by Alan Glynn
“You can make predictions,” he goes on, “and fairly elaborate ones, but they can never just be based on the numbers.”
They’re strolling in Palisades Park in late January and von Neumann is about to make a rejoinder when someone calls out his name.
They stop and turn around. A young man approaches, a colleague of von Neumann’s from RAND. He’s short and slim, with thick curly black hair.
“Ahh,” von Neumann says, and then adds, under his breath, for Sweeney’s benefit, “shoot me now.”
“Johnny, listen,” the young man says, “I meant to mention it yesterday, but I forgot. Will you come for lunch this Sunday? Sally and I are having some people over and we’d love to see you and Klara.”
“Well, uh—”
“And, of course”—the young man turns to Sweeney—“any friend of Johnny’s is welcome, too.”
Von Neumann suppresses a weary sigh.
Sweeney extends his hand. “Tom Monroe, pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Likewise,” the young man says, smiling broadly. “The name’s Clay Proctor.”
* * *
Sweeney accepts the invitation, but is disappointed when Johnny and Klara don’t show. They send their apologies, saying something has come up. The afternoon with Clay Proctor and his wife, Sally, and their little newborn, Stephanie, along with various people Sweeney has never met, is perfectly pleasant, but Sweeney has a slightly uncomfortable feeling about it all. It’s as though he is being observed, assessed, even. The feeling is exacerbated over the next week or two when he finds himself continually bumping into this Clay Proctor. It seems casual enough—Santa Monica isn’t that big—but he doubts these encounters would pass even the most basic statistics-and-probability smell test.
At RAND, Proctor appears to be fairly low-level in terms of the work he’s doing, but he lets it be known that he has a top-secret security clearance. He also makes a point of talking up his various business and political connections—he does work for Eiben Laboratories, he’s had lunch with Senator Karl Mundt. Sweeney doesn’t care about any of this, or about the fact that he himself may well be under surveillance. If, as seems likely, Proctor is the person actually conducting the surveillance, then Sweeney reckons there isn’t much to worry about. Besides, what dark secrets or shady affiliations do the people Proctor is working for expect him to uncover?
Tom Monroe doesn’t have a past. It’s his future they should be more concerned about.
Or all of their futures, really.
Because if there’s one argument Sweeney can’t get away from in the countless pages he has typed and left neatly stacked on the floor of his room in the Sausalito Arms, it’s that the higher your level of natural intelligence, the closer you’ll inevitably come to devising—or helping devise, or being co-opted in to devising—a technology that will become, sooner or later, a direct threat to human civilization. It’s happening here at RAND—and at Stanford, at Princeton, at MIT. The generals want bombs, the eggheads want computers. Numerical simulations are essential to the design of the bombs, and computers are essential to the execution of the numerical simulations.
Money is essential for both. So it’s checkmate to the generals, because they have the money.
It’s a long game, though. At least that’s how Sweeney sees it. Because as far as the bombs are concerned, once they’re developed and tested, yes, they may well proliferate—but a single device is all it would take, which means that the very first one could easily be the last. However, with the computers (assuming anyone survives the bombs), increases in processing power will necessarily be a slow-burn affair, taking decades probably, but at some point a line will be crossed and these coded sequences will then surprise everyone by doing two things: thinking for themselves and reproducing. In all likelihood, that will be the end of Homo sapiens—at least in any currently recognizable form.
These dark extrapolations fill Sweeney’s mind and he does his best to get them down on paper. He can only go so far with them in conversation, because pretty much everything he says now, to some degree, is heretical. He engages with Clay Proctor, and others, and enjoys twisting them into intellectual knots, but there’s no doubt that it’s all becoming increasingly difficult for him.
* * *
Sweeney has no problem talking to nuclear physicists, however, and in late February he accepts an offer to join a group of them on a trip to Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, two and a half thousand miles west of Hawaii. The purpose of the trip is to witness the detonation of a thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb. A few telephone calls are made to high-level officials and an interim security clearance is arranged. Sweeney and the group fly Pan American from Los Angeles to Honolulu, then on to an air force base in the South Pacific. From there they are transported to the USNS Ainsworth, which is docked a couple of hundred miles east of the test site.
The nuclear device, code-named Castle Bravo, was designed using complex mathematical simulations and is supposedly small enough to load onto a U.S. Air Force bomber, which could deliver it to the skies above an enemy city such as Moscow within minutes. With a projected yield of six megatons, Castle Bravo is expected to explode with several hundred times the force of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
In a minority report to the AEC, Enrico Fermi, an alumnus of the Manhattan Project, has already called the hydrogen bomb an “evil thing.” Sweeney doesn’t disagree with this, but he wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to be present at what will either be a critical turning point in history, or simply the end of it.
For the duration of the trip, he slightly increases his morning dose of MDT. While this adds another sensory dimension to the experience, it also means he can keep up intellectually with his fellow “observers” and distract them from the fact that he’s not actually a physicist.
In the early morning hours before the test, huddled in one of the bunkrooms of the ship, they drink Chivas Regal and swap predictions. Two of them are extremely nervous, convinced that the explosion will be so powerful that the hydrogen in the earth’s atmosphere will catch fire and burn the planet to a crisp. Two of them are fairly relaxed, convinced that the calculations and projections made at Los Alamos are unassailable.
Then there’s Tom Monroe.
With that extra kick of MDT in his system, Sweeney finds that he can talk fluently and comprehensibly with these guys—take in new information on the fly and respond to it, even though he doesn’t necessarily understand everything he’s saying. It’s as if the knowledge is self-aware, and in charge, and happy to use him as a conduit.
“Tom? You get the deciding vote.”
“Ha.” He peers into his glass of Chivas. “The strange thing is, I think you’re both going to be proven wrong.”
“What?”
“Look, as I see it, the yield we’re expecting—six megatons or so?—that’s way off. It’s going to be a lot more than that, two or three times more, and—”
“That’s ridiculous, Tom. How do—”
“It’s the isotopes in the lithium deuteride, they’ve enriched it to forty percent lithium-6, right? But they’re not taking into account all the lithium-7 in there. That’s going to release additional fission power, which means a much bigger explosion and a lot more fallout.”
They all stare at him, their brows furrowed, calculating in furious silence.
“So the mushroom cloud,” he goes on, “you’ll see it expand to maybe … seventy miles? And it’ll reach fifty thousand feet.”
This elicits a collective gasp.
“But at that point—I think—it’ll slow down. It has to.”
No one says anything.
“It’s the lithium-7. It’s there. You can’t discount it.” Sweeney shrugs. It seems so obvious.
At 5:15 a.m. they all trudge up to the deck and wait for the countdown. Even though the sun hasn’t come up yet, every person assembled there—observers, engineers, crew members—puts on their high-density goggles. As he
stares out into the darkness, Sweeney can smell the fear—it’s in the air around him, mingling like pollen with the residue of last night’s tropical rainfall. He doesn’t feel it himself, because he knows what’s going to happen—or, rather, he knows that the worst isn’t going to happen, at least not today. What he does feel is a profound, cellular-level queasiness.
Nausea.
This is the evil thing, after all, and it shouldn’t be happening—less than a minute to go now—especially not as a result of mere calculations, the head-scratching doodles of some very clever men.
Thirty seconds.
Mild-mannered, pipe-smoking men.
Ten, nine, eight …
And they are all men.
… three, two, one.
There is a flash of thermonuclear light and then a flood of gamma radiation fills the air. Deciding to let the mushroom cloud form and rise up behind him, Ned Sweeney quickly turns around. What he sees instead—X-rays laying everything bare—is a gallery of faces that have glimmered and bleached into skeletal negatives … eye sockets, jawbones, rows of teeth.
18
I place the bottle of pills Proctor gave me on the top shelf of my medicine cabinet and try not to think about them.
But it’s difficult.
It reminds me of that last tiny envelope of smack I managed to keep in my wallet for a whole month before I convinced myself to throw it out. There’s a thin line between anticipating something and being tormented by it.
I have another thought. If these pills are mine now, where does that leave Proctor? Does he have any left?
I don’t know.
I putter around for a while and send a few work-related emails. But it’s no use.
I actually hate that this is the stuff I’m thinking about, when what I should be thinking about is Ned Sweeney.
The situation as sketched out by Proctor was annoyingly light on detail, but some of what he had to say was intriguing—the stuff about Ned calling himself Tom Monroe, for instance, and about his being in Santa Monica, and meeting John von Neumann.
What’s frustrating is that my only “source” here is Clay Proctor himself. But then I remember something Jill said to me when I spoke to her on the phone that first night. And then before Mom died I had a few conversations with her about it all. Actually she said a lot of stuff, which I’ll have to tell you about some day …
I never knew this, and I wouldn’t have cared anyway. But I do now. And there was also Dad’s old stuff—boxes and boxes of shit he’d accumulated over the years, the detritus of a life. I remember going through some of it in the basement of the old house in Westchester. But that was years ago. And I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Whatever became of all that?
Only one way to find out.
“Twice in the space of a week, Ray, what’s the matter with you?”
“I love you, too, Jill. I’m … I’m working on something, and you know how I get, I’m obsessive. So indulge me.”
I ask her what became of Dad’s old stuff.
“My God, what exactly are you working on?”
I’m going to have to tell her sooner or later, but not right now. “Just answer my question, Jill, and I promise I’ll explain.”
“It’s all in storage, everything. His stuff, Mom’s, decades’ worth of garbage. I wanted to get rid of it, but Jim wouldn’t let me. You think you’re obsessive? He’s clinically insane. It’s, ‘Oh, you never know’—and about everything! My God, talk about a hoarder. We’ve still got unused packs of diapers from seven, eight years ago.”
“In storage where?”
“It’s a unit. I don’t know. Out on Route 35 somewhere. Empire Self-Storage. We have three of them. It’s embarrassing.”
“I’m coming up there.”
“What?”
“I’ll get a flight, it’ll be … tonight or tomorrow morning.”
“Ray!”
“I’ll explain when I see you. It’s just that I heard something. It was about Ned. Maybe things happened differently than we thought.”
Silence.
“Jill?”
“I’m here.”
“You okay?”
“Let me know when you’re getting in.”
* * *
I go to meet Molly for a drink at six o’clock at a place on Third Avenue. I get there first, sit at the bar, and order a Bushmills. I’m anxious to share my plan about paying a visit to Jill’s with her. I also want to hear any news there might be about the congresswoman.
She walks into the bar a few minutes later, glances around, and spots where I am.
“Hey there,” she says and leans in for a kiss. She looks different. She’s wearing jeans and a short leather jacket.
“So, how was your day?” I ask.
She plants herself on the stool next to mine, puts her phone on the bar, sighs, and looks around for the bartender. He appears and she orders a Goose Island.
“How was my day?” she says. “Well, it started out great, then it got a little weird, then it got kind of awful. But I think it’s heading back to great again.”
“And the awful bit?”
“Stephanie. She’s sobered up, at least for the moment, but there’s something bugging her and I don’t know what it is, no one does. She seems depressed.”
“Could it be something to do with her dad?”
“I was thinking that, but … I couldn’t say it to anyone. The mood in the office is pretty grim. It’s as if we’re looking into the abyss. Everything is kind of on hold at the moment.”
“Maybe I could talk to her. She listens to me for some reason.”
“Yes.” Molly pokes me in the arm. “I’ve noticed.”
“You always thought I was an interfering jerk, didn’t you?”
She makes a face. “Come on, you know how it is. Message control is a delicate business.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
The bartender arrives with her drink.
“So, did you pop one of those, what are they called … Dr. Proctor’s Astounding Pep Pills?”
“No,” I say, taking a sip of Bushmills. “I wanted to.”
I tell her about Empire Self-Storage and my plan to head up to Boston tomorrow. I explain how I really need to understand what’s going on.
“That makes sense,” she says. “How long are you going for?”
“I don’t know. Tomorrow’s what, Saturday? Just the day, I guess. Back tomorrow night.”
“You want company?”
* * *
At the airport the next morning, Molly gets a text saying that Clay Proctor has just been taken to the hospital. She sees the concern on my face and immediately texts back for more.
“He’s in a coma.”
“Shit.”
We look at each other.
“Oh, Ray.”
“Is this because he doesn’t have his pills?”
“He gave them to you. He knew what he was doing.”
“I know.”
We say nothing for a while, airport stuff going on around us.
“What do you want to do?” she says eventually.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you still want to go?”
I think about it. “There’s no point in staying here if he’s in a coma. In fact, it’s all the more reason to go and find out what I can.” I pause. “You don’t have to come, though.”
“I want to.”
During the flight, I fill her in on some details about my father. Not long ago, if the subject of Tom ever came up, I would have dismissed him as an asshole and moved on. But I can’t really do that anymore. He was an asshole, but now it all feels a bit more complicated than that. I barely know anything about his early life—or about our mom’s, for that matter—just the stuff you pick up along the way. He was from Long Island. He did two tours in Vietnam. When he came back, he got a degree in engineering, then worked as some kind of a technician—I think. By the time Jill and I came along, he
was running a small construction business. The main thing I remember about him from when I was small is the shouting—the raw face, red with rage, the open mouth, the spittle, the door slamming.
Stop it.
Shut up.
Get out.
Fuck you.
Drop dead.
He never hit us, or our mom, but his presence in the house was toxic. When I was older, I realized he was a big drinker and that this was part of the problem. But it wasn’t everything, by any means. He was angry and bitter, and in the end I basically had no relationship with him at all. I didn’t know him. I didn’t get anything from him. He made our mom miserable and I hated him.
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. And at the back of all this was a vague, whispered story about his father jumping out a fourteenth-story window in Manhattan when Tom was only six or seven years old. I never thought of it as an excuse, or even an explanation. It always just confused me.”
“When did he die?”
“Dad? About ten years ago.”
She’s leaning her head on my shoulder. I stare straight ahead. My eyes sting and my throat feels a little raw. If I wasn’t sitting on a fucking plane right now, I’m not sure I’d be able to keep this under control.
At Logan, we rent a car and head out to West Roxbury. Jill is an actuary and does a lot of work from home. When we get there, she has lunch ready, some pasta and a salad. I texted her earlier to say that I was coming with a friend, so when she sees Molly, her interest skyrockets. But I don’t want her giving Molly the third degree, so I remind her that we’re only here for a few hours.
“Aw, Ray.” She drags the syllable out. “Josh and Ellie won’t be here until this evening. They’ll be so disappointed.”