“Attention in the area! Attention in the area!” The site-wide public address system was rarely used, but when the speakers awoke from their silence, the message usually proved to be important.
Damn! Elizabeth glanced up from her desk, having lost her place in the intricate calculation. The other women in the computations room put down their pencils and started to chat with each other. Someone stood up and looked out the window. Three women lit up cigarettes.
“All project scientists, staff members, and other personnel are to attend an immediate mandatory meeting in the Tech Area,” the tinny voice on the loudspeaker said. “I say again… ”
Elizabeth stared down at her paper. The equations were becoming longer and more difficult to solve, and an independent team rechecked everything, so introducing errors would be pointless—if she even wanted to keep doing that. She had already caused the death of Teller, could not force herself to assassinate Oppenheimer. She didn’t know anymore what she wanted to do. After living in the past in the constant turmoil of a bloody war for nearly a year, her own convictions had grown fuzzier.
Around her the scientists felt greater pressure as they fell behind their milestone. They had two options for making a bomb core—uranium-235, which was nearly impossible to separate from natural uranium, and the new element plutonium. But now the theoreticians had learned that their so-called gun design would never work with plutonium, something to do with ambient slow neutrons that would cause the reaction to fizzle. Frantically, they returned to the drawing board to develop new models from scratch. For a uranium core, a simple gun assembly shot one small mass of uranium into a larger one, making the combined sphere into a critical mass. For plutonium they would require something much more complicated.
Elizabeth watched her pencil roll off her desk to the floor. It gladdened her to observe their difficulties anyway. She had already proven to herself that she couldn’t do much more than observe.
It looked as if they would be receiving plutonium from the Hanford, Washington, plant sooner than Oak Ridge could provide any uranium-235. The scientists needed to have a plutonium bomb design ready immediately. Elizabeth thought she remembered the Manhattan Project scientists had worked on two different designs, but her memory of the other timeline had been getting worse with every day she remained here.
“Don’t you want to see what’s up?” It was Gladys something-or-other drawling into Elizabeth’s ear. Elizabeth had never gotten to know the woman well, content to nod at her in the morning and ignore her in the afternoon.
Elizabeth tried to listen to the rest of the message as it repeated. “They want us to go too, huh? You think they’re going to treat us as human beings for a change?”
Gladys looked at her. “You heard him—all personnel. That’s us too, Betty. It might be something exciting.”
Gladys pushed away as von Neumann entered the room from his office. He clapped twice to get their attention. With his short build, dark hair, and sharp Hungarian accent, von Neumann reminded her of a puffed-up dictator. “Quickly now. You have heard the announcement. Everyone assemble at the meeting hall. We will redo your calculations after the meeting.” He whirled and strode out the door before anyone had a chance to react.
Gladys popped her gum. “You can sit by me if you want. Harvey will probably be too busy with the other eggheads.” Gladys spent every afternoon incessantly talking or complaining about her husband Harvey, a member of the University of Chicago group.
Elizabeth turned over her sheet of calculations before leaving. “I wonder what’s going on.”
“Probably another one of Oppie’s pep talks. Harvey says he’s getting under the skin of the professional staff— the scientists, that is. Says Oppie might be pushing things a bit too much. The krauts are losing anyway, and we’re mopping up the Japs in the Pacific. We’ll never get done in time.”
Don’t be so sure, Elizabeth thought, but followed Gladys out the door, trying to lose herself among the other women hurrying to the meeting hall. She frowned at how they all acted like high school cheerleaders.
Outside, the late spring sunshine felt good; another month and the scrub oak would be full and turn the top of the mountain deep green. Elizabeth made an effort to hurry her step so that she could avoid sitting next to Gladys.
The meeting hall was nearly filled when Elizabeth reached the entrance. She had never seen so many people from the Project assembled at one place before, and this was much different from Oppenheimer’s weekly scientific colloquia. The cafeterias held only a hundred or so people; even the ubiquitous ball games, pitting the eggheads against the doughboys, pulled in no more than a few hundred bystanders. Now all the chairs were taken, and late arrivals crowded inside the doors and along the walkway.
“Miss, over here.” An Army type rose from his chair and offered it to her. She started to refuse, but then thought better of it. No telling how long the meeting might last, and she would rather be sitting down… even if it meant she would probably have to endure the young man’s shuffling his feet, blushing red, and asking her to meet him at the movies sometime.
But when she turned to thank him, he had already disappeared into the crowd. Elizabeth sat down, struck by his politeness, the sexist kind that would have always annoyed her before. But she had been gone for so long now that she had forgotten how she was accustomed to having men act. She had been caught up with working on the Gadget.
She stopped her own thoughts. Gadget. Just as they refused to call the Manhattan Project for what it was, they continuously referred to the atomic bomb as a Gadget. Dehumanizing the weapon, painting warheads pink.
A year ago her blood had boiled at the dehumanization, making her go to extremes such as sabotaging the MCG test. Five months ago she had attempted to assassinate Oppenheimer. But Jeff’s death, and her inability to harm the Project director, had killed something inside her. The simple black-and-white answers from before now seemed muddied into shades of gray.
The past few months had started to catch up with her. She didn’t know whether she herself had changed or if somehow the Project itself had wavered in its course. With everyone else at Los Alamos, she had seen the regular newsreels—colored with optimism and filled with silly propaganda, but still holding a bit of truth. She had watched World War II proceed with a horror greater than she remembered feeling about the news footage of the Vietnam war. In her mind she still recalled the horribly burned corpses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but now she watched other footage: the Pearl Harbor attack, the death march of Bataan, the abused POWs found in Burma. Nobody knew the full truth about the Nazi concentration camps yet.
She thought she understood her attitude change, and she accepted it with trepidation—she had immersed herself in this culture and had begun to see things from their point of view. Her daily life had started to get in the way of the larger things, the important things such as her ideals, her morals.
But Elizabeth knew deep inside that she would never change, even if it meant she had to take a different approach. History could be changed—she had already proven that. When the Germans inevitably surrendered, she would be one of the first to insist that the Gadget not be used. Many of the Manhattan Project scientists would also be very outspoken—they were the first antinuclear protesters. She could feel the backlash bubbling and waiting to be released. Graham Fox would probably be among them. She couldn’t see him in the auditorium.