The genie had escaped its bottle.
“I am become death, the shatterer of worlds,” Elizabeth said.
Oppenheimer was supposed to say that. She didn’t think he was around to quote from the Bhagavad Gita.
EPILOGUE
Santa Fe, New Mexico
May 1952
“For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant; still, we could not escape an eerie feeling when we knew we had actually done it. We felt as, I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knows will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee.”
When the protester walked through the open door into Elizabeth’s art gallery, her radio in back was playing yet another Frank Sinatra song. She wondered if she would live long enough to hear Led Zeppelin, or even the Beatles.
The protester wore a neat skirt suit, but Elizabeth could spot her intentions immediately. She carried the leaflets under her arm like a weapon.
Elizabeth rocked back in her chair and watched her look around the small gallery, pretending to be interested in the pottery and sand paintings. Outside in the street a man and woman walked by with a small child. They were conservatively dressed in light slacks and billowing shirts, perfect for the Santa Fe summer sun but not for the cool evenings.
The protester glanced up to meet her gaze, smiling. She fidgeted; she was new at this, Elizabeth could tell. Elizabeth turned her head to the side so she could see her clearly, since she could never look at anything straight on again. Not since the Trinity blast.
The woman opened her mouth as if she were going to ask her a question, but when Elizabeth did not meet her gaze, she swallowed and pulled out one of her leaflets instead. Elizabeth’s offset gaze always disturbed people.
The center part of her vision was gone, and she could see only out of the corners of her eyes. She didn’t want to remember the old days, eight years before, but the Trinity test was burned in her memory forever, every time she opened her eyes. The towering, glowing mushroom cloud that branded itself onto her retinas so that she had seen it for days, while recuperating.
“Excuse me, ma’am. I was wondering if I could talk to you for a moment? It’s very important to the future of all of us.”
The piece of newsprint bore the words stop atomic warfare!
She replaced her shiver in her spine with a wry smile. “Of course I’ll look at it.” She held the paper to the side to read the words.
After the detonation, she had been in and out of consciousness for a day, flash-burned and shock-deafened. She had been delirious for another half a day, but then had focused on the chaos, the tiny infirmary set up in the McDonald ranch house, the medics tending them all.
It had taken the support staff two full days to find Graham Fox. In the confusion after the atomic blast and the explosion of the bunker, no one had thought to look for one man at a single outlying survey station who had not checked in. Only later, when Elizabeth began to sob and babble about what had happened, did they realize that no one had seen Fox. When they drove out to his station, they found him in the open, unmoving, staring up at the limitless New Mexico sky.
Elizabeth had broken Fox’s leg and hip when she struck him with the jeep. Fox had lain mere on the baking sands, unable to move for two full days, with no food, no water, and no shade. On his broken leg he had crawled over to the thin shadow cast by the telephone pole. Bloodstains and scuff marks in the sand showed how he had crawled around the pole, trying to remain in the narrow shadow as the sun moved across the sky. His face and arms were raw from flash burn as well as sunburn. Elizabeth pictured him sprawled unprotected and staring in awe as the great fireball rose into the dawn sky.
“If you have any questions, I’d be happy to explain them,” the protester said. “I know some of the concepts are rather difficult, but you don’t need to know about nuclear physics to understand the danger if these weapons aren’t used properly.”
Elizabeth looked up at her from the paper. “No, I don’t think I need you to explain anything.” But the woman had begun her speech now.
“I know Americans are excited right now with the atomic bombing of Pyongyang, Mukden, and Fushun. Congress didn’t do much debate when General MacArthur asked to use the weapons, and now he is claiming total victory over North Korea and southern Manchuria. President Lodge has formally petitioned the Republic of North Vietnam to adhere to France’s Indochina Occupation Accords or risk the same penalty. MacArthur is calling it his ‘Pax Americana’ and everybody seems happy about the whole situation.”
Elizabeth, though, had not been happy. When she read of the use of three bombs in Indochina, she had been absolutely horrified.
“But those weapons,” the protester was saying, “were exact duplicates of the uranium gun-type weapon that we dropped on Peenemunde and Hiroshima six years ago and Moscow last year. In all that time we haven’t improved them at all. No one’s been able to recreate the plutonium bomb they tested down in the desert.”
Elizabeth cleared her throat, feeling sweat prickle her arms. “I understand that most of the scientists got killed during the first test.”
She herself had suffered a concussion and two cracked ribs, second-degree burns—all in all, rather minor compared to the others. Eight people had died, including Oppenheimer and General Groves, crouching side by side and watching for an atomic flash they would never see. The explosion had broken both of Fermi’s legs, tossed and smashed Dick Feynman every which way, leaving him crippled. Only Johnnie von Neumann had somehow emerged unscathed. “Probabilities,” he had said in his thick Hungarian accent, “merely probabilities.”
Out of the corner of her eye she looked up to the framed black-and-white photograph of Feynman in his augmented wheelchair in front of a chalkboard. He had signed it, “For Elizabeth, what a great bang we had!” He had gone back to teaching at Berkeley, working off-hours on his theoretical studies. He still kept in touch with her, trying to get her to join him in California, where she could be his assistant. He claimed the wheelchair and the partial loss of function in his left arm didn’t slow him down at all. “I’m a theoretician, Elizabeth,” he had told her. “I don’t need to do anything.” The only other effect, he said, was that the women on campus now considered him safer.
She sighed at the thought. Going to work with Feynman again was indeed a tempting offer, but she wanted nothing more to do with any such work. She had left nuclear research once before, vowing never to support the effort. This time she meant it. She had seen once again what it could do.
“Those warheads are mass-produced at Oak Ridge. Uh, that’s in Tennessee.”
“I know. I’ve been there,” she snapped, growing annoyed at being reminded of everything.
The protester’s eyes widened. “Well, if you’ll read this you’ll see what I’ve been getting at. Some scientists have developed proposals to put atomic bombs to peaceful uses. Beating swords into plowshares, as it were.” She laughed a little.
“We could use atomic explosions to blast canals, to excavate new harbors, to make reservoirs. Down there at the bottom of the page, you’ll also see a description of something called ‘Thunderwells,’ deep pits filled with water under which we would set off an atomic explosion— our calculations show that the shock wave would be enough to launch something into orbit. Americans would be the first to send an object to space!”
“Wonderful,” said Elizabeth. “If you leave the paper here, I will read it. I promise.”