The Trinity Paradox (27 page)

Werner ran his hand over the rounded warhead of the black-and-red rocket. The metal felt warm to his touch. He drew back, but then checked all three rockets. Each nose emanated heat that hinted at the boiling power trapped inside. He saw the external paint beginning to show signs of blistering along the edges.

He was glad the submarine had nearly reached its destination. The captain wanted to be rid of these strange new weapons.

U-415
slid into calm New York harbor under cover of darkness. The sky was smeared with a whitish-gray overcast of spring clouds, under lit by the glow of New York City. Splashes of black night and glittering stars showed through where the overcast cleared.

Executive Officer Gormann joined the captain on the conning tower as soon as the hatch opened. Water ran off the wood planking and steel plates of the submarine’s hull. Moving under the silent power of electric motors, they had crept up the Lower Bay after sunset, through the Narrows, and emerged into the Upper Bay under full darkness.

Captain Werner drew a deep breath of the cool air and surveyed the skyline. Everyone in the city would be calm, resting, unsuspecting. The U-boat would escape out to the ocean before anyone could understand what had happened.

The exec took out his binoculars and began scanning the glittering silhouettes of lighted skyscrapers. They had only a sketched map of the area, but the landmarks were obvious. “That is their Statue of Liberty ahead,” Gormann whispered. “She is staring right at us.”

The greenish-yellow glow around the statue made it look like a leviathan guarding the way. “In a moment we will give her something more interesting to watch,” Werner replied.

The submarine glided ahead. In the distance the running lights of a small ferry boat cut across the water; U-415 kept all her lights off.

The captain thought of the last time he had headed into a port—Lorient. A minesweeper had met them at a predetermined point to lead them through the deadly labyrinth to a safe berth. Captain Werner had hoisted white pennants on a line fastened to the periscope, proclaiming the total tonnage he and his crew had sunk during their previous mission. All the crewmen had changed into their last pair of clean fatigues and combed their beards, ready to celebrate. They were coming into port, with fresh food, fresh clothes, and fresh women. A band met them on the quay; nurses and other ladies waited in crowds, holding flowers.

Their reception in New York harbor couldn’t have been more different.

Captain Werner stood beside the radar-detection gear; Gormann stared through his binoculars. “I wonder which one is the Empire State Building.”

“The tallest one, I’m sure.”

“That must be it. Do you think I can see King Kong on top of it?
King Kong
is Hitler’s favorite film, you know.”

“We did not come here to be tourists, Leutnant Gormann,” Werner said.

“Understood, sir.” Gormann leaned down to call into the hatch. “Prepare to stop!”

“All stop,” the captain said.

“All stop!” the executive officer repeated.

“Open rocket bay doors. Let us see if this thing works.”

Gormann nodded. “It’ll be a long, embarrassing trip back if it doesn’t.”

The seamen below unsealed the hatches, and the forward deck section of U-415 split in half, letting the red dimness of the submarine’s interior show through. The opening widened as the seamen cranked open the bay doors, sliding the deck plating aside so that the rockets sat exposed in the shadows below.

“Use the hydraulic motors,” Werner said. “Raise the first rocket. Watch what you’re doing now. We’re going to have to launch the other two in rapid succession, then get out of here. Make certain everything goes properly.”

“Aye, Captain,” one of the men said from below.

A grinding hum came from the interior as the metal platform for the first rocket rose up to the deck. The rocket itself was longer than a man, tilted up at an angle.

“Exec, will you adjust the aim point? Elevation sixty-three degrees is the optimal angle, according to our instructions.” Captain Werner looked at his sketched map of the New York area, then he pointed to three different locations. “I want them to strike approximately there, there, and there. If these weapons do what Professor Esau claims, we should wipe out Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.”

Gormann walked unsteadily down to the narrower end of the deck. The harbor waters remained calm as the exec cranked the stand. “Sixty-three degrees. Captain, the front end of the rocket is very hot.”

‘‘I know. The professor told us not to worry about that.’’

Gormann adjusted the blast shield to protect the wet wooden deck, then climbed back to the conning tower. Werner called into the submarine. “All clear below. Prepare for firing.”

He heard men scrambling below in the open bay. “Exec, you may fire when ready.”

Gormann adjusted the binoculars around his neck, then bent to the controlling device installed there. He depressed the activation switch for the preparatory stage that would pressurize the fuel chambers. “You might want to duck below, sir. We don’t know how serious these flames are going to be.”

Captain Werner crouched behind the metal wall of the conning tower; the exec bent beside him. Werner said, “I am going to stay here and watch. I’ve had a few singed hairs before.” After a pause, he nudged Gormann. “What are you waiting for?”

“Firing now,” the exec said. He pushed the launch button.

A roar like a thousand blowtorches blasted the submarine’s deck. Captain Werner saw the orange glow of the flames, then he and the exec raised their heads to peep over the shielding wall just as the rocket heaved itself off the stand and rose into the air, graceful and ponderous at the same time.

Heat washed over the captain’s face, but he stood and stared as the missile rose from the U-boat and climbed into the night sky, picking up speed as it arced toward the skyline. Werner looked at his pocket watch. He could not remember when the rocket was set to detonate. Already, people on the shore must have noticed. He wondered how long it would take a patrol boat to come investigate. Werner wasn’t too worried about that, though; he knew how to man the antiaircraft guns, which would make short work of any curious vessel.

“Ready second rocket!” Gormann called down. Silence no longer mattered so much.

Werner looked at the heat shield, saw it glowing a deep red from the rocket’s exhaust flames. Even with the protection, the wet, algae-covered deck had been scorched. “Wear your gloves, Gormann.”

The exec had already pulled them on and scrambled away from the conning tower over to the rocket bay as the second missile emerged from the dimness below.

Captain Werner watched the red-orange flame of the first rocket streaking toward the skyscrapers, riding high over the Empire State Building. Suddenly, in an explosion whose sound did not reach them until a full five seconds later, the rocket burst in midair, spreading its radioactive payload in a broad yellow cloud of glittering dust. The debris continued to spread and glow like embers, crawling across the sky as the poison seeped over the city.

Some bystanders might be killed by falling shrapnel from the detonated rocket casings, but the rest would believe they had survived. They would learn in a few days how mistaken they were.

Werner continued to stare at the cloud until the executive officer interrupted him. “Second rocket ready to fire, Captain. This one is targeted on Brooklyn.”

“Good,” the captain said. “Let’s finish our work and get out of here. We have made history here tonight, Leutnant Gormann. We will return home victorious.”

The executive officer launched the second rocket.

Then the third.

U-415 had submerged and slid unseen through the Narrows before the harbor patrol could find them.

In the locked supply cabinet below, Captain Werner took out his bottle of brandy. The men were in a festive mood.

Part 4

15

Los Alamos May 1944

“Everyone in that room [at Trinity] knew the awful potentialities of the thing they thought was about to happen ... We were reaching into the unknown and we did not know what might come of it.”

—
Genera/
Thomas F. Farrell

“The bomb must be used [for that is] the only way to awaken the world to the necessity of abolishing war altogether. No technical demonstration ... could take the place of the actual use with its horrible results.”

—
James
8.
Conant

“Attention in the area!
Attention in the area!” The site-wide public address system was rarely used, but when the speakers awoke from their silence, the message usually proved to be important.

Damn!
Elizabeth glanced up from her desk, having lost her place in the intricate calculation. The other women in the computations room put down their pencils and started
to chat with
each other. Someone stood up and looked out the window. Three women lit up cigarettes.

“All project scientists, staff members, and other personnel are to attend an immediate mandatory meeting in the Tech Area,” the tinny voice on the loudspeaker said. “I say again ...
 
”

Elizabeth stared down at her paper. The equations were becoming longer and more difficult to solve, and an independent team rechecked everything, so introducing errors would be pointless—if she even wanted to keep doing that. She had already caused the death of Teller, could not force herself to assassinate Oppenheimer. She didn’t know anymore what she wanted to do. After living in the past in the constant turmoil of a bloody war for nearly a year, her own convictions had grown fuzzier.

Around her the scientists felt greater pressure as they fell behind their milestone. They had two options for making a bomb core—uranium-235, which was nearly impossible to separate from natural uranium, and the new element plutonium. But now the theoreticians had learned that their so-called gun design would never work with plutonium, something to do with ambient slow neutrons that would cause the reaction to fizzle. Frantically, they returned to the drawing board to develop new models from scratch. For a uranium core, a simple gun assembly shot one small mass of uranium into a larger one, making the combined sphere into a critical mass. For plutonium they would require something much more complicated.

Elizabeth watched her pencil roll off her desk to the floor. It gladdened her to observe their difficulties anyway. She had already proven to herself that she couldn’t do much more than observe.

It looked as if they would be receiving plutonium from the Hanford, Washington, plant sooner than Oak Ridge could provide any uranium-235. The scientists needed to have a plutonium bomb design ready immediately. Elizabeth thought she remembered the Manhattan Project scientists had worked on two different designs, but her memory of the other timeline had been getting worse with every day she remained here.

“Don’t you want to see what’s up?” It was Gladys something-or-other drawling into Elizabeth’s ear. Elizabeth had never gotten to know the woman well, content to nod at her in the morning and ignore her in the afternoon.

Elizabeth tried to listen to the rest of the message as it repeated. “They want us to go too, huh? You think they’re going to treat us as human beings for a change?”

Gladys looked at her. “You heard him—all personnel. That’s us too, Betty. It might be something exciting.”

Gladys pushed away as von Neumann entered the room from his office. He clapped twice to get their attention. With his short build, dark hair, and sharp Hungarian accent, von Neumann reminded her of a puffed-up dictator. “Quickly now. You have heard the announcement. Everyone assemble at the meeting hall. We will redo your calculations after the meeting.” He whirled and strode out the door before anyone had a chance to react.

Gladys popped her gum. “You can sit by me if you want. Harvey will probably be too busy with the other eggheads.” Gladys spent every afternoon incessantly talking or complaining about her husband Harvey, a member of the University of Chicago group.

Elizabeth turned over her sheet of calculations before leaving. “I wonder what’s going on.”

“Probably another one of Oppie’s pep talks. Harvey says he’s getting under the skin of the professional staff— the scientists, that is. Says Oppie might be pushing things a bit too much. The krauts are losing anyway, and we’re mopping up the Japs in the Pacific. We’ll never get done in time.”

Don’t be so sure, Elizabeth thought, but followed Gladys out the door, trying to lose herself among the other women hurrying to the meeting hall. She frowned at how they all acted like high school cheerleaders.

Outside, the late spring sunshine felt good; another month and the scrub oak would be full and turn the top of the mountain deep green. Elizabeth made an effort to hurry her step so that she could avoid sitting next to Gladys.