The Trinity Paradox (28 page)

The meeting hall was nearly filled when Elizabeth reached the entrance. She had never seen so many people from the Project assembled at one place before, and this was much different from Oppenheimer’s weekly scientific colloquia. The cafeterias held only a hundred or so people; even the ubiquitous ball games, pitting the eggheads against the doughboys, pulled in no more than a few hundred bystanders. Now all the chairs were taken, and late arrivals crowded inside the doors and along the walkway.

“Miss, over here.” An Army type rose from his chair and offered it to her. She started to refuse, but then thought better of it. No telling how long the meeting might last, and she would rather be sitting down ... even if it meant she would probably have to endure the young man’s shuffling his feet, blushing red, and asking her to meet him at the movies sometime.

But when she turned to thank him, he had already disappeared into the crowd. Elizabeth sat down, struck by his politeness, the sexist kind that would have always annoyed her before. But she had been gone for so long now that she had forgotten how she was accustomed to having men act. She had been caught up with working on the Gadget.

She stopped her own thoughts.
Gadget.
Just as they refused to call the Manhattan Project for what it was, they continuously referred to the atomic bomb as a Gadget. Dehumanizing the weapon, painting warheads pink.

A year ago her blood had boiled at the dehumanization, making her go to extremes such as sabotaging the MCG test. Five months ago she had attempted to assassinate Oppenheimer. But Jeff’s death, and her inability to harm the Project director, had killed something inside her. The simple black-and-white answers from before now seemed muddied into shades of gray.

The past few months had started to catch up with her. She didn’t know whether she herself had changed or if somehow the Project itself had wavered in its course. With everyone else at Los Alamos, she had seen the regular newsreels—colored with optimism and filled with silly propaganda, but still holding a bit of truth. She had watched World War II proceed with a horror greater than she remembered feeling about the news footage of the Vietnam war. In her mind she still recalled the horribly burned corpses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but now she watched other footage: the Pearl Harbor attack, the death march of Bataan, the abused POWs found in Burma. Nobody knew the full truth about the Nazi concentration camps yet.

She thought she understood her attitude change, and she accepted it with trepidation—she had immersed herself in this culture and had begun to see things from their point of view. Her daily life had started to get in the way of the larger things, the important things such as her ideals, her morals.

But Elizabeth knew deep inside that she would never change, even if it meant she had to take a different approach. History could be changed—she had already proven that. When the Germans inevitably surrendered, she would be one of the first to insist that the Gadget not be used. Many of the Manhattan Project scientists would also be very outspoken—they were the first antinuclear protesters. She could feel the backlash bubbling and waiting to be released. Graham Fox would probably be among them. She couldn’t see him in the auditorium.

Oppenheimer, standing like a scarecrow in front of the crowd, rapped on the podium at the front of the hall. Everyone quieted down. Oppie crushed out a cigarette in the ashtray and coughed for their attention. He looked as if he had been stunned. The strain showed on him more than on any of the other workers.

Elizabeth shifted her head to try and get a better view. She remembered him sneezing in the canyon, wiping his nose on his sleeve. She closed her eyes to clear the thought. As Oppenheimer waited, two men in Army uniforms struggled with a canvas, erecting a movie screen. Elizabeth sat up straight to see over the heads of the people in front of her.

Oppie leaned forward and raised his voice. “I know it’s hot, but please bear with us. We’ll have to close the doors in a moment to show a film, so the heat is going to get worse. But not as bad as what we’ve got to show you. This is extremely important.” When the murmuring stopped, Oppenheimer nodded to his right. “General Groves.”

A burly man in uniform stood up from his seat and walked over to the podium. “Thank you, Dr. Oppenheimer.”

General Groves had been given the responsibility to develop the Gadget at all costs, no matter how much money he required, how many people he needed to commandeer. Few people liked the chubby and overbearing man who demanded two hundred percent from every worker on the Project. Though the general had been in and out of Los Alamos over the past year on frequent inspection tours, Elizabeth had not actually seen him until now.

She would have to fight against Groves after Germany surrendered. She studied his lantern jaw, his crest of dark hair edged with gray, and his peppery moustache. She would have to work to convince him to do a demonstration shot rather than annihilate human beings.

That was her next chance to change things.

Groves cleared his throat and gripped the podium as if he wanted to break it. He wore his khaki dress blouse. Semicircles of sweat stood out under his arms in the heat, but he showed no sign of discomfort.

“All right, everyone on the Project! I didn’t pull you away from your work to mince words, so I’ll get straight to the point. Straight to it. You’re all aware that what you’re doing, developing the Gadget, is the most noble and patriotic act your country could ask.”

Oh brother, here it comes, Elizabeth thought. She tried to remember exactly when Germany had surrendered. Maybe that was the announcement. The war had already been going badly for Hitler, if she could believe the non-objective newsreels. She thought the war in Europe had not ended until sometime in mid-1945, but could things have been changed by her presence?

She had tried to alter events here, but her actions appeared to have had no immediate effect. She couldn’t conceive of anything
she
had done having repercussions around the world. Could Germany have surrendered early, thus invalidating the need for the Project? Was Oppenheimer upset now because he had not completed his Gadget in time for it to be used in this war? She forced herself not to smile. Too bad, Oppie, she thought.

Groves turned around to look at the blank screen. “They say a picture is worth a thousand words.” He pointed to his aide. “Kil1 the lights.”

As the lights went off, officers standing by the outside doors swung them shut, plunging the hall into darkness. Elizabeth saw a match flare up, then a red glow as someone lit a cigar at the front of the hall. Groves’s voice came from the direction of the cigar.

“I flew into Albuquerque this morning, direct from Washington. These films have been shown exactly twice— first to the War Department, then an hour later to the President. The rest of the country is going to know soon. We might be able to hide a town the size of Los Alamos, but we can’t possibly keep New York City a secret. Go ahead and roll it.”

A movie projector at the rear of the hall spewed a ghostly light as smoke shot up from the incandescent bulb. The makeshift screen displayed an aerial view of buildings and streets, endless rows of suburbs and identical
All in the Family
style houses, that showed how little New York had changed over the years. In the background, Elizabeth could see the famous city skyline, which the camera approached.

“You’re looking at reconnaissance photos from a modified Army Air Corps P-51, traveling close to three hundred knots a thousand feet off the ground. We didn’t know how safe it was to fly over the area, but we needed to get in close. We had a few dozen volunteers to go in on the ground, and doctors are being flown in from around the country.”

The black-and-white film jumped, then settled down as the aircraft soared into the air. Elizabeth caught a glimpse of what looked like a bridge—the Brooklyn Bridge?—but she couldn’t see any signs of activity. The view jumped to an overhead of downtown Manhattan and Wall Street. But again the streets appeared deserted.

“At three thousand feet, you can’t tell anything unusual. Unless you know New York.” The film jumped again. This time the view was from the plane racing not more than fifty feet above a wide avenue. Broadway? Elizabeth knew only the landmarks she had seen on television.

Gasps of disbelief and astonishment broke out in the crowd. She felt her own horror building.

No traffic moved. No pedestrians ran across the pavement. Smoke rose from cars that had crashed into streetlights. The scene looked more powerful in black and white than any color splatter movie she had ever seen. She saw a body sprawled here and there. The pictures seemed to go on forever. Then the view swayed as the plane turned tightly in the air and just missed a tall building.

“Two nights ago the Germans launched three new bombs over New York. We believe a U-boat slipped into the harbor. Only one person died from shrapnel—all three of the bombs exploded in midair. We thought they were failures. We couldn’t figure out what the point was.”

The plane made another run over a different street. The desertion looked the same.

“By the next morning a lot of people were very sick. The worst ones died within hours. The doctors didn’t have any idea how to treat them. Vomiting, diarrhea, massive skin damage like burns, hemorrhaging. Many of them died on the street, taken so quickly that they couldn’t get anywhere. That’s what you see in the pictures. Nobody wanted to go back in and get the bodies.

“Then panic set in. The mayor decided to evacuate the city. Most of the casualties occurred in the frenzy to get away.”

The film changed to a different shot of a hospital filled with moaning patients. The camera showed lines of beds, many of which held two patients. Other people lay on the floors, in the corridors. Then the scene jumped to a subway station, also filled with sick-looking people. Doctors, nurses, priests, nuns, and any other healthy-looking person tried to help the sick, but they didn’t seem able to do anything but console them. A little girl sat bawling in abject grief beside her mother, who lay wide-eyed and motionless in death; the woman’s skin looked horribly burned.

Someone got sick at the rear of the hall. Wedges of sunlight spilled into the room as several people fled outside. Elizabeth could smell vomit.

“At first we thought the krauts were using some new kind of poison gas. We sent teams in to study it. What they found surprised us all.” The film showed soldiers walking cautiously down the deserted streets, wearing gas masks, holding Geiger counters in front of them. A close-up of the counter showed the needle pushed to the top of the scale.

“The Geigers went nuts,” Groves continued. “We don’t know exactly what happened, but I think we can make a good guess.”

The picture jumped, then went black. Bright light blazed on the screen. The sound of the loose end of the film flapped on the reel, but it took the stunned operator a moment to shut off the projector.

“Hit the lights,” Groves said.

Overhead, the bulbs shone down. Army officers swung open the doors, allowing sunlight and fresh outside air to enter the room.

Groves waited a good ten heartbeats before speaking; no one in the hall moved during the wait. A few groans and outraged comments came from the audience. Elizabeth found herself drawing in short, quick breaths. Her heart raced and she couldn’t slow it down. She kept picturing the little girl screaming beside her mother in the crowded subway tunnel.

“We’ve already got an estimated five thousand dead, the ones who received a massive dose in the first day and the ones killed during the evacuation. You know as well as anyone that ten times that number will probably die within the next couple of weeks. Worst of all, New York City will not be habitable for years.”

Groves smashed his fist down on the podium and made a startling, animal sound of anger. “You have just witnessed actual, uncensored photographic evidence of the Nazi nuclear research effort. Their weapon was directed against the millions of men, women, and children in New York City. But it was also to show us how far ahead they are. They have scared the pants off of me!” He lowered his voice. “No doubt they have the capability of using it again. Whenever and wherever they want.”

A murmur swept through the crowd. Groves rapped on the podium. “All right, now listen up. You men up here on the Hill have a reputation around the White House of being prima donnas, living in your own little world and pouring two billion dollars down a rat hole while the rest of the country struggles with real problems to win this damned war. In fact, other than yourselves, I don’t think there’s more than a handful of people who actually believe you can do it.’’

Groves lowered his voice. “But thank God Almighty the President is one of those people who does believe.” His voice trailed off. Then, stiffly, “If you need a pep talk after seeing that film, if you need someone to come around and kick you in the butt to get you working harder on our own Gadget, then you are in the wrong place. You’d better practice your
sieg heilsl

“The Germans have hit us hard, and unless you ... ‘wizards’ can come up with something and do it fast, we might as well roll over and play dead. Because I guarantee you that the krauts aren’t going to stop with New York.”

Groves motioned for Oppenheimer to stand beside him on the stage. “I don’t care how you do it—just do it. Those boys fighting in Europe need you. Our Pacific forces need you. Your country needs you—” He hesitated as his gruff voice fell to a whisper, “And I need you. This may be it. Don’t let us down.”