The Trinity Paradox (33 page)

“Please don’t call me Fritz, sir.”

“If you didn’t get so annoyed about it, nobody would bother.”

The two men amazed Elizabeth by not slowing for a moment. They talked as they met, then moved along at a half run. The younger man turned and held out his hand to her, still walking away from the train. “New secretary, General? I’m Lieutenant Colonel J. T. Matthias, ma’am.”

“Not much of a secretary,” Groves snapped.

“Technical advisor, at the moment,” she answered, taking his hand in a curt grip. “Elizabeth Devane. The general is upset because I wouldn’t read him a bedtime story.” Matthias seemed to have trouble hiding his shock.

The colonel took Elizabeth’s satchel and packed it in the back of a dusty jeep parked alongside the Richland station. Groves kept hold of his own briefcase. Matthias wiped a finger along the grime on the windshield. “Just had the damn thing washed this morning.”

“You picked this place, Fritz. Put up with it.”

They drove out, bouncing as Colonel Matthias turned sharply over the embankment to the main street. They left the outskirts of the city of Richland and struck north along a straight road that the horizon swallowed in the flat distance.

The Hanford Engineering Works lay twenty miles away from Richland. All signs of civilization fell away, plunging them into a wasteland of sagebrush and sand that seemed to stretch forever. The sky looked like an inverted blue china plate, with a thin crepe of high clouds. The aquamarine path of the Columbia River curled across the desert; untended orchards and farmland broke the monotony. Far, far in the distance, she could see a green-gray haze of mountains.

Groves raised his voice above the breeze whipping over the windshield. “I plan to stay a week or so and get everything knocked into shape. What’s going on? You didn’t tell me why you came to meet me yourself.”

“Well, General, we got the reactors completed ahead of schedule—and you know how tight the schedule was in the first place. I think what the Nazis did to New York got everybody quaking in their socks. These workers don’t have the tiniest idea what we’re doing at the plant, of course, but they think this must be some pretty big project.”

“When are we going to start getting usable amounts of plutonium? My boys at Los Alamos are waiting. They’ve got a hot new idea of how the plutonium Gadget might work”—Groves looked at Elizabeth grudgingly—”thanks to Miss Devane here.”

Matthias grinned. “Well, we had to make sure all the safety systems were installed in the reactors, but they’ve been cooking for more than a month now. The plutonium-separation plants are up and running. All remote-controlled.”

‘ ‘Any other troubles? Out with it! I can see you waffling.’’

Matthias stared ahead at the road. “Nothing out of the ordinary, sir. Just handling some of the men. Yesterday afternoon all 750 of our plumbers went on strike. I was up salmon fishing at the mouth of the Columbia—my only day off in a month—but I got called back. It’s a mess. They’ve been whining to their union.”

Groves’s face turned a deep red. “Strike! This is wartime, dammit! They can’t strike.”

Matthias seemed haggard, but Elizabeth saw the hint of a smile behind his eyes. He looked at his wristwatch. “They’ve brought part of the construction work to a standstill. I’ve called a meeting with the strikers at, um, nine o’clock this morning. Half an hour from now. I was hoping you might speak to them, General.”

Groves seethed on the seat of the jeep. “Just drive, Fritz!”

Elizabeth and Lieutenant Colonel Matthias stayed out of Groves’s way as he charged into the Hanford theater. All 750 strikers had gathered there, grumbling and looking ugly. Many had been drinking, and Elizabeth saw a brawl about to happen, or perhaps murder. On the door and walls, people had put campaign posters for presidential candidate Dewey, looking sincere with his short dark hair parted in the middle, his black eyes, his bushy brown moustache. Someone else had drawn a large caricature of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“Sieg heil,
you Nazis!” Groves shouted as he walked onto the stage. “Yes, I mean you! Every one of you! What the hell do you think is going on here?”

He paused for the barest second, just enough for the first instant of an outcry, but then he raised his voice, using the microphone this time so that his words drowned out all other noise. “You are interrupting a project that could save the lives of a great many of our servicemen. I’m sure that most of you are patriotic Americans, but I wish I could find the dozen men responsible for this outbreak, and send them packing to Germany where they belong!”

The auditorium echoed with a storm of protests, but the general weathered it without flinching. “You have complaints? You don’t like working conditions here? My heart aches for you—it really does—and I’m sure all our soldiers getting shot in the Pacific would sure hate to be in your shoes.” He found a podium and pounded it.

“In case you haven’t been watching the newsreels, there is a war going on! You’re part of it here! Men are dying by the thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—and you have a chance to end it all if this project works out!”

He lowered his voice as the striking plumbers became quieter. “Now you just think about your complaints and write them down. You think about all our men lying at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. You think about all the good soldiers who died alongside the road on the Philippines during the death march of Bataan. Then you write down your complaints and get them to me. I’ll see that everything’s taken care of.

“Oh, I forgot to introduce myself. I’m General Leslie Groves. I’m in charge of this whole mess. Everything. I can cut wages by half. I can cut off all alcohol supply. I can make things better, or I can make it worse. It just depends on whether you cooperate. Now get back to work!”

Groves stalked off the stage to where Elizabeth and Lieutenant Colonel Matthias stood waiting. Elizabeth could hear an uncertain, not-so-outraged tone in the grumbling of the striking plumbers, and she didn’t want to stay around in case their mood changed.

“Thank you, General,” Matthias said.

“Let’s get out of here. Show me those damned separation buildings you’re so proud of.”

Ugly.
Elizabeth could think of no better word. The Queen Mary separation plant stood like a long, stretched shoe box made of blotched concrete. Windowless, the narrow building sat in a great basin of scrubbed dirt, barren of anything but a few weeds. The jeep’s tires kicked up dust on the worn dirt road as the vehicle bounced along.

Control shacks, power lines, and a single tall smokestack ran toward the prisonlike complex. A thin humming hung in the air. Matthias held open the door of the control bunker for Elizabeth.

“I’ve asked Raymond Genereaux to meet us here,” he said. “He designed the separation plants for Du Pont. He’s in charge of everything here, and he could probably give you a better overview of the process.”

Inside, the air became hot and stifling, smelling of grease and cigarette smoke. Naked yellow light bulbs made the interior of the control bunker look like the belly of a submarine. “Ray, you’ve got visitors!” Matthias called.

They went to a bustling control room with a dozen operators working the panel for big machinery. A tall engineer stepped toward them, extending a hand to the general. The yellow light made Genereaux’s hair look paler, his blue eyes appear greenish. His expression was serious. “General Groves, I hope you will find everything satisfactory here.”

He led them toward the crowded control works. The brusque-looking men there remained silent, concentrating on their work with a dedication that convinced Elizabeth they had been instructed how to act around the general.

“Because everything must be remote-controlled,” Genereaux said, towering over one man who looked very nervous at his station, “we must watch all activities through a special monitoring system we developed. It uses television cameras—we find it very effective.”

The grainy TV pictures looked dim and distorted, but Elizabeth could make out the general images of the tomblike interior. On the grainy image she saw long lines of processing cells with a metal pier standing beside each one. Garish lights shone down on everything, showing open corridors where no human being could ever walk again. She imagined what it must have been like for the last person to close the door and seal the newly constructed building, knowing the place was about to be filled with radioactive poison.

“Using mechanical lifts, we take the irradiated uranium slugs and put them underwater. The slugs are still glowing because of the radioactivity. We need to take them to a depth of thirty feet. We operate remotely from here, every step of the separation process.”

He tapped one of the smeared monitor screens. “This is one of the first practical uses ever made of television. We had to redesign the optics so we could use a microscope through the water. Our original glass lenses all turned black from the radiation, and we had to come up with plastic replacements. So far we have overcome all obstacles, General.”

Elizabeth pondered the irony of men designing an atomic bomb with a technological background that could barely make a television work.

“Good,” Groves said, “so when do we get the plutonium?”

Genereaux looked to Matthias. The lieutenant colonel opened his mouth to answer, but suddenly the windowless control bunker plunged into blackness. All power stopped, the television screens winked out, the yellow bulbs faded-just for an instant as Elizabeth saw colors dancing in front of her eyes—then everything switched back on.

An alarm sounded. The control workers scrambled over their panels, looking at blinking lights, old analog gauges and monitors. The television picture skirled with a horizontal band of interference, then straightened out.

“What was that?” Groves demanded.

“One moment, General,” Genereaux said, checking his monitor panel. Matthias didn’t even answer, but grabbed a clunky black telephone. Groves scowled.

“It was less than a second,” Elizabeth said. “A blip in the power.”

“Makes all the difference in the world,” Matthias said around the telephone mouthpiece, then shifted his concentration as someone answered the other end. “It’s Matthias,” he said, “tell me. Quick!” He paused to listen. “Oh, damn! Well, I mean it’s good, I suppose, but dammit anyway!” He scowled. “Everybody okay? All right, get moving. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

He slammed the phone back down. Groves stood waiting. Matthias didn’t hesitate, didn’t try to make excuses. “Something cut the main power line between Bonneville and Grand Coulee. Backup power came on in about a fifth of a second, but that was still too long. It triggered the emergency systems, and all the reactors shut down. Shut down!”

“Well, get them running again!” Groves said.

“We will, but it’ll take days.”

Groves closed his eyes and pounded on the control console hard enough to make parts rattle. Elizabeth looked at the TV monitors and thought of the deadly forces kept so precariously contained throughout the entire Hanford site. “Aren’t you at least glad all the safety systems kicked in as they were supposed to? You probably didn’t test them out, with the slapped-together way you’re doing everything on the entire project. If the reactors had gone out of control, you could have had a major disaster here.”

Groves narrowed his eyes at her. “There are times when I really don’t like your attitude, Miss Devane,” he said. “This is one of them.”

“I’m just giving you technical advice.” She knew Groves couldn’t conceive of a disaster like Chernobyl, and she felt sorry for him.

The general looked as if he wanted to order her to drop to the floor and do push-ups. Instead he redirected his anger toward Matthias. “Find out what caused the power outage. I want to see it myself. And make sure it doesn’t happen again.” He strode toward the door, a mass of clenched muscles. Then, remembering what he was expected to say, he turned toward the control room workers. “Keep up the good work, men.”

Two days later the jeep bounced along the rough desert surface, following the web of power lines strung from pole to pole across the endless flat. Sandstorms had long since obliterated any trace of a road alongside the power poles and had covered all potholes, but Lieutenant Colonel Matthias managed to find every single one of them.

Elizabeth swayed, feeling seasick. Her back and buttocks throbbed. She wanted to snap at something, yell at someone, but she kept her silence. Beside her in the back of the jeep, General Groves looked even angrier than she felt.

They had been driving for an hour and a half. The dust and heat of the central Washington desert made even a few minutes in the open jeep miserable. Elizabeth had seen no markers, but Matthias seemed to know exactly where they were. He turned around from the steering wheel and raised his voice over the grind of the engine. “Should be right up here, General. You’ll find it interesting.”

Groves wiped a ham like hand across his mouth, smearing dust away from his lips. “It better be. I’m starting to wonder whatever caused you to pick this place, Fritz. Didn’t you have any better alternatives?”

“Please don’t call me Fritz, sir.”

Elizabeth turned and shouted toward the general, “What did you mean about him picking this place?”

“Fritz went out on a site-selection tour for the plutonium works. We gave him a handful of likely choices for the installation. He chose Hanford. He had worked with me on building the Pentagon, and he offered some advice on the gaseous-diffusion plant in Oak Ridge. I trust his judgment.”