She read documented complaints from labor unions about the working conditions, about the lack of amenities, about the poor transportation services. Apparently everyone had to ride in dilapidated buses out to the reactor construction sites, which were no closer than six miles and often as far as fifteen miles from the main camp. To encourage productivity, the Du Pont management had chosen the buses in worst condition and used them for the last runs in the morning and the first runs in the evening; that way, the last to arrive at work and the first to leave were forced to suffer the worst ride.
The whole place sounded like a Wild West mining town. “A charming vacation spot,” Elizabeth muttered to herself. She watched a feathering of ripples on the surface of her coffee as the train shuttled along.
Groves had fallen asleep with papers in his lap, his black coffee untouched. It surprised her that he didn’t snore.
The dry air smelled dusty when they disembarked from the train at Richland, Washington. The sunlight bore a yellowish tinge, reflected up from the barren land.
Elizabeth looked around, blinking sleep from her eyes. She felt stiff and uncomfortable from the hours on the train, but Groves stepped down, clasping his briefcase to his side. His khaki dress uniform had wrinkled, but the general himself looked supercharged.
“General!” a man called. “General Groves, over here!”
Groves turned and walked over to a younger, thin man, also in military uniform, standing on the platform. The man smiled behind a pair of dark sunglasses while snapping a salute. Elizabeth followed Groves, carrying her overnight satchel.
“Fritz! I didn’t expect you to come out here yourself.” Groves tightened his voice and returned the salute. “Don’t you have anything better to do? I didn’t leave you in charge of all this just to be a chauffeur.”
“Please don’t call me Fritz, sir.”
“If you didn’t get so annoyed about it, nobody would bother.”
The two men amazed Elizabeth by not slowing for a moment. They talked as they met, then moved along at a half run. The younger man turned and held out his hand to her, still walking away from the train. “New secretary, General? I’m Lieutenant Colonel J. T. Matthias, ma’am.”
“Not much of a secretary,” Groves snapped.
“Technical advisor, at the moment,” she answered, taking his hand in a curt grip. “Elizabeth Devane. The general is upset because I wouldn’t read him a bedtime story.” Matthias seemed to have trouble hiding his shock.
The colonel took Elizabeth’s satchel and packed it in the back of a dusty jeep parked alongside the Richland station. Groves kept hold of his own briefcase. Matthias wiped a finger along the grime on the windshield. “Just had the damn thing washed this morning.”
“You picked this place, Fritz. Put up with it.”
They drove out, bouncing as Colonel Matthias turned sharply over the embankment to the main street. They left the outskirts of the city of Richland and struck north along a straight road that the horizon swallowed in the flat distance.
The Hanford Engineering Works lay twenty miles away from Richland. All signs of civilization fell away, plunging them into a wasteland of sagebrush and sand that seemed to stretch forever. The sky looked like an inverted blue china plate, with a thin crepe of high clouds. The aquamarine path of the Columbia River curled across the desert; untended orchards and farmland broke the monotony. Far, far in the distance, she could see a green-gray haze of mountains.
Groves raised his voice above the breeze whipping over the windshield. “I plan to stay a week or so and get everything knocked into shape. What’s going on? You didn’t tell me why you came to meet me yourself.”
“Well, General, we got the reactors completed ahead of schedule—and you know how tight the schedule was in the first place. I think what the Nazis did to New York got everybody quaking in their socks. These workers don’t have the tiniest idea what we’re doing at the plant, of course, but they think this must be some pretty big project.”
“When are we going to start getting usable amounts of plutonium? My boys at Los Alamos are waiting. They’ve got a hot new idea of how the plutonium Gadget might work”—Groves looked at Elizabeth grudgingly—“thanks to Miss Devane here.”
Matthias grinned. “Well, we had to make sure all the safety systems were installed in the reactors, but they’ve been cooking for more than a month now. The plutonium-separation plants are up and running. All remote-controlled.”
“Any other troubles? Out with it! I can see you waffling.”
Matthias stared ahead at the road. “Nothing out of the ordinary, sir. Just handling some of the men. Yesterday afternoon all 750 of our plumbers went on strike. I was up salmon fishing at the mouth of the Columbia—my only day off in a month—but I got called back. It’s a mess. They’ve been whining to their union.”
Groves’s face turned a deep red. “Strike! This is wartime, dammit! They can’t strike.”
Matthias seemed haggard, but Elizabeth saw the hint of a smile behind his eyes. He looked at his wristwatch. “They’ve brought part of the construction work to a standstill. I’ve called a meeting with the strikers at, um, nine o’clock this morning. Half an hour from now. I was hoping you might speak to them, General.”
Groves seethed on the seat of the jeep. “Just drive, Fritz!”
Elizabeth and Lieutenant Colonel Matthias stayed out of Groves’s way as he charged into the Hanford theater. All 750 strikers had gathered there, grumbling and looking ugly. Many had been drinking, and Elizabeth saw a brawl about to happen, or perhaps murder. On the door and walls, people had put campaign posters for presidential candidate Dewey, looking sincere with his short dark hair parted in the middle, his black eyes, his bushy brown moustache. Someone else had drawn a large caricature of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“Sieg heil, you Nazis!” Groves shouted as he walked onto the stage. “Yes, I mean you! Every one of you! What the hell do you think is going on here?”
He paused for the barest second, just enough for the first instant of an outcry, but then he raised his voice, using the microphone this time so that his words drowned out all other noise. “You are interrupting a project that could save the lives of a great many of our servicemen. I’m sure that most of you are patriotic Americans, but I wish I could find the dozen men responsible for this outbreak, and send them packing to Germany where they belong!”
The auditorium echoed with a storm of protests, but the general weathered it without flinching. “You have complaints? You don’t like working conditions here? My heart aches for you—it really does—and I’m sure all our soldiers getting shot in the Pacific would sure hate to be in your shoes.” He found a podium and pounded it.
“In case you haven’t been watching the newsreels, there is a war going on! You’re part of it here! Men are dying by the thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—and you have a chance to end it all if this project works out!”
He lowered his voice as the striking plumbers became quieter. “Now you just think about your complaints and write them down. You think about all our men lying at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. You think about all the good soldiers who died alongside the road on the Philippines during the death march of Bataan. Then you write down your complaints and get them to me. I’ll see that everything’s taken care of.