The Trinity Paradox (29 page)

He abruptly strode out a side door of the meeting hall. “Dr. Oppenheimer, let me see you in your office.”

The audience sat stunned for countless moments, trying to think of what to say, how to react, and what to do. The scientists stood up and broke into heated arguments. A cacophony of foreign accents filled the room, with many of the émigré” scientists lapsing into languages other than English.

“At least there was not an atomic explosion! None of the buildings were leveled—”

“What else could it have been? Fairy dust? Something killed those people—”

“Chemical weapons?”

“No, no, no! Think of the Geiger counter readings! What about radioactive dust? Do you think it’s possible”

“But why? If they were working on their own Gadget ... ”

Elizabeth stared at the blank screen; vivid memories cascaded through her mind in a jumble of terror. New York City had become a radioactive wasteland. Much worse than Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. Groves had guessed that thousands more would be dead within a few weeks, but Elizabeth knew they couldn’t be counting on all the cancer deaths in the coming years. This one attack would last for decades and decades. Even in World War II, this made Pearl Harbor look like a picnic.

But what about comparing it to her own memories of Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Those images seemed too dim now, the horrors too displaced. Was it really that different?

She squeezed her eyes shut and wished she could be holding Graham Fox again. Or Jeff.

This seemed worse man what she knew of the two Japanese cities that would be bombed. Those other occurrences had been historical events, gruesome snapshots of people who had died long before she was born.

Hadn’t Japan at least been warned, to surrender or else? As far as she could remember, several cities including Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been notified days before that an attack was going to take place. But New York—had the Nazis warned America? She tightly shook her head.

Yes, there was a difference between America and Germany—like the difference between a fencer and a mad dog. The swordsman fights with finesse and honor, but the mad dog attacks indiscriminately, savaging any target in sight and stopping only when someone puts it down.

Hitler could strike again at any time.

So what would the Project do now? They were far behind with uranium-235 separation at Oak Ridge, and the theoreticians had not yet developed an alternative to the gun concept for the plutonium weapon. It looked as if they would not develop the Gadget anytime soon.

But this wasn’t as she remembered it at all. While not an expert by any means, she did have some knowledge of the bomb program because of her protest work. The scientists were supposed to be converging on the best of two solutions, not chasing after a single concept. Not just the gun.

What was it ... the names of the two devices? She knew there were two, one plutonium and one uranium. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And they had to prove the plutonium design at the Trinity test down at Alamogordo, New Mexico. She had written down the names of the bombs on that damned sheet of paper a year ago when she had first showed up at the administration building for work.

Fat Man—yes, Fat Man and Little Boy! Two bomb designs. But why were they only pursuing the one design, when they knew it wouldn’t work with plutonium? Teller had died—did he have anything to do with them neglecting one of the concepts?

She remembered something about an ... implosion scheme ...
 

.Elizabeth pushed out of the meeting hall, leaving the crowd behind. She held her hand to shade her eyes in the brilliant sunlight. She wanted to find Graham Fox, but she didn’t know what to tell him.

She drew in a breath of pine smells and flowers that had remained in bloom late in the spring. The outdoors seemed to cleanse her, soften the guilt and hurt from the films she had just seen.

She felt all mixed up inside. Nothing was simple anymore, nothing was assured—she had not felt so devastated since Jeff had died, or maybe not since she had tried to kill Oppenheimer.

Living in the past had been predictable up to now. But the New York City attack put an entirely new parameter on how she viewed things, how she lived. And what she lived for.

How could she reconcile working for the Project? Especially when the stakes had changed so drastically? How could she reconcile
not
working for the Project, knowing what the Nazis might do now? And it scared her.

She turned to the women’s dorm. She needed a long walk. Some time to be alone, maybe even get back out to visit Jeff’s grave, or to Bandelier. She had avoided the place since that morning the previous December.

A memory of Oppenheimer flashed through her thoughts—watching his horse approach over the virgin snow, sighting Oppie’s angular head along the line of her rifle barrel—

“Oops!” She ran into another man wrapped up in his thoughts. Elizabeth drew back. “Sorry. I wasn’t looking where—” She looked up and reddened. “Oh, Dr. Feynman. I’m sorry.”

“Ah, please call me Dick, my dear. Allow me to get out of your way.” He made a dramatic show of stepping aside. “Especially if you’re heading for the Admin building. This just might be a good time to forge another reassignment, get out of the Gadget-building business.” He stepped aside and grinned; but the sparkle had gone from his eye.

Elizabeth lowered her shoulders. “Things aren’t going all that well, are they?”

Feynman cocked an eye at her. “Why do you say that?”

“The calculations you’re giving us. The theory group, that is. I mean, everything used to be so straightforward, calculating small variations of one design. But now the designs are changing radically, they get much smaller or bigger. And you haven’t got the right idea yet.”

Feynman looked alarmed. “You picked all that stuff up just from the numbers we were giving you?’’

Elizabeth swallowed, wondering how much of the “dumb girl” charade she should keep up. “It wasn’t hard. Not if you pay attention to the lectures at the beginning of the day, and if you watch the parameters change.”

Feynman jammed his hands in his pocket. “My, my. What’s G-2 going to do when they discover we’re teaching a bunch of housewives how to build atomic bombs?”

He remained silent for a moment, while Elizabeth resented being called a housewife. Glancing around, Feynman seemed satisfied that no one was looking in their direction. He lowered his voice. “Yes, we are having some difficulty. We can’t use our main design for a plutonium Gadget, and Oak Ridge is having trouble with the isotope-separation process for uranium-235. “He looked glum.” There’s got to be a simpler way to do things.”

“Then what about the implosion scheme?” The one you’re going to use for Fat Man, she added silently.

“Uh?” Feynman frowned. “Which design was that?”

Elizabeth closed her eyes and swallowed, all too afraid of what she might be doing. “Implosion—you know, take a spherical shell of plutonium that’s subcritical, then crunch it together into a solid sphere that is critical. You can use symmetrical high explosives to do the compacting.” You’re going to do it anyway! she thought.

Feynman spoke slowly. “Betsy, where in the hell did you hear that? And what makes you think an implosion would work?”

Elizabeth opened her eyes, acting innocent again. “You’re the physicist, you tell me.”

Feynman’s eyes widened. He took his time thinking things through. Finally, he nodded to himself. “This is right up Neddermeyer’s alley.” He reached out and squeezed Elizabeth’s shoulder. “We’ll look into it. You’re pretty bright. Uh, thanks. And anytime you want a new job—”

“Right. You’ll break into the Admin building and doctor the papers for me.”

“No. Really.” Feynman put his hands on his hips. He looked serious for the first time she’d known him. “I can get you transferred out of Johnnie’s group just as easy as I got you transferred in. You’re too bright to be a cog in a wheel. I can use a good math assistant, someone to help me on these analytic solutions. Or maybe just to keep track of my notes.”

“Ah, surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” She paused, then mumbled, “Never mind, you wouldn’t understand.”

“No, I’m serious. You know, helping me with my research, the stuff Oppie wants recorded?” She waited for him to drop to his knees or something. “Won’t you at least think about it?”

Embarrassed, Elizabeth set her mouth. “Why me? I’m not that good.”

Feynman let a smile spread across his face. “I don’t know. Maybe I believe in luck too much—but you’ve got something special going for you, and until I figure it out, I want to tap into it. Maybe you can really help the Project.”

Elizabeth thought quickly. Things were moving so fast. She felt she had to jump onto the bandwagon before it rolled on and left her in the dust. This wasn’t a time she wanted to be left behind—not with the timeline turning out so differently from what she remembered. “Okay.” She stuck out a hand. “See you tomorrow?”

“I’ll clear it with Johnnie. Just report to the design group tomorrow morning, my office.” He shook her hand and was off. “Implosion!”

Elizabeth watched Feynman as he ran back toward the Tech Area fence. She didn’t know whether to feel like a savior or a traitor.

16

German U-Boat415 May 1944

“It is the sad, terribly ironic truth ... that toward the end most of them knew that their cause was lost. The heroism of the warrior, who is generally naive, young, honorable and incorruptible, can never make up for a bad cause.”

—
Captain Edward L. Beach, U.S. Navy

“It is an awful responsibility which has come to us, and we thank God that it has come to us instead of to our enemies. We pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”

—
President Harry S Truman

Captain Hans Werner
gripped the iron rail on the edge of the deck, steadying himself though the sea remained calm. Wrapped in an old sheet, the corpse of First Watch Officer Tellmark looked like a shapeless blob of bread dough.

Two of the remaining men coughed; they appeared to be waiting for something. Werner realized he had said no eulogy yet, and he tried to concentrate, pulling his mind away from the agony in his body. In the past handful of days, he had exhausted all of the eulogies he could imagine.

“May the sea take this man and keep him. Let the currents carry him to a grand reunion with all the other brave submariners who have died in this miserable war. And may God have mercy on the rest of us.”

The other two men rolled the sheet-covered body off the edge of the deck. Tellmark made a deep, soft splash as he struck the water, then bobbed on the surface, slowly sinking. The knocking diesel engines carried the U-boat away from where the corpse disappeared.

Captain Werner had delivered sixteen similar eulogies in the past week. Another twenty of the crew lay deathly ill, retching and crapping blood into the bilges. The U-boat did not have enough bunks for them all—the men were supposed to alternate shifts, some sleeping while others worked. But out of his crew of fifty, only fourteen remained functional enough to perform their duties.

They were all dying, trapped in a metal drum the size of two railroad cars. Below, the air smelled with a fantastic stench of sickness and death.

By the time they had begun to chart their return journey across the Atlantic, away from New York harbor, the crew members all looked alike, smelled alike, acted alike. Being imprisoned in such close quarters for so long, many mannerisms, curses, and facial expressions had become identical. Each man’s individual habits became known intimately among the entire crew—how they snored, how they laughed, how they ate. They were a close team; only two had felt sick with what seemed to be a severe flu.

On previous voyages, Werner had enjoyed that supernatural rapport, that sharing of secrets no other human beings could understand. But now it worked against them, because the entire crew knew, to a man, that they were doomed. The sickness ran rampant in the great iron coffin of U-415.

Werner descended into the submarine, using each rung of the aluminum ladder. His trembling legs would not let
him slide
down to the deck plates as he had always done before. Inside the conning tower, three men shared a cigarette, keeping it protected from the breakers and spray that too often extinguished a smoke. The acrid smell of burning tobacco struck Werner as refreshing compared to the fetid air inside the boat.

He removed his white cap and found that clumps of his beautiful dark hair had stuck to the sweat inside. Werner had given his mother a lock of hair before departing on this voyage; she had pasted it in her keepsake book....
 
Most of the crew had patchy baldness, skin sores, nausea, and terrible dysentery.

His executive officer, Gormann, had been one of the first. Days before, Captain Werner had knelt beside Gormann’s bunk, whispering to him. Gray and clammy, the exec was surrounded by an awful smell. He looked as if he had been boiled alive in some caustic substance.