During the winter’s first snowfall, gray clouds made the afternoon dreary and claustrophobic. Elizabeth stood wearing a borrowed pink sweater on the dormitory porch. The frantic pace of the Project grated like fingernails on a chalkboard, and she knew she had to get away, if only for a while.
The Los Alamos stables were on the other end of town, but Elizabeth didn’t mind walking there. She had put on the worn pair of jeans she had kept packed since the night she arrived here in 1943. It didn’t matter that the other women wore long skirts—she was not going to ride a horse in a dress.
The walls of the stable had been covered with scrap wood and pieces of corrugated sheet metal left over from the Quonset hut barracks. A few trees stood on either side of the building, but they hung still. No breeze caused the settling snowflakes to swirl in the air.
Elizabeth slipped through the half-open main doors and smelled horses, hay, and manure. Splashes of light spilled through the four-paned windows and the chinks in the walls. Dust motes trickled through the light.
“Can I help you, ma’am?”
She turned to see a gray-haired, dark-skinned Indian beside one of the horses. He stared at her with a perplexed but uninterested gaze. She had heard of Roger—who apparently had no last name—the Indian taking care of the dozen or so horses maintained for the people on the Project. Roger had worked on a dude ranch near Espanola and impressed Oppenheimer during one of his boyhood trips here; Oppie had pulled strings to get him transferred to Los Alamos.
“Yes, I need a horse saddled up,” Elizabeth answered. “I want to take a ride for the afternoon.”
Roger squinted as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Do you need an escort, ma’am? I’m sure we could find one of the guys who’d be willing to—”
“No! Thank you, but I’m perfectly capable of handling a horse myself.” She recited her cover story. “I come from Montana—you have to take a horse if you want to get anywhere.” In truth, she had done quite a lot of riding around the New Mexico mountains. If Jeff had known how to ride, they would not have needed to backpack all the way around to destroy the MCG site… so long ago.
“One of the Project scientists, uh, Dick Feynman, told me I was working too hard,” she continued. “Said I should take a few hours off, go for a horseback ride. It’ll feel good to be on a horse again.” Elizabeth didn’t know if Feynman’s name would carry any weight with Roger, but it couldn’t hurt. She didn’t want people to suspect that she might be thinking for herself—that didn’t seem to be expected of the women around Los Alamos.
Roger shrugged and put his callused hands on his hips, studying the horses in the stable. Elizabeth let her eyes adjust to the dimness. She wondered which one was Oppenheimer’s horse; she had not been able to see clearly in the dawn light when he had passed by and waved, months before.
“Let’s see,” Roger said to himself, “you don’t want to take Crisis, that’s George Kistiakowski’s. You probably couldn’t handle him. Oppie might take his own horse out… no, that’s tomorrow. He usually goes riding down into Bandelier. You could go there if you like. It’s designated a National Monument, but restricted to Project folks these days. It’s almost always empty, especially now that it’s getting cold.”
Roger hefted a saddle lying in the corner and staggered over to three horses that stood munching on a pile of hay in front of them. “Proton, Neutron, and Electron—these are sort of community horses. You’re welcome to take one of them.”
He set the saddle down beside a palomino that gleamed as if it had just been groomed, then picked up a red-and-white-checkered pad and straightened it on the palomino’s back.
“This one’s Proton. He’s probably your best bet.”
Roger hummed low in his throat as he draped the saddle over the pad. Elizabeth watched him, saying nothing, as he tightened the cinch strap, tugged on the stirrups, then mounted the headstall over Proton’s ears. Giving the palomino the bit, Roger handed the reins to Elizabeth.
“All yours, ma’am. Don’t ride him too hard.”
Elizabeth went to Proton, let him sniff her hands, and ran her palm over the pale patch of his nose. She stood on the left side, grabbed the reins and the palomino’s blond mane, then stepped into the stirrup. She swung over the horse’s back, adjusted her sweater, and squeezed Proton’s ribs with her thighs.
“Ah, yes,” she whispered to herself. “This’ll be fun.”
“Remind you of Montana?” Roger said, patting Proton on the flank to get him moving.
Elizabeth cantered the horse out of the stable doors and turned him around, feeling his strength under her, as if she were finally in control again.
The sky overhead still looked gray, and snow continued to fall, but it seemed a gentle snow, not a storm to be feared. Roger looked up at the clouds and nodded, but then turned to her. “You be back by dark. Make sure now, and be careful.”
Elizabeth crouched over the horse, putting her face beside its pale mane and its ears. Smiling, she urged the horse into a gallop away from the stables. Roger waved to her, but she was too engrossed in the ride to acknowledge him.
Proton seemed excited as he moved down the trail. Elizabeth felt the wind whipping her hair with cold gusts of impending winter. She shivered in her pink sweater, but it felt good.
She wanted to ride and keep moving, just to get away from the Project, but she had nowhere to run. She could never go back to her life before—she had not the slightest idea how that might be accomplished. She was stuck here in the past, but it didn’t matter so much anymore, not after six months. Her life had changed before, and she had adapted. She could change herself… and if that proved too difficult, she would just have to change her surroundings instead.
She left the clustered temporary buildings of Los Alamos behind and galloped along the trail. Without the dusty streets and soldiers and barbed-wire fences, the wind brushed against her skin, and she inhaled deeply. The mountains were clean and filled with the hint of ozone. All seemed silent and pristine.
The paths had been used by the old Los Alamos boys’ school and some of the dude ranches; rangers from the Santa Fe National Forest patrolled them occasionally. Now, men taking a break from the Project rode around the mountains carrying rifles to shoot jackrabbits. Oppenheimer himself had spent much time in these mountains.
Elizabeth headed southeast toward where the town of White Rock would eventually be built. She thought of the sprawling Los Alamos National Laboratory that would creep out to here. Many of these areas had been restricted to her before.
Proton galloped along the trail. Snow fell and began to stick to the ground, whitewashing the landscape with a soft covering. As an hour went by, Elizabeth suddenly realized where her subconscious had led her.
She used the reins to tie Proton to a low mesquite bush. The wind had picked up, but the snow slackened off.
The sky looked a darker gray, and she had no doubt that it would keep snowing throughout the night.
She wondered what would happen if a real blizzard hit the fledgling town. In Elizabeth’s former life, the snow plows would be gearing up to clear the mountain roads, schools might close. If the routes got too bad, the scientists who lived in White Rock might have difficulty driving the ten miles up the Hill to Los Alamos. But now everything was deserted.
The walls of Pajarito Canyon towered high and steep, prehistoric in their total absence of any human marking. The Anasazi Indians had been here centuries before. In the main canyon of Bandelier National Monument, Frijoles Canyon, they had grown their beans and chills, raised their sheep. The Anasazi had left abandoned cliff dwellings, much like those at Mesa Verde in Colorado. The Anasazi had disappeared, though—vanished, just like all the equipment from the MCG test she and Jeff Maple had sabotaged in this very canyon.