The woman appeared defeated, but she bought a small Nambe pot before leaving. Elizabeth told her she could leave some of her leaflets on the counter. She smiled and thanked her before moving down the mall to find someone else.
Not too many tourists showed up anymore nowadays. Elizabeth rarely thought of her old timeline, but when she did, she remembered that the tourists would flock to the plaza, catch a midday meal at the Bullring and then stop by the galleries before heading up to Los Alamos or Taos.
But Los Alamos had been shut down for years. Nothing remained but a deserted old Army town, decaying buildings. The Project had done its work, and it could now rest in peace.
As one of his last official presidential acts, Franklin Roosevelt had used the uranium bomb. The gun-type design did not need to be tested, once the purified uranium-235 had arrived from the Oak Ridge plants. Even without Oppenheimer and Groves to push for its use, Roosevelt had dropped the Bomb on the German island of Peenemunde, where the Nazis had developed the radioactive-dust missiles that had made New York uninhabitable.
President-elect Dewey had engaged in an enthusiastic propaganda campaign, dropping millions of leaflets in German cities, showing photographs of the death and devastation of both New York and Peenemunde, with a caption urging the people “Don’t Let This Go On!”
Dewey had announced a list of German cities to be obliterated if the Nazis did not surrender immediately. His first act as the new U.S. President would be to annihilate Berlin if Hitler did not surrender unconditionally. Frightened more by the unknown actions of a new President, Hitler surrendered on the day Dewey took his oath of office. He had then killed himself with a poison capsule before the Allies could begin carving up his Reich….
Current events always frightened Elizabeth. She rarely looked at the newspapers at all anymore, because she had lost track of what had already happened, and what might still come. She felt responsible for every disaster she read about.
Had she done something to trigger all this? What would have happened if she had assassinated Oppenheimer? Was the world better now or worse? Or just different?
For a while she had dabbled in the stock market, investing in television manufacturers, in John von Neumann’s company that produced “computing machines”—but the world economy had changed enormously, and she had no particular edge over anyone else. It was like what had happened to her eyesight—though she stared straight at something, she still could not see.
After opening her art gallery, exhibiting the work of local Indian artists, she had decided just to live her life and let the world go on by itself. History had chosen a different path, and it had to proceed where it would go, without any help, or interference, from her.
She would watch the future happen, while she lived in the past. Do what you have to do. If things got too bad, she would have to step in again and try to change things. And damn the consequences. For someone.
Afterword
THE TRINITY PARADOX ORIGINS
Doug Beason
I think it was Kevin who came up with the idea of writing an alternate history of the Manhattan project. And it all seemed natural at the time, the thing everyone expected us to do. After all, we’d met back in ’85 at a nuclear weapons laboratory, and we’d both had experience at Los Alamos National Laboratory—birthplace of the atomic bomb—and we’d both been out to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site: Kevin as a technical writer, and myself as a researcher.
Writing Trinity was not only personally and professionally interesting for us, but it made extensive use of our training and education. In fact this had become somewhat of a trademark for us: we both knew and understood our writing because we were not only active in the field, but we were publishing and making technical advances in it as well. This became an attribute of our collaborations: inserting real life experience and knowledge into our work. Other projects, such as our short story “Reflections in a Magnetic Mirror,” and novels such as Ill Wind, Ignition, Lifeline, the Nebula-nominated Assemblers of Infinity, and the Craig Kreident SF-mystery series (Virtual Destruction, Fallout, and Lethal Exposure), all made use of our scientific backgrounds.
What made writing Trinity even more exhilarating was that Kevin was a fanatic for historical detail, and as a computational physicist, I was fascinated by the science pioneered at war-time Los Alamos. I had performed my PhD thesis on the Los Alamos supercomputers, and Kevin had orchestrated some complex technical publications at the lab, as well as spent weekends touring the once highly secretive complex, and hiking throughout Bandelier National Park and the Anasazi ruins.
Writing Trinity started as a typical brainstorming session for us. We were eating either pizza or grilling steaks—a great way to fuel the creative juices—and whoever wasn’t cooking was taking notes. The concept grew into about five pages when we decided to start chopping it up logically and laying out the different plot lines.
The idea was that an extremely bright, and blindingly passionate female anti-nuclear protestor would somehow be transported back to the origins of the Manhattan project, in the middle of wartime America. This allowed us to explore the question of whether her foreknowledge of history would change the outcome of inventing the bomb… or WWII? And would her views change when she was suddenly immersed in this frantic, all-out effort to save 1940s America?
Writing the novel was one of the most fun collaborative experiences I’ve had. For example, one morning we wrote synopsis of major scenes onto sheets of paper. That afternoon (after a hike up the Sandia mountains in Albuquerque) Kevin and I laid the paper all over my living room floor, rearranging them while we mapped out the plot. My wife kept our toddlers out of the way while Kevin and I unscrambled plot lines, added and subtracted chapters, and finally achieved a holistic, visual view of the novel.
The story naturally divided itself along two lines: the German nuclear effort, and the US/UK Los Alamos secret program to produce the “device” (what the atomic bomb was called at the time).
Kevin and I divided the writing duties equitably. “You take that character and I’ll take this one.” Or, “I’ll write this chapter if you want to write the next one.” After the first draft was finished, whoever wanted to take the first cut at re-writing the entire novel had carte-blanche to change anything he wanted—words, sentences, scenes, structure, plot, whatever. And that, I think, was the strength of our collaboration. It was like taking our own work (but yet weirdly different because we had not written all of it) and rewriting it as our own. It took awhile to get into this mode of editing, but that gave the novel a single voice, and gave us the freedom to produce something that was much greater than simply slapping two pieces of disparate text together.
For this collaboration, the process of figuring out “who wrote what” fell naturally along our areas of interest. Kevin may not have literally jumped up and shouted that he wanted to write the German part of the novel, but he did everything but that. And I assume that I did the same for writing the US part. One anecdote I fondly remember was about the innovative way that we fictionally killed off Edward Teller, father of the H-Bomb. I actually truly admired Dr. Teller, and years later, he nodded his head in amusement when I told him I’d committed literary homicide in Kevin and my critically acclaimed book.
The Trinity Paradox was a culmination of our diverse experiences, a fusion of mutual interests. At the time we wrote the novel, it had been fifty years since the Manhattan project had occurred when we wrote Trinity in 1991, and that monumental event was quickly fading from memory. By contrast today, the Beatles first appeared on the international scene some fifty years ago, and look at how many people are still swept up by that creative explosion… equivalent in cultural change, if not in energetic force, to the impact made by wartime Los Alamos. We just wanted to ensure that perspective was not forgotten.