“Elizabeth…”
“Hello, Graham.” Elizabeth stopped walking.
Feynman placed his hand behind her back and urged her forward. “Dr. Fox—you’ve heard the shot is back on?”
“Yes.” Fox’s eyes didn’t move from Elizabeth as he answered. They glittered in the glare from the headlights.
Feynman said, “Hey, you can join us in the bunker. I think we’ve got room for one more.”
Fox shook his head. He spoke so low it was hard for her to hear his words. “Elizabeth, I shall be with my radionuclide collection experiment. Were you still planning on joining me? I came back to fetch you.”
The suggestion startled her. She had never agreed to be with him for the test. “Well, Oppie is expecting me in the bunker.”
“I was planning on having you help me—none of the technicians is free. These measurements are crucial.”
Elizabeth swallowed and tried to think of a way out. Fox worked his mouth but said nothing else. She felt very uncomfortable.
Feynman dropped his hand from her back. “Oh, go ahead, Elizabeth. You’ll be able to see the test much better from out there. Too many big heads crammed in the command bunker. We’ll be up to our necks in IQs.”
Elizabeth drew in a breath, stalling for time. What was going on here? Why was Fox so insistent?
“We must hurry, Elizabeth,” Fox said, touching her elbow. “The test is set to go in eighty minutes. I’ve still got to check out the radiometers.”
“He’s right.” Feynman gently pushed her from behind. “You’d better hurry.” With that he turned and climbed into one of the jeeps. He called back as the jeep started to move. “Keep your fingers crossed!”
“I will,” Fox said.
As the jeeps moved off, Elizabeth frowned at the vehicle’s sour exhaust fumes over the fresh smell of rain. One by one the jeeps sped off along the dark road toward Ground Zero. In the backs, men hung onto their hats.
Fox pressed his lips together. He watched her for a moment. Neither of them spoke. Finally, as one of the last vehicles pulled out, he said, “Let’s go. I brought my own jeep.” Swinging into the driver’s seat, he checked out the gear shift and waited for Elizabeth to join him.
Elizabeth hesitated. Fox’s attitude didn’t leave room for questions. He had tried to talk to her several times in the last few days, but she had ignored him, though she watched him growing more and more desperate. She looked around. She brushed away a few spots of standing water in the passenger seat, then climbed into the jeep.
The last vehicle pulled away from the ranch house and followed the others down the dirt path. She recognized none of the remaining scientists in the back. All of the camaraderie she had felt as the Project had come to its conclusion seemed to have flown away. Just as she had arrived here alone, now she stood with Fox—she might as well have been alone again. She didn’t want to be with him. Everything had changed, she had changed. She wasn’t sure she liked—or understood—what had happened to her.
The times with General Groves, Dick Feynman, and even Mrs. Canapelli had provided her with a means to cope with this new timeline. She would never have made it this far without the support she’d gotten from the others.
She had used Graham Fox as a crutch to help her after she had tried to assassinate Oppenheimer. That former Elizabeth seemed a stranger to her now. How could she have thought about murdering someone in cold blood? Hadn’t Fox himself mentioned it, if only in conversation?
Now that the bomb was about to detonate, now that the life she had lived for the past year was suddenly coming to a head, she had nothing that was her own. Nothing but the companionship of the one man here who resented the bomb as much as she once had. Now Fox hated it more. In his eyes she must be a traitor to what she had believed.
Oh, crap. She pushed back her hair and sat back in Fox’s jeep. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t know what you expect to accomplish.” Fox didn’t look at her as he gripped the steering wheel. His knuckles shone white as he gripped the shift lever.
Ten miles away, the blinking red light on top of the shot tower was barely visible. Elizabeth walked around the clunky-looking diagnostic electronics as Fox worked on his collection device. The equipment contained strip charts with red marker pens, vacuum tubes, and gauges with wobbling needles. A hundred-foot-tall telephone pole stood at her right, from which ran a bundle of wires. She could see a small package attached to every ten feet up the side of the pole. Behind her a tinny voice came from an Army field radio propped against the car. “Thirty minutes to zero.”
Fox wiped his dusty hands and joined her. He nodded toward the pole. “Each instrumentation package has a velocimeter, a barometer, thermometer, and flypaper.”
“Flypaper?”
“To catch radioactive debris in the wind. The other stuff is to correlate the wind velocity, pressure, and temperature of the blast wave. My flypaper will give us an idea of the total radioactivity in this part of the explosion.” Fox seemed disinterested in what he was doing, rattling off the information as if he were lecturing in front of a class.
Elizabeth turned back to the shot tower. She felt the tension like a knot in her stomach. A light glow appeared behind the mountain, where the sun struggled to come up over the horizon. The distant mountains looked like jaws ready to bite down on the dawn.
Fox didn’t speak much. The desert around them remained absolutely quiet. Elizabeth thought it strange not to hear at least some noise: for the past few days, sounds of hammering, sawing, welding, cursing, and nervous laughter had filled the camp. But now she heard nothing. The desert held its breath, waiting for the test, waiting for the world to change.
Fox fumbled in a knapsack. “Here. Use this suntan lotion. No telling how much protection we’ll need from this faraway.”
“What?” She grasped the bottle of sunscreen.
“We’re likely to get hit with a healthy dose of radiation centered about the ultraviolet. That means we could get sunburned from the blast.” He picked up a pair of sunglasses from the portable table. “And wear these. We must face the opposite direction until after the initial flash, but then we can turn around.”
“Twenty-five minutes,” the tinny voice said from the radio.
Elizabeth held up the glasses; in the darkness she could barely see through the dark lenses. She lowered the glasses. “Graham?”
“Yes?”’
“What’s with the bunker? Why this? Why did you need to take me out here?”
“What do you mean?” He avoided her expression and mumbled his words.
“You know damned well what I mean.”
Fox thrust his hands in his pockets and stared off toward the shot tower.
Elizabeth allowed him a minute of silence before speaking. “Then what is it? My God, you know it’s over between us. Give it up and quit resenting me.”
“Resenting you?” He whirled on her. “I opened myself up to you! I don’t make friends easily, but I let you in. I trust my friends. I value them. I can’t trust you anymore. You’ve changed too much. You’ve become one of them. You’re dazzled by all this, and you can’t think of the consequences anymore. You sold your conscience for a pat on the back.”
Elizabeth winced, then defended herself with anger. “Just because I slept with you a few times doesn’t make us soul mates. We’re too different. I don’t agree with—”