“Now these particular calculations are going to be used in what we’re calling our gun experiment. Basically, we want to shoot two blobs of uranium-235 at each other, and we think if we can do it fast enough, then the one resulting hunk will be at critical mass—and that’s what will make our Gadget work. So, what you ladies are doing is very critical.” Feynman grimaced at his own pun, but Elizabeth didn’t think any of the other women understood it. “If the answers look good, we’ll try a small experiment with depleted uranium to get the mechanics down.”
None of the other people seemed to care or understand what the egghead du jour was talking about. Elizabeth listened to everything.
“All right, ladies,” Feynman continued. “The numbers I’ll be giving you correspond to initial neutron velocities and material temperatures. Get ready, and have fun. I’ll ring the bell every ninety seconds to let you know when to transfer your result—that should give you plenty of time to check your calculations.”
At the bell, Elizabeth knew that she had another ten minutes before the first number would work its way through the chain of calculations to reach her position in the string of workers. She kept her eyes averted from Feynman.
She wondered if anyone else might have been desperate enough to steal into the locked offices and change their particular assignments. She dismissed the thought after looking around the room; the rest of the women—they didn’t mind being called “girls”—stared at their work, oblivious to Feynman’s teasing. To the rest of them, this was just assisting the war effort, as much as assembling bomb casings or sewing infantry uniforms. They had no grasp of the big picture.
Feynman looked directly at her for the first time; he winked to show he had known she was there all along. Elizabeth tried to ignore him, but she felt her face grow red.
At any time he could divulge what she had done, that she had falsified her records, that she didn’t belong here inside the fence. And if anyone thought to question her, she would have no answers to give them….
“Elizabeth! Hey, Liz-here!”
“Uh? Oh, sorry.” Elizabeth grabbed the sheet thrust at her. She had not heard the bell ring and had forgotten where she sat. The metal fans continued to make noise, but the air felt too thick for it to stir. Feynman stood at the front of the room watching a miniature hourglass dripping ninety seconds worth of sand. Von Neumann had vanished, probably to work on his own calculations. Elizabeth glanced down at the paper. Written on it was:
v(r) = 137, T = 28
She plugged the values into the lengthy equation written on yet another sheet of paper. If only her college physics work had been so simplistic. Seconds later she ran through the algebra and produced another set of values, which she wrote down on a fresh sheet of paper.
She started to set down her pencil and hand the paper to the woman on her right when a thought struck her. What was to keep her from introducing her own errors? To muck things up a little bit. It would take the scientists a while to unravel the problems, to double-check the work. In the meantime, she could be delaying the development of the atomic bomb.
The thought stunned her. Could she change the future? She needed only to stall the work by a few weeks—when Fat Man and Little Boy had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Germany had already fallen and Japan was trying to surrender. A delay of even a handful of days might make the destruction of all those human beings unnecessary. By changing a minus sign or two, she could save a few million lives!
If the atomic bomb could be demonstrated, during peacetime, as part of an exhibition of the potential horrors of nuclear war, then maybe the superpowers would sign immediate agreements to halt, or at least control, their research. The shock that led to the terrible Cold War paranoia would not be nearly so severe.
She could make a difference now. Would she be able to change the future? It couldn’t hurt, no matter what. She need to buy only a few weeks.
The bell rang. Elizabeth tapped her pencil against her lips. The women around her started passing their papers… Elizabeth moved the decimal points on her answers one digit to the right, making each number ten times larger than what she had calculated. She would have to be consistently off from now on, or else the sabotaged answers would stick out too plainly.
Without hesitating, she passed the altered paper to her right. When she accepted the paper from her left, Elizabeth felt confident in what she had to do.
Kirk Hackett felt good about his munitions laboratory, pleased that high-level interest was starting to center on his work. He hadn’t been up on the Hill for more than a few months at the Impact Studies lab when people started coming to him for answers rather than telling him what to do.
After leaving the service five years before as an ordnance man at Sandia Base in Albuquerque, Hackett had continued to serve as a consultant to the Army using his high-explosive expertise. Now that he had been snatched up for the Project and his family relocated to the Hill, Hackett was finally getting his lab into shape. He felt good about working with his superior, George Kistiakowski, the man in charge of all explosives for the Project. Kistiakowski had once used some TNT lifted from the ordnance bunkers to blast clear a ski slope for the Project scientists. Hackett didn’t feel he could get away with anything like that. Not yet.
Lately, more and more scientists had been coming to the lab, taking advantage of his unique facility without understanding what they were doing. It would have been all right if they just asked Hackett to help, asked him to prepare their experiments—but too many of them, tired of spending too much time scribbling theories, wanted to work hands-on with their own schemes. It was like playing to them. Nobody seemed to realize that having a Ph.D. didn’t make one an expert in everything.
Hackett watched the latest intrusion with his arms crossed and a scowl on his face. It was obvious that this crazy Hungarian didn’t have a clue about what he should be doing. But the Hungarian was some sort of bigwig in Project hierarchy, and Hackett had to let him do what he wanted. Hackett had protested to Oppenheimer—he didn’t feel comfortable calling him “Oppie” ye—but the chief scientist had just smiled around his pipe and told Hackett to be patient. “Some of the scientists need a lot of patience. That one’s a loner, but you couldn’t ask for anyone more brilliant.”
And now, armed with a batch of calculations, the Hungarian scientist waved his arms and insisted that the depleted uranium gun experiment be rearranged, reconfigured to adhere to the latest theoretical results. His theoretical results, checked by some kid named Feynman. So Hackett had reassembled the experiment according to the scientist’s wishes. It didn’t look right, but the models had given the scientist all sorts of numbers to prove everything.
Speaking with a thick accent in his very deep voice, the Hungarian insisted that a steel shield be inserted in front of the gun, just in case the experiment went amiss. Hackett shrugged and complied.
The scientist walked with an exaggerated limp, moving to stand behind the shield, close to the experiment, as Hackett set the fast cameras that would show the depleted uranium spherical pieces flying toward each other, propelled by the detonation into one big lump. Hackett had conducted hundreds of such experiments, all with different explosive charges, so he was not concerned about the Hungarian’s safety—why should this experiment be any different? Didn’t they have their precious calculations to prove everything? The only change this time was in the shape of the uranium lumps that would be shot together. They were fashioned in what the Hungarian called a self-forging configuration.
Hackett yelled at the Hungarian to put on protective goggles. Without a word of acknowledgment, the crazy scientist yanked the lenses over his eyes. With a shrug, Hackett pulled on his own goggles, then started the klaxon, warning people inside the lab of the impending shot. The Hungarian crouched behind the two-inch-thick steel guard. As the countdown continued, Hackett twitched his thumb on the detonator. At zero he pushed the button and an explosion filled the lab. His ears rang.
Nothin
g unusual.
Standing up, Hackett peered through the smoke. He waved a hand in front of his face and coughed. “Well I’ll be damned.”
A hole some three inches in diameter had been punched through the steel plate. Curved shrapnel looked like flower petals blossoming out from the back side of the metal. Hackett frowned. Usually, the explosive charge left nothing more than a large pit on the front, not even with twice the explosive charge.
“Hey, Doc—you see that?”
When he didn’t get an answer, Hackett scrambled around the still-smoking assembly. On the opposite side of the protective plate, the Hungarian physicist lay on his back, thrown halfway across the room from the impact. Blood oozed from his rib cage, seeping into the dry concrete floor.
“Well I’ll be damned.” In his shock, Hackett couldn’t think of anything better to say.
For the first time since Elizabeth had been coming to the calculation group, von Neumann was late. She had been altering her calculations for more than a week now, and she looked forward to the daily work, where she could make her small differences, chipping away at the Manhattan Project.
Early in the morning, Elizabeth thought she had heard alarms from inside the Technical Area, but no one could be sure. The women waited in the room, seated at their desks, for a good fifteen minutes before anybody suggested that someone find out what was happening. One woman opened a window. None of them looked willing to go check until Elizabeth ran out of patience. She strode out of the building.
The Tech Area was clear of people inside its barbed-wire fence, as though everyone had packed up and walked away. Von Neumann’s office was empty. Elizabeth wandered over by Oppenheimer’s office inside the fence—the Project director kept a room both inside and outside of the classified Tech Area so that anyone on the Hill could have access to him. The office was deserted as well, but Elizabeth didn’t think she would have the nerve to talk to Oppenheimer anyway.
Frowning, she stalked to the meeting hall. The scientists usually gathered there for Monday morning colloquia, a tradition Oppenheimer had established so that technical interchange would flourish within the Project. But this was Wednesday, and she had not heard of any meeting being called.
As Elizabeth approached she could hear angry voices coming from the open door. She slowed her pace, stopping outside of the wooden pre-fab building. She could hear Oppenheimer’s cultured voice pleading with someone, “… a week at the most.”
“But surely someone checked the figures! It’s inconceivable that a three order of magnitude error could slip past! Aren’t all the calculations run through twice?”
Oppenheimer, wearily: “And to reiterate, the procedure will be changed, using two separate and independent teams to check the computational group’s results. The fallacy was to allow the same group to check its own work. So please, there is nothing more we can do. In the meantime, Dr. Teller’s family will appreciate your prayers.” A moment of silence followed.
“All right, if there are no further questions, let’s get back to work. I’ll call a town meeting at lunch to inform everyone else. Because he was so well-known, we may have to come up with some sort of false press release. I’ll have to speak to General Groves about it.”
Elizabeth could hear the sound of chairs being pushed across the wooden floor as the scientists rose from their seats. She stepped back, not sure whether to run as men began leaving the meeting hall. No one spoke to her or even acknowledged that they saw her. They walked out, eyes to the ground.
Elizabeth searched the crowd. She spotted Graham Fox coming toward her. He looked sullen in his baggy clothes. He didn’t even smile as he looked at her. Elizabeth reached out and grabbed his arm. “Graham! What’s the matter?”
“Accidents happen. What do they expect?” Fox’s eyes grew wide. “They failed to tell you?”
“What? Tell me what?”
“Edward Teller.” Fox shook his head. “One of the theoretical physicists. You may have seen him—he had a limp, and a Hungarian accent? He… he tried to test one of the new gun schemes, wanted to be the first. Thought he could improve the gun kinematics for a theory he was working on.”
“What are you talking about?”
Fox shook his head. “The photos showed it all. Magnificent high-speed cameras. He created a self-forming fragment—like a bazooka bullet that jets out, only made out of depleted uranium, which is a very dense metal. The jet was able to punch through a protective plate made of solid steel.”
Elizabeth couldn’t say anything for a moment. Teller was one name she recognized—he had been called the Father of the H-bomb, he had co-founded the Lawrence Livermore Lab, and he had been one of the major advocates of the Star Wars defense program, the x-ray laser, Brilliant Pebbles. Elizabeth had fought against everything he had done—but Edward Teller was an idea man, not a hardware jockey.
“But what was a theoretician doing with the experiment?” she asked.
“Feynman’s results got him excited. The possibilities looked better than he expected. He tried to assemble the blasted thing himself.”
Elizabeth took a step back. “But Teller… he isn’t supposed to die.” She recalled the Livermore protest back in 1983, the time she had been arrested. Teller had lived to a very old age. She remembered marching with the other demonstrators, knowing that just inside the fence, old Teller was up in his ivory tower in Building 111, concocting new ways to destroy the world.
He certainly couldn’t die in 1943, before he had made much of a name for himself. That made everything different.
Fox set his mouth. “Oppie tracked the error down to a misplaced decimal point. No one was at fault, it was a mistake anyone could make. But because the group who checked the numbers was the same group that performed the original calculations, the mistake slipped past them a second time.”
Elizabeth could barely contain the conflicting emotions within her. “But what about the rest of the Project?”
“Oh, don’t worry.” Fox glanced up and narrowed his eyes. He looked around and spoke quietly, sounding bitter. “The work goes on. Teller might have been one of our brightest theoreticians, but the bloody Gadget must be built. The show must go on.”
Fox walked away with the rest of the scientists. Elizabeth leaned back against the door of the meeting hall. I’ve really done it, she thought. I’ve changed history.
But now what was going to happen?
She felt caught in a vice—the exhilaration of being able to change things was tempered by the realization that she had killed someone. Through her tampering with numbers, she had caused a fatal mistake. Would the change be for the better, or worse?
So why wasn’t she ecstatic? The man responsible for developing the hydrogen bomb, the very instrument of death that had escalated the arms race, the billion-dollar buildup of weapons, the nuclear weapons research at Livermore, California—now Teller would never be able to accomplish all that. She could consider herself responsible for wiping clean the slate of inhumanity, perhaps giving the future a real future.
Giving Jeff a second chance. The Jeff in this timeline. He wouldn’t have to die to prevent something that never occurred in the first place.
But as she watched the grim-faced scientists slog back to work, she could tell by their expressions that they had no intention of stopping because of an accident, any more than the future Los Alamos would stop the MCG test because of the deaths of some old scientist and a few technicians. Perhaps the Manhattan Project workers were even more determined to succeed.
Elizabeth would always think of Teller in his tall building behind the restricted-area fence, as she and the other members of the Livermore Challenge Group marched up and down with their banners outside the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, trying to get someone to listen to their pleas.
In her new timeline, the Manhattan Project would continue, even without Edward Teller.
8
Livermore, California
April 1983
“I have fe
lt it myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to it as a scientist, to feel it’s there in your hands to release the energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding, to perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is responsible for all our troubles, I would say, this… technical arrogance that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”
—Freeman Dyson
Actions speak louder than words. Thoreau might have been content to sit at Walden Pond and write about civil disobedience. Elizabeth Devane had always wanted to do something more tangible. She and others in the Livermore Challenge Group felt their conscience was more important than any laws they might be breaking.
On the morning of the scheduled protest, most of her companions in the van sat in silence, lulled toward sleep as the van moved along the interstate. The sun had not yet risen. Though Jeff dozed beside her, leaning against her shoulder, Elizabeth felt too keyed-up to relax. Everything about this day mattered too much. It was her first major blow against the research that had almost lured her away from an acceptable life.
Since joining the Livermore Challenge Group, Elizabeth had done her bit standing on street corners in Berkeley, handing out leaflets to people who didn’t really care. On the other corners up and down Telegraph Avenue other demonstrators were passing out their leaflets too, side by side with people handing out coupons for pizza restaurants. Many of the students were interested, she knew, but they frequently suffered from activism burn-out, with too many causes to fight for and too many organizations asking for donations. Would it be El Salvador this week, or the homeless, or Ethiopian famine relief, or Amnesty International?
But the gigantic Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was right in their own backyard, less than an hour’s drive from Berkeley. There, within the mile-square fence, scientists developed generation after generation of nuclear weapons, high yield or low yield, multiple warheads, surveillance systems, death-beam lasers, and who knew what else. Elizabeth couldn’t ignore it. She had fled the defense contractors and the nuclear support industry in Los Angeles, but it seemed she couldn’t escape. As soon as she began to pay attention, the pervasiveness of defense work shocked her.
The Trinity Paradox Page 11