Fox stopped and tried to find the fortified bunker in the distance. It was barely visible from where he stood across the flat nothingness. He could make out two more bunkers in the desert.
“All the senior staff will be present? General Groves as well? Watching the bomb go off?”
“Well, assuming it does go off. Somebody said it might rip away the whole atmosphere, but the general said to go ahead anyway.”
Fox drew his lips tight. “What about the risk?”
“I really don’t know much about it, sir. The general said the models had predicted enough margin for error.” Johnston kept walking toward the ranch house. “Please follow me, sir.”
Margin for error? Fox couldn’t believe it. After the miscalculations had caused Teller’s death, he thought the scientists wouldn’t put so much faith in models anymore. And they would all be up front, closest to Ground Zero, watching to see what their Gadget would do.
Once the genie was released from the bottle, it could never be stuffed back in. But if the wizards who conjured up that genie were destroyed, then perhaps no one else would be able to command it.
Do what you have to do. Damn the consequences.
The entire senior staff.
If he somehow prevented the Manhattan Project from ever following through on their Gadget, and if the Germans would never use their own device, then the world would truly be safe. People needed time to grow and learn to deal with holding such power. He could not stop it forever, of course, but he could buy time. Let people deal with such knowledge during rational years, after peace had come and the world had learned its lessons of war. He would have to bankrupt the Allied “brain trust.”
“Dr. Fox, I almost forgot—see these flatbeds?”
Fox looked again at the canvas-covered flatbeds he had seen upon driving in. “Yes?”
“It would sure make everyone a lot more relaxed if you would do something about them. Now that you’ve arrived, you’re officially in charge over there.”
Fox frowned. “What do you mean? I don’t even know what they are.”
“Your explosives—a hundred tons of H.E. for the benchmark test. It’s keeping the guards a little nervous.”
Fox stared at the shapeless masses under the tarpaulins. A hundred tons of high explosives, at his disposal.
“Yes, I can see how they might be nervous about it.” He nodded. “Don’t worry. I’ll see to everything.”
22
Los Alamos
November 1944
“We are influenced by the fact that we are under great pressure, both internally and externally, to carry out the test, and that it undoubtedly will be carried out before all the experiments, tests, and improvements that should reasonably be made, can be made.”
The newspapers hadn’t come up from Santa Fe yet, but the little Los Alamos radio station broadcast the news immediately. For those without radios switched on, the loudspeakers around the camp made the announcement.
“Dewey wins the election! Roosevelt has lost in a landslide on his bid for a fourth term at the presidency of the United States. Dewey vows to put an end to the war. What this means to the Project, ladies and gentlemen, is anyone’s guess.”
Elizabeth had arrived back in the mountain city after being gone for months, traveling around the country with General Groves, accompanying him back to Washington, D.C., and now returning to Los Alamos while the general went down to Alamogordo to set up the Trinity test. It took Elizabeth a long moment to understand the mood of the people moving down A Street, but then the loudspeaker repeated the announcement.
“Dewey has won…”
Yet another change, she thought. It was an endless spiral going nowhere. She couldn’t keep up with what she remembered about how the events should have occurred.
Groups of Army men marched in close-order drill at one end of the encampment; jeeps carrying uniformed officers roared by, spewing dirt from the unpaved streets; the officers hung onto their hats. The localized public address system was in constant use, paging one person after another.
Elizabeth moved her bags to the side of the administration building. It felt good to be away from General Groves. Now maybe she could catch a breath of air, preferably one untainted by cigar smoke. The time she had spent with Groves seemed a million years away—as distant as her old life in her original timeline.
Along with the bustling activity, an extraordinary number of vehicles filled the center of Los Alamos—trucks, jeeps, and cars in every conceivable parking spot, stashed behind the dorms and along the barbed-wire fence of the Tech Area.
Before heading back to the dormitory, she decided to check in with Feynman’s office. She had missed working with him, his jokes and his laughter. She didn’t want to miss what caused the excitement around the camp. Groves had told her about the scheduled test of the implosion device. The Trinity test. The theoreticians had worked even more overtime than usual, and Hanford had shipped down barely enough plutonium to make the bomb’s core. Something in the back of her mind suggested it wasn’t right. Didn’t the explosion happen next year? In 1945? Still… it was all going to end soon.
And then it would just begin. She could no longer guess what might happen.
Everywhere she walked, red-eyed intensity shone on the scientists’ faces. Everyone seemed on the verge of snapping at anything that stood in their way, but they all looked to be bearing the weight of something important.
But what if Germany surrendered soon? she wondered. What if Dewey refused to continue funding the Project? They would have only another two months before Roosevelt handed over the presidential reins. Any advantage she might have had in predicting the future had dissolved with the bombing of New York.
Elizabeth stepped up her pace to Tech Area 1, back to her old working place. Feynman was nowhere to be seen. His office lay in its usual cluttered state, and even her desk had papers strewn all over the place, as if Feynman had used her room as a holding tank for his notes. She wrote a scribbled message, tacked it to the back of his chair, then made her way to the applied mathematics area.
John von Neumann’s computation group was grinding away, furiously trying to complete several sets of computations, double-checking parameters for the upcoming test. The physicist passing out the initial values hadn’t seen any members of the senior staff. Some of the gathered ladies in the room looked up at the disturbance—Gladys what’s-her-name scowled at her—but Elizabeth left.
She made her way back to the Admin building. After being at the center of things during Groves’s trip, she felt discarded. They could have at least left a message for me. But she tried to rationalize to herself that the Project didn’t revolve around her. She had served when she was needed, but that didn’t give her the right to an inside track to what was going on.
Still, she felt empty, left out.
She picked up her bags and started for the ladies’ dormitory. The dry autumn had left Los Alamos basking in heat. She remembered the first rainstorm and the muck covering all the streets. The place looked no more civilized, but she realized that it did feel like home.
Elizabeth hauled her luggage and kept to the side of the street. A military jeep sped by, then stopped. The driver craned his neck around and gunned the engine, sending the jeep roaring back toward her. “Need a lift, ma’am?”
“Sure.” Elizabeth pushed her bags into the backseat before the driver could get out to help her. She climbed into the front.