Elizabeth pulled away from him in shock. “A German spy? You’ve got to be kidding! I’m from the future. The future! Or a different future, at least. I caused an accident, I woke up back here. I don’t know how it all happened. I wanted to change things, fix it for the better, but now I think maybe I should have left it alone, left everything alone. A spy?”
Elizabeth froze, about to laugh, but then her eyes widened. “Are yow?” She grabbed the front of his white shirt. She could see dust and sweat stains on the material. One of the buttons pulled off as she gripped him. “Graham, what did you do to the bunker? Tell me!”
“Elizabeth, you’re insane. From the future? You don’t know what’s happening here. You can’t understand—”
She struck him again across the mouth, hard enough to split his lip. “What did you do to the bunker?”
Fox flinched, then glared at her.
“Twenty minutes,” the announcer said.
He shoved her away. “Too late now anyway. Somebody must do something to stop the madness before it begins. Germany showed restraint. They proved they could control their destructive urges. I’m not at all convinced we can do the same. You’ve seen the look in General Groves’s eyes. He wants this weapon, he wants to see the blast. He wants to take over the world with it. He’ll have a better Big Stick than any other military commander has ever had.”
“Graham, it doesn’t happen that way. We survive it. Times get ugly and paranoid for a while, but we survive. You can’t uninvent something!”
“But I can certainly delay its progress. That’s the beauty of having a classified program, Elizabeth—only the senior staff know how the entire project fits together. Once you get rid of most of the people who know how to make the Gadget—”
“Get rid of… ” She glanced at the jeep and started to move toward it. Her heart pounded. Fox grabbed her arm, squeezing and digging in with his fingernails. “Don’t touch me!”
“You’re going to stay right here. You can’t make it back to the command bunker before the detonation.” He looked ludicrous with white suntan cream smeared on his cheeks and nose. But his words frightened her very much.
Fox turned back to look at the tower. In the distance the first rays of the sun had just begun to peek over the San Andres mountains. It would be several minutes yet before the light hit the ground around the base of the mountains.
“Fifteen minutes,” the radio said.
Elizabeth whirled and lashed out, jerking herself from his grip. He clung to her blouse so that it ripped along one seam. “You cannot make it!” he said.
She started for the jeep again, but Fox tackled her. Sharp rocks and sand stung her face, and she coughed, trying to wheeze her breath back. Fox held her down. She squirmed and kicked.
“It is already done, Elizabeth. Everything is in place. I hid some of the test explosives inside the command bunker, then wired the detonation to occur in parallel with the bomb. They’ll never even feel it.”
She thought of Oppie and Groves and Feynman and all the other scientists in the command bunker, leaning forward, waiting to see the flash that would be brighter than a thousand suns.
“No!” She moved sideways and brought her knee up, jamming it between Fox’s legs, then punched him in the larynx, using the sharp edges of her knuckles. Being a student in Berkeley had taught her plenty of self-defense techniques.
Fox mewled and turned to jelly. She scrambled out from under him and crawled toward the jeep.
“Too late,” Fox wheezed behind her.
“Oh shut up!” Elizabeth threw a glance at the radio. The Army field unit was propped up against one of the muddy tires. Painted a khaki green, it was as big as a large knapsack.
“Ten minutes,” the voice said. “Minute by minute countdown starting now.”
The dials looked incomprehensible to her; she couldn’t make out any of the settings. Nothing came from the speaker box except a quiet hiss of background static. Elizabeth dropped to her knees and started flipping dials. “Hello, can anyone hear me? Hello?” She leaned into the device. “Answer me!” She smacked the radio with the flat of her hand.
Fox’s voice came from behind her. “There’s no microphone, Elizabeth. They didn’t want the scientists to inadvertently compromise the test by breaking radio silence.”
She scrambled back over and grabbed his hair to smash his head down on the sand. “Then give me the keys to the jeep. Now!”
Fox grunted and tried to claw at her with his hands. She pointed her fingers straight out and held them like an icepick in front of his wide, glazed eyes. “Give me the keys, dammit, or I’ll gouge your eyes out!”
He tried to roll her off of him, then groaned in his own agony.
“All right, we’ll do the left eye first!” She drew back her hand.
Fox gasped his words. “No, no!” He seemed to realize he couldn’t get away. “Jeep… doesn’t have keys!”
Elizabeth leaped to her feet, feeling stupid. Of course, the Army Series M vehicles used only a starter button. She thought about kicking Fox one more time in the kidneys for good measure, but sprinted for the jeep instead.
She threw herself behind the steering wheel and fumbled for the starter button. She pushed her hair out of her eyes. In the distance the area around the shot tower remained deserted. Nothing moved as far as she could see, where moments before the area had been a flurry of activity—jeeps had bounced across the desert, carrying last-minute dispatches; scientists had set up their diagnostics. Now nothing moved as far as she could see. The desert waited for a second sun to rise.
Setting the choke, she pushed the starter button. The engine caught, and she jammed it into gear. The vehicle lurched forward.
And then Fox stood there, somehow getting to his feet and throwing himself in front of the jeep. She swerved, ran into a rock and bumped over it. The front headlight struck Fox and sent him sprawling back to the sand. She could see blood in the dim dawn light. Fox screamed in pain, then shouted a last, plaintive “Stop!”
She gripped the steering wheel and did not move for a fraction of a second. Fox was hurt. He needed help. She remembered holding him, talking with him, making love to him.
She recalled sitting in front of a car, skier 4, in the Livermore demonstration. She had trusted civil rules of protest. Instead, she had now run down Graham Fox.
You gotta do what you gotta do, and damn the consequences. She should stay with Fox, take care of him, see what she could do to help him. What if he was dying? What if she had killed him? She didn’t have time to prevent anything back at the bunker anyway. She couldn’t stop the explosion from killing all the scientists. She had to get her priorities straight.
“I can try,” she said to herself, and left Fox lying there as she let up on the clutch. The jeep jerked as it moved into first gear, but she managed to keep it moving. The stick shift wasn’t too different from what she had learned to drive, but it took most of her remaining energy to jam the clutch to the floor.
The jeep sped off, spewing wet sand from its tires. Fox raised a hand, trying to call her back, but she ignored him. She had made her choice. His wasn’t the only life at stake.
Things had changed from what she thought. These people were not the historical monsters she had imagined them to be years ago when she was with the Livermore Challenge Group or with her Santa Fe activists. Flesh, blood, feelings—and things were different here.
The jeep picked up speed as she ran through the gears. Her body smacked against the side of the vehicle as she hit a depression; she clung to the wheel to keep herself from bouncing out. She could hardly see the road. She fumbled for the headlights, but they helped little in the growing glare of sunrise. Still, she kept the jeep pointed toward the command bunker, a good five miles away from her, from Ground Zero.
She had to punch the vehicle to over sixty miles an hour. Could an old Army jeep even go that fast? It had to. She had less than ten minutes. She pressed the pedal to the floor. Over the bouncin
g she could make out that the wobbling speedometer read a maximum of fifty miles an hour. The rough desert road made her bones rattle in their sockets. She didn’t have any idea how fast she was really traveling, but she prayed that there would be time to reach the bunker.
She didn’t want to be caught in the open when the blast went off. In her mind she saw a snippet of one of the silly civil defense films from the fifties, with cartoon ducks singing a ditty about how to “duck, and cover!” if you happened to be away from a fallout shelter during a nuclear air raid.
As she came closer to the bunker she blasted the horn and yelled at the top of her lungs. “Come on, somebody let me know you’re hearing me!”
She couldn’t tell how far she had gone, or even how far she had left to go. The bunker seemed to sit fixed on the horizon with the tower standing vigil five miles farther away.
She didn’t even know if they could stop the test.
But that didn’t matter. She had to get the people out of the bunker. Feynman, Oppie, Groves, Fermi, von Neumann, a bunch of other Project scientists, a New York Times reporter, a dozen military men, all waiting for the Gadget to go off, and not even knowing they were sitting on another bomb themselves.
She spotted something—someone standing outside the bunker, as if he had just stood up and noticed the oncoming jeep. She tried to keep her hand on the horn, but kept bouncing up with the potholes. She steered with one hand and tried to swerve to miss a cactus the size of a tire, then ran over a broken mesquite bush instead.
The tire exploded, causing the jeep to lurch and bounce, barely avoiding a rollover. “Dammit!” she screamed, and tried to keep the jeep moving, but it caught in a pothole and spun around in the other direction.
Without a second to waste, Elizabeth leaped away from the steering wheel and ran toward the command bunker. She could see it just over the rise in front of her. She sprinted so quickly, leaning forward, that she sprawled on her face in the wet sand, got up again, then kept going.
“Get out of the bunker! Out!” She screamed until her voice fell hoarse. “Get out of there!”
Back at the bunker another person joined the first one outside, then another. One of them pointed at her, but the other two whirled around to look at the tower, then all three made frantic motions with their hands, urging her to hurry.
“No, you idiots! Not me!” Panting as if each breath were being ripped from her lungs, she grew closer. “Out of the bunker!” She had to make them hear her. She took a deep breath and put all her strength behind shouting one word. “Bomb!”
She scrambled ahead and could hear faint words called back to her. “Fifteen seconds until the bomb! Hurry!”
They were not thinking of the right bomb. With more energy than she knew she possessed, Elizabeth threw herself forward. She didn’t recognize the military men standing outside it, motioning to her. They had all turned to watch the tower. The countdown clicked off its final few seconds.
“Get out of the bunker! Please!” she cried. “Out!”
Several people heard her and came to the doorway. The military men ducked down. “Get them out! There’s a bomb! Sabotage!” Elizabeth said again, but she had little force left behind her voice. “They’re going to die!”
Feynman stepped to the doorway. He wore black sunglasses and had suntan cream smeared on his face. He saw her, frowned, and instantly recognized something was wrong. He turned back to the bunker entrance and shouted. Some of the people inside looked startled and reacted with alarm, moving toward the doorway.
As Elizabeth fell to her knees at the last embankments outside the bunker, she could see Oppenheimer and General Groves sitting side by side, ignoring all the rest of the commotion. Oppie turned to her, blinking at seeing Elizabeth there. “A bomb! Get out!” she said one more time, but Oppenheimer flinched and turned back to the slit window, staring through smoked glass and focusing all his attention on the shot tower. One of the military men reached out to grab the general’s shoulder.
“…one… zero!”
Far across the desert, a flash, bright enough to deaden all her senses, then everything went dark. At the same time, the bunker erupted like a volcano. She heard an instant of sound like the roar of a world breaking apart, then her ears were swallowed in a blanket of shocked silence.
Time seemed to go in slow motion. Elizabeth brought her other hand up to her eyes. Purple splotches filled her vision, like a thousand flashbulbs going off at once. Dirt filled her mouth as she rolled; a smell of gasoline seared her nose.
The ground moved from both explosions. Dirt, chunks of rock, shrapnel thanked to the earth around her. The packed sand gave a lurch, then settled down to a long rolling motion in the shock wave from the atomic blast, the same feeling as the San Francisco earthquake of ‘89, which she had felt back at Berkeley.
She could hear or see no other reaction from any of the gathered observers. Every person had to experience this alone, to deal with it in his or her own way.
And then the wind struck. A hot, smacking pop that grew and grew, and never seemed to quit. The wind howled, pushed her back, away from the tower, away from the bunker. Away from the bomb…
She forced her eyes open and tried to see, but still the purple-yellow splotches obscured her vision. She fought against the wind that tried to shove her away from the people she had been trying to save.
And just as suddenly, the wind reversed itself. It came as a shallow, haunting roar that tried to suck her back in the opposite direction, like an undertow into the sea, into the past, into the future.
But she could never go back. She had to live with what she had helped create.
She struggled to her knees. At her left came a growing heat. She turned, still unable to see. The blindness persisted. But as she faced the heat, she felt as if she could feel the growth of the fireball—it should have already risen thousands of feet by now, boiled into the upper atmosphere and spread out in a yellow-orange mushroom cloud.
The genie had escaped its bottle.
“I am become death, the shatterer of worlds,” Elizabeth said.
Oppenheimer was supposed to say that. She didn’t think he was around to quote from the Bhagavad Gita.
EPILOGUE
Santa Fe, New Mexico
May 1952
“For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant; still, we could not escape an eerie feeling when we knew we had actually done it. We felt as, I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knows will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee.”
—Eugene Wigner
When the protester walked through the open door into Elizabeth’s art gallery, her radio in back was playing yet another Frank Sinatra song. She wondered if she would live long enough to hear Led Zeppelin, or even the Beatles.
The protester wore a neat skirt suit, but Elizabeth could spot her intentions immediately. She carried the leaflets under her arm like a weapon.
Elizabeth rocked back in her chair and watched her look around the small gallery, pretending to be interested in the pottery and sand paintings. Outside in the street a man and woman walked by with a small child. They were conservatively dressed in light slacks and billowing shirts, perfect for the Santa Fe summer sun but not for the cool evenings.
The protester glanced up to meet her gaze, smiling. She fidgeted; she was new at this, Elizabeth could tell. Elizabeth turned her head to the side so she could see her clearly, since she could never look at anything straight on again. Not since the Trinity blast.
The woman opened her mouth as if she were going to ask her a question, but when Elizabeth did not meet her gaze, she swallowed and pulled out one of her leaflets instead. Elizabeth’s offset gaze always disturbed people.
The center part of her vision was gone, and she could see only out of the corners of her eyes. She didn’t want to remember the old days, eight years before, but the Trinity test was burned in her memory forever, every time she opened her eyes. The toweri
ng, glowing mushroom cloud that branded itself onto her retinas so that she had seen it for days, while recuperating.
“Excuse me, ma’am. I was wondering if I could talk to you for a moment? It’s very important to the future of all of us.”
The piece of newsprint bore the words stop atomic warfare!
She replaced her shiver in her spine with a wry smile. “Of course I’ll look at it.” She held the paper to the side to read the words.
After the detonation, she had been in and out of consciousness for a day, flash-burned and shock-deafened. She had been delirious for another half a day, but then had focused on the chaos, the tiny infirmary set up in the McDonald ranch house, the medics tending them all.
It had taken the support staff two full days to find Graham Fox. In the confusion after the atomic blast and the explosion of the bunker, no one had thought to look for one man at a single outlying survey station who had not checked in. Only later, when Elizabeth began to sob and babble about what had happened, did they realize that no one had seen Fox. When they drove out to his station, they found him in the open, unmoving, staring up at the limitless New Mexico sky.
Elizabeth had broken Fox’s leg and hip when she struck him with the jeep. Fox had lain mere on the baking sands, unable to move for two full days, with no food, no water, and no shade. On his broken leg he had crawled over to the thin shadow cast by the telephone pole. Bloodstains and scuff marks in the sand showed how he had crawled around the pole, trying to remain in the narrow shadow as the sun moved across the sky. His face and arms were raw from flash burn as well as sunburn. Elizabeth pictured him sprawled unprotected and staring in awe as the great fireball rose into the dawn sky.
“If you have any questions, I’d be happy to explain them,” the protester said. “I know some of the concepts are rather difficult, but you don’t need to know about nuclear physics to understand the danger if these weapons aren’t used properly.”
The Trinity Paradox Page 32