“Just hold me a minute.” She squeezed him tighter.
Fox bent down to kiss the top of her head. Elizabeth blocked out all thoughts of Jeff and of her obsession with Oppenheimer. She and Jeff had made love only three times since he came down from Berkeley. It had been all too brief. She had not held anyone close in so long, had not felt herself moving beneath a lover, felt him inside her as their passion grew, building toward a release that could drown out all the anger in her life. It had been half a year.
She groaned deep in her throat and tilted her head up. Reaching with one hand to pull Fox’s face close to hers, she kissed him. His eyes went wide, but she closed hers and she kissed him again. He responded this time. She let her teeth fall open and touched out with her tongue, probing between his lips. Fox made a thin sound and pushed his body closer to hers.
Then he straightened and pulled himself away from her. She looked up at him, waiting for him to say something else, but he remained quiet.
“It doesn’t make any difference,” she said.
Fox looked down at her. His thin face and his big eyes gave him an intense puppy-dog expression. She found it charming, very attractive. Pressing her hips against his, Elizabeth pulled off his loosened tie and unbuttoned his shirt.
Fox kept his own hands moving, but seemed a little shy. Elizabeth remembered many fumbling but passionate moments with other physics nerds she had dated in college. Being one of the minority of women in the curriculum, she had never had trouble getting men to go out with her. Something about Graham Fox reminded her of that shyness. She took his hand and guided it to her breast.
It seemed to release a restraint in him, and he made another one of his cooing sounds. He kissed her more deeply. “You’re not wearing a brassiere.”
Elizabeth tilted her head back. “Scandalous, isn’t it?” she mumbled around his lips. “I guess I’m just ahead of my time.”
Fox kept his eyes closed for the most part. Elizabeth watched him make the most delicious wince of pleasure when she slid her hand down the front of his pants.
Caressing, she made herself move carefully and slowly. She didn’t want to excite him too much. She wanted—no, she needed this to last a long time.
Elizabeth woke, shivering, in the middle of the night. The sweat had dried on her body, and now she felt stiff and grimy. She needed a hot shower. Fox lay next to her, but he had pulled most of the single blanket over his own shoulders. She smiled and felt the remnants of afterglow.
Elizabeth slid out of bed. The mattress springs creaked enough for Fox to mumble and roll over, partially awake. She went to the table and sipped the cold tea she had not touched before. After steeping all night long, it tasted bitter.
She stood next to the radiator, hoping for more warmth, but the heat had been shut off for the night.
Fox sat up in bed, blinking. Upon seeing her, his face carried an expression of pleased surprise. She wondered if he thought it had all been a dream. “Something the matter?” he said.
“Nothing.” She came back to sit next to him, brushing the sheets before she sat down. He rolled over and put his arms around her waist. He kissed her.
“You never told me what was bothering you when you came.”
“When I came?” She raised her eyebrows, but she didn’t think he understood her comment.
“When you came to my door.”
Elizabeth frowned. “I’m not sure I want to.”
Fox nodded. “Then you don’t have to.”
They sat in silence in the dimness. A bluish-white glow from the floodlights outside crept through the blinds.
“Why are we doing this?” Fox asked in a quiet voice that implied he had rehearsed the words to himself many times. “Why are we here? Why are we working on such things when we know what will come of it?”
Elizabeth clenched her fist and said nothing, reminded again of what she had tried to do, and how she had failed. One fraction of a second to pull the trigger, to change the whole world, and she could not do it. She still didn’t know if she had made the right decision. Who was she to decide things like that?
But didn’t every person have to act on their own conscience, to follow their moral imperative? It was not good enough just to brush aside the responsibility to someone else.
“You gotta do what you gotta do,” Ted Walblaken had said, “and damn the consequences.”
Fox sat up in bed and leaned over, slipping both hands around her. “This is life. We’re alive,” Fox continued. “Why are we working to bring about so much death, just to show off what we can do with our physics?”
“Is that what you really think I’m working toward?” Elizabeth asked. Her throat grew dry. She was leading him on. She hadn’t the nerve to do what she herself had decided to do.
“Do you—” Fox hesitated, swallowed, and then continued, as if he couldn’t restrain himself from asking anymore. “Do you have some sort of plan? I wish I knew who you were.”
She considered long before answering. “You can’t listen to anybody else when it’s your own conscience at stake. Do what you have to do. Damn the consequences.” Feeling like a hypocrite, she got up and began to get dressed in the dim light.
“Must you go?”
“You don’t want your colleagues to see me coming out of your room in the morning, now do you?”
He grinned, and she thought he was probably blushing. “Might I see you again?”
She shrugged and kept her back turned toward him so he couldn’t see her smile. “It’s a small town. It’s going to be kind of hard to avoid you.” She stood at the door and blew him a kiss. “Good night.”
“Yes.”
Elizabeth left as quietly as she could, already trying to decide which story would make the best excuse for Mrs. Canapelli.
13
Peenemunde Experimental Rocket Station
December 1943
“We have developed this weapon. We can service it and put it to tactical use. It was not our task to assess its psychological effect, its usefulness in present conditions, or its strategic importance in the general picture.”
“Europe and the world will be too small from now on to contain a war. With such weapons, humanity will be unable to endure it.”
The white cuffs of the Peenemunde estuary reminded Esau of the chalk cliffs of Dover. Graham Fox had taken him there one humid day when they were students at Cambridge. They had made a picnic on the grass, listening to the distant crashing surf, arguing esoteric points about the nature of the universe….
The cold wind of winter removed the charm from the Baltic coast, made Peenemunde look harsh and hellish—a perfect place to be building a secret weapon of destruction. Esau imagined that the waters of the bay here would also be quiet in the summertime; the brown and broken reeds he saw now would be green, a place for ducks to gather. Above the low hills on the mainland side of the Peene River, he could see the red-brick tower of the Wolgast Cathedral and rooftops of the nearby village.
Across the Peenemunde experimental site Esau located dozens of craters; some from failed rocket launches that had fallen back and exploded near the test stands; others from the Allied bombing raid of the previous August.
Esau had not slept well on the long train ride to the northern coast. He never could relax in the crowded closeness of other passengers, the rattling movement of the train, the drafts whistling through the windows. People were not meant to sleep while war-torn scenery rushed by during the day, while villages came and went, some lighted and some dark, all through the night.