The neutron counters went wild, rattling and roaring. Any attempt to keep track of individual counts failed in an instant. Esau could see no apparent difference from watching the pile.
“The reaction is self-sustaining!” Hahn cried.
Paul Harteck stood on the opposite side of the room behind another barricade, staring down at his counter. He had to shout over the noise of the cheering and the neutron counters. “It is still climbing.”
The pile looked unchanged, but the neutron counters insisted that something wondrous kept happening at the core. They had succeeded! With only minimal information, they had reproduced the triumph of Enrico Fermi a few months earlier. Perhaps the German program would not remain so far behind at all. He couldn’t wait to send a telegram to Reichminister Speer.
The counters continued to buzz with their bombardment of flying neutrons. The air itself felt hot to Esau.
“It is still climbing!” Harteck repeated. This time his voice held a greater urgency.
Hahn did not seem alarmed. He gestured to von Weizsacker and raised his voice. “Remove the rods. We now know it will work.”
Von Weizsacker released his emergency lever and the counterweight fell a few inches. The chain grew taut with a metallic ringing, but the six uranium oxide rods remained in place within the pile.
Everyone instantly fell silent. Von Weizsacker yanked on the chain, adding his strength to the counterweight. “Thermal effects!” he said. “The rods have expanded with the heat. They’re snug inside the holes and we can’t get them out. Stupid!”
“Pull!” Esau shouted. He kept remembering Hahn’s mousetraps and the marbles flying through the air, all released at once.
“It would be good to stop this now,” Hahn said with a ragged edge to his voice.
“If the reaction continues, it will melt the rods, maybe even the uranium metal. It could start the graphite on fire,” von Weizsacker said.
“All the readings are completely off scale,” Harteck shouted across the room. “We never thought it would be like this.”
“Dump the barrel!” Diebner shouted. “Use the boric acid!” He ran to the release cord himself.
“No!” Esau clapped his hands. “That will ruin everything!”
Esau added his own weight to von Weizsacker’s, pulling to draw the uranium oxide rods upward. Hahn also helped. Together they strained, and the top layer of graphite bricks buckled, shifted apart, and finally the uranium oxide rods jerked upward, glowing a dull red. Black bricks of graphite slid from the top of the pile, knocking others out of place.
The neutron counters slowed from a sound like crackling fire to a random patter of clicks. Paul Harteck slumped to the floor behind his small barricade and sat down without heed to the graphite dust on the boards.
“Well that was interesting,” Hahn said.
“It was just a start,” Esau said, raising his voice so they could hear him. He slapped one fist against the palm of his hand. “But now we are on our way.”
10
Los Alamos
December 1943
“When the clouds opened up over the target at Nagasaki, the target was there, pretty as a picture. I made the run, let the bomb go. That was my greatest thrill.”
“Now I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.”
Autumn colors had turned the cottonwoods and alders around Los Alamos a brilliant yellow, but the pinon, ponderosa pine, and mesquite remained dark green. The rocks were tan, streaked with blood-colored stains.
Elizabeth sat with Fox on a pile of boulders under a broad cottonwood, eating a lunch she had packed for the two of them. It made her feel annoyingly domestic to do so. The wind made a loud whisper through the trees, but the rest of the world lay in heavy silence around them.
“Nobody tells me anything,” Elizabeth said after a long lull in their conversation. “They treat me like a stupid clerk, when I know as much about what they’re doing as anyone else.” She pulled out the green ribbon Mrs. Canapelli had insisted she wear in her hair, letting the long reddish strands fall loose and free. “I try to talk about the war with some of the other women, and they couldn’t care less! Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin just met in Teheran—the women I work with didn’t even know where Teheran was!”
Fox glanced sidelong at her. He had always refrained from asking questions of her, though he must know something was amiss with her. He said, “You are quite unusual, Elizabeth. You do have a more intuitive grasp of physics than half the people here, and you don’t just let the men do all the talking about politics. Maybe you’d best watch yourself. You’ll begin to stand out, and you don’t want that.”
“What?” Elizabeth raised her eyebrows, wondering what he was thinking. Terror spun through her, but he couldn’t possibly know who she was.
“I said intuitive grasp. Not women’s intuition—that’s altogether different. You catch on to an idea and extrapolate conclusions better than most of the physicists I know.”
“Thanks.” She leaned back on an elbow, still uneasy. “So why the compliments? And why now?”
Fox smiled thinly. “Maybe it is the season. A girl is like Nature, showing a side of herself that changes in time. Who would have thought these aspens would turn a brilliant yellow—or that a pretty girl like you could be so complex, so deep.”
Elizabeth cringed at being called a girl. But Graham Fox, with his suave British accent, was no lounge lizard on the make. He was… sincere. This placed Fox in an entirely new light for her. She decided to change the subject to something just as dangerous, but in a different way.
“Um, so, has the project slowed down at all with the death of Teller?” Elizabeth tried to keep her voice conversational to cover how eager she was to find out what she herself had changed.
Fox looked across the canyon, toward the finger of the mesa known as Bathtub Row, where the most important scientists occupied small homes originally built for the boys’ school, each equipped with its own bathtub and plumbing.
“No,” he said, then shook his head. Fox sounded downcast, which surprised her. She had shaken him out of his romantic thoughts. “Teller was merely a theoretician, and Oppie allowed him to work alone on a fusion bomb idea. I doubt that that’s practical for at least another decade.
“Work on the actual Gadget is going as it should. We’re just waiting for plutonium from the Hanford, Washington, plants and enriched uranium from Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” He sighed. “Teller may have been brilliant indeed, but at this point we can recover from losing him.”
Fox bit his lip. “Now Oppenheimer—he is the fulcrum on which everything pivots. Oppie knows all the scientists, he is familiar with what they’re working on. He understands the problems. He knows how difficult the calculations are. He keeps his office door open, and anyone can talk to him. He listens.
“But he’s also got the ear of General Groves, who’s pushed everyone to the edge, demanding results. The scientists wouldn’t be able to tolerate Groves for a single day. Oppie’s the perfect bridge between the government and the scientists. Without him, the Project would fall flat on its face.”
Fox paused, refusing to look at her as he spoke. “Sometimes, I ponder what might have happened if he had been standing behind the projectile test instead of Teller.” Fox stared down at his half-eaten sandwich.
Elizabeth gazed off into the bright delineated canyon. She heard a few birds, and the wind rustling through the trees. Far off, the sounds of Los Alamos seemed distant and irrelevant.