“Are we ready to begin?” he asked.
The others looked to Hahn, who handed his notebook to someone else. “Yes. First we must add our neutron source. Spontaneous neutrons should be sufficient, but this will make sure the reaction commences.” He raised an eyebrow. “We are tossing our first marble into the room, Professor Esau.”
Esau nodded.
“Then we will drop the remaining uranium oxide rods into the pile. This should bring us to criticality. The reaction will be self-sustaining.”
Esau folded his arms across his chest. “You may proceed.” But Hahn had already gone to the equipment piled along the walls, opening a small wooden case lined inside with lead foil. He withdrew a thin glass cylinder.
“This neutron source contains radon gas and beryllium powder. You may find it ironic that the Nazis confiscated it from the laboratories of Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie in Paris.”
Diebner laughed. He had taken many of the Joliot-Curie notes from their laboratories, claiming the discoveries as his own. No one else said anything.
Hahn climbed the ladder to the top half of the graphite pile rising from the pit in the floor. Suspending the glass tube from a thin chain, he dangled it and let the neutron source slide down into the central hole. The clicking of the counters increased. Hahn looked over his shoulder at them. “That is as we expected. Everything is now in place.”
Esau felt nervousness chewing inside of him. “Fine. We are already behind the Americans. No use wasting time. Let’s see if the reactor works.” He listened to the counters rattling and thought of Hahn’s mousetraps.
Paul Harteck spoke up. “Would everyone please step behind the shielding wall? The leaded glass observation windows should protect you.” No one needed to be reminded twice.
“Perhaps we should proceed an inch at a time,” Hahn said, coming around behind the wall. “We will gain more information that way.”
Esau crowded up so he could see through the narrow window. “We can repeat the experiment later if you require such niceties. For now, we must see if all of us have a future here! If we do not show success with this, certain people will be very upset.” He turned to von Weizsacker. “Lower the uranium oxide.”
Von Weizsacker looked to Hahn, then Diebner, as if searching for someone to counteract Esau’s orders, but no one would speak out loud. Some of the assistants edged toward the door. Von Weizsacker released the catch on the chain, letting the six rods of uranium oxide fall into place inside the pile, bringing the pile beyond its critical limit.
The neutron counters went wild, rattling and roaring. Any attempt to keep track of individual counts failed in an instant. Esau could see no apparent difference from watching the pile.
“The reaction is self-sustaining!” Hahn cried.
Paul Harteck stood on the opposite side of the room behind another barricade, staring down at his counter. He had to shout over the noise of the cheering and the neutron counters. “It is still climbing.”
The pile looked unchanged, but the neutron counters insisted that something wondrous kept happening at the core. They had succeeded! With only minimal information, they had reproduced the triumph of Enrico Fermi a few months earlier. Perhaps the German program would not remain so far behind at all. He couldn’t wait to send a telegram to Reichminister Speer.
The counters continued to buzz with their bombardment of flying neutrons. The air itself felt hot to Esau.
“It is still climbing!” Harteck repeated. This time his voice held a greater urgency.
Hahn did not seem alarmed. He gestured to von Weizsacker and raised his voice. “Remove the rods. We now know it will work.”
Von Weizsacker released his emergency lever and the counterweight fell a few inches. The chain grew taut with a metallic ringing, but the six uranium oxide rods remained in place within the pile.
Everyone instantly fell silent. Von Weizsacker yanked on the chain, adding his strength to the counterweight. “Thermal effects!” he said. “The rods have expanded with the heat. They’re snug inside the holes and we can’t get them out. Stupid!”
“Pull!” Esau shouted. He kept remembering Hahn’s mousetraps and the marbles flying through the air, all released at once.
“It would be good to stop this now,” Hahn said with a ragged edge to his voice.
“If the reaction continues, it will melt the rods, maybe even the uranium metal. It could start the graphite on fire,” von Weizsacker said.
“All the readings are completely off scale,” Harteck shouted across the room. “We never thought it would be like this.”
“Dump the barrel!” Diebner shouted. “Use the boric acid!” He ran to the release cord himself.
“No!” Esau clapped his hands. “That will ruin everything!”
Esau added his own weight to von Weizsacker’s, pulling to draw the uranium oxide rods upward. Hahn also helped. Together they strained, and the top layer of graphite bricks buckled, shifted apart, and finally the uranium oxide rods jerked upward, glowing a dull red. Black bricks of graphite slid from the top of the pile, knocking others out of place.
The neutron counters slowed from a sound like crackling fire to a random patter of clicks. Paul Harteck slumped to the floor behind his small barricade and sat down without heed to the graphite dust on the boards.
“Well that was interesting,” Hahn said.
“It was just a start,” Esau said, raising his voice so they could hear him. He slapped one fist against the palm of his hand. “But now we are on our way.”
10
Los Alamos
December 1943
“When the clouds opened up over the target at Nagasaki, the target was there, pretty as a picture. I made the run, let the bomb go. That was my greatest thrill.”
—USAF Captain Beehan
“Now I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.”
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
Autumn colors had turned the cottonwoods and alders around Los Alamos a brilliant yellow, but the pinon, ponderosa pine, and mesquite remained dark green. The rocks were tan, streaked with blood-colored stains.
Elizabeth sat with Fox on a pile of boulders under a broad cottonwood, eating a lunch she had packed for the two of them. It made her feel annoyingly domestic to do so. The wind made a loud whisper through the trees, but the rest of the world lay in heavy silence around them.
“Nobody tells me anything,” Elizabeth said after a long lull in their conversation. “They treat me like a stupid clerk, when I know as much about what they’re doing as anyone else.” She pulled out the green ribbon Mrs. Canapelli had insisted she wear in her hair, letting the long reddish strands fall loose and free. “I try to talk about the war with some of the other women, and they couldn’t care less! Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin just met in Teheran—the women I work with didn’t even know where Teheran was!”
Fox glanced sidelong at her. He had always refrained from asking questions of her, though he must know something was amiss with her. He said, “You are quite unusual, Elizabeth. You do have a more intuitive grasp of physics than half the people here, and you don’t just let the men do all the talking about politics. Maybe you’d best watch yourself. You’ll begin to stand out, and you don’t want that.”
“What?” Elizabeth raised her eyebrows, wondering what he was thinking. Terror spun through her, but he couldn’t possibly know who she was.
“I said intuitive grasp. Not women’s intuition—that’s altogether different. You catch on to an idea and extrapolate conclusions better than most of the physicists I know.”
“Thanks.” She leaned back on an elbow, still uneasy. “So why the compliments? And why now?”
Fox smiled thinly. “Maybe it is the season. A girl is like Nature, showing a side of herself that changes in time. Who would have thought these aspens would turn a brilliant yellow—or that a pretty girl like you could be so complex, so deep.”
Elizabeth cringed at being called a girl. But Graham Fox,
with his suave British accent, was no lounge lizard on the make. He was… sincere. This placed Fox in an entirely new light for her. She decided to change the subject to something just as dangerous, but in a different way.
“Um, so, has the project slowed down at all with the death of Teller?” Elizabeth tried to keep her voice conversational to cover how eager she was to find out what she herself had changed.
Fox looked across the canyon, toward the finger of the mesa known as Bathtub Row, where the most important scientists occupied small homes originally built for the boys’ school, each equipped with its own bathtub and plumbing.
“No,” he said, then shook his head. Fox sounded downcast, which surprised her. She had shaken him out of his romantic thoughts. “Teller was merely a theoretician, and Oppie allowed him to work alone on a fusion bomb idea. I doubt that that’s practical for at least another decade.
“Work on the actual Gadget is going as it should. We’re just waiting for plutonium from the Hanford, Washington, plants and enriched uranium from Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” He sighed. “Teller may have been brilliant indeed, but at this point we can recover from losing him.”
Fox bit his lip. “Now Oppenheimer—he is the fulcrum on which everything pivots. Oppie knows all the scientists, he is familiar with what they’re working on. He understands the problems. He knows how difficult the calculations are. He keeps his office door open, and anyone can talk to him. He listens.
“But he’s also got the ear of General Groves, who’s pushed everyone to the edge, demanding results. The scientists wouldn’t be able to tolerate Groves for a single day. Oppie’s the perfect bridge between the government and the scientists. Without him, the Project would fall flat on its face.”
Fox paused, refusing to look at her as he spoke. “Sometimes, I ponder what might have happened if he had been standing behind the projectile test instead of Teller.” Fox stared down at his half-eaten sandwich.
Elizabeth gazed off into the bright delineated canyon. She heard a few birds, and the wind rustling through the trees. Far off, the sounds of Los Alamos seemed distant and irrelevant.
During the winter’s first snowfall, gray clouds made the afternoon dreary and claustrophobic. Elizabeth stood wearing a borrowed pink sweater on the dormitory porch. The frantic pace of the Project grated like fingernails on a chalkboard, and she knew she had to get away, if only for a while.
The Los Alamos stables were on the other end of town, but Elizabeth didn’t mind walking there. She had put on the worn pair of jeans she had kept packed since the night she arrived here in 1943. It didn’t matter that the other women wore long skirts—she was not going to ride a horse in a dress.
The walls of the stable had been covered with scrap wood and pieces of corrugated sheet metal left over from the Quonset hut barracks. A few trees stood on either side of the building, but they hung still. No breeze caused the settling snowflakes to swirl in the air.
Elizabeth slipped through the half-open main doors and smelled horses, hay, and manure. Splashes of light spilled through the four-paned windows and the chinks in the walls. Dust motes trickled through the light.
“Can I help you, ma’am?”
She turned to see a gray-haired, dark-skinned Indian beside one of the horses. He stared at her with a perplexed but uninterested gaze. She had heard of Roger—who apparently had no last name—the Indian taking care of the dozen or so horses maintained for the people on the Project. Roger had worked on a dude ranch near Espanola and impressed Oppenheimer during one of his boyhood trips here; Oppie had pulled strings to get him transferred to Los Alamos.
“Yes, I need a horse saddled up,” Elizabeth answered. “I want to take a ride for the afternoon.”
Roger squinted as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Do you need an escort, ma’am? I’m sure we could find one of the guys who’d be willing to—”
“No! Thank you, but I’m perfectly capable of handling a horse myself.” She recited her cover story. “I come from Montana—you have to take a horse if you want to get anywhere.” In truth, she had done quite a lot of riding around the New Mexico mountains. If Jeff had known how to ride, they would not have needed to backpack all the way around to destroy the MCG site… so long ago.
“One of the Project scientists, uh, Dick Feynman, told me I was working too hard,” she continued. “Said I should take a few hours off, go for a horseback ride. It’ll feel good to be on a horse again.” Elizabeth didn’t know if Feynman’s name would carry any weight with Roger, but it couldn’t hurt. She didn’t want people to suspect that she might be thinking for herself—that didn’t seem to be expected of the women around Los Alamos.
Roger shrugged and put his callused hands on his hips, studying the horses in the stable. Elizabeth let her eyes adjust to the dimness. She wondered which one was Oppenheimer’s horse; she had not been able to see clearly in the dawn light when he had passed by and waved, months before.
“Let’s see,” Roger said to himself, “you don’t want to take Crisis, that’s George Kistiakowski’s. You probably couldn’t handle him. Oppie might take his own horse out… no, that’s tomorrow. He usually goes riding down into Bandelier. You could go there if you like. It’s designated a National Monument, but restricted to Project folks these days. It’s almost always empty, especially now that it’s getting cold.”
Roger hefted a saddle lying in the corner and staggered over to three horses that stood munching on a pile of hay in front of them. “Proton, Neutron, and Electron—these are sort of community horses. You’re welcome to take one of them.”
He set the saddle down beside a palomino that gleamed as if it had just been groomed, then picked up a red-and-white-checkered pad and straightened it on the palomino’s back.
“This one’s Proton. He’s probably your best bet.”
Roger hummed low in his throat as he draped the saddle over the pad. Elizabeth watched him, saying nothing, as he tightened the cinch strap, tugged on the stirrups, then mounted the headstall over Proton’s ears. Giving the palomino the bit, Roger handed the reins to Elizabeth.
“All yours, ma’am. Don’t ride him too hard.”
Elizabeth went to Proton, let him sniff her hands, and ran her palm over the pale patch of his nose. She stood on the left side, grabbed the reins and the palomino’s blond mane, then stepped into the stirrup. She swung over the horse’s back, adjusted her sweater, and squeezed Proton’s ribs with her thighs.
“Ah, yes,” she whispered to herself. “This’ll be fun.”
“Remind you of Montana?” Roger said, patting Proton on the flank to get him moving.
Elizabeth cantered the horse out of the stable doors and turned him around, feeling his strength under her, as if she were finally in control again.
The sky overhead still looked gray, and snow continued to fall, but it seemed a gentle snow, not a storm to be feared. Roger looked up at the clouds and nodded, but then turned to her. “You be back by dark. Make sure now, and be careful.”
Elizabeth crouched over the horse, putting her face beside its pale mane and its ears. Smiling, she urged the horse into a gallop away from the stables. Roger waved to her, but she was too engrossed in the ride to acknowledge him.
Proton seemed excited as he moved down the trail. Elizabeth felt the wind whipping her hair with cold gusts of impending winter. She shivered in her pink sweater, but it felt good.
She wanted to ride and keep moving, just to get away from the Project, but she had nowhere to run. She could never go back to her life before—she had not the slightest idea how that might be accomplished. She was stuck here in the past, but it didn’t matter so much anymore, not after six months. Her life had changed before, and she had adapted. She could change herself… and if that proved too difficult, she would just have to change her surroundings instead.
She left the clustered temporary buildings of Los Alamos behind and galloped along the trail. Without the dusty streets and soldiers and barbed-wire fences, the
wind brushed against her skin, and she inhaled deeply. The mountains were clean and filled with the hint of ozone. All seemed silent and pristine.
The paths had been used by the old Los Alamos boys’ school and some of the dude ranches; rangers from the Santa Fe National Forest patrolled them occasionally. Now, men taking a break from the Project rode around the mountains carrying rifles to shoot jackrabbits. Oppenheimer himself had spent much time in these mountains.
Elizabeth headed southeast toward where the town of White Rock would eventually be built. She thought of the sprawling Los Alamos National Laboratory that would creep out to here. Many of these areas had been restricted to her before.
Proton galloped along the trail. Snow fell and began to stick to the ground, whitewashing the landscape with a soft covering. As an hour went by, Elizabeth suddenly realized where her subconscious had led her.
She used the reins to tie Proton to a low mesquite bush. The wind had picked up, but the snow slackened off.
The sky looked a darker gray, and she had no doubt that it would keep snowing throughout the night.
She wondered what would happen if a real blizzard hit the fledgling town. In Elizabeth’s former life, the snow plows would be gearing up to clear the mountain roads, schools might close. If the routes got too bad, the scientists who lived in White Rock might have difficulty driving the ten miles up the Hill to Los Alamos. But now everything was deserted.
The walls of Pajarito Canyon towered high and steep, prehistoric in their total absence of any human marking. The Anasazi Indians had been here centuries before. In the main canyon of Bandelier National Monument, Frijoles Canyon, they had grown their beans and chills, raised their sheep. The Anasazi had left abandoned cliff dwellings, much like those at Mesa Verde in Colorado. The Anasazi had disappeared, though—vanished, just like all the equipment from the MCG test she and Jeff Maple had sabotaged in this very canyon.
The Trinity Paradox Page 14