“Uh, thanks,” Elizabeth said. “I talked to him yesterday but forgot to ask his name.” The other men had already become absorbed in their technical journals again.
Fox spoke around his meal after an uncomfortable silence. “I really imagined this place would feel like more of a university town.”
“What do you mean?” Elizabeth nodded to the men still immersed in their technical papers. “Seems pretty close to me.”
“No, not that. It’s the feel of it. Look around you. People are wrapped up in their journals or moving at breakneck speed. A university town is supposed to be more relaxed, a place where people can ponder the implications of their discoveries. Sit under a tree with a blade of grass between one’s teeth, and simply think about the nature of the universe. Here, everyone appears to have a hot foot all the time.”
Elizabeth took a deliberate bite of food. Sit around under a tree? Fox must not have been going for an MBA! She didn’t want to jump into a debate on what Los Alamos should be like—not at this point.
Fox pushed back from the table. “But on the other hand, I imagine the research here is more directed than what you’d find at a university. More focused.” He shook his head. “And if it’s all to beat the Nazis to the punch, then it’s probably the only way to run a research establishment. Too bad. With all these bright lads around, some pondering would probably be better for us in the long run.”
Elizabeth put down her hamburger. “Do you really think we have so much to worry about from the German atom bomb program?”
Fox snorted. “From what I hear tell, the Nazis are about to make a breakthrough. After all, they had a corner on nuclear physics, and a two-year start on us. All the great ones from Hahn and Strassman to Heisenberg are working on their project.”
Elizabeth shook her head, suddenly remembering her list. It wasn’t often she knew enough to say something in a conversation around here. “Don’t worry about Heisenberg. He’s screwed something up, cross-section data I think. Botched calculations.”
Two of the men at their table looked up sharply. Fox narrowed his eyes. “What? Where did you hear this?”
Elizabeth grew red. She lowered her voice, trying to back out of what she had said. “Oh, just a hypothetical situation. But it’s perfectly reasonable, isn’t it? I’m sure their program is going to fizzle.” Elizabeth returned to eating her sandwich. She felt herself sweating.
“Do you know what you said?” Fox persisted.
Elizabeth breathed deeply through her nose. “Look, I’m only a file clerk, remember? How the hell should I know?”
Fox kept quiet. She felt him studying her, trying to come up with an answer; but he couldn’t possibly guess the truth. Then he nodded and dropped his voice. “I think I understand.”
Glancing up, Elizabeth noticed that he no longer looked at her, but instead stared off at a blank wall, eyes focused to infinity. She could not tell how to interpret his expression. She never wanted to bring up the subject again.
5
Los Alamos
July 1943
“In certain circumstances, this [proof of nuclear fission] might lead to the construction of bombs which would be extremely dangerous in general and particularly in the hands of certain governments.”
—Leo Szilard
“We take the liberty of calling your attention to the newest development in nuclear physics, which, in our opinion, will probably make it possible to produce an explosive many orders of magnitude more powerful than the conventional ones… The country which first makes use of it has an unsurpassable advantage over the others.”
—Paul Harteck and Wilhelm Groth, initial letter to the German War Office
R and R: Rest and Recreation. He would go crazy if he didn’t get away from the bloody Project.
The road out of the bustling, primitive town of Los Alamos plunged down the mesa like something constructed for an amusement park, then wound back up for the thirty-five-mile trek to Santa Fe. Graham Fox watched the landscape unfold as the dusty bus chugged past the small towns of Tesuque and Cuyamungue, then through the Nambe and Rio Grande valleys. As the bus strained up the last hill before Santa Fe, someone pointed out the silhouette of the Sandia mountains jutting up seventy miles to the south, near Albuquerque.
A few days ago the scenery had looked totally alien to Fox, something that existed only in cowboy movies. If he had seen a painting of the startling contrast between turquoise skies and red and golden clay, he would have considered the painter an impressionist with a garish palette. The air smelled sharp, the wind felt dry. His lips and hands had begun to chap as soon as he disembarked from the train in Santa Fe station.
This place seemed to belong on a different planet from serene, civilized Cambridge, England. At any moment he half expected a band of wild Indians to ride over the clipped-off mesas. But was a frontier town full of nuclear scientists any less bizarre?
Fox tried to tear his mind away from the letter in his pocket, concentrating instead on the distant mountains. In England the farthest distance he could see was up to the nearest grove of trees. The hills there had been soft, rolling, lush and green. In contrast, New Mexico had unlimited visibility, with a clean starkness that hurt the eyes.
But J. Robert Oppenheimer had found no better place to establish a new town whose purpose was to meet the grandest challenge of science. From his security indoctrination, Fox knew that the boys’ school on the site had been purchased in secret by the War Office, the solitary teacher and his small group of students packed off without any explanation, and Los Alamos had been set up virtually overnight. Right in the middle of America’s legendary wide-open spaces.
Maybe that was the real reason Oppenheimer had decided to set the Project here. Not so much for the solitude—from what Fox had heard, West Virginia or China Lake in California would have served as well—but other locations might place too much pressure on the scientists, box them into traditional ways of thinking. No, the limitless view had the psychological effect of keeping the scientists unbridled, uncontained with enormous ideas that could end up destroying the world. And Fox had been chosen to lend his talents, whether he wanted to or not.
Fox fingered his letter. The stationery felt thin and simple, but the words were so dangerous. Just bringing the letter out of the fenced compound went against all instructions the G-2, the Army Intelligence people, had been feeding him the past week. “All correspondence is to be submitted to the security detail with envelopes unsealed. Failure to cooperate will result in a direct violation of the Espionage Act.”
Espionage Act! The whole situation seemed ludicrous. Fox felt caught between paranoia and laughter at the absurdity of it. How could they in all honesty suspect a relationship that had already lasted fifteen years, one that had been cemented long before Chancellor Hitler began his rampage across Europe?
Fox’s Ph.D. studies at Cambridge had brought him into contact with several international students. After all, his teacher, Rutherford, was a world-renowned physicist; studying under him had marked Graham Fox as a rising star. It was something ordinary students only dreamed about.
Fox had become fast friends with Abraham Esau, a young German student. They had lived together in the boardinghouse, sharing the single water closet down the hall; they had played typical pranks together, until they had been sobered by the boating accident that left Esau’s lip scarred. Later, despite his growing preoccupation with the National Socialist Party, Esau had arranged for Fox to complete his post-doctoral work in Göttingen under Sommerfeld himself.
After Fox’s post-doctoral study, the two friends had corresponded for years, exchanging results of their latest work. They shared the excitement of Dirac’s relativistic field theory, the discovery of spinor mathematics… to them, physics was apolitical, a true bridge between cultures. Did an atomic nucleus care about inequities in the Treaty of Versailles? No matter what governments might squabble about, physics remained immutable. Fox admired that. Esau had always agreed with hi
m.
And now, because of the war, his friendship with Esau had become illegal. Fox wanted to write his old companion, tell him that their communications must stop, but he had reluctantly adhered to the rules. Letters between himself and Esau had dwindled over the past few years, since Germany had declared war on the U.S. after the Pearl Harbor attack. But Fox’s friendship had never stopped, and he knew Esau must feel the same.
A colleague at William and Mary College had agreed to mail Fox’s letters to another colleague in Mexico, where in turn they would be sent to Norway, then forwarded to one of the occupied countries. A letter might take months to cover this circuitous route, but Fox and Esau kept their communication open.
And pointedly nonpolitical.
Fox’s leanings were certainly not toward Germany—but they did not rest blindly with the Allies either. He had heard much talk of a single world government lately. In Fox’s view, any one independent government was as bad as any other, especially if both used their weapons for mass destruction. Look at the horrible poison gas weapons used during the Great War. The great physicist Otto Hahn himself had created those weapons—was that a fitting purpose for such a man to apply his mind?
As a physicist, he believed the world could flourish without political meddling. Governments demanded too much. Physicists knew how to handle relations between countries. After all, new scientific ideas and discoveries had been exchanged freely for years. It seemed that only the bureaucrats, the militarists, and—worst of all—the bean counters, could not accept the laws of Nature for what they were.
No one government should have an upper hand, an ace in the hole it could use to dominate anyone else. It would be like two men standing in a room with loaded pistols aimed at each other. No sane person would pull the trigger, for fear that both might die. But if only one man held a gun, he might be tempted to take a preemptive action. He would feel superior, with nothing to worry about…. How could the U.S. be trusted with a doomsday weapon such as the atomic bomb, when no other country could?
Fox feared the pace the American program was setting. Did the Germans know that Enrico Fermi’s reactor, constructed in secret under the squash court at the University of Chicago, had achieved a self-sustaining nuclear reaction? It had never been done before, and marked a true milestone in the history of physics—but the results had remained a tight secret. Such breakthroughs were not to be kept under lock and key!
Fermi had used a common substance—graphite of all things!—as a moderator to slow the neutrons down in natural uranium, making it possible for them to split the uranium-235 isotope and create more neutrons to keep the reaction going. Some nuclei of the overwhelming majority of uranium-238 absorbed a neutron, thereby transmuting into a new element, one step higher in the periodic table.
Thanks to the efforts of Leo Szilard, and his constant harping for secrecy from the Germans, the news that would ordinarily be reported in Physical Review now was shared among only a few scientists whose political views were considered acceptable. What trash! German scientists like Esau might never know the simple technique, and the warring countries would continue to threaten each other with nearly completed “secret weapons.”
He had been strongly tempted to write Esau then, to tell him of Fermi’s chain reaction. He had sweated for days, changing his mind over and over again, until finally his own fear had won. But the innocuous remark that woman Elizabeth Devane had made set him to thinking again. What if Werner Heisenberg had somehow mucked up the data? What if he had miscalculated cross-sections? It was certainly possible, even for a Nobel Prize winner. Normally the physics and experimental data would be checked and cross-checked at every point when such an important application hinged on the results. But when the most respected of all German physicists, the creator of the quantum Uncertainty relation himself, stood by his results, no one chose to question him in the secrecy of war.
Fox snorted. Elizabeth Devane would have had no way of knowing… yet she had struck him as odd, the carefully prepared and trained person, so cleverly disguised that no one would suspect. Wasn’t that the way spies worked? In an undertaking as huge as the Manhattan Project, Fox thought it unrealistic that the Nazis had planted no informant. And what better cover than as an unobtrusive filing clerk who happened to have a physics background much more extensive than seemed reasonable for a simple woman? Elizabeth could quietly keep track of everything going on at Los Alamos and report back to Berlin at her convenience.
He mused about what she had said. What if Heisenberg was working for the Allies, sabotaging his research to keep Hitler’s work far behind what the others could accomplish? What if Elizabeth’s information went to the wrong people, the true Nazi warmongers, not trusted scientists like Abraham Esau?
The whole idea was preposterous. But yet… how had Elizabeth even imagined such a thing? What did she know?
That image of two men with loaded pistols seemed dangerously stabilizing when compared with a monopoly of power on either side. Equally matched, the two sides would be forced toward peace; given a bigger stick than anyone else in the world, even the most democratic nation would turn into a playground bully.
Fox knew it was dangerous to contact Esau at all, but this new insight was just too important not to pass on. The news of Fermi’s reaction had almost been enough incentive, almost, and Elizabeth’s comment had added the extra bit to tip the scales. He tucked the letter back in his jacket pocket.
The bus jarred Fox as it hit a pothole. The windows rattled and the springs creaked. Santa Fe spread out in front of him in all its historical aplomb. Brown adobe buildings lined the street, splashed with color from bundles of red chili pepper hung by doorways. Colorful Mexican tiles encircled the round-cornered windows. As stark decoration, black wrought-iron gates and bars adorned some of the houses.
A young man stood up at the front of the bus. Although dressed in typical civilian attire of white shirt, baggy gray pants, and a thin dark tie, the man seemed out of place. His mannerisms gave off an invisible signal that said “military,” G-2—not just another Nice Young Man who seemed anxious to help the scientists feel at ease on their R-and-R outing. This was, after all, the American celebration of Independence Day. Independence from Britain—Fox found that ironic. The G-2 man would probably have every person on the bus watched all day. The man cleared his throat and tried to speak over the grumbling of the bus’s engine.
“We’ll stop at 109 East Palace, Mrs. McKibbin’s place, where you all checked in before coming to the Hill. The bus will head back at 1900—that’s seven o’clock tonight, for you civilians.”
Or for anyone not used to European time, Fox thought.
“If you need assistance,” the man continued, “Mrs. McKibbin can help you. Remember not to talk with strangers about who you are or what you do. Have your new name ready in case you’re asked. Don’t reveal a whit—not even if you get arrested. We’ll take care of everything. Remember, German agents have probably infiltrated Santa Fe, and we don’t want to give them any more information than they already have. Any questions?”
Fox fingered his letter to Abraham Esau through his pocket; the note seemed to burn a hole in the material. What if they searched him? He tried to breathe normally, not to give a clue that anything was the matter.
This must be the last of it, he vowed to himself. No more. If I’m found even holding this letter, my head will be on the chopping block.
He had thought about getting to Albuquerque to mail the message, but transportation there was very limited. He couldn’t slip away for so long, not with badge checks and accountability back on Project. Military G-2 types were probably stashed away at the bus depot and the train station, just watching. Any attempt to leave Santa Fe would no doubt bring them running.
Fox fidgeted in the cold sweat of fear. Through the briefings and cautions he had received, the seriousness of the situation had never seemed real. It had been like a child’s game of I’ve Got a Secret—keep quiet and tell no one what yo
u’re doing, then everything should turn out all right.
But now, faced with the possibility of getting caught, he felt a knot in his stomach. Was this worth the trouble? Yes, Fox thought. The balance of the world is at stake.
He forced himself to look out the dusty window as the other scientists and Army workers filed off the bus. Fox ignored the smiling young man standing at the front, still waiting for anyone to ask him a question.
The bus had pulled up to 109 East Palace. Fox had been there only a week before. Departing from the train that had taken him cross-country, he had asked directions until he found the quaint adobe house. At that address he had introduced himself to a Mrs. McKibbin; though the woman didn’t know him from Adam, she had made him feel at home. She hadn’t been expecting him in particular, she said, but so many people came and went, with her as their contact point, that she couldn’t keep track anymore. And everybody traveled under false identities anyway.
Fox stepped off the bus in the middle of the crowd. He avoided the other people’s eyes—particularly the Nice Young Man who watched the scientists disperse into the Santa Fe streets. Most of them would be going to cafes, or shopping trips, or to spend some time in an approved club drinking to the Stars and Stripes or arguing about the continuing American assault on the Solomon Islands.
Dust swirled through the air, kicked up by a summer wind that tumbled down from the mountains. The stinging dust forced people to duck their heads and keep the dirt out of their eyes. A newspaper skittered by. Fox held a hand up to his face. The bus was virtually invisible in the sudden storm.
He took advantage of the cover and strolled away from the activity. Narrow unpaved streets ran at crooked angles to East Palace. He turned at the second street—an alley—and quickened his pace. He could ask directions and find his way back later. Now he just wanted to be out of sight.
The Trinity Paradox Page 7