The Trinity Paradox

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Through eyes blurred with tears of pain, he gaped at the blocky, dark leviathan of the reactor. Already he could feel waves of heat pulsing, growing hotter. The water felt cool, but Daniel could not concentrate. The dizziness roared in his head. As the water swirled and the reactor continued to eat itself alive from within, he slumped cross-legged in the churning pool.

  They had done something. They had made a point. This wasn’t useless. In response to his thoughts, his lips made their own small smile.

  Saul hunkered down beside him. The gushing water continued to echo in the empty building. All the prisoners remained silent as the heat rose. They had no strength to scream, or cheer.

  “Are you all right?” Saul asked. “How do you feel?”

  Daniel hung his head and felt water dripping down his back, down his chest. He looked up. “I feel fine.”

  Dr. Kurt Diebner sat in his austere, tiny office in the administrative barracks near the camp processing center. All day long he heard the movements, the banging, the wailing, the complaints of prisoners being taken into Dachau. He had his own small window covered with a splintered set of wooden blinds he had insisted upon installing. He did not want to look upon the wasteland of the camp all the time.

  Diebner doodled on a piece of paper, ostensibly working on plans to improve the efficiency of his graphite-moderated pile, but he had nothing else to work on, nothing he could do except sit and resent what had been done to him and his career.

  The radioactive dust dumped on New York had bought them time. Hitler had been so pleased, he had allowed them the freedom to go back to their original work. They would produce a bomb to write their names larger in history than any other incident in the war. But not Diebner. He was stuck here, in this place.

  He rubbed his hands to slick back his thinning hair and pressed his black glasses against his face. He had worked for the Ministry of Armaments to develop new munitions, though he had no interest or skill in such activities. He had served a short assignment at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, leading all the Virus House researchers, before he had been reassigned to a different team. He had not felt comfortable until he worked with his own group at Göttingen, with Paul Harteck and Walther Bothe and the others. Together, they had used the information taken from the Joliot-Curies in Paris to further German nuclear research.

  But then Abraham Esau, with his Cambridge education and his arrogance, had snatched it back from him, pushed him down like a naughty child. Now Diebner had been thrown here in this hellish pit of Dachau. He had welcomed the responsibility at first, to run a project by himself, no matter where it was located—until he realized what it meant. Now his digestion was bad, his attitude bad, his health declining. He found he could no longer care about the reactor project or the plutonium they had begun to produce. He had seen the deaths caused in New York by the radioactive by-products from this reactor, but the Jews here seemed to be dying in numbers as great.

  Before long, they might have enough material to make Hitler’s super bomb.

  A draft whistled through the chinks in Diebner’s window. It had been a breezy day, a cold November morning. He snapped open his wooden blinds and stared out at the bleak camp, at the muddy barrenness surrounding the reactor building.

  He noticed that the smokestacks had stopped giving up steam. For a moment he felt only puzzlement, knowing it should have been days yet before they disassembled the pile and removed the irradiated uranium rods. Then, when he saw the gathering black smoke coming from the walls and roofline, he panicked.

  He had just turned around when one of the guards pounded on his door. Bursting into the small office, the guard shouted over the normal chaos of the processing center. “Dr. Diebner! You must come to the reactor building immediately!”

  “I can see already. What happened?”

  “There is a fire! We can hear it through the walls, but the prisoners have blockaded the door. We don’t know what they have done.”

  A fire in the reactor, Diebner thought. A blaze hot enough to burn the graphite. It would be an inferno inside the building already. He could see black smoke gushing out the stacks, through cracks around the ceiling, through the lips of the large doors.

  The reactor was melting down, the core burning. He felt an ice lump inside himself. He alone knew what that meant.

  “Dr. Diebner, you must come and see! Tell us how to fix it.”

  But Diebner didn’t move. His knuckles grew white as he gripped the corners of his desk. “There’s no way to fix it. This is a disaster!”

  Inside the blaze, uranium rods would be melting. All the graphite slumping together into a mass, all contaminated, everything radioactive. They had constructed the reactor building so rapidly that they added no containment, nothing to trap all the deadly by-products and keep them from spraying through the air if such a catastrophe happened. The smoke gushing into the sky would be poison, dumping death just as the small rockets had spread radioactive dust on New York City.

  “Get my car. Immediately! I must leave within the next two minutes! All of your men must evacuate. Everyone must flee.”

  “Evacuate? But what about the prisoners?”

  “Go! Now!” Diebner slapped his hand on the desktop. “Do not worry about the prisoners.” He lowered his voice. “They’re already dead.”

  The guard finally ran out. Diebner himself left. He looked around to see if he should take anything with him. He had only a moment—if it wasn’t too late already. But then he realized that there was nothing here he wanted to keep.

  He hurried outside. Prisoners gathered near the reactor building, staring at the spectacle. Flames came out from the roofline, through chinks in the side. Guards scurried about, some directing firefighting efforts, others trying to escape.

  Diebner waited for his car, and kept waiting. He looked around to find some other way he could flee. He wanted to get moving, put distance between himself and the invisible death. He didn’t know if he should hold his breath, duck his head and cover his mouth. He could never hide from the radiation.

  Black smoke rolled out from the fire, swirling in the mild autumn breezes, some of it settling like a blanket on the camp.

  Diebner’s hands were trembling. This, he thought, is a true holocaust.

  He wondered why his car was taking so long.

  PART 5

  21

  Trinity Site

  November 1944

  “Those who have originated the work on this terrible weapon and those who have materially contributed to its development have, before God and the World, the duty to see to it that it should be ready to be used at the proper time and in the proper way.”

  —Leo Szilard

  The trip from Los Alamos took three hours in the unmarked government car, and Fox sweated in the autumn sunshine every minute of the dusty journey south. The two military policemen accompanying him didn’t blink as the car passed through the Albuquerque city limits without slowing. If a traffic policeman stopped them, Fox would have to show his unmarked and unsigned driver’s license; he was not allowed to divulge his name or his purpose. His MP escorts would see to that.

  Fox swallowed in a dry throat. The three of them had emptied their thermos of coffee half an hour before. He didn’t dare suggest that they stop, not even for some refreshment. The orders were clear enough: no stopping allowed on the way to Trinity site, near Socorro.

  He had insisted on being the driver, despite what General Groves said about the poor road skills of the scientists. Fox only had to remember to drive on the right side of the pavement.

  Fox treated the two MPs coolly, not partaking in their stilted argument about the presidential election. Politics and Washington, D.C., seemed so far away, so irrelevant. He was going to help set up a test to explode an atomic bomb.

  He kept his responses to their questions on the level of a grunted yes or no. He felt too uncomfortable with his own reservations to speak pleasantries with the young men. Somehow he suspected that these innocent-
looking escorts had really been assigned to G-2 to watch him, not simply for his “protection.” What if they were sent out to make him trip up, spill something that he ordinarily wouldn’t divulge? What if they suspected that by now Graham Fox abhorred everything about the Manhattan Project and what it was bound to unleash on the world?

  He remembered the day he had sent the letter to Esau, how the Nice Young Man from G-2 had seemed to sense that Fox had circumvented the security regulations. Nothing had happened in the intervening months, but Fox couldn’t shake the feeling that he was still being watched, observed. The paranoia stirred up feelings of guilt, like looking in the rearview mirror and seeing a police car following too close, just waiting for it to flick on the flashing lights.

  But he had only himself on this end, now that Elizabeth Devane had… changed, throwing her assistance in with the Project itself. She had been gone for nearly two months with General Groves—talk about going off with the devil himself! Fox had always assumed she was a well-hidden German sympathizer, perhaps even a spy; he hadn’t wanted to know what she really was, so long as she felt the way he did.

  “You can’t listen to anybody else when it’s your own conscience at stake.” She had said it herself, the first night they had made love, almost a full year before. “Do what you have to do. Damn the consequences.” But now that had changed. She had changed.

  He would take her earlier advice, whether or not she still believed it herself. He knew Abraham Esau would be trying his best on the German end. The fact that no further radioactive attacks had occurred on American cities implied that Esau had convinced the Nazi high command to stage a warning shot. Esau would not allow the development of a full-scale bomb such as this one they were about to test at the Trinity site.

  The plutonium bomb, based on the implosion concept Elizabeth had suggested herself, had been designed and completed. But no one knew if it would work. The assembly used explosive lenses to smash a hollow sphere of plutonium into super criticality, and it should function, according to all the calculations and models. But Edward Teller had been killed in an experiment that had also been proven, according to all calculations and models. Theory made mistakes. A successful test would put all doubts to rest.

  Fox’s duty was to manage part of that test.

  He tried to concentrate on the driving. He kept his eyes on the road and his hands upon the wheel, but the turn of events at Los Alamos kept creeping up on him. After New York, after Elizabeth had suggested the implosion scheme for the plutonium bomb, the entire Project had seemed reborn. There could be no stopping it now.

  Unless he could do something. His new assignment might afford him an opportunity. Could he allow the warlords to up the stakes a thousand fold?

  Fox hadn’t minded being taken off the radionuclide team; he realized that the importance of his group had diminished with respect to the overall Project goals. But being placed under Kistiakowsky’s high-explosive group had angered him. What did he know about shock physics? Hydrodynamic motion? Detonation waves? “If you don’t know it, learn it!” Oppie had said. The same thing had happened repeatedly over the years, with scientists forced to become instant experts in fields where they had no background. But somehow it worked.

  Lucky that the crazy Ukrainian had realized Fox’s predicament and had suggested that Fox be sent down to coordinate a simulation for the actual test. To provide a benchmark to compare the blast of the plutonium bomb, one hundred tons of high explosives were going to be detonated in the desert. A radioactive source would be placed in the high explosive, and the debris would be tracked. Fox was going to put counters at various distances from the explosion, then would run around in a jeep to take readings afterward.

  Fox thought about the chance he had missed to join a few outspoken colleagues who had left the Project in protest. But he thought he might have a greater chance to influence events from inside. As if that would make a difference to the world at large.

  Once south of Albuquerque, the MP escorts began to relax. It seemed as if everything north of the city had served as a testing ground to see how well they could follow directions. Or maybe they assumed that the clumps of sagebrush held innumerable spies close to the Project, but now they had traveled far enough to be safe. Their conversations grew less strained; Fox still didn’t join in. No doubt the military police thought all the Project scientists were weird anyway.

  As they headed into the flat volcanic basin south of Albuquerque, the two-lane road wound along the Rio Grande. Grande—a true misnomer; the muddy channel seemed to hold no more than a bathtubful of water. There was no comparison with even the Thames. But in an area of the country where water was as scarce as here, perhaps a tubful of water did deserve to be called “Grande.”

  The sun shone into the car, and hot wind rushed through the open windows. General Groves had insisted on strict observance of all speed limits. Fox fidgeted, and increased his speed anyway.

  An hour later Fox found them leaving the small town of Socorro, a smudge of a village that marked the last town of any appreciable size before the site. Ten miles south of Socorro the MPs had Fox slow down for the three buildings called “San Antonio, New Mexico,” a laughable image of its Texas namesake. No sooner had Fox turned off the highway than the military policemen exchanged looks.

  The man stretched out in back pushed his head up next to Fox’s. “Ah, Dr. Fox, you know once we get to Trinity, we’ll be stuck with mess hall food.”

  The MP in front twisted his body and joined the conversation. “And since it’s one o’clock, that means at least another four hours until we get to eat.” The backseat MP grinned. “And we would hate for one

  of the lead Project scientists to go hungry.”

  “Especially with such an important test coming up.”

  Fox slowed the car down. On the left a small adobe house sat with a sign dangling on rusted chains from a wooden arch.

  OWL CAFE

  home of the green chile cheeseburger

  WELCOME!

  The backseat MP said, “Why, look, Dr. Fox. There’s a restaurant right now!”

  His partner responded too quickly. “Good idea!”

  Fox badly needed to stretch, though he didn’t feel very hungry. His stomach had been upset for days. “How much farther to the site?”

  “Uh, at least another hour.”

  “Maybe two.”

  “If not more.”

  Fox hesitated. “The orders were not to stop—”

  “Except for necessary bathroom stops and emergencies.”

  “And this certainly qualifies, doesn’t it?” The two MPs looked at Fox hopefully. “You’re the driver, though.”

  The two couldn’t have been older than twenty, not at all like the steely-eyed G-2 agents he imagined them to be. They were really just adolescents. Growing boys. Fox pulled into the dusty clearing in front of the Owl Cafe.

  Minutes later they sat in the dim bar, the only customers in the place. A large dark-skinned man grinned at them from the grill. Long tangled hair hung around his shoulders and gold-plated teeth filled his mouth. Turquoise hung from his neck and adorned his rings. He flipped three half-pound hamburgers, scraping with his spatula and sizzling them back on the grill. The MPs and Fox sipped on long-necked bottles of Mexican beer.

  The cook slipped dripping green-chili burgers in front of the men, and both MPs grabbed for theirs. Huge cut french fries filled the remainder of the plate. Fox picked his up, looked around for a napkin, but found none. He wrapped his mouth around the bun; biting down and feeling hot juices squirt into his mouth. American food.

  The Indian leaned back against a post that bisected the bar. “Lot of visitors coming through lately. You fellas lucky to catch me open today.”

  Fox swallowed a mouthful of chili before answering. “What’s the occasion?” He had to catch a gulp of beer to wash down the burning in his throat.

  The Indian nodded to a row of bottles behind the bar. “I’m moving them to the rear of
the cafe Some Army types told me they all might get knocked down the next couple of weeks by some sort of explosion. Never can tell what they’re doing out in the middle of the desert. Know what that desert’s called? Jornada del Muerto—The Journey of Death. Dead Man’s Trail. Don’t know what they’re doing out there.”

  Fox choked on his food. The two MPs ignored the exchange and kept to their lunch. Fox finished chewing so he could swallow, then asked innocently, “When did you hear about this?”

  “The explosion?” The Indian picked his teeth and shrugged. “Let’s see—one, maybe two weeks ago.”

  “And when is it supposed to happen?” Fox tried to sound disinterested so that he wouldn’t raise suspicion. One of the MPs kicked him under the table.

  “Sometime this month. Doesn’t matter to me. That’s the Alamogordo Bombing Range out there anyway, always something blowing up.” The large Indian laughed. He leaned forward, propped his elbows on the bar and whispered loudly, “They say they are building windshield wipers for submarines, or an electric airplane.” He made a small circle in the air with his finger next to his ear. “I think they are putting me on, so I figure that I might humor them.” He straightened and spoke louder. “And if moving my bottles keeps bringing the Army guys in, hey, what does it matter?”

  Fox smiled and nodded. Releasing knowledge of the impending explosion was strictly forbidden, but warnings were always mixed with the “official” cover stories and staged rumors that filled the streets of Santa Fe.

  But the whole incident left Fox certain of one thing: the MPs were definitely not G-2 agents—otherwise they would have shut the Indian up the second he had mentioned an explosion. Perhaps the two young men were exactly what they appeared to be, simple military escorts.

  Fox muttered a thanks to the Indian and pushed back from the bar, leaving half his meal on the plate. The MPs looked up at him, their mouths full of hamburger.