The Trinity Paradox

by Kevin J. Anderson

  She hadn’t been back to Jeff’s grave in nearly half a year.

  Proton snorted and pulled back, dissatisfied and looking for something to do. The reins held, and he tilted his head up to eye Elizabeth.

  She stared down the length of the canyon. There, she could see the rough path she and Jeff had used to descend to the canyon floor, coming in behind the fences and waiting for the Los Alamos security men to depart, waiting for the time when they could destroy the equipment.

  Elizabeth hated everything that had made their actions necessary.

  She saw the mound of rocks she had piled over Jeff’s body. No one would ever come to take him away. Some of the rocks had been disturbed, possibly by coyotes or birds, but the grave seemed to be intact. A drifting of snow clung to it now; the storm would cover his burial place like a shroud.

  Elizabeth didn’t want to go closer. She hated to be afraid to come near Jeff, but she didn’t want to see what was left of his body. She wanted to remember him sleeping beside her, making love to her in anxious desperation on the night before the Livermore demonstration. She wanted to remember kissing him, brushing tongues on the canyon rim as they planned their descent and sabotage. She wanted to remember him holding the sledgehammer high like… Conan the Peace Activist.

  Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t like to think of hauling him to his grave, his eyes closed and burned from within, his skin melted from being caught on the edge of the explosion that had hurled her half a century back in time. She didn’t want to think of Jeff dead because of her, because of fighting the juggernaut of weapons research. All of it had started here, and now, in Los Alamos during World War II.

  She hunkered down on the cold ground and picked up a handful of loose stones. As if trying to wake Jeff, she tossed them toward the indentation in the cliff wall, scattering the pebbles on his cairn. His sacrifice had not made much difference.

  She remembered the Livermore protest. It hadn’t made any difference either.

  She had tried more and more desperate acts. Here in 1943, in the heart of the Manhattan Project, she had done even more. Her miscalculations had led to the death of Edward Teller. But the Project still moved along. The war still went on, unchanged as far as she could tell. Berlin was being bombed, endless fighting was going on in the Pacific, Russia was surging back and recovering terrain lost to the Nazis. All of that would be insignificant once the atomic bomb came onto the scene.

  How much more would it take?

  “You have to think of your future,” Jeff had told her when she first considered volunteering to be arrested. “Your actions have consequences, Elizabeth. Think about what you’re doing.”

  She didn’t know what to think anymore.

  Graham Fox, who reminded her of Jeff in many ways, had said,’ ‘Oppenheimer is the fulcrum on which everything pivots. Without him, this Project would fall flat on its face.”

  As the snow picked up once more, Elizabeth recalled the documentary clip she had seen, the grainy black-and-white picture of Oppenheimer grinning after the Trinity test, reciting, “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds….”

  Oppenheimer had known what he was unleashing! He recognized the consequences, the destruction of his creation. And still he went ahead! If that wasn’t evil, she didn’t know what was.

  Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut. Everything felt silent, as if the world were holding its breath, waiting for her decision.

  She had asked Ted Walblaken for advice once—she couldn’t even remember now what the problem had been, but it was before he had known about the cancer, back when he would have punched out any “smelly longhair” who spoke a bad word about United Atomics or the defense industry. But Elizabeth remembered the answer Ted gave her, hearing the words in his own voice as if he could stand there right now and talk in her ear.

  “You gotta do what you gotta do,” Ted had said, “and damn the consequences.”

  She tossed more stones at Jeff’s grave. Melting snow-flakes made tracks along her cheeks, like tears. But Jeff said nothing, gave her no suggestions from his silent grave.

  How much more would it take? The answer, difficult as it seemed, stared her in the face. As she turned to go, Elizabeth realized she had to do what she had to do. It wouldn’t be hard to steal one of the hunting rifles back at the Project. She made plans to return the next day.

  Dawn came late in Frijoles Canyon. The sun shed light onto the canyon floor a full hour before the clear rays poured over the sheer walls, illuminating the sparkling new snow.

  Elizabeth stirred in the abandoned cliff dwelling where she had spent the night, shivered, and sat up. She blinked, then rubbed a hand under her eyes. The cold snapped her awake and she shook her head.

  Taking the stolen hunting rifle in hand, she leaned forward to the adobe window opening. She had to be ready at any time. She didn’t know when Oppenheimer would come riding through.

  It had snowed all night, making her solitary vigil hushed and cold. She had slept in one of the crumbling Anasazi ruins in Bandelier, curled in the corner and trying to stay warm. She didn’t dare light a fire; she wanted to leave as little evidence as possible. Elizabeth had thought that far ahead at least.

  In her time, all the cliff ruins of the Long House had been restored and reinforced to withstand the depredations of tourists. The Park Service had rebuilt joints with concrete instead of crumbling adobe; steps and trail markers had been cut into the path; safety guardrails lined all the dangerous ledges.

  Not now, though—she lay awake in the ruins; rodents sought shelter in corners, and snow piled in ledges on the rocks. It felt like spending a night in a haunted house. Somehow, that seemed appropriate.

  Late the previous afternoon, she had ridden back to the stable, returned Proton to Roger and thanked him. She went to the women’s dorm, telling Mrs. Canapelli she might be working odd hours for the next day or two, then had gone to bed early.

  After midnight she crept out again, stole a different horse from the stables—Roger might suspect it was her if she took Proton again—and snatched one of the hunting rifles.

  She would be hunting something far more important than a rabbit.

  Everything seemed so easy, which she found to be a bizarre contradiction of the insipid propaganda posters warning of spies. The Project workers seemed so comfortable in their trappings of security, they couldn’t believe anyone would try the smallest action against them.

  Oppenheimer would learn otherwise.

  The canyon floor remained deserted early in the morning. Up near the mouth of the canyon a curl of smoke rose from the ranger’s station. Frijoles Canyon Lodge sat on the other side of the creek, a place for the Project scientists to stay when they needed to escape for an evening. It had been run by a civilian family before the war, but the Army had appropriated it when they took over the mountain site.

  Morning birds began to sing in the trees, fluttering in the pines and cottonwoods below. From her vantage partway up the slope, she could see the only entrance to the canyon. Some of the adobe structures had been partly excavated a few decades before, when the National Forest Service had run the park. She could see wall lines and piled bricks from the ancient, rounded plaza of the Tyuonyi ruin, highlighted by the snow.

  Scrub juniper, pinon pines, and mesquite poked up on the floor and the canyon walls. Above her the beige tuff wall rose straight and unmarred, unscalable over the line of cliff dwellings, but she had toiled down a different trail that reached the ruins. She had left her horse tethered for the night near some scrub grass on the rim. She realized she might need to escape quickly.

  Elizabeth looked up and down the canyon, tense already. She tossed aside the horse blanket she had used to keep herself warm, smacked her lips, and thought of how much she wanted a thermos of hot coffee. She didn’t know whether thermos bottles had been invented yet. It frightened her to think of the possibility of people inventing an atomic bomb if they couldn’t even manage a thermos….

 
; She felt her stomach tighten with fear. She had rationalized everything so nicely the day before. Jeff would have been proud of her reasoning. It had made sense then. She tried to drive away her doubts.

  This time, at least, she did have a chance to make a real change. Perhaps it would be enough, in a different timeline, to bring Jeff back, to make his death unnecessary. She didn’t know how he would have decided the question himself.

  Waiting.

  Roger had said Oppenheimer would ride down to Bandelier this morning. But what if he had gone the other direction from the visitor’s center? Perhaps he went down to the Rio Grande instead, only a mile or so downhill from the canyon floor, to look at the waterfalls.

  Then she would just have to try again a different day.

  Ted Walblaken had waited as the cancer permeated every part of his body. He had waited to die, waited for United Atomics to admit their error, to make changes so nobody else would suffer the same way. He had died waiting for that to happen.

  Elizabeth stood up, leaning the rifle beside her. Her hands melted a spot on the snow piled along the rounded sill of the window opening. An abandoned bird’s nest was tucked in the logs supporting part of the ceiling. She watched her breath steam in the chilly air.

  Hoof beats. The snow muffled all sounds, but the absence of other noises amplified the clopping and jingling. Many of the birds in the ponderosa pines stopped their morning songs.

  Elizabeth leaned back into the shadows of the cliff dwelling. She could bide her time. Oppenheimer had to come this way. The narrow canyon floor would lead him right in front of her.

  The sun creeping over the canyon rim made the shadows stark and the colors garish. The bright snow hurt her eyes. Jagged clumps of lava tuff looked like nightmarish sculptures; they blocked the view of the trailhead.

  She swallowed. Her throat tightened.

  By her one action, she was about to save uncounted lives, and it would cost only one. Didn’t that make sense?

  Oppenheimer rode into view, straight and aloof on a sleek brown Appaloosa, the one Roger had indicated in the stables the day before. Oppie wore gloves and a red flannel shirt. His floppy brown hat covered his eyes.

  She watched the gangly way he moved, sucking on a cigarette, then tossing it into the snow. He cocked his head up, squinting to the top of the canyon wall. She could see his protruding Adam’s apple. He glanced toward the cliff houses, then away.

  He rode alone. She looked for other riders, escorts or rangers to watch the all-important director of the Manhattan Project. But no, they suspected nothing. In such isolation in the New Mexico mountains, what did they have to worry about?

  Elizabeth slid the rifle out of the window opening. Crumbling adobe pattered to the snow outside the wall. She looked down, then squinted at Oppie. He pulled up his horse, as if to present a better target for her.

  This would change everything.

  She thought of a poster she had helped assemble for the Livermore Challenge Group, showing hideously burned corpses from Hiroshima, silhouettes of human beings reduced to blast shadows against a wall in Nagasaki. A hundred thousand dead from the first blast, another fifty thousand from the second.

  What about the fear inspired for decades with the Cold War, the production of bigger and better bombs? The children brought up—as she had been—in mortal fear of the air raid sirens, the civil defense training films showing how to “duck and cover.” What about the people, like Jeff, who had given their lives to resist the spread of nuclear weapons?

  Jeff lay dead, in an unmarked grave, thrown back in time to twenty years before he was supposed to be born, as a consequence of the ball J. Robert Oppenheimer had started rolling.

  / am become death, the shatterer of worlds.

  Elizabeth had a chance to wipe the chalkboard clean, start over with a new and better equation.

  She squinted along the rifle barrel. She steadied it with her left hand and rested the stock against her shoulder. She felt her hands shaking. She would have only two shots.

  She centered Oppenheimer’s head in the sight. Below, he waited for her, unsuspecting, enjoying the morning.

  Oppenheimer was the fulcrum, Fox had said. His actions, his brilliance made the Manhattan Project work. He had known what he was doing as visions of nuclear fire danced in his head. Perhaps it was a game to him, an interesting physics question to see how much destruction one man could cause. She couldn’t think of him as a worthy human being. Right now, Oppenheimer was a target, a domino she was going to tip in the opposite direction, away from the chain of events she knew would happen if she didn’t act.

  Mrs. Canapelli had chatted about being friends with Oppie and his wife Kitty back in Berkeley, how he had gotten her the job to chaperone the women’s dormitory after her husband had died. Mrs. Canapelli had spoken of him with fondness. Elizabeth found it difficult to imagine him as the same man, this madman.

  Oppenheimer turned to look back toward the cliff dwellings. The hat cast his face in shadow, but she could see part of a smile.

  Elizabeth tightened her finger on the trigger. It would be just like pushing The Button, the big red button that would launch the world into a nuclear holocaust.

  Oppenheimer sneezed, startling her.

  With a flinch, she recentered his head along the gun sight.

  Oppie hesitated, looked around as if to make sure no one was watching, then wiped his nose on the sleeve of his red flannel shirt.

  Elizabeth froze, paralyzed by the simple, human gesture. Oppenheimer blinked as if he were a little boy who had gotten away with bad manners, and then rode on.

  Elizabeth couldn’t fire.

  Her finger slid away from the trigger and she rested the rifle barrel on the sloping window opening. Her bones turned to rubber and she felt faint. Black spots danced in front of her eyes.

  She had wanted to kill a man! The trigger had been a hair’s breadth away from sending a bullet through Oppenheimer’s head. Elizabeth began to shiver.

  The rifle dropped out of her hand, slid along the adobe wall of the ruined dwelling and struck the rocks below.

  The gun discharged, sending a sharp thunderclap through the narrow canyon.

  Oppenheimer jerked up on his horse. He gawked around, frozen like a jackrabbit for an instant of terror, then wheeled his Appaloosa and rode off back toward the ranger station at full gallop. His hat flew off behind him as the horse kicked up snow.

  Cursing herself, Elizabeth stood up, grabbed her blanket, and scrambled out the broken back wall of the An-asazi dwelling. She didn’t know how close the rangers would be. Stupid! Oppenheimer would send an entire hunting party after her. She had to hurry up the steep path along the canyon wall to reach the top, mount her horse and flee back to Los Alamos.

  She didn’t know what she had done. Stupid!

  She couldn’t take it back now. She had failed.

  As she scrambled up the path, she kept shuddering, feeling her crisis, her indecision. “I’m sorry, Jeff,” she whispered, then hurried before she could hear the sound of approaching guards.

  PART 3

  11

  Dachau Concentration Camp

  December 1943

  “The focus of the problem does not lie in the atom. It resides in the heart of man.”

  —Henry L. Stimson, U.S. Secretary of War

  “We technicians do not believe in miracles; we believe that success comes only as the fruit of unrelenting, purposeful labor.”

  —Professor Abraham Esau

  A white plywood sign inside the barbed-wire fence proclaimed in bright red letters, arbeit macht frei—but it looked as if no amount of work could set free the skeletal Jewish prisoners who moved about like stunned marionettes.

  Esau felt his body tremble with revulsion. No wonder Reichminister Speer had warned him to avoid the concentration camps. “How can you stand the smell?” he whispered. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Major Stadt, in his black SS uniform, wrinkled his nos
e and nodded. “Yes, they stink, don’t they? Jews! They smell when they’re alive, they smell when they’re dead, they even smell when they’re cremated. We killed seventeen thousand of them at Majdanek camp just last month. You should come here in the summer heat if you think this is bad!” He shook his head. “And they’re all crawling with vermin. The delousing stations can’t possibly keep up. I wouldn’t get too close if I were you.”

  Professor Abraham Esau had no intention of getting too close.

  Under the direction of Reichminister Speer, the SS had brought workers to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute to dismantle the experimental graphite pile. They took all the components—the carbon bricks, the uranium oxide, the uranium cubes, the neutron source—to erect a larger-scale pile, using more uranium procured from someplace Speer would not identify. After a month and a half of heavy Allied bombing, Berlin was no longer safe.

  The SS had kept careful notes and drawings so they could rebuild the reactor where the production work could continue under absolute security, and where they would not need to worry so greatly about the safety of other citizens. Reichminister Speer had asked Esau to appoint an administrator to the project, someone who could supervise the reactor and deal with the uncertainties that were bound to arise.

  “But I wouldn’t suggest you pick anyone you like,” Speer had said. “The reason will become obvious if you ever visit the site we have selected.”

  “Where is it?”

  Speer had raised his eyebrows and looked far away, as if troubled. “Near Munich, on the Amper River. A place called Dachau.”

  “I believe I’ve been there. I like the area around Munich. It’s rather scenic.”