Mrs. Canapelli kept encouraging her to wear makeup, to do her nails with the rest of the women, to apply garish lipstick so that she left a bright red arc on the coffee cup each time she took a drink. “But you look so plain, dear!” Mrs. Canapelli said as Elizabeth left in the morning, before the other ladies marched over to breakfast. “Don’t you want the young men to notice you?”
“I’ll do just fine,” she said. “And besides, I’m still grieving for Jeff.” After two months, Elizabeth thought. Two months!
“I understand, dear,” Mrs. Canapelli said, and patted her wrist. “Fresh coffee?”
“Thank you.” Elizabeth accepted the cup. Her morning walk provided an easy way to avoid invitations from the other “girls” to join them. They considered her aloof and grumpy; she considered them boring gossips.
Mrs. Canapelli followed Elizabeth to the back porch of the wooden dorm. Elizabeth sipped her coffee; she had gotten accustomed to the odd taste of coffee beans blended with chicory to help with rationing.
The back porch gave a panoramic view of the Sandia peaks. Elizabeth felt she could reach out and touch the desert sprawling below her. “I really appreciate all you’ve done for me. This payday I’ll make up the rest of the money you loaned me on my first night.”
“No hurry, dear. I remember what I went through myself right after Ronald died. Besides, you should never try to pay people back—pay them forward by helping the next person in trouble.”
“Thanks.” Elizabeth smiled as Mrs. Canapelli turned back toward the dorm kitchen. It was really a sign of simpler days, to be so trusting and helpful to anyone with a little bad luck.
Elizabeth had about fifteen minutes until she needed to head out; she could not tell for certain, since she kept her digital watch—sorely out of place in 1943—packed away.
She sat back against the rough outer wall. She felt comfortable here, enjoying the morning. But behind her comfort nagged a feeling that she had begun to stagnate. She couldn’t keep telling herself that this was merely a delusion. And what did it matter if this was just a delusion, if it never ended?
Two months. She had been following the news, trying to assemble the pieces of World War II—and she had to stop thinking of it by that name too, since no one yet called it a “world war.” Mussolini had been overthrown in Italy; the Allies were heavily bombing Germany, Italy, and the Pacific; and the fighting in the Solomon Islands seemed to go on forever. And here she felt so isolated from the rest of the world.
Joining Johnny von Neumann’s calculational group had come naturally enough. Elizabeth didn’t mind the work, though she found it mostly repetitious: add, multiply, subtract, or divide a number that was given to her from the woman beside her. If she got lucky, she might be required to look up the logarithm, or even an exponential. Oh boy! She rarely saw enough of the entire problem to determine what the model was supposed to show, even when the physicists explained it before the calculation.
She wished she had brought along her simplest calculator. She wondered how the Los Alamos scientists could ever overcome the theoretical difficulties of modeling an atomic blast if no one had invented a computer yet.
Von Neumann himself would do that sometime later.
But for the most part, the work was straightforward. Elizabeth had no trouble fitting in and doing her job—and that worried her. She enjoyed her life here. She enjoyed sitting with Graham Fox in the late afternoons, chatting or just relaxing in silence; he had never made a move on her, to her relief. Jeff still burned too close in front of her mind. But she and Fox had enough in common to hold fascinating conversations. He seemed too shy to express any romantic intentions.
Other times, on her Sundays off, she would go hiking by herself throughout the mesas and exploring the areas where she had never been allowed to go in her old life. Mrs. Canapelli disapproved of her going out alone, but Elizabeth ignored her.
With the exception of the Army grunts and some of the civilian workers, the Project people were all above aver age, both in intelligence and in the things that they did. Solving the problems of the universe gave them a passion in their lives, led them to push forward with the need to discover something new, because so much was left to be discovered. It was very different from her own physicist raining, where the all-knowing professors had basically told her How It Was, with no room left for questions, only a bit of fine tuning.
She found the change refreshing, back to the sense of wonder she herself had felt when choosing science in the first place. She might have been able to forget about what was going to happen with the bomb and enjoy herself here. The frantic pace of developing the Gadget brought the men together in a team more intense than any research group before or since. These people were not competing for a Nobel Prize, or even a first publication—they were trying to win a war.
She knew it would be extremely easy for her to be swept up in the group, drift along with the flow of the research; to forget about where she had been and what personal convictions had driven her here, since she had no hope of getting back to her own time. In the past month she had been thinking less and less about Jeff.
And worst of all, she—Elizabeth Devane!—was contributing to the effort. She already knew how everything would escalate, letting the sleeping dog grow more vicious year after year; how the public would become immune to common sense; how it would all lead to her own desperate actions at the MCG site, and how it would cause Jeff’s death.
Below her she heard the cantering of a single horse. Elizabeth stood, holding her warm coffee cup, and looked down the slope to see a rider come up the path. He rode an Appaloosa, guiding it up the side of the hill to a high point on the mesa where he could look back on the settlement of Los Alamos. Elizabeth saw his thin body, gangling arms, and hawkish nose. The man turned, flashed a smile at her, and waved.
As he climbed, she watched his back, the faded red-flannel shirt he wore in the cool morning. When he stopped the horse and turned it, the man was silhouetted by the rising sun. His black outline looked like a scarecrow. He looked hauntingly familiar.
“Oppie’s out for a morning ride again,” Mrs. Canapelli said beside her. Elizabeth had not heard her return to the porch. “He must be thinking of something pretty important.”
Oppie. Oppenheimer—J. Robert Oppenheimer, the mastermind behind the entire atomic bomb project. In a flash Elizabeth remembered where she had seen him before: in footage of the original nuclear test, Trinity. In the light of the dying atomic blast, Oppenheimer had quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, a book of Hindu spiritual poetry—”Now I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” The expression on his face, the light behind his dark and too-intense eyes, had made him look like the most evil of all mad scientists.
Shatterer of worlds. She thought of the wreckage of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the shadows of burned bodies cast on brick walls. She thought of Jeff lying dead with fused legs at a time twenty years before he was supposed to be born.
Oppenheimer spurred his horse into motion. At a gallop, they sped over the rise and down the trail into the trees.
“Shouldn’t you be getting off to work, Betsy?” Mrs. Canapelli asked.
Elizabeth finished her cold coffee and handed the cup to Mrs. Canapelli. She needed to get to her work assignment, but she felt more worried about what she would do in the long term.