But would it have come in time?
It didn’t matter now. The point was that she had let the genie out of the bottle, and she couldn’t stuff the horror of nuclear warfare back inside. You can’t close Pandora’s box. If it hadn’t been Germany, then someone else would have abused the new knowledge of the atom. Before the war nuclear physics had been esoteric stuff, full of theory and empty of practical use, while geniuses strolled along under tree-lined lanes chatting about the possibilities. Nuclear Metaphysics?
If Germany did have the capability to dump radioactive dust on American cities, would they issue an ultimatum to President Roosevelt, force him to surrender? Even now Roosevelt was campaigning against Dewey for his fourth term, but the aftereffects of the New York disaster didn’t look good for him. The war continued to go badly for all sides, and Dewey’s rhetoric had grown ugly. The Los Alamos scientists muttered among themselves, but went back to work. Dewey knew nothing about the Manhattan Project. FDR’s own vice president, Henry Wallace, didn’t even know about it, unless secrecy had changed since the New York attack. If Roosevelt lost the election, the existence of Los Alamos might be in question.
But the election remained three months away. Would a change of power cause Hitler to issue an ultimatum? Elizabeth shuddered, thinking of life in America under a Nazi regime.
She rolled back over on Fox’s bed and stared at the ceiling. No wonder she couldn’t doze off, thinking about saving the world—or at least what was going to happen to it.
“Can’t sleep?” Fox’s voice was quiet. He didn’t sound groggy, so he must have been awake for a while.
“No.”
“What’s wrong?”
She answered too quickly. “Nothing.”
He rolled to the side. “I’ve been listening to you tossing and turning for the last hour.” He was silent for a moment, then reached over to caress her arm. “What’s wrong?”
Elizabeth turned so that she faced him. She could barely make out the outline of his head in the dim light. Oh, damn, she thought. She had tried to keep her thoughts about Fox detached, to prevent getting close to him. It had been more than a year now since Jeff had died.
Jeff. The memory of him seemed far away. She couldn’t even place his face in her mind. What color eyes did he have? Curly, dark brown hair, red-rimmed glasses, but his features escaped her—she just couldn’t see him.
And Fox. Sure, she had slept with him, but what did that really signify? She needed companionship, and she liked him. But that didn’t mean she shared every little thought with him. Often, Fox looked at her strangely, as if he suspected something, but he seemed to have drawn his own conclusions about who she was. She didn’t want to tell him the truth.
Too much Father Knows Best mentality filled Los Alamos—commitment, religion, obedience: Truth, Justice, and the American Way. She was a product of the eighties, after all, when everyone was in it just for themselves. You didn’t have to pledge heart and soul just to sleep with someone—she was living a way of life half a century before her time!
But sometimes it became too much for her to handle. She needed someone to talk to, and she couldn’t alienate Graham Fox. He would find out for himself soon. She bit her lip and whispered, “Feynman. I’m the one who explained to him how to make the Gadget work.”
“Certainly. Now go to sleep.” He smiled at her.
“Graham, listen to me.”
A moment passed. His puppy-dog eyes widened. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
Fox sat up in bed, tangling one arm in the sheet. “What?”
“I told him what was wrong, how they could get it to work.”
Fox’s breath quickened. “I never asked you how you know so much. I always thought—I mean, how could you? Can’t you see what’s going to happen now? Someone will drop the atomic bomb on Berlin. The Germans used only fission by-products when they attacked us. Many people died, yes, but it could have been so much worse! They must be just warning us that they could annihilate us anytime they like. But they haven’t! Abraham Esau wouldn’t do that! They haven’t come back with another weapon in months—what makes you think they will? But if the U.S. goes on the offensive, it’s never going to end!”
Elizabeth shook her head and tried not to listen to his reasoning, or what he had said. She didn’t know who Abraham Esau was, didn’t know how Fox could have figured out so much. “It’s not like that.”
Fox sighed, but she could still hear the anger simmering behind his words. He avoided touching her as he sat on the narrow bed. “What did you tell Feynman?”
“Nothing he wouldn’t have figured out in time.”
“What did you tell him? Is that why he wanted you as his assistant? What’s going on here? Are you sleeping with him?”
Elizabeth got up from the bed and stood naked in the warm room. She opened the blind a little to let moonlight splash across her skin. “Graham—”
Fox leaned over and grabbed her wrist. “Elizabeth, I need to know what—”
She twisted away from him. “Implosion physics, Graham. Implosion. They would have figured it out sooner or later. Until they get enough U-235, they’ll never get the gun method to work on plutonium.”
“You let Feynman know that? He’s one of the brightest men around! I thought you wanted to stop the madness too!” His voice was rising, and she let her own anger boil, feeling defensive, not wanting to hear the argument she had already had with herself.
“All I did was give them a hint, a head start.” For all she could remember, the implosion method should have been considered long before now, so somehow she had managed to change something else in history…
Fox reached up and grabbed her shoulder. His fingernails dug into her flesh. His voice came as a hiss, sounding alien to her. “You’ve destroyed any hope of us halting this insanity. Now it’s going to escalate who knows where. The war was winding down. We couldn’t take any more, but now we’ll have a whole new array of weapons to use. Wonderful, is it not? Why didn’t you tell me? I might have been able to get the information back to Germany, to keep things equal again—”
Elizabeth struggled away. She stood at the edge of the bed. Pushing her hair back, she glared at Fox’s silhouetted figure. “Let the Nazis know? Are you crazy? Look what the bastards have already done. Didn’t you see those films of New York? You don’t even know how many people are going to die of leukemia in the next decade or so! It’s not over—it’ll keep getting worse and worse.”
As if he hadn’t heard her, Fox kept his voice cold. “Elizabeth, working with Feynman will only accelerate the completion date of the Gadget.” He stood up and took a step toward her.
“Keep away from me. Want me to start screaming—or would you rather I just kick your testicles up into your stomach?” Her words shocked Fox, but she didn’t care.
She breathed deeply through her nose, feeling the adrenaline pump through her veins. Fox wanted to contact Germany? What did he mean? What did Fox think she was, a Nazi spy? Was he? Her eyes went wide and she clenched both hands to her side. When Fox didn’t move, she backed away, keeping her eyes on him.
Picking up her clothes, she quickly dressed.
“Elizabeth,” he said, “wait—we haven’t finished this.”
“Don’t come near me.” She whirled and left the tiny apartment, leaving the door wide open.
Elizabeth hadn’t seen Richard Feynman for more than ten minutes at a time in the full month she had been working for him. He’d fly into his cluttered office like a whirlwind, hand her a stack of scribbles to transcribe, breathlessly answer a question about his notes from the previous time, then get pulled away as another physicist collared him.
“Implosion is the word!” he hollered to her once as he hurried off to yet another meeting. The delay from the Oak Ridge uranium isotope-separation plants had sent the Hill into a funk. Feynman’s revelation of an implosion process for the plutonium device revitalized the Project. None of the physicists were fre
e for more than minutes in the hectic new schedule imposed by Oppenheimer and General Groves.
This made Feynman’s notes even more crucial—Elizabeth had to transcribe scrawled shorthand that covered entire research notebooks into a coherent flow for the other Project scientists to follow. With her background in physics, she was the ideal transcriber—helped along by the fact that she was not getting the information cold. As a result, she established herself in less than five weeks as an invaluable link between Feynman’s group and the rest of the Project.
Meanwhile, she kept to herself, sitting alone at meals and making sure that Fox did not bother her. She felt totally justified in her decision to help Feynman, and her feelings could not be swayed by more rhetoric from Fox. He frightened her, now that she had seen an entirely new sliver of fanaticism peeping out from him. Or maybe she was hiding from a similar streak in herself.
Things changed—circumstances and people. In her younger days she could not have imagined anything worse than nuclear proliferation as the ultimate crime against humanity. A year ago—six months ago, in fact—she could not have foreseen herself supporting the Project to the degree she was now.
She would never believe in the bomb as the ultimate peacemaker, but now the country had to protect itself from another Nazi attack. The U.S. needed to keep the bomb as a defense, not to explode it on already-pounded Japanese cities just to show off the nifty toy they had concocted.
The cafeteria in Tech Area 1 had previously closed at eight p.m., but now stayed open twenty-four hours a day—one of General Groves’s incentives to keep the scientists working round the clock. They could work however and whenever they wanted, as long as they worked all the time.
Elizabeth’s eyes widened when Feynman dragged Oppenheimer into her work area. She felt all her muscles lock. She had never met the man face to face. In her mind she saw him riding his Appaloosa in the morning snow. Legs trembling, she started to rise when they entered.
Oppenheimer took charge; even Feynman seemed cowed in the director’s presence. “Please sit, no need to stand. Betsy, I don’t think we’ve formally met. I’m Robert Oppenheimer.”
“Dr. Oppenheimer.”
“Please, call me Oppie. Everyone else does.”
“Then call her Elizabeth,” said Feynman, “not Betsy.”
Oppie’s dark eyebrows shot up. He looked genuinely upset, as if he had not been thoroughly briefed about an important subject. “I’m sorry—”
Elizabeth extended her hand. Her skin went clammy, but she forced herself to meet the man’s eyes. “A common mistake these days.”
Oppie offered a firm grip, his fingers long. “But it’s a mistake that should be avoided. Thank you.” He tapped his pipe against his palm and looked around the cluttered office. “Dick tells me you’re doing a smash-up job for him.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary.” Elizabeth tried to behave appropriately demure.
Oppie found the edge of a desk and sat on a stack of handwritten papers she had not yet transcribed. Feynman flopped down in a chair and just smiled, showing white teeth, content to have the director do the talking. Elizabeth got the strange feeling that this wasn’t going to be one of Oppenheimer’s infamous pep talks. He sucked on his unlit pipe, looked at it, then continued in his soft voice, taking special care to pronounce every single word correctly.
“To the contrary, Elizabeth, I think it’s extraordinary to make sense out of any physicist’s notes—especially to the point of finding flaws in equations and writing a logical sequence of conclusions. And when you throw in the fact that it’s Dick Feynman’s penmanship…” Oppie pulled the pipe from his mouth. “I’d say that we’ve found a real gem in you.”
Elizabeth started to argue, but caught a glimpse of Feynman nodding. She suddenly realized she was being set up. She said slowly, “I don’t see what you’re getting at, Oppie.” She couldn’t help the edge of sarcasm in her voice; it felt like a defense against her fear of him, and her shame at what she had tried to do.
Oppenheimer set his pipe beside him on Feynman’s desk and said pointedly, “I think you were too modest describing your background, Elizabeth. A typical faculty wife never gets a scientific background like yours. It’s a shame that your records were lost, otherwise we might have spotted your experience and put you to work helping out the Project in a more meaningful manner.” He held her gaze. “By the way, what is your background? Montana State University can’t find a copy of your transcripts. They say they would have sent their entire file if the Army requested it.”
Elizabeth noticed that Feynman watched her intently. She attempted to make herself blush. She couldn’t tell if Oppenheimer was trying to frame her, to catch her at her lie. Had Feynman told Oppie about finding her breaking into the administration building a year before, falsifying her records?
“Well, I was always close to Jeff’s work—he was my husband. You probably don’t remember him, but he says he met you once or twice. He was a student at Berkeley when you were there.” Elizabeth tried to draw from all the details she had heard about the director.
“I can’t say I remember him too clearly, but I’m sure I would if I saw his picture. I taught a lot of students.”
“Jeff was pretty shy,” Elizabeth said, feeling weak inside. “Not having children gave me an opportunity to attend classes in the department. Montana State was not very strict about who audited what.” She shrugged. “I helped Jeff grade papers as well, so I guess I just picked up most of my physics background.”
“Impressive. You really should be proud of yourself.” Oppenheimer fell silent for a moment. Elizabeth glanced at Feynman; he gave her a thumbs up and grinned his support. He fidgeted in the chair.
Elizabeth pushed back her hair, adjusting a barrette that itched. “So what’s up? You didn’t come here just to compliment me on transcribing Dr. Feynman’s notes.”
“You’re right. I didn’t.” Oppenheimer stood up from the desk, looking like a gangling marionette with flopping stick arms. He started to pace about the room. “The Project has a chance to achieve its goal with this implosion concept. Our other theoreticians have solved the predetonation problem with uranium-235. Everything up here at Los Alamos is falling into place. Except we still have one problem—our liaison with the places making the material. General Groves is hot to get out to Hanford and Oak Ridge to chew some of the contractors out and get things into higher gear.”
“So why does this concern me?”
Oppenheimer shot a quick glance at Feynman, who stared at the floor. “The general needs to leave directly from here to Washington State. And he wants someone knowledgeable about the physics of the Gadget to accompany him. We’ve got everyone I can spare on this implosion scheme, and pulling any of the scientists off that project might be disastrous. We’re spread very thin here, and every man has his particular area of expertise. If I send the wrong man away with Groves, and we end up needing his experience…” Oppenheimer shrugged. “It could set back the Project, give the Nazis time to hit us again.”
“You want me to accompany Groves?” The tubby, overbearing man had rubbed her the wrong way each time she had seen him. He reminded her of a gravel-voiced drill sergeant, an impatient man always one cup of coffee behind being cured of his grouchy mood. “Um, I’m not sure I know enough about the Gadget to give him any advice.” And he probably wouldn’t listen anyway.
“You know just the right amount, don’t worry,” said Feynman. “Most people here are only concerned about their specialized part. When you’ve been transcribing my notes, you’ve been concerned with the Gadget as a whole.”
“It will be a good opportunity for you,” Oppenheimer said.
“Opportunity for what?” She felt defensiveness rise up again, some of the old annoyances that had been building for the past year. She had tried to ignore them, to adapt to the 1940s environment. “How is General Groves going to react to having a woman along with him, especially a smart woman?”
Oppenheimer
looked to Feynman, trying to understand Elizabeth’s complaint. “The general usually has a woman accompanying him, his own secretary. She happens to be in Washington, D.C., at the moment, so we’ll have you fill in.”
Elizabeth scowled. “Oh boy, I get to be the general’s personal secretary. Are you sure he doesn’t want me locked in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant?”
Feynman hesitated. “You’ve done secretarial work for me here, Elizabeth. We’ll skip the barefoot and pregnant bit.”
“Is Groves going to expect me to talk when I’m spoken to, and shut up when he’s through listening to me? If I’m going along as an advisor and a personal secretary, I can do what’s required for the job. But he has to order his own meals and lay out his own bedclothes.”
Oppenheimer hesitated. “The general is a busy man… ”
Elizabeth only glared at him with an icy expression.
“I told you, Oppie,” Feynman mumbled out of the corner of his mouth. Then he reached out to pat Elizabeth’s arm. “You’ll be General Groves’s technical point of contact. It’s an important spot, and that’s your duty. You and he will have to work out the details, but we’ll warn him about some of the things he’ll have to do by himself.”
“And he calls the scientists prima donnas!” Elizabeth said.
“Dick will prep you the next twenty-four hours before you leave,” Oppenheimer said.
Elizabeth stood and walked to the window. The morning sun had fully risen, bathing the mountain mesa in fresh light. Sounds of people hurrying to their jobs in the Tech Area were tempered by the birds chattering to each other. As she glanced up the hillside, she saw a sudden movement—a white-tailed mule deer bounding out of sight. She would miss this place. But it might be good to be away from Graham Fox for a while.
“How long am I going to be gone?”
“You’ll leave in about a week, by train from Albuquerque,” Oppenheimer said. “Total travel time will be a month, maybe two. The general needs to spend time at Hanford and at Oak Ridge. You have to take a train everywhere, or a private car. None of us is allowed to fly anymore; airplanes are considered too dangerous, and we’re too valuable to the country to risk it.”
The Trinity Paradox Page 23