Elizabeth looked up and down the canyon, tense already. She tossed aside the horse blanket she had used to keep herself warm, smacked her lips, and thought of how much she wanted a thermos of hot coffee. She didn’t know whether thermos bottles had been invented yet. It frightened her to think of the possibility of people inventing an atomic bomb if they couldn’t even manage a thermos….
She felt her stomach tighten with fear. She had rationalized everything so nicely the day before. Jeff would have been proud of her reasoning. It had made sense then. She tried to drive away her doubts.
This time, at least, she did have a chance to make a real change. Perhaps it would be enough, in a different timeline, to bring Jeff back, to make his death unnecessary. She didn’t know how he would have decided the question himself.
Waiting.
Roger had said Oppenheimer would ride down to Bandelier this morning. But what if he had gone the other direction from the visitor’s center? Perhaps he went down to the Rio Grande instead, only a mile or so downhill from the canyon floor, to look at the waterfalls.
Then she would just have to try again a different day.
Ted Walblaken had waited as the cancer permeated every part of his body. He had waited to die, waited for United Atomics to admit their error, to make changes so nobody else would suffer the same way. He had died waiting for that to happen.
Elizabeth stood up, leaning the rifle beside her. Her hands melted a spot on the snow piled along the rounded sill of the window opening. An abandoned bird’s nest was tucked in the logs supporting part of the ceiling. She watched her breath steam in the chilly air.
Hoof beats. The snow muffled all sounds, but the absence of other noises amplified the clopping and jingling. Many of the birds in the ponderosa pines stopped their morning songs.
Elizabeth leaned back into the shadows of the cliff dwelling. She could bide her time. Oppenheimer had to come this way. The narrow canyon floor would lead him right in front of her.
The sun creeping over the canyon rim made the shadows stark and the colors garish. The bright snow hurt her eyes. Jagged clumps of lava tuff looked like nightmarish sculptures; they blocked the view of the trailhead.
She swallowed. Her throat tightened.
By her one action, she was about to save uncounted lives, and it would cost only one. Didn’t that make sense?
Oppenheimer rode into view, straight and aloof on a sleek brown Appaloosa, the one Roger had indicated in the stables the day before. Oppie wore gloves and a red flannel shirt. His floppy brown hat covered his eyes.
She watched the gangly way he moved, sucking on a cigarette, then tossing it into the snow. He cocked his head up, squinting to the top of the canyon wall. She could see his protruding Adam’s apple. He glanced toward the cliff houses, then away.
He rode alone. She looked for other riders, escorts or rangers to watch the all-important director of the Manhattan Project. But no, they suspected nothing. In such isolation in the New Mexico mountains, what did they have to worry about?
Elizabeth slid the rifle out of the window opening. Crumbling adobe pattered to the snow outside the wall. She looked down, then squinted at Oppie. He pulled up his horse, as if to present a better target for her.
This would change everything.
She thought of a poster she had helped assemble for the Livermore Challenge Group, showing hideously burned corpses from Hiroshima, silhouettes of human beings reduced to blast shadows against a wall in Nagasaki. A hundred thousand dead from the first blast, another fifty thousand from the second.
What about the fear inspired for decades with the Cold War, the production of bigger and better bombs? The children brought up—as she had been—in mortal fear of the air raid sirens, the civil defense training films showing how to “duck and cover.” What about the people, like Jeff, who had given their lives to resist the spread of nuclear weapons?
Jeff lay dead, in an unmarked grave, thrown back in time to twenty years before he was supposed to be born, as a consequence of the ball J. Robert Oppenheimer had started rolling.
/ am become death, the shatterer of worlds.
Elizabeth had a chance to wipe the chalkboard clean, start over with a new and better equation.
She squinted along the rifle barrel. She steadied it with her left hand and rested the stock against her shoulder. She felt her hands shaking. She would have only two shots.
She centered Oppenheimer’s head in the sight. Below, he waited for her, unsuspecting, enjoying the morning.
Oppenheimer was the fulcrum, Fox had said. His actions, his brilliance made the Manhattan Project work. He had known what he was doing as visions of nuclear fire danced in his head. Perhaps it was a game to him, an interesting physics question to see how much destruction one man could cause. She couldn’t think of him as a worthy human being. Right now, Oppenheimer was a target, a domino she was going to tip in the opposite direction, away from the chain of events she knew would happen if she didn’t act.
Mrs. Canapelli had chatted about being friends with Oppie and his wife Kitty back in Berkeley, how he had gotten her the job to chaperone the women’s dormitory after her husband had died. Mrs. Canapelli had spoken of him with fondness. Elizabeth found it difficult to imagine him as the same man, this madman.
Oppenheimer turned to look back toward the cliff dwellings. The hat cast his face in shadow, but she could see part of a smile.
Elizabeth tightened her finger on the trigger. It would be just like pushing The Button, the big red button that would launch the world into a nuclear holocaust.
Oppenheimer sneezed, startling her.
With a flinch, she recentered his head along the gun sight.
Oppie hesitated, looked around as if to make sure no one was watching, then wiped his nose on the sleeve of his red flannel shirt.
Elizabeth froze, paralyzed by the simple, human gesture. Oppenheimer blinked as if he were a little boy who had gotten away with bad manners, and then rode on.
Elizabeth couldn’t fire.
Her finger slid away from the trigger and she rested the rifle barrel on the sloping window opening. Her bones turned to rubber and she felt faint. Black spots danced in front of her eyes.
She had wanted to kill a man! The trigger had been a hair’s breadth away from sending a bullet through Oppenheimer’s head. Elizabeth began to shiver.
The rifle dropped out of her hand, slid along the adobe wall of the ruined dwelling and struck the rocks below.
The gun discharged, sending a sharp thunderclap through the narrow canyon.
Oppenheimer jerked up on his horse. He gawked around, frozen like a jackrabbit for an instant of terror, then wheeled his Appaloosa and rode off back toward the ranger station at full gallop. His hat flew off behind him as the horse kicked up snow.
Cursing herself, Elizabeth stood up, grabbed her blanket, and scrambled out the broken back wall of the An-asazi dwelling. She didn’t know how close the rangers would be. Stupid! Oppenheimer would send an entire hunting party after her. She had to hurry up the steep path along the canyon wall to reach the top, mount her horse and flee back to Los Alamos.
She didn’t know what she had done. Stupid!
She couldn’t take it back now. She had failed.
As she scrambled up the path, she kept shuddering, feeling her crisis, her indecision. “I’m sorry, Jeff,” she whispered, then hurried before she could hear the sound of approaching guards.