Oppenheimer, standing like a scarecrow in front of the crowd, rapped on the podium at the front of the hall. Everyone quieted down. Oppie crushed out a cigarette in the ashtray and coughed for their attention. He looked as if he had been stunned. The strain showed on him more than on any of the other workers.
Elizabeth shifted her head to try and get a better view. She remembered him sneezing in the canyon, wiping his nose on his sleeve. She closed her eyes to clear the thought. As Oppenheimer waited, two men in Army uniforms struggled with a canvas, erecting a movie screen. Elizabeth sat up straight to see over the heads of the people in front of her.
Oppie leaned forward and raised his voice. “I know it’s hot, but please bear with us. We’ll have to close the doors in a moment to show a film, so the heat is going to get worse. But not as bad as what we’ve got to show you. This is extremely important.” When the murmuring stopped, Oppenheimer nodded to his right. “General Groves.”
A burly man in uniform stood up from his seat and walked over to the podium. “Thank you, Dr. Oppenheimer.”
General Groves had been given the responsibility to develop the Gadget at all costs, no matter how much money he required, how many people he needed to commandeer. Few people liked the chubby and overbearing man who demanded two hundred percent from every worker on the Project. Though the general had been in and out of Los Alamos over the past year on frequent inspection tours, Elizabeth had not actually seen him until now.
She would have to fight against Groves after Germany surrendered. She studied his lantern jaw, his crest of dark hair edged with gray, and his peppery moustache. She would have to work to convince him to do a demonstration shot rather than annihilate human beings.
That was her next chance to change things.
Groves cleared his throat and gripped the podium as if he wanted to break it. He wore his khaki dress blouse. Semicircles of sweat stood out under his arms in the heat, but he showed no sign of discomfort.
“All right, everyone on the Project! I didn’t pull you away from your work to mince words, so I’ll get straight to the point. Straight to it. You’re all aware that what you’re doing, developing the Gadget, is the most noble and patriotic act your country could ask.”
Oh brother, here it comes, Elizabeth thought. She tried to remember exactly when Germany had surrendered. Maybe that was the announcement. The war had already been going badly for Hitler, if she could believe the non-objective newsreels. She thought the war in Europe had not ended until sometime in mid-1945, but could things have been changed by her presence?
She had tried to alter events here, but her actions appeared to have had no immediate effect. She couldn’t conceive of anything she had done having repercussions around the world. Could Germany have surrendered early, thus invalidating the need for the Project? Was Oppenheimer upset now because he had not completed his Gadget in time for it to be used in this war? She forced herself not to smile. Too bad, Oppie, she thought.
Groves turned around to look at the blank screen. “They say a picture is worth a thousand words.” He pointed to his aide. “Kil1 the lights.”
As the lights went off, officers standing by the outside doors swung them shut, plunging the hall into darkness. Elizabeth saw a match flare up, then a red glow as someone lit a cigar at the front of the hall. Groves’s voice came from the direction of the cigar.
“I flew into Albuquerque this morning, direct from Washington. These films have been shown exactly twice— first to the War Department, then an hour later to the President. The rest of the country is going to know soon. We might be able to hide a town the size of Los Alamos, but we can’t possibly keep New York City a secret. Go ahead and roll it.”
A movie projector at the rear of the hall spewed a ghostly light as smoke shot up from the incandescent bulb. The makeshift screen displayed an aerial view of buildings and streets, endless rows of suburbs and identical All in the Family style houses, that showed how little New York had changed over the years. In the background, Elizabeth could see the famous city skyline, which the camera approached.
“You’re looking at reconnaissance photos from a modified Army Air Corps P-51, traveling close to three hundred knots a thousand feet off the ground. We didn’t know how safe it was to fly over the area, but we needed to get in close. We had a few dozen volunteers to go in on the ground, and doctors are being flown in from around the country.”
The black-and-white film jumped, then settled down as the aircraft soared into the air. Elizabeth caught a glimpse of what looked like a bridge—the Brooklyn Bridge?—but she couldn’t see any signs of activity. The view jumped to an overhead of downtown Manhattan and Wall Street. But again the streets appeared deserted.
“At three thousand feet, you can’t tell anything unusual. Unless you know New York.” The film jumped again. This time the view was from the plane racing not more than fifty feet above a wide avenue. Broadway? Elizabeth knew only the landmarks she had seen on television.
Gasps of disbelief and astonishment broke out in the crowd. She felt her own horror building.
No traffic moved. No pedestrians ran across the pavement. Smoke rose from cars that had crashed into streetlights. The scene looked more powerful in black and white than any color splatter movie she had ever seen. She saw a body sprawled here and there. The pictures seemed to go on forever. Then the view swayed as the plane turned tightly in the air and just missed a tall building.
“Two nights ago the Germans launched three new bombs over New York. We believe a U-boat slipped into the harbor. Only one person died from shrapnel—all three of the bombs exploded in midair. We thought they were failures. We couldn’t figure out what the point was.”
The plane made another run over a different street. The desertion looked the same.
“By the next morning a lot of people were very sick. The worst ones died within hours. The doctors didn’t have any idea how to treat them. Vomiting, diarrhea, massive skin damage like burns, hemorrhaging. Many of them died on the street, taken so quickly that they couldn’t get anywhere. That’s what you see in the pictures. Nobody wanted to go back in and get the bodies.
“Then panic set in. The mayor decided to evacuate the city. Most of the casualties occurred in the frenzy to get away.”
The film changed to a different shot of a hospital filled with moaning patients. The camera showed lines of beds, many of which held two patients. Other people lay on the floors, in the corridors. Then the scene jumped to a subway station, also filled with sick-looking people. Doctors, nurses, priests, nuns, and any other healthy-looking person tried to help the sick, but they didn’t seem able to do anything but console them. A little girl sat bawling in abject grief beside her mother, who lay wide-eyed and motionless in death; the woman’s skin looked horribly burned.
Someone got sick at the rear of the hall. Wedges of sunlight spilled into the room as several people fled outside. Elizabeth could smell vomit.
“At first we thought the krauts were using some new kind of poison gas. We sent teams in to study it. What they found surprised us all.” The film showed soldiers walking cautiously down the deserted streets, wearing gas masks, holding Geiger counters in front of them. A close-up of the counter showed the needle pushed to the top of the scale.
“The Geigers went nuts,” Groves continued. “We don’t know exactly what happened, but I think we can make a good guess.”
The picture jumped, then went black. Bright light blazed on the screen. The sound of the loose end of the film flapped on the reel, but it took the stunned operator a moment to shut off the projector.