He was alone. No one could see him.
He ducked into the tented area and stuffed five bricks of high explosives into his satchel. He didn’t relax until he had zipped the satchel shut.
For the fifth night in a row he had managed to slip some H.E. blocks out of the test area.
He had one more stop before heading for his quarters to snatch a few hours of sleep before piling the explosive bricks under the harsh morning sun. As project manager for the H.E. simulation, it was his responsibility to check on all aspects of the upcoming test. That included visiting the observation bunker the senior staff would inhabit.
23
Trinity Site
November 1944
“If the bomb were not used in the present war, the world would have no adequate warning as to what was to be expected if war should break out again.”
“It ought to be clear to us that we, and we alone, are to be blamed for the frustration of our work.”
Mrs. Canapelli peered over a stack of bleached white towels at Elizabeth. “Have a good trip down there. It sounds exciting. I wish you could just stay for a day or two and rest!”
Elizabeth helped Mrs. Canapelli carry the towels back into the dorm. “Yeah, it sure would have been nice to settle down for a while. I’ve been on the road so much that I can’t seem to figure out where I am anymore.”
“Well, you must be doing something right, Betty. All these important people keep asking you to accompany them.”
Elizabeth laughed. “I don’t know about that.” She bent to pull out her old blue jeans—”dungarees”—from the bottom of the drawer. She shook them out and looked wistful. She hadn’t put them on since the day she had tried to shoot Oppenheimer.
“You aren’t thinking of wearing those, are you?” Mrs. Canapelli wrinkled her nose.
“White Sands isn’t the place to wear a dress.” Mrs. Canapelli looked blank. Elizabeth explained, “I mean the Trinity site.” That’s right—White Sands missile range probably wasn’t established until the fifties or so!
“You’ve been down there before?”
“No, but some of the guys here told me about it. Trying to scare me with stories about rattlesnakes and tarantulas and scorpions.” Mrs. Canapelli cringed, but Elizabeth used it to her advantage. “So you see, that’s not the place I want to be having bare legs.”
Mrs. Canapelli still looked skeptical. “If you say so. I suppose that you’re used to wearing that sort of clothes, being from Montana and all. But to tell you the truth, you really don’t look very feminine in those dungarees.”
Elizabeth smiled to herself at Mrs. Canapelli’s concern. Self-doubt about her femininity was the least of her concerns. She wondered what Mrs. Canapelli would think in twenty years when women started wearing hip-huggers and burning their bras.
“Tell you what—I’ll change when I get down there. Okay?”
“You know best. Just be careful. And good luck with whatever it is you’re doing down there.”
“Thanks.” Elizabeth closed her suitcase.
A horn honked from outside the dormitory. Mrs. Canapelli squinted out the window. “Oh, it’s your ride. They’re waiting for you.”
Elizabeth swung her bag from the bed. “Thanks again. With any luck I’ll be back within a week.”
Once in the black government-licensed car, Elizabeth settled back for the ride down to Trinity. She recognized the two other passengers as physicists from their interactions with Feynman; she thought one might be Enrico Fermi, but she didn’t recognize the other. They politely nodded to her and went back to reading their journals. Everything seemed so calm—the driver didn’t speak either, but Elizabeth didn’t mind. She hoped to catch a long nap on the drive down. It would be a nice change from accompanying General Groves.
Elizabeth stared out the car window with her eyes half closed, lost in thought. As the car wound its way down from the mesa, they passed cliffs that jutted up hundreds of feet and boulders bigger than houses. Pinon pine, Douglas fir, and blue spruce hung onto rocky ledges.
Although no one spoke, Elizabeth sensed a subdued excitement in the car, and it kept her awake. The rugged landscape seemed to magnify the tension. The bomb could have been developed in no other place, nowhere that matched the grandeur of northern New Mexico, the limitless boundaries that allowed physicists to tinker with the forces at the heart of the universe.
In another few days everything would reach its climax. The goal to which they had devoted years of their lives would be wrapped up in the detonation of one sphere of plutonium.
And then what? What would happen when Pandora’s box was finally opened for all the world to see? Would all nations react the same way as they had in her original timeline? The bipolar split of the USSR and U.S.? Would it still take fifty years for those old wounds to heal? Or would everything get worse?
Elizabeth then wondered about her own life. What was she going to do with herself after the test succeeded and the urgency of developing the bomb went away? One way or another, the war would soon be over. Someone would eventually discover that she had no birth certificate, no real identification. She didn’t know how much longer she could fast-talk her way through everything.
She couldn’t stay at Los Alamos. Even though she had helped develop the weapon in the first place, she couldn’t keep helping to make it worse and worse. Or would even that conviction change? At times she hated herself and her weakness. Germany would be stopped, and hopefully America would have enough sense to get rid of the weapon once and for all.
In her old timeline she realized that some people had accused the U.S. of racism by dropping the bomb on Japan. It was all right to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki because the Japanese were “different.” Japanese-Americans were thrown into detention camps; German-Americans never were. No matter how terrible the Nazis were, they still looked like Americans. What would the public think if they saw radiation-crisped blond-haired babies lying in the rubble of a nuked Berlin?
It would never be Harry S Truman’s decision now. It fell into the hands of President Dewey. She had no idea what the man would do.
With her knowledge of how things might have turned out, maybe she could start something that would force the U.S. to ban further work in nuclear weapons. Some of the other scientists had expressed doubts. She might even have to talk to Graham Fox again, try to resolve things with him. One person should be able to make a difference. Look at what Ralph Nader had started, back in her timeline, overturning the whole safety industry.
She knew the U.S. had experienced food riots and some war demonstrations in the past, but they were nothing like the major protests in the sixties, or even her Livermore demonstration. Maybe she could change things, help keep the world on the razor-thin path that would let them survive the next fifty years.
Elizabeth set her mouth, unable to sleep in the car as she considered the possibilities of all she could do.
They ate a late lunch at a run-down place called the Owl Cafe, which was one of only a few adobe buildings that collectively called themselves a town. Several cars and jeeps were parked at the small restaurant; the longhaired cook appeared frantic but delighted by the unexpected flood of business. Half the people were civilians, the other half military. As the only woman in the place, Elizabeth felt many gazes turned to her, but she ignored them. Her eyes stung from the cigarette smoke floating in the claustrophobic room—that was one thing she still had not been able to get used to, even after all this time.