed the sides of the steering wheel, the way they had caressed her face a dozen times, but the gesture seemed oddly tense, almost resentful. “A bomb worth all that money? They say it will be the technological achievement of the century if we can pull it off—one little firecracker that can end the war. The catch is, of course, that Hitler is working on the same thing. What do you suppose will happen if he builds his first?”

  “You shouldn’t be talking about it, Erich.” Jenny forced herself to look away. She kept her eyes on her hands, feeling helpless and beaten. Was there nothing it wouldn’t occur to him to use like this? “I don’t want to listen to another word.”

  Erich Lautner raised his eyebrows in feigned astonishment—the susceptibilities of these Americans were such a bore!

  “Very well.”

  Outside, women from the base were walking back and forth, carrying bags of groceries to their cars, if they were fortunate enough to have cars, or wheeling their shopping carts across the gravel. Several of them Jennie knew at least by sight, and more than a few screwed up their faces to peer in through the windshield of Erich’s car. Tonight, in between the silences, they would have something different to tell their husbands over the pot roast and boiled potatoes. “You’ll never guess what I saw today. You know that Mrs. Springer whose husband works in Security. . ?” And Mrs. Springer’s dominant emotion, taking place even over her fear of exposure, was simple jealousy.