The Trinity Paradox (32 page)

Elizabeth noticed that Feynman watched her intently. She attempted to make herself blush. She couldn’t tell if Oppenheimer was trying to frame her, to catch her at her lie. Had Feynman told Oppie about finding her breaking into the administration building a year before, falsifying her records?

“Well, I was always close to Jeff’s work—he was my husband. You probably don’t remember him, but he says he met you once or twice. He was a student at Berkeley when you were there.” Elizabeth tried to draw from all the details she had heard about the director.

“I can’t say I remember him too clearly, but I’m sure I would if I saw his picture. I taught a lot of students.”

“Jeff was pretty shy,” Elizabeth said, feeling weak inside. “Not having children gave me an opportunity to attend classes in the department. Montana State was not very strict about who audited what.” She shrugged. “I helped Jeff grade papers as well, so I guess I just picked up most of my physics background.”

“Impressive. You really should be proud of yourself.” Oppenheimer fell silent for a moment. Elizabeth glanced at Feynman; he gave her a thumbs up and grinned his support. He fidgeted in the chair.

Elizabeth pushed back her hair, adjusting a barrette that itched. “So what’s up? You didn’t come here just to compliment me on transcribing Dr. Feynman’s notes.”

“You’re right. I didn’t.” Oppenheimer stood up from the desk, looking like a gangling marionette with flopping stick arms. He started to pace about the room. “The Project has a chance to achieve its goal with this implosion concept. Our other theoreticians have solved the predetonation problem with uranium-235. Everything up here at Los Alamos is falling into place. Except we still have one problem—our liaison with the places making the material. General Groves is hot to get out to Hanford and Oak Ridge to chew some of the contractors out and get things into higher gear.”

“So why does this concern me?”

Oppenheimer shot a quick glance at Feynman, who stared at the floor. “The general needs to leave directly from here to Washington State. And he wants someone knowledgeable about the physics of the Gadget to accompany him. We’ve got everyone I can spare on this implosion scheme, and pulling any of the scientists off that project might be disastrous. We’re spread very thin here, and every man has his particular area of expertise. If I send the wrong man away with Groves, and we end up needing his experience ...” Oppenheimer shrugged. “It could set back the Project, give the Nazis time to hit us again.”

“You want
me
to accompany Groves?” The tubby, overbearing man had rubbed her the wrong way each time she had seen him. He reminded her of a gravel-voiced drill sergeant, an impatient man always one cup of coffee behind being cured of his grouchy mood. “Um, I’m not sure I know enough about the Gadget to give him any advice.’’
And he probably wouldn’t listen anyway.

“You know just the right amount, don’t worry,” said Feynman. “Most people here are only concerned about their specialized part. When you’ve been transcribing my notes, you’ve been concerned with the Gadget as a whole.”

“It will be a good opportunity for you,” Oppenheimer said.

“Opportunity for what?” She felt defensiveness rise up again, some of the old annoyances that had been building for the past year. She had tried to ignore them, to adapt to the 1940s environment. “How is General Groves going to react to having a woman along with him, especially a smart woman?”

Oppenheimer looked to Feynman, trying to understand Elizabeth’s complaint. “The general usually has a woman accompanying him, his own secretary. She happens to be in Washington, D.C., at the moment, so we’ll have you fill in.”

Elizabeth scowled. “Oh boy, I get to be the general’s personal secretary. Are you sure he doesn’t want me locked in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant?”

Feynman hesitated. “You’ve done secretarial work for me here, Elizabeth. We’ll skip the barefoot and pregnant bit.”

“Is Groves going to expect me to talk when I’m spoken to, and shut up when he’s through listening to me? If I’m going along as an advisor and a personal secretary, I can do what’s required for the job. But he has to order his own meals and lay out his own bedclothes.”

Oppenheimer hesitated. “The general is a busy man ... ”

Elizabeth only glared at him with an icy expression.

“I told you, Oppie,” Feynman mumbled out of the corner of his mouth. Then he reached out to pat Elizabeth’s arm. “You’ll be General Groves’s technical point of contact. It’s an important spot, and that’s your duty. You and he will have to work out the details, but we’ll warn him about some of the things he’ll have to do by himself.”

“And he calls the scientists prima donnas!” Elizabeth said.

‘‘Dick will prep you the next twenty-four hours before you leave,” Oppenheimer said.

Elizabeth stood and walked to the window. The morning sun had fully risen, bathing the mountain mesa in fresh light. Sounds of people hurrying to their jobs in the Tech Area were tempered by the birds chattering to each other. As she glanced up the hillside, she saw a sudden movement—a white-tailed mule deer bounding out of sight. She would miss this place. But it might be good to be away from Graham Fox for a while.

“How long am I going to be gone?”

“You’ll leave in about a week, by train from Albuquerque,” Oppenheimer said. “Total travel time will be a month, maybe two. The general needs to spend time at Hanford and at Oak Ridge. You have to take a train everywhere, or a private car. None of us is allowed to fly anymore; airplanes are considered too dangerous, and we’re too valuable to the country to risk it.”

“Elizabeth.” Feynman spoke from behind her; his voice softened. “We don’t really have a choice. I didn’t want to ask you to do this—heck, I’d rather have you here keeping me straight—but you’re really the best person we have.”

Elizabeth blinked, stunned at the rapid change of events. And all because of an offhand comment to Feynman. Or was it? Would this have happened anyway? Groves was out here because of the Nazi bombing—but would he have decided to go on this little trip if her implosion scheme had not surfaced? She did not want to be thrust into such a pivotal role. She had already done far more than she had intended.

Elizabeth breathed deeply. All she saw in front of her was the film of the P-51 racing close to the ground, and the deserted streets of New York, overlaying remembered photographs of burned and mutilated corpses from the Japanese atomic bomb blasts. What was that saying? A person could not serve two masters, lest she despise one and hate the other. Telling Feynman about implosion was one thing—she didn’t take an active role in the weapon development—but giving direct technical advice was an entirely different matter. Now she could see why Fox felt betrayed. But there was no other way.

“Let’s get started,” she whispered.

18

Hartford Engineering Works, Washington August 1944

“On the day I learned that I was to direct the project which ultimately produced the atomic bomb, I was probably the angriest officer in the United States Army.”

—
General Leslie R. Groves

“We came to recognize that this substance [plutonium], which up to then one had never seen except through its radioactivity, would be fissile. This conclusion was soon to lead to a preposterous dream: by means of a neutron reactor such as never before existed, manufacture kilograms of an element never before seen on earth.”

—
John
A. Wheeler

“Get your own
damned pot of coffee,” Elizabeth said.

General Groves had grated on her nerves from the beginning. After ten hours beside him on the train, Elizabeth had all she could do to keep her temper in check. She didn’t turn away from the night-blackened window of the streamliner as it sped with muffled clacking along the tracks.

She saw the reflection of Groves’s astonished expression, then she watched it change to one of outrage. “I— Are you questioning my orders?”

Now Elizabeth turned to him. The situation struck her as so funny she had to control a giggle inside of her. “I’m not in the Army, General, and I’m not a waitress. You can’t just order me. Slavery was abolished in the 1800s, you know.”

Groves snapped shut the manila folder of papers on his lap. His jowls trembled as he tried to find words. The smoldering cigar in his hand spewed out stinging smoke. His eyes looked bloodshot, and his chestnut-and-gray hair was disheveled. “I brought you along, Missy, in order to—”

“To be your technical advisor about some parts of the Project. That’s what Feynman and Oppenheimer crammed me with all night. And my name is not Missy. You can call me either Ms. Devane or Elizabeth.”

Groves sat speechless. Elizabeth enjoyed it very much, but decided she had made her point. “However, I think I’ll go get us a pot of coffee. I could use some myself.”

She got up and went looking for the conductor. Returning from the dining car, Elizabeth carried a tray with a silver coffeepot and two china cups. She set it on the small courtesy table and fixed herself a cup. ‘ ‘You can pour your own, General.”

Groves thrust a manila folder at her. “If you’re going to act like my technical advisor, then you’d damn well better get your facts straight. Read this. Memorize it. It’s all about Hanford and the plutonium plant.’’

He reached for the coffeepot, and she sat back in her seat. In the folder she found black-and-white aerial photographs of the central Washington desert, an enormous sprawling complex of long brown barracks flanked by occasional Quonset huts. Another photo showed gigantic buildings, water towers, smokestacks, power lines, all erected in the middle of a barren wasteland.

“Did you get any cream and sugar?” Groves asked.

“No. I take mine black.” She didn’t look up, but she heard him mutter to himself.

The pages of text had been typewritten on an old manual machine with a faded ribbon. She could see marks from erasures and scribbled-in corrections.

Six hundred square miles of land in the middle of the flat Richland valley had been deemed by the Department of Justice as “necessary to the public interest,” and appropriated en masse. Fifteen hundred residents had received eviction notices from the government—most of the people had been farmers, or veterans who had settled there after World War I; many were offered jobs in the burgeoning Hanford Engineering Works, where construction began on a scale that would have made Egyptian pharaohs proud.

The construction numbers staggered Elizabeth. 45,000 workers, 11,000 pieces of heavy machinery, 158 miles of railroad tracks, 386 miles of roads, 1177 buildings. She shook her head. The bigger numbers were difficult to comprehend—40,000 tons of structural steel, 780,000 cubic yards of concrete, 160 million board feet of lumber. All for an installation that had magically appeared out of nothing in the middle of sagebrush and emptiness!

She read accounts of difficulties the Hanford management, run by Du Pont as a contractor, had had with rowdy workers, the brawls, the drunkenness. The quantity of beer consumed in the construction camp was greater than in the entire city of Seattle. The camp bars had special windows that allowed security forces to lob in containers of tear gas whenever the workers got out of hand; paddy wagons hauled unconscious drunks off to a holding area until they sobered up enough to go back to work.

She read documented complaints from labor unions about the working conditions, about the lack of amenities, about the poor transportation services. Apparently everyone had to ride in dilapidated buses out to the reactor construction sites, which were no closer than six miles and often as far as fifteen miles from the main camp. To encourage productivity, the Du Pont management had chosen the buses in worst condition and used them for the last runs in the morning and the first runs in the evening; that way, the last to arrive at work and the first to leave were forced to suffer the worst ride.

The whole place sounded like a Wild West mining town. “A charming vacation spot,” Elizabeth muttered to herself. She watched a feathering of ripples on the surface of her coffee as the train shuttled along.

Groves had fallen asleep with papers in his lap, his black coffee untouched. It surprised her that he didn’t snore.

The dry air smelled dusty when they disembarked from the train at Richland, Washington. The sunlight bore a yellowish tinge, reflected up from the barren land.

Elizabeth looked around, blinking sleep from her eyes. She felt stiff and uncomfortable from the hours on the train, but Groves stepped down, clasping his briefcase to his side. His khaki dress uniform had wrinkled, but the general himself looked supercharged.

“General!” a man called. “General Groves, over here!”

Groves turned and walked over to a younger, thin man, also in military uniform, standing on the platform. The man smiled behind a pair of dark sunglasses while snapping a salute. Elizabeth followed Groves, carrying her overnight satchel.

“Fritz! I didn’t expect you to come out here yourself.” Groves tightened his voice and returned the salute. “Don’t you have anything better to do? I didn’t leave you in charge of all this just to be a chauffeur.”