The Trinity Paradox (39 page)

And then it would just begin. She could no longer guess what might happen.

Everywhere she walked, red-eyed intensity shone on the scientists’ faces. Everyone seemed on the verge of snapping at anything that stood in their way, but they all looked to be bearing the weight of something important.

But what if Germany surrendered soon? she wondered. What if Dewey refused to continue funding the Project? They would have only another two months before Roosevelt handed over the presidential reins. Any advantage she might have had in predicting the future had dissolved with the bombing of New York.

Elizabeth stepped up her pace to Tech Area 1, back to her old working place. Feynman was nowhere to be seen. His office lay in its usual cluttered state, and even her desk had papers strewn all over the place, as if Feynman had used her room as a holding tank for his notes. She wrote a scribbled message, tacked it to the back of his chair, then made her way to the applied mathematics area.

John von Neumann’s computation group was grinding away, furiously trying to complete several sets of computations, double-checking parameters for the upcoming test. The physicist passing out the initial values hadn’t seen any members of the senior staff. Some of the gathered ladies in the room looked up at the disturbance—Gladys what’s-her-name scowled at her—but Elizabeth left.

She made her way back to the Admin building. After being at the center of things during Groves’s trip, she felt discarded.
They could have at least left a message for me.
But she tried to rationalize to herself that the Project didn’t revolve around her. She had served when she was needed, but that didn’t give her the right to an inside track to what was going on.

Still, she felt empty, left out.

She picked up her bags and started for the ladies’ dormitory. The dry autumn had left Los Alamos basking in heat. She remembered the first rainstorm and the muck covering all the streets. The place looked no more civilized, but she realized that it did feel like home.

Elizabeth hauled her luggage and kept to the side of the street. A military jeep sped by, then stopped. The driver craned his neck around and gunned the engine, sending the jeep roaring back toward her. “Need a lift, ma’am?”

“Sure.” Elizabeth pushed her bags into the backseat before the driver could get out to help her. She climbed into the front.

“Where you going?”

She pushed back her hair. “Women’s dormitory-Second Street.”

The driver jammed the jeep in gear and set off before she had a chance to say thanks. He wore standard khaki military dress along with the ubiquitous tie and overseas cap. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen years old, and noting the absence of military decorations, she thought he was probably a new clerk assigned to the Project. She had to hold onto the side of the jeep as they spun around a corner until the driver stopped directly in front of the dormitory.

“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.”