She could make a difference now. Would she be able to change the future? It couldn’t hurt, no matter what. She need to buy only a few weeks.
The bell rang. Elizabeth tapped her pencil against her lips. The women around her started passing their papers… Elizabeth moved the decimal points on her answers one digit to the right, making each number ten times larger than what she had calculated. She would have to be consistently off from now on, or else the sabotaged answers would stick out too plainly.
Without hesitating, she passed the altered paper to her right. When she accepted the paper from her left, Elizabeth felt confident in what she had to do.
Kirk Hackett felt good about his munitions laboratory, pleased that high-level interest was starting to center on his work. He hadn’t been up on the Hill for more than a few months at the Impact Studies lab when people started coming to him for answers rather than telling him what to do.
After leaving the service five years before as an ordnance man at Sandia Base in Albuquerque, Hackett had continued to serve as a consultant to the Army using his high-explosive expertise. Now that he had been snatched up for the Project and his family relocated to the Hill, Hackett was finally getting his lab into shape. He felt good about working with his superior, George Kistiakowski, the man in charge of all explosives for the Project. Kistiakowski had once used some TNT lifted from the ordnance bunkers to blast clear a ski slope for the Project scientists. Hackett didn’t feel he could get away with anything like that. Not yet.
Lately, more and more scientists had been coming to the lab, taking advantage of his unique facility without understanding what they were doing. It would have been all right if they just asked Hackett to help, asked him to prepare their experiments—but too many of them, tired of spending too much time scribbling theories, wanted to work hands-on with their own schemes. It was like playing to them. Nobody seemed to realize that having a Ph.D. didn’t make one an expert in everything.
Hackett watched the latest intrusion with his arms crossed and a scowl on his face. It was obvious that this crazy Hungarian didn’t have a clue about what he should be doing. But the Hungarian was some sort of bigwig in Project hierarchy, and Hackett had to let him do what he wanted. Hackett had protested to Oppenheimer—he didn’t feel comfortable calling him “Oppie” ye\—but the chief scientist had just smiled around his pipe and told Hackett to be patient. “Some of the scientists need a lot of patience. That one’s a loner, but you couldn’t ask for anyone more brilliant.”
And now, armed with a batch of calculations, the Hungarian scientist waved his arms and insisted that the depleted uranium gun experiment be rearranged, reconfigured to adhere to the latest theoretical results. His theoretical results, checked by some kid named Feynman. So Hackett had reassembled the experiment according to the scientist’s wishes. It didn’t look right, but the models had given the scientist all sorts of numbers to prove everything.
Speaking with a thick accent in his very deep voice, the Hungarian insisted that a steel shield be inserted in front of the gun, just in case the experiment went amiss. Hackett shrugged and complied.
The scientist walked with an exaggerated limp, moving to stand behind the shield, close to the experiment, as Hackett set the fast cameras that would show the depleted uranium spherical pieces flying toward each other, propelled by the detonation into one big lump. Hackett had conducted hundreds of such experiments, all with different explosive charges, so he was not concerned about the Hungarian’s safety—why should this experiment be any different? Didn’t they have their precious calculations to prove everything? The only change this time was in the shape of the uranium lumps that would be shot together. They were fashioned in what the Hungarian called a self-forging configuration.
Hackett yelled at the Hungarian to put on protective goggles. Without a word of acknowledgment, the crazy scientist yanked the lenses over his eyes. With a shrug, Hackett pulled on his own goggles, then started the klaxon, warning people inside the lab of the impending shot. The Hungarian crouched behind the two-inch-thick steel guard. As the countdown continued, Hackett twitched his thumb on the detonator. At zero he pushed the button and an explosion filled the lab. His ears rang.
Nothing unusual.
Standing up, Hackett peered through the smoke. He waved a hand in front of his face and coughed. “Well I’ll be damned.”
A hole some three inches in diameter had been punched through the steel plate. Curved shrapnel looked like flower petals blossoming out from the back side of the metal. Hackett frowned. Usually, the explosive charge left nothing more than a large pit on the front, not even with twice the explosive charge.
“Hey, Doc—you see that?”
When he didn’t get an answer, Hackett scrambled around the still-smoking assembly. On the opposite side of the protective plate, the Hungarian physicist lay on his back, thrown halfway across the room from the impact. Blood oozed from his rib cage, seeping into the dry concrete floor.
“Well I’ll be damned.” In his shock, Hackett couldn’t think of anything better to say.
For the first time since Elizabeth had been coming to the calculation group, von Neumann was late. She had been altering her calculations for more than a week now, and she looked forward to the daily work, where she could make her small differences, chipping away at the Manhattan Project.
Early in the morning, Elizabeth thought she had heard alarms from inside the Technical Area, but no one could be sure. The women waited in the room, seated at their desks, for a good fifteen minutes before anybody suggested that someone find out what was happening. One woman opened a window. None of them looked willing to go check until Elizabeth ran out of patience. She strode out of the building.
The Tech Area was clear of people inside its barbed-wire fence, as though everyone had packed up and walked away. Von Neumann’s office was empty. Elizabeth wandered over by Oppenheimer’s office inside the fence—the Project director kept a room both inside and outside of the classified Tech Area so that anyone on the Hill could have access to him. The office was deserted as well, but Elizabeth didn’t think she would have the nerve to talk to Oppenheimer anyway.
Frowning, she stalked to the meeting hall. The scientists usually gathered there for Monday morning colloquia, a tradition Oppenheimer had established so that technical interchange would flourish within the Project. But this was Wednesday, and she had not heard of any meeting being called.
As Elizabeth approached she could hear angry voices coming from the open door. She slowed her pace, stopping outside of the wooden pre-fab building. She could hear Oppenheimer’s cultured voice pleading with someone, “… a week at the most.”
“But surely someone checked the figures! It’s inconceivable that a three order of magnitude error could slip past! Aren’t all the calculations run through twice?”
Oppenheimer, wearily: “And to reiterate, the procedure will be changed, using two separate and independent teams to check the computational group’s results. The fallacy was to allow the same group to check its own work. So please, there is nothing more we can do. In the meantime, Dr. Teller’s family will appreciate your prayers.” A moment of silence followed.
“All right, if there are no further questions, let’s get back to work. I’ll call a town meeting at lunch to inform everyone else. Because he was so well-known, we may have to come up with some sort of false press release. I’ll have to speak to General Groves about it.”