“Here you are, ma’am.” The serviceman’s eyes seemed bright, as though he was privy to some sort of exciting secret. He helped her take the luggage to the dormitory step.
Elizabeth extended a hand. “Thanks. Are you going down to Trinity for the test?”
“Me?” The young man looked shocked. “No ma’am. They don’t need me down there. But, you know, if the test is successful, then we’ve practically won the war! Everybody knows that.”
“And what if it’s not successful?”
“Uh?”
“The test. What if it fails?”
The young man appeared shocked. “It can’t. I mean, all these smart professor types holed up for all these years—there’s no way the test is going to fail!”
“Do you even know what’s supposed to happen?”
The G.I. shook his head and took a step back. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” As he hopped back in the jeep he brightened. “Don’t worry, those guys know what’s going on. After all, our government wouldn’t waste all this manpower on a dud, would it?” He waved, and left Elizabeth standing in a whirl of dust.
The government wouldn’t waste things. Boy, has he got a lot to learn. But she couldn’t fault an optimistic young man for having faith in his government, especially not during the most devastating war in history. There was no comparison to what she remembered about Vietnam here— it was literally life or death for these people.
For her as well.
And it wasn’t just him. It was everyone around here. The secretaries, the scientists, and worst of all, the military men. They all believed in these physics wizards who promised an atomic bomb that might destroy Europe. The magic that would solve their problems, end war forever because with an atomic weapon America could enforce peace throughout the whole world. Everything depended on the success of this test, two weeks from now.
She felt surprised at herself for having these thoughts, the first doubts and cynicism since… when? Since she had failed to assassinate Oppenheimer? What would have happened if she had succeeded? Time would have changed in some other unpredictable fashion. She no longer had the temporal hindsight to determine if anything had changed for the better. She could barely remember how things were supposed to be.
Her past reality seemed farther and farther away. She knew she would never return to the world she had known. She had to live here, and now.
So why not give in, move ahead and go with the flow? Her early effort to change things only mucked up history itself. Would she do even more damage if she tried to change things again? New York had been bombed, Teller had died, Dewey had won the election… how many more things could she hope to change—would she change?
Elizabeth turned to stare at the encampment again. She had been gone so long. The Tech Area remained out of sight from where she stood by the dorm, but she could just make out the top of the administration building. To her right the Jemez mountains showed her where she had stumbled in from the rain a lifetime before, just after Jeff’s death, to see Mrs. Canapelli waving her into the warmth and shelter of 1943.
So why couldn’t she just live things out like a normal person? Forget about changing the world—she already knew that life was a lot more complicated than she gave it credit for. “Do what you gotta do. And damn the consequences,” Ted Walblaken had said. Was he even alive in this timeline? He would probably be just a baby. The thought made her shiver.
Some things had to be immutable, no matter how she tried to change them. But was the war one of them? Already, she had forgotten to think of it as World War II. Had she set into motion inexplicable forces that could not be turned back? What if Germany really did win this war? That didn’t seem possible, given the turn of events lately, according to the newsreels—but what if more things happened later? What if the Cold War got worse, and the Cuban Missile Crisis did escalate into a full-scale nuclear war? What if the world did not survive to see the days of glasnost and perestroika, to see the Berlin Wall come down and the Eastern bloc cracked open?
The thought didn’t cheer her, but she couldn’t do anything to change what she had already set into motion. She stooped to pick up her bags, more confused than ever about what she wanted to do. Mrs. Canapelli opened the screen door as Elizabeth stepped for the dormitory.
“Welcome back, hon! You look absolutely exhausted. Why don’t you come on in and take a bath, soak your feet for a while. This time of day we might be able to get a little hot water for you.” She bent to help Elizabeth with her luggage, then started talking at her usual speed.
“Things have been racing so fast since you left. The Project is quite abuzz with something happening. I suspect there’s going to be a big climax or something, and soon.” When Elizabeth was inside, Mrs. Canapelli suddenly stopped her chatter. She reached inside her apron and pulled out a sheet of paper.
“I almost forgot. Dr. Feynman dropped this by this morning, and wanted to be sure you got it. He knew you were coming back today.”
Elizabeth opened the envelope with shaking hands. All the self doubts and worries she had experienced just moments before melted away. She tried to read the letter through Feynman’s chicken-scrawl handwriting. After typing so many of his notes, she had learned to interpret his words.
Elizabeth,
By the time you get this we’ll be on our way to accomplishing the test. I have taken the liberty of sending your security clearance to Trinity; please come as soon as you can. Oppie has authorized your presence. Implosion was your idea, after all!
Dick
Mrs. Canapelli raised an eyebrow as Elizabeth looked up. “Well? Is everything all right?”
She couldn’t understand whether she felt proud of herself or nauseated at what she had done. It was your idea after all! But she had been invited to witness the test, and if the test device worked, then the end of the war with Germany wouldn’t be far behind.
Elizabeth smiled, keeping the note to herself. “Everything is fine.”
Graham Fox worked late at the Trinity site, but that was not an unusual occurrence. Everyone worked late, every night, sometimes until four ill the morning, when they would stagger off to bed, only to awake three hours later and start all over again. The deadline approached, and excuses were not acceptable. Standing outside, under the infinite starry skies of the desert, feeling the cold autumn wind ruffle his hair, Fox could clear his thoughts, harden his resolve, and go back to what he had to do.
Once the last technician had left, staggering down the wooden steps of the shot tower, Fox continued working. A half-empty thermos of weak tea sat among the clutter on the planks of the detonation platform. On the main surface of the platform the high-explosive bricks were arranged in thick blocks and staggered into a huge hemispherical dome that rose fifty feet above the desert sands. A white tent like structure surrounded the setup.
Alone now, Fox allowed a half hour to pass before he stopped his own work. Looking down to the ground, he saw nothing in the glistening darkness. The moon lit everything with a watery gray-blue. A guard sauntered past on the dirt road a hundred yards to the east. Fox listened, but could make out no other sounds.
He was alone. No one could see him.
He ducked into the tented area and stuffed five bricks of high explosives into his satchel. He didn’t relax until he had zipped the satchel shut.
For the fifth night in a row he had managed to slip some H.E. blocks out of the test area.
He had one more stop before heading for his quarters to snatch a few hours of sleep before piling the explosive bricks under the harsh morning sun. As project manager for the H.E. simulation, it was his responsibility to check on all aspects of the upcoming test. That included visiting the observation bunker the senior staff would inhabit.
23
Trinity Site
November 1944
“If the bomb were not used in the present war, the world would have no adequate warning as to what was to be expected if war should
break out again.”
—Arthur Compton, in a letter to Secretary of War Stimson
“It ought to be clear to us that we, and we alone, are to be blamed for the frustration of our work.”
—Leo Szilard
Mrs. Canapelli peered over a stack of bleached white towels at Elizabeth. “Have a good trip down there. It sounds exciting. I wish you could just stay for a day or two and rest!”
Elizabeth helped Mrs. Canapelli carry the towels back into the dorm. “Yeah, it sure would have been nice to settle down for a while. I’ve been on the road so much that I can’t seem to figure out where I am anymore.”
“Well, you must be doing something right, Betty. All these important people keep asking you to accompany them.”
Elizabeth laughed. “I don’t know about that.” She bent to pull out her old blue jeans—”dungarees”—from the bottom of the drawer. She shook them out and looked wistful. She hadn’t put them on since the day she had tried to shoot Oppenheimer.
“You aren’t thinking of wearing those, are you?” Mrs. Canapelli wrinkled her nose.
“White Sands isn’t the place to wear a dress.” Mrs. Canapelli looked blank. Elizabeth explained, “I mean the Trinity site.” That’s right—White Sands missile range probably wasn’t established until the fifties or so!
“You’ve been down there before?”
“No, but some of the guys here told me about it. Trying to scare me with stories about rattlesnakes and tarantulas and scorpions.” Mrs. Canapelli cringed, but Elizabeth used it to her advantage. “So you see, that’s not the place I want to be having bare legs.”
Mrs. Canapelli still looked skeptical. “If you say so. I suppose that you’re used to wearing that sort of clothes, being from Montana and all. But to tell you the truth, you really don’t look very feminine in those dungarees.”
Elizabeth smiled to herself at Mrs. Canapelli’s concern. Self-doubt about her femininity was the least of her concerns. She wondered what Mrs. Canapelli would think in twenty years when women started wearing hip-huggers and burning their bras.
“Tell you what—I’ll change when I get down there. Okay?”
“You know best. Just be careful. And good luck with whatever it is you’re doing down there.”
“Thanks.” Elizabeth closed her suitcase.
A horn honked from outside the dormitory. Mrs. Canapelli squinted out the window. “Oh, it’s your ride. They’re waiting for you.”
Elizabeth swung her bag from the bed. “Thanks again. With any luck I’ll be back within a week.”
Once in the black government-licensed car, Elizabeth settled back for the ride down to Trinity. She recognized the two other passengers as physicists from their interactions with Feynman; she thought one might be Enrico Fermi, but she didn’t recognize the other. They politely nodded to her and went back to reading their journals. Everything seemed so calm—the driver didn’t speak either, but Elizabeth didn’t mind. She hoped to catch a long nap on the drive down. It would be a nice change from accompanying General Groves.
Elizabeth stared out the car window with her eyes half closed, lost in thought. As the car wound its way down from the mesa, they passed cliffs that jutted up hundreds of feet and boulders bigger than houses. Pinon pine, Douglas fir, and blue spruce hung onto rocky ledges.
Although no one spoke, Elizabeth sensed a subdued excitement in the car, and it kept her awake. The rugged landscape seemed to magnify the tension. The bomb could have been developed in no other place, nowhere that matched the grandeur of northern New Mexico, the limitless boundaries that allowed physicists to tinker with the forces at the heart of the universe.
In another few days everything would reach its climax. The goal to which they had devoted years of their lives would be wrapped up in the detonation of one sphere of plutonium.
And then what? What would happen when Pandora’s box was finally opened for all the world to see? Would all nations react the same way as they had in her original timeline? The bipolar split of the USSR and U.S.? Would it still take fifty years for those old wounds to heal? Or would everything get worse?
Elizabeth then wondered about her own life. What was she going to do with herself after the test succeeded and the urgency of developing the bomb went away? One way or another, the war would soon be over. Someone would eventually discover that she had no birth certificate, no real identification. She didn’t know how much longer she could fast-talk her way through everything.
She couldn’t stay at Los Alamos. Even though she had helped develop the weapon in the first place, she couldn’t keep helping to make it worse and worse. Or would even that conviction change? At times she hated herself and her weakness. Germany would be stopped, and hopefully America would have enough sense to get rid of the weapon once and for all.
In her old timeline she realized that some people had accused the U.S. of racism by dropping the bomb on Japan. It was all right to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki because the Japanese were “different.” Japanese-Americans were thrown into detention camps; German-Americans never were. No matter how terrible the Nazis were, they still looked like Americans. What would the public think if they saw radiation-crisped blond-haired babies lying in the rubble of a nuked Berlin?
It would never be Harry S Truman’s decision now. It fell into the hands of President Dewey. She had no idea what the man would do.
With her knowledge of how things might have turned out, maybe she could start something that would force the U.S. to ban further work in nuclear weapons. Some of the other scientists had expressed doubts. She might even have to talk to Graham Fox again, try to resolve things with him. One person should be able to make a difference. Look at what Ralph Nader had started, back in her timeline, overturning the whole safety industry.
She knew the U.S. had experienced food riots and some war demonstrations in the past, but they were nothing like the major protests in the sixties, or even her Livermore demonstration. Maybe she could change things, help keep the world on the razor-thin path that would let them survive the next fifty years.
Elizabeth set her mouth, unable to sleep in the car as she considered the possibilities of all she could do.
They ate a late lunch at a run-down place called the Owl Cafe, which was one of only a few adobe buildings that collectively called themselves a town. Several cars and jeeps were parked at the small restaurant; the longhaired cook appeared frantic but delighted by the unexpected flood of business. Half the people were civilians, the other half military. As the only woman in the place, Elizabeth felt many gazes turned to her, but she ignored them. Her eyes stung from the cigarette smoke floating in the claustrophobic room—that was one thing she still had not been able to get used to, even after all this time.
She and her companions ate quickly and managed to get back on the road before many of the other diners had finished. When they turned south for Trinity, time seemed to slow. The scenery looked blasted and monotonous. She felt eager to get to the place, but also uneasy about being part of the atomic test. Elizabeth kept looking at the driver, trying to urge the man to drive faster, but the desert miles crawled.
Elizabeth squinted at the horizon. A dust storm shrouded the base of the mountains, obscuring the view. The car shook as they drove along the bumpy road, making it even harder for her to see. They crept over a sloping hill, and the dust lowered like a veil. Not more than two miles in front of her stood a metal tower, alone in the middle of the desert.
It rose over a hundred feet from the ground. Four legs supported the structure with pipes crisscrossing the middle. A tent covering of canvas billowed in the wind on the top, shielding whatever the tower held.
Elizabeth’s chest started to hurt; she realized she was holding her breath. She breathed deeply and looked around the car. No one else had seemed to notice the site. Fermi glanced up from his journal.
“Ah, is this the shot tower?” he said in his thick Italian accent.
The driver cleared his throat.
“Yup. You shoulda seen it a week ago, when they blew up a test shot. A hundred tons of explosives, they said. Boy oh boy, it looked like Hell on Earth, with dust and smoke flying up into the sky. We were so far away down in the base camp that we couldn’t hear the boom for five seconds or so.” He lowered his voice. “And I heard that’s gonna be nothing compared to this real shot.”
“If it works,” Fermi said.
“It will work,” Elizabeth muttered. Fermi stared at her, but seemed to dismiss her comment.
Elizabeth looked back at the tower. So this is it. Everything they had been working for on the Manhattan Project—and every reason why she had first gotten involved in the antinuclear movement. The Livermore Challenge Group at Berkeley, the United Conscience Group at Santa Fe, she and Jeff climbing down the canyon during the storm to smash the MCG setup… this flimsy tower looked too frail to even hold the weapon.
In the next few days the precious plutonium core would be driven down from Los Alamos under heavy escort. In the desert heat a few men would begin the final assembly of the test device. Until now the tower sat like a rifle with no bullets—it needed to be loaded with the Gadget before it was complete.
The driver proceeded past the front guard shack, then circled around the settled area of the site, keeping at least half a mile from the structure before they pulled up to an old wooden farmhouse in the middle of the barren area. The driver pulled the car to a stop and spoke. “We’re here. Old McDonald’s farm—ha, ha, I mean ranch.”
Elizabeth barely noticed the joke, thinking how glad she was that he had remained quiet during the journey. The driver opened the trunk and started removing their luggage.
“A jeep will come around and take you to the tents. That’s where you’ll be staying until the test.” He nodded to her. “I think Oppie wanted to put you up in the ranch house, ma’am. I’ll get someone to help with the bags.”
The Trinity Paradox Page 29