“I heard he has his wife tear up her letters to him in at least fifty pieces, then send the shreds here. The security guys have to put the thing back together before they can read it. Feynman doesn’t mind.”
“Uh, thanks,” Elizabeth said. “I talked to him yesterday but forgot to ask his name.” The other men had already become absorbed in their technical journals again.
Fox spoke around his meal after an uncomfortable silence. “I really imagined this place would feel like more of a university town.”
“What do you mean?” Elizabeth nodded to the men still immersed in their technical papers. “Seems pretty close to me.”
“No, not that. It’s the feel of it. Look around you. People are wrapped up in their journals or moving at breakneck speed. A university town is supposed to be more relaxed, a place where people can ponder the implications of their discoveries. Sit under a tree with a blade of grass between one’s teeth, and simply think about the nature of the universe. Here, everyone appears to have a hot foot all the time.”
Elizabeth took a deliberate bite of food. Sit around under a tree? Fox must not have been going for an MBA! She didn’t want to jump into a debate on what Los Alamos should be like—not at this point.
Fox pushed back from the table. “But on the other hand, I imagine the research here is more directed than what you’d find at a university. More focused.” He shook his head. “And if it’s all to beat the Nazis to the punch, then it’s probably the only way to run a research establishment. Too bad. With all these bright lads around, some pondering would probably be better for us in the long run.”
Elizabeth put down her hamburger. “Do you really think we have so much to worry about from the German atom bomb program?”
Fox snorted. “From what I hear tell, the Nazis are about to make a breakthrough. After all, they had a corner on nuclear physics, and a two-year start on us. All the great ones from Hahn and Strassman to Heisenberg are working on their project.”
Elizabeth shook her head, suddenly remembering her list. It wasn’t often she knew enough to say something in a conversation around here. “Don’t worry about Heisenberg. He’s screwed something up, cross-section data I think. Botched calculations.”
Two of the men at their table looked up sharply. Fox narrowed his eyes. “What? Where did you hear this?”
Elizabeth grew red. She lowered her voice, trying to back out of what she had said. “Oh, just a hypothetical situation. But it’s perfectly reasonable, isn’t it? I’m sure their program is going to fizzle.” Elizabeth returned to eating her sandwich. She felt herself sweating.
“Do you know what you said?” Fox persisted.
Elizabeth breathed deeply through her nose. “Look, I’m only a file clerk, remember? How the hell should I know?”
Fox kept quiet. She felt him studying her, trying to come up with an answer; but he couldn’t possibly guess the truth. Then he nodded and dropped his voice. “I think I understand.”
Glancing up, Elizabeth noticed that he no longer looked at her, but instead stared off at a blank wall, eyes focused to infinity. She could not tell how to interpret his expression. She never wanted to bring up the subject again.
5
Los Alamos
July 1943
“In certain circumstances, this [proof of nuclear fission] might lead to the construction of bombs which would be extremely dangerous in general and particularly in the hands of certain governments.”
“We take the liberty of calling your attention to the newest development in nuclear physics, which, in our opinion, will probably make it possible to produce an explosive many orders of magnitude more powerful than the conventional ones… The country which first makes use of it has an unsurpassable advantage over the others.”
R and R: Rest and Recreation. He would go crazy if he didn’t get away from the bloody Project.
The road out of the bustling, primitive town of Los Alamos plunged down the mesa like something constructed for an amusement park, then wound back up for the thirty-five-mile trek to Santa Fe. Graham Fox watched the landscape unfold as the dusty bus chugged past the small towns of Tesuque and Cuyamungue, then through the Nambe and Rio Grande valleys. As the bus strained up the last hill before Santa Fe, someone pointed out the silhouette of the Sandia mountains jutting up seventy miles to the south, near Albuquerque.
A few days ago the scenery had looked totally alien to Fox, something that existed only in cowboy movies. If he had seen a painting of the startling contrast between turquoise skies and red and golden clay, he would have considered the painter an impressionist with a garish palette. The air smelled sharp, the wind felt dry. His lips and hands had begun to chap as soon as he disembarked from the train in Santa Fe station.
This place seemed to belong on a different planet from serene, civilized Cambridge, England. At any moment he half expected a band of wild Indians to ride over the clipped-off mesas. But was a frontier town full of nuclear scientists any less bizarre?
Fox tried to tear his mind away from the letter in his pocket, concentrating instead on the distant mountains. In England the farthest distance he could see was up to the nearest grove of trees. The hills there had been soft, rolling, lush and green. In contrast, New Mexico had unlimited visibility, with a clean starkness that hurt the eyes.
But J. Robert Oppenheimer had found no better place to establish a new town whose purpose was to meet the grandest challenge of science. From his security indoctrination, Fox knew that the boys’ school on the site had been purchased in secret by the War Office, the solitary teacher and his small group of students packed off without any explanation, and Los Alamos had been set up virtually overnight. Right in the middle of America’s legendary wide-open spaces.
Maybe that was the real reason Oppenheimer had decided to set the Project here. Not so much for the solitude—from what Fox had heard, West Virginia or China Lake in California would have served as well—but other locations might place too much pressure on the scientists, box them into traditional ways of thinking. No, the limitless view had the psychological effect of keeping the scientists unbridled, uncontained with enormous ideas that could end up destroying the world. And Fox had been chosen to lend his talents, whether he wanted to or not.
Fox fingered his letter. The stationery felt thin and simple, but the words were so dangerous. Just bringing the letter out of the fenced compound went against all instructions the G-2, the Army Intelligence people, had been feeding him the past week. “All correspondence is to be submitted to the security detail with envelopes unsealed. Failure to cooperate will result in a direct violation of the Espionage Act.”
Espionage Act! The whole situation seemed ludicrous. Fox felt caught between paranoia and laughter at the absurdity of it. How could they in all honesty suspect a relationship that had already lasted fifteen years, one that had been cemented long before Chancellor Hitler began his rampage across Europe?
Fox’s Ph.D. studies at Cambridge had brought him into contact with several international students. After all, his teacher, Rutherford, was a world-renowned physicist; studying under him had marked Graham Fox as a rising star. It was something ordinary students only dreamed about.
Fox had become fast friends with Abraham Esau, a young German student. They had lived together in the boardinghouse, sharing the single water closet down the hall; they had played typical pranks together, until they had been sobered by the boating accident that left Esau’s lip scarred. Later, despite his growing preoccupation with the National Socialist Party, Esau had arranged for Fox to complete his post-doctoral work in Göttingen under Sommerfeld himself.