The Trinity Paradox (43 page)

Fox wiped his dusty hands and joined her. He nodded toward the pole. “Each instrumentation package has a velocimeter, a barometer, thermometer, and flypaper.”

“Flypaper?”

“To catch radioactive debris in the wind. The other stuff is to correlate the wind velocity, pressure, and temperature of the blast wave. My flypaper will give us an idea of the total radioactivity in this part of the explosion.” Fox seemed disinterested in what he was doing, rattling off the information as if he were lecturing in front of a class.

Elizabeth turned back to the shot tower. She felt the tension like a knot in her stomach. A light glow appeared behind the mountain, where the sun struggled to come up over the horizon. The distant mountains looked like jaws ready to bite down on the dawn.

Fox didn’t speak much. The desert around them remained absolutely quiet. Elizabeth thought it strange not to hear at least some noise: for the past few days, sounds of hammering, sawing, welding, cursing, and nervous laughter had filled the camp. But now she heard nothing. The desert held its breath, waiting for the test, waiting for the world to change.

Fox fumbled in a knapsack. “Here. Use this suntan lotion. No telling how much protection we’ll need from this faraway.”

“What?” She grasped the bottle of sunscreen.

“We’re likely to get hit with a healthy dose of radiation centered about the ultraviolet. That means we could get sunburned from the blast.” He picked up a pair of sunglasses from the portable table. “And wear these. We must face the opposite direction until after the initial flash, but then we can turn around.”

“Twenty-five minutes,” the tinny voice said from the radio.

Elizabeth held up the glasses; in the darkness she could barely see through the dark lenses. She lowered the glasses. “Graham?”

“Yes?”’

“What’s with the bunker? Why this? Why did you need to take me out here?”

“What do you mean?” He avoided her expression and mumbled his words.

“You know damned well what I mean.”

Fox thrust his hands in his pockets and stared off toward the shot tower.

Elizabeth allowed him a minute of silence before speaking. “Then what is it? My God, you know it’s over between us. Give it up and quit resenting me.”

“Resenting you?” He whirled on her. “I opened myself up to you! I don’t make friends easily, but I let you in. I trust my friends. I value them. I can’t trust you anymore. You’ve changed too much. You’ve become one of them. You’re dazzled by all this, and you can’t think of the consequences anymore. You sold your conscience for a pat on the back.”

Elizabeth winced, then defended herself with anger. “Just because I slept with you a few times doesn’t make us soul mates. We’re too different. I don’t agree with—”

“Just because you slept with me? Is that all it means to you? An amusing little roll on the mattress?” Fox seethed with his anger, but then he lowered his voice in defeat. “I thought you were like me. I thought you understood exactly what sort of monster we were creating here. I thought you wanted to work with me from the inside, to stop it. Do what your conscience tells you to do—those were your own words, Elizabeth! But you change your conscience whenever it’s convenient—”

She slapped him, but didn’t know which of them felt the most stung. “It’s not like that. This test will go off, but I don’t know what will happen next. I used to know. New York never got wiped out. Germany surrendered. President Truman dropped the bomb first on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki. He used both the plutonium bomb and then the uranium bomb.” Elizabeth turned away from him and felt herself shaking. “This isn’t how it happened at all.”

Fox blinked in confusion. “President Truman? What are you talking about? Roosevelt and Truman lost the election. They want to use the bomb on Germany, not on Japan.”

“This is a different timeline! History has changed, somehow. I changed it. Everything is all messed up.”

Fox grabbed her shoulders. “Elizabeth, what on earth are you saying? Who are you? I thought you were planted here. A German spy or saboteur or something. I never reported you because I thought we were both working toward the same goals, but then you went over to
them!”

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 bouncing 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.