Bob Mayer
The Rift
PROLOGUE
On August 21, 1945, Harry K. Daghlian was stacking blocks just fifteen days after the bomb they’d put together at Los Alamos blew the dragon’s breath onto Hiroshima and twelve days after Nagasaki received the same fate.
Enrico Fermi called what Daghlian was doing “tickling the dragon’s tail.”
He had no idea how right he was.
On this day, Daghlian dropped a block.
Everyone has dropped something. Sometimes one hits the big toe and hops about and curses. Sometimes the thing dropped breaks. Unfortunately, the blocks Daghlian was stacking and what he was stacking them around were both rather unusual.
Rarely does the thing dropped kill, but when connected to the dragon, nothing good can happen. Daghlian was part of the Critical Assembly Group and was attempting to build a neutron reflector by arranging bricks of tungsten carbide around a plutonium core, trying to achieve criticality.
He was moving the last brick into place — sort of like how one should never do the last run on the ski slope, except a lot more dangerous — when the neutron counters in the room went off, alerting him that the last brick would be a mistake. What physicists call going supercritical and laymen call a “big oops.”
As Daghlian withdrew his hand, he dropped the brick.
This caused the core to go into what’s technically called “prompt critical region of supercritical behavior resulting in a power excursion” and what laymen would call “oh shit.”
Give him credit. Daghlian didn’t run away. He didn’t spin in circles and scream and shout. He attempted to knock the dropped brick off the pile.
Without success.
He then stuck to the job and began disassembling the pile to halt the reaction. He managed to do so and in the process received an estimated dosage of 510 rem.
He was dead twenty-five days later.
Exactly nine months later to the day, as if Daghlian’s death had conceived and was giving birth, another scientist working on the exact same core, in the exact same room, poked the dragon’s tail with a screwdriver.
Scientists.
He’d been warned. After they buried Daghlian, everyone muttering proud words at the funeral service and remembering the good times building the atomic bombs, Fermi looked Louis Slotin in the eye and told him, “Keep doing that experiment, tickling the dragon’s tail that way, and you’ll be dead within a year.”
For a betting person, anyone who took the under of three months from the year made a lot.
In front of seven of his fellow scientists, Slotin was maneuvering two half-spheres of beryllium around the same plutonium core. He had his left hand on one of the half-spheres, with his thumb in a hole drilled into the top and a screwdriver in his right, which he was using to keep the two half-spheres apart.
He’d removed the safety shims that usually did that.
They’re called safety shims for a reason.
He didn’t drop the half-sphere in his left hand. He missed with the screwdriver in his right, the blade slipping and allowing the two halves to touch, ever so briefly. Slotin flung the half in his left hand to the ground, but the damage had been done.
Everyone in the room saw a blue glow, an indication of the air in the room being ionized. They were all washed by the dragon’s breath, a blast of warm air, also known as radioactivity. Slotin’s hand was burned and he had a strange taste in his mouth, as if he’d swallowed something sour. In fact, his entire body had absorbed something deadly. As his colleagues hustled him from the lab, he began vomiting.
That was just the beginning of the bad. While Daghlian had died in a coma, Slotin wasn’t so fortunate. Over the next nine days, his body disintegrated until death brought a merciful end.
Two days after Slotin died, a convoy of heavily armed army vehicles pulled up to the front gate of Los Alamos. The base had the highest security clearance possible, given it headquartered the Manhattan Project, so it was rather amazing that the leader of the convoy could produce paperwork that cleared that high hurdle and the vehicles were allowed access.
The men inside the convoy were dressed in army fatigues but had no rank, no names stenciled above their breast pockets, no unit insignias. They just carried weapons in a way that indicated everyone was a hardened combat veteran looking for an excuse to use those weapons. They seemed to have a particular dislike for scientists.
The convoy drove straight to the lab.
Fermi was waiting outside, having been alerted by the gate guards.
“Might I help you?” he inquired of the hard-looking, gray-haired man who led the phalanx of soldiers to the door of the lab. A scar crossed the man’s face from above his left eye to the right of his chin. It made his smile look terrible, but since he didn’t smile, it didn’t matter. He wore aviator sunglasses, hiding his eyes from not only the sun but also everyone else. A set of pilot’s wings adorned his chest.
“My name is Thorn. Colonel Thorn.”
“And what can I do for you, Colonel Thorn?” Fermi asked. “The guards said you had authorization directly from the White House to access the base. I called Washington and that order was verified.”
“I want the plutonium core that killed Daghlian and Slotin.”
Fermi didn’t budge. “Why?”
“Because you idiots play with things you don’t understand.”
Fermi raised an eyebrow. “And you do?”
Thorn removed his sunglasses, revealing dead eyes. “We like to keep people alive.”
“We understand what we’re doing here,” Fermi said. “We developed the bombs that ended the war. You do remember that they worked.” It was not a question. The entire world knew that Little Boy and Fat Man worked.
“And two of your people killed themselves playing around with that core.” Thorn reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the same sheet of paper he’d shown the gate guards. “I have the authorization to take the core.”
Fermi reached out to take the paper, and for a moment Thorn didn’t let go. Then he released and Fermi put on a pair of reading glasses and scanned the document.
“What is this Majestic-12 organization?” Fermi asked.
“You don’t need to know.”
“Where is Area 51?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“Who exactly are you and your men?”
“You don’t need to know.”
Fermi took off the reading glasses and handed the paper back. “Do you have the proper facilities to store the core?”
“We do.”
“Do you have scientists who understand what they’re dealing with?”
A grimace flickered for the slightest of moments on Thorn’s rough visage. “We do.”
Fermi frowned. “We have the best physicists in the country here. Who do you have?”
“You ask too many questions,” Thorn said. “I’m taking that core. We can do it easy or we can do it hard, Professor. My men would prefer hard. Personally, I like it easy.” That was such a blatant lie that even Fermi — a scientist, not someone skilled in the subject of psychology — could read it. Thorn was itching for the hard way.
Fermi stepped aside. “It is all yours, then, Colonel.”
Thorn waved and his men went into the lab, rolling a large lead box they’d taken off a specially built truck. A cluster of guards, weapons at the ready, surrounded them.
“A bit overly dramatic, don’t you think?” Fermi observed.
“No.”
“The guards, not the box,” Fermi said.
“Protocol is important,” Thorn said. “Didn’t Slotin violate protocol by removing the shims?”
Fermi had no response to that.