“Evacuate? But what about the prisoners?”
“Go! Now!” Diebner slapped his hand on the desktop. “Do not worry about the prisoners.” He lowered his voice. “They’re already dead.”
The guard finally ran out. Diebner himself left. He looked around to see if he should take anything with him. He had only a moment—if it wasn’t too late already. But then he realized that there was nothing here he wanted to keep.
He hurried outside. Prisoners gathered near the reactor building, staring at the spectacle. Flames came out from the roofline, through chinks in the side. Guards scurried about, some directing firefighting efforts, others trying to escape.
Diebner waited for his car, and kept waiting. He looked around to find some other way he could flee. He wanted to get moving, put distance between himself and the invisible death. He didn’t know if he should hold his breath, duck his head and cover his mouth. He could never hide from the radiation.
Black smoke rolled out from the fire, swirling in the mild autumn breezes, some of it settling like a blanket on the camp.
Diebner’s hands were trembling. This, he thought, is a true holocaust.
He wondered why his car was taking so long.
PART 5
21
Trinity Site
November 1944
“Those who have originated the work on this terrible weapon and those who have materially contributed to its development have, before God and the World, the duty to see to it that it should be ready to be used at the proper time and in the proper way.”
The trip from Los Alamos took three hours in the unmarked government car, and Fox sweated in the autumn sunshine every minute of the dusty journey south. The two military policemen accompanying him didn’t blink as the car passed through the Albuquerque city limits without slowing. If a traffic policeman stopped them, Fox would have to show his unmarked and unsigned driver’s license; he was not allowed to divulge his name or his purpose. His MP escorts would see to that.
Fox swallowed in a dry throat. The three of them had emptied their thermos of coffee half an hour before. He didn’t dare suggest that they stop, not even for some refreshment. The orders were clear enough: no stopping allowed on the way to Trinity site, near Socorro.
He had insisted on being the driver, despite what General Groves said about the poor road skills of the scientists. Fox only had to remember to drive on the right side of the pavement.
Fox treated the two MPs coolly, not partaking in their stilted argument about the presidential election. Politics and Washington, D.C., seemed so far away, so irrelevant. He was going to help set up a test to explode an atomic bomb.
He kept his responses to their questions on the level of a grunted yes or no. He felt too uncomfortable with his own reservations to speak pleasantries with the young men. Somehow he suspected that these innocent-looking escorts had really been assigned to G-2 to watch him, not simply for his “protection.” What if they were sent out to make him trip up, spill something that he ordinarily wouldn’t divulge? What if they suspected that by now Graham Fox abhorred everything about the Manhattan Project and what it was bound to unleash on the world?
He remembered the day he had sent the letter to Esau, how the Nice Young Man from G-2 had seemed to sense that Fox had circumvented the security regulations. Nothing had happened in the intervening months, but Fox couldn’t shake the feeling that he was still being watched, observed. The paranoia stirred up feelings of guilt, like looking in the rearview mirror and seeing a police car following too close, just waiting for it to flick on the flashing lights.
But he had only himself on this end, now that Elizabeth Devane had… changed, throwing her assistance in with the Project itself. She had been gone for nearly two months with General Groves—talk about going off with the devil himself! Fox had always assumed she was a well-hidden German sympathizer, perhaps even a spy; he hadn’t wanted to know what she really was, so long as she felt the way he did.
“You can’t listen to anybody else when it’s your own conscience at stake.” She had said it herself, the first night they had made love, almost a full year before. “Do what you have to do. Damn the consequences.” But now that had changed. She had changed.
He would take her earlier advice, whether or not she still believed it herself. He knew Abraham Esau would be trying his best on the German end. The fact that no further radioactive attacks had occurred on American cities implied that Esau had convinced the Nazi high command to stage a warning shot. Esau would not allow the development of a full-scale bomb such as this one they were about to test at the Trinity site.
The plutonium bomb, based on the implosion concept Elizabeth had suggested herself, had been designed and completed. But no one knew if it would work. The assembly used explosive lenses to smash a hollow sphere of plutonium into super criticality, and it should function, according to all the calculations and models. But Edward Teller had been killed in an experiment that had also been proven, according to all calculations and models. Theory made mistakes. A successful test would put all doubts to rest.
Fox’s duty was to manage part of that test.
He tried to concentrate on the driving. He kept his eyes on the road and his hands upon the wheel, but the turn of events at Los Alamos kept creeping up on him. After New York, after Elizabeth had suggested the implosion scheme for the plutonium bomb, the entire Project had seemed reborn. There could be no stopping it now.
Unless he could do something. His new assignment might afford him an opportunity. Could he allow the warlords to up the stakes a thousand fold?
Fox hadn’t minded being taken off the radionuclide team; he realized that the importance of his group had diminished with respect to the overall Project goals. But being placed under Kistiakowsky’s high-explosive group had angered him. What did he know about shock physics? Hydrodynamic motion? Detonation waves? “If you don’t know it, learn it!” Oppie had said. The same thing had happened repeatedly over the years, with scientists forced to become instant experts in fields where they had no background. But somehow it worked.
Lucky that the crazy Ukrainian had realized Fox’s predicament and had suggested that Fox be sent down to coordinate a simulation for the actual test. To provide a benchmark to compare the blast of the plutonium bomb, one hundred tons of high explosives were going to be detonated in the desert. A radioactive source would be placed in the high explosive, and the debris would be tracked. Fox was going to put counters at various distances from the explosion, then would run around in a jeep to take readings afterward.
Fox thought about the chance he had missed to join a few outspoken colleagues who had left the Project in protest. But he thought he might have a greater chance to influence events from inside. As if that would make a difference to the world at large.
Once south of Albuquerque, the MP escorts began to relax. It seemed as if everything north of the city had served as a testing ground to see how well they could follow directions. Or maybe they assumed that the clumps of sagebrush held innumerable spies close to the Project, but now they had traveled far enough to be safe. Their conversations grew less strained; Fox still didn’t join in. No doubt the military police thought all the Project scientists were weird anyway.
As they headed into the flat volcanic basin south of Albuquerque, the two-lane road wound along the Rio Grande. Grande—a true misnomer; the muddy channel seemed to hold no more than a bathtubful of water. There was no comparison with even the Thames. But in an area of the country where water was as scarce as here, perhaps a tubful of water did deserve to be called “Grande.”