The Trinity Paradox

by Kevin J. Anderson

  He slammed the phone back down. Groves stood waiting. Matthias didn’t hesitate, didn’t try to make excuses. “Something cut the main power line between Bonneville and Grand Coulee. Backup power came on in about a fifth of a second, but that was still too long. It triggered the emergency systems, and all the reactors shut down. Shut down!”

  “Well, get them running again!” Groves said.

  “We will, but it’ll take days.”

  Groves closed his eyes and pounded on the control console hard enough to make parts rattle. Elizabeth looked at the TV monitors and thought of the deadly forces kept so precariously contained throughout the entire Hanford site. “Aren’t you at least glad all the safety systems kicked in as they were supposed to? You probably didn’t test them out, with the slapped-together way you’re doing everything on the entire project. If the reactors had gone out of control, you could have had a major disaster here.”

  Groves narrowed his eyes at her. “There are times when I really don’t like your attitude, Miss Devane,” he said. “This is one of them.”

  “I’m just giving you technical advice.” She knew Groves couldn’t conceive of a disaster like Chernobyl, and she felt sorry for him.

  The general looked as if he wanted to order her to drop to the floor and do push-ups. Instead he redirected his anger toward Matthias. “Find out what caused the power outage. I want to see it myself. And make sure it doesn’t happen again.” He strode toward the door, a mass of clenched muscles. Then, remembering what he was expected to say, he turned toward the control room workers. “Keep up the good work, men.”

  Two days later the jeep bounced along the rough desert surface, following the web of power lines strung from pole to pole across the endless flat. Sandstorms had long since obliterated any trace of a road alongside the power poles and had covered all potholes, but Lieutenant Colonel Matthias managed to find every single one of them.

  Elizabeth swayed, feeling seasick. Her back and buttocks throbbed. She wanted to snap at something, yell at someone, but she kept her silence. Beside her in the back of the jeep, General Groves looked even angrier than she felt.

  They had been driving for an hour and a half. The dust and heat of the central Washington desert made even a few minutes in the open jeep miserable. Elizabeth had seen no markers, but Matthias seemed to know exactly where they were. He turned around from the steering wheel and raised his voice over the grind of the engine. “Should be right up here, General. You’ll find it interesting.”

  Groves wiped a ham like hand across his mouth, smearing dust away from his lips. “It better be. I’m starting to wonder whatever caused you to pick this place, Fritz. Didn’t you have any better alternatives?”

  “Please don’t call me Fritz, sir.”

  Elizabeth turned and shouted toward the general, “What did you mean about him picking this place?”

  “Fritz went out on a site-selection tour for the plutonium works. We gave him a handful of likely choices for the installation. He chose Hanford. He had worked with me on building the Pentagon, and he offered some advice on the gaseous-diffusion plant in Oak Ridge. I trust his judgment.”

  Matthias brought the jeep to a stop so suddenly that the back wheels slewed to the left. “Almost passed it. Between these two poles up here.”

  “What can you see of the explosion?” Groves asked.

  “You’ll find out in a minute.” Matthias climbed over the side of the jeep and turned to offer his hand to Elizabeth.

  “Not necessary,” she said, and scrambled after him. Groves, with his girth, needed the help more.

  Matthias took off his sunglasses, swiped them across the front of his khaki shirt to brush away the dust, then planted them back on his face. Sweat caused the fine sand to stick to his forehead and cheeks. “Follow me.”

  He trudged toward the nearest wooden power pole, avoiding mounds of scrub grass. Groves and Elizabeth came after. She could already see the blackened blasted mark on the ground, the gashes in the wood, and the shine of new electrical connections above. Small chunks of shrapnel lay scattered over the ground.

  “We got the primary wiring rigged again in half a day,” Matthias said as he strode around the burned area. “This is the power line between Bonneville and the Grand Coulee dams. The Hanford Engineering Works installed special safeguards just so we wouldn’t lose power completely. I guess somebody must have thought a fifth of a second switching time was acceptable.”

  “Make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Groves said. “Find out who made that assumption and chew his ass. How long is everything going to be out of commission?”

  “Three days, sir. Everything shut down, all safety systems kicked in just like they were supposed to. Sorry, sir.”

  “Three days! For a fifth of a second blip?” Groves kicked a melted piece of metal from the sand. “Tell me what happened here.”

  Matthias cleared his throat and straightened his sunglasses again. “The shrapnel is what’s left from a small thermite bomb. We also found some mechanism and tattered pieces of rice paper nearby in the desert.”

  “A Fugo balloon?” Groves rolled his eyes. “Good God, what luck the Japs have!”

  Elizabeth bent down to look at the scraps of slagged metal. “What’s a Fugo balloon? What are you talking about?”

  “Fire balloons, a present from Japan,” Groves said.

  “The Japs launched what must have been thousands of them,” Matthias explained. “Rice-paper balloons carrying fire bombs. They go up on the winds at about forty thousand feet, drift along the air currents, over to the United States. We’ve found a few intact over the past month or so—they seem to have a system of weights and altimeters that keeps them in the jet stream. When they’re over the U.S., the balloons explode their bombs, like this one did.”

  “How come we never heard about this?” she asked. “Why weren’t people warned?”

  “The first couple hit in remote parts of Montana and North Dakota,” Matthias said. “Nobody noticed except for a few local small-town newspapers—but the Jap press made a big deal of the stories, so we know their spies are reading even our dinkiest hometown rags. We stopped publishing any word about it.”

  “The Japs don’t understand just how big this country is,” Groves said. “They can’t beat us by lobbing a few balloons at random across the entire western half of the United States. They just got lucky here, damned lucky.” He picked up a chunk of melted shrapnel, swaying as he bent his large body over. He inspected the lump, then hurled it out into the desert. “I’ve seen enough.”

  He strode back to the jeep, moving with swift determination that looked awkward on him. “If that’s the best damned secret weapon they can come up with, we don’t have to worry about the Japanese. Come on, Fritz! I’ve only got another few days here before I catch a train to Oak Ridge.”

  19

  Oak Ridge, Tennessee

  September 1944

  “We have spent more than two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history—and we have won.”

  —President Harry S. Truman

  “I feel immensely cheered and braced up. Oak Ridge is the largest, most extraordinary scientific experiment in history.”

  —Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson

  Despite all the priority General Groves commanded, despite the Manhattan Project’s AAA war status to get every supply at the soonest possible moment, the streamliner train still took forever to get from one side of the country to the other.

  Elizabeth had visited other parts of the U.S. before, but had mostly divided her time between California and New Mexico. She had flown in a plane wherever she vacationed—but as the passenger train moved across endless miles of desert, mountains, plains, she began to get a conception of the vastness of the United States. Seeing this, she thought how ludicrous the Japanese plot had been to drop untargeted balloon bombs on random sites, thinking to cause important damage.

  Now that she had established her working rela
tionship with General Groves, Elizabeth decided to slacken her hardline approach and be more cooperative. She had made her point, and Groves seemed uneasy enough around her that he watched his step more than he normally would.

  So she helped arrange connections for the trains, working to avoid long delays and to determine the best route to get him to Tennessee. The two of them sat and talked sometimes; Groves ignored her often; he dictated letters; he smoked his cigar. She stared out the window at the 1944 landscape.

  The two of them could have flown to Oak Ridge in a day, but Groves refused to risk himself or any of the Los Alamos scientists to the less-safe airplanes. “Listen, Miss Devane, every one of those scientists—and myself too— are vital national assets right now. We are needed for the war effort. You may not comprehend this yourself yet, but we will change the history of the world by what we do.”

  Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. She knew that more than he did himself.

  “I won’t even let the scientists drive themselves around,” the general continued. “One day when I rode with Dr. Lawrence up in the Berkeley hills, he was gesturing with both hands and wrapped up in his thoughts, talking to me and paying no attention to the road. The car was weaving back and forth—a few more feet and we would have gone over the hillside. For some of these eggheads, just letting them drive is dangerous. And I can’t let them do anything dangerous. I obtained a chauffeur for him that afternoon, and all the top scientists got one too.”

  Groves puffed on his cigar. “For us, taking a plane is dangerous. We sit here on the train, and we take as long as it needs to take. Besides, we’re getting work done right here.”

  Elizabeth thought of how she would rather be back in Los Alamos. But then she recalled her last fight with Graham Fox, and how much she had changed in the fifteen months she had been trapped here in the past. Her former life seemed unreal to her. She tried not to ponder it often.

  Groves settled back in his train seat, sucked on his cigar, and dictated a letter. Elizabeth scribbled as fast as she could; she had never learned shorthand.

  “I’ve done a lot of things,” the general said later in conversation as the sun set across the hilly farmland of Indiana, “but this is going to be my crowning achievement. I’ve seen duty in Hawaii, Europe, and Central America. I built the Pentagon, for God’s sake, but nothing compares to this… this dream. Two billion dollars’ worth, and we’ve only got a lot of construction and exhaustion and receipts to show for it. No Gadget yet.”

  Elizabeth worried for a moment that he might ask about her own background, and she would have to make up a story again. But Groves had never shown any interest before, and he didn’t now. He seemed preoccupied only with himself and his project. He had no real conception of what he was starting—and Elizabeth no longer had any idea how it would all turn out. Too much had changed.

  Groves stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray beside his seat in the coach. Elizabeth tried to open the train window to let in some fresh air, but the catch would not work.

  The general opened his briefcase and stared at its contents. He spoke as if finally deciding to break news to her. “The real reason we have to get to Oak Ridge when we do is to be on hand for a very special inspection. It seems one of the congressional ninnies, Albert Engel from Michigan, is making a stink about all the money we’re spending and the funny way we’re covering up our expenses. He thinks I’m committing a major-league fraud on American taxpayers, and he’s making public noises about it.”

  Groves sighed. “Just what we need—some congressman calling all sorts of attention to a billion-dollar secret war project we’ve been working on for years. Why not just send a typed notice to the krauts?”

  Elizabeth looked at him. She had not considered the funding before. “You mean all this work, all that money, and nobody in Congress knows about it. Nobody authorized the expenses?”

  “Roosevelt authorized them. He’s commander-in-chief, it’s wartime, and he considered it his own prerogative. Oh, Secretary of War Stimson and a couple others have met with the House Speaker, the Majority Leader, and the Minority Leader about it, explaining the Project’s urgency and all that. They accepted the explanation and they agreed not to worry about it until after the war. But you can’t tell everybody. And trying to convince Congressman Engel to keep his mouth shut just makes him yap more. Especially now with the election only a couple months away, with Dewey ahead in the polls, anybody’s looking for a way to shoot down the people in office.” Groves ground his cigar stub into the ashtray once more.

  “So what is this inspection at Oak Ridge?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Secretary Stimson is traveling down with Engel. I’m supposed to be there as head of the whole Project to show them around, tell Engel as little as possible, but impress the hell out of him.”

  “I thought we were going to check on uranium production?”

  “Well, that’s the main reason anyway. Stimson shouldn’t be traveling anywhere. His health is so bad he can hardly walk. He’s got to use a cane. We had new ramps installed all over the place at Oak Ridge, then polished all the doorknobs, cleaned all the windows, swept all the sidewalks. Of course, none of the Oak Ridge folks know Stimson is coming. Half of them think it’s FDR and that the ramps are for his wheelchair.”

  Groves looked at her with his pale eyes. He puffed out his cheeks and spoke in an almost human tone. “So please cooperate and help me out here with whatever I need. This is important.”

  Elizabeth frowned and realized that Groves actually seemed intimidated by her. “Okay, I will,” she said. “But don’t get used to it.”

  Late summer left the Tennessee hills verdant and filled with insects, most of which bit or stung. The air was rich with humidity that made Elizabeth sweat just from the effort of breathing. Her gingham dress clung to her and itched. She had rolled down the passenger-side window of the limousine, but even the stirred breeze didn’t help as the motorcade climbed the hill.

  In the back of the limousine rode General Groves, dressed in a clean and freshly pressed uniform, taking up more than his share of the seat. Next to the general sat the gray-haired Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. Stimson’s skin looked ashen, and his pale moustache emphasized the sharpness of his hawkish nose. Stimson laid his cane across his bony knees and rode with an expression of discomfort on his face. Directly behind Elizabeth, Michigan congressman Albert Engel sat making nervous small talk with his two companions. The balding, red-faced representative looked as if he had somehow gotten in over his head by questioning the Manhattan Project.

  In the backseat General Groves attempted to explain some of the physics behind isotope separation. Elizabeth listened with a bemused smile on her face as he simplified the concept to the point of ridiculousness, but neither Stimson nor Engel appeared to be grasping the science, nor did they seem to care. When Groves described the atomic nucleus, comparing hydrogen and helium, Stimson perked up and interrupted. “Helium? That word comes from Helios, the Greek sun god, doesn’t it?”

  Groves stumbled on his words for a moment, then agreed, though he plainly couldn’t see the relevance of the comment. “Yes, I believe helium was first discovered in the sun.”

  Stimson formed his thin lips into a smile and nodded as if pleased with himself. He had apparently not understood anything else. But then, Elizabeth realized, Stimson probably didn’t need to understand. He had given Groves the responsibility of bringing the whole Project together, and he trusted his choice.

  Meanwhile, the Oak Ridge driver tried to make small talk with Elizabeth, working too hard to catch her eye and then drawl some inane comment about the weather or about his local baseball team. The man’s words came out so slowly in his Southern accent that Elizabeth wanted to shake his cheeks and knock the rest of the sentence out long before he ever got to the verb.

  She looked out the front windshield instead, at the bug specks all across the glass. Butterflies flew about in the pine, oak, and poplar trees; fluffy seeds gusted in the breeze.
The driver had pointed out the dogwoods that would be bursting with pink or white flowers in the spring. To the west she could see the bluish hazy line of the Cumberland Mountains, to the east were the Great Smoky Mountains. Below the road the meandering Clinch River wound around the base of the ridge.

  Nineteen miles from Knoxville, Black Oak Ridge had been selected by Groves himself as the first major site for the atomic program because of its isolation, its pleasant climate, and abundant water and electrical supply, thanks to the Tennessee Valley Authority dams. Few locals lived in the area, yet the site was easily accessible by train and road. The enormous construction project here had revitalized the flagging rural economy.

  When the driver topped the ridge and drove out across the sprawling complex, Congressman Engel leaned forward and spoke to no one in particular; his words rang in Elizabeth’s ears. “Good Lord!”

  Stimson cackled and slapped his cane on the back of the limousine seat. “Now do you see what all the money’s being spent for, Albert?”

  Groves spoke in a smug voice. “Actually, this is only the K-25 plant, just one of the major facilities we have here. The entire complex is on 54,000 acres.”

  “But it’s… huge!” Engel said.

  The sight astonished Elizabeth as well. The building sprawled in front of them, shaped like a squared-off U half a mile on a side, four hundred feet wide. It appeared as ugly as the buildings at Hanford, sinister and gray, like a fortress with tiny windows along only the top floor.

  Groves smiled. “We believe it’s the largest single building in the entire world. Shall we step outside the car? You can comprehend the size better.”

  Groves opened the car door himself and stood. He extended his large hand to help Stimson climb out, slow and careful. Congressman Engel got out the other side and stood, gripping the edge of the car. The driver waited, pleased to have a chance to talk alone with Elizabeth, but she got out of the car as well, staring down at the gargantuan building.