The Trinity Paradox (17 page)

Ranks of guards strode out across the road again. Elizabeth did not look up. She saw only sets of legs in identical tan uniforms and dangling black riot clubs. She heard the officer’s voice droning, and the person next to her was carried off.

The anger, the triumph, the love and support of her companions, pounded on her in waves. She felt that it would lift her up and rescue her, rescue them all, and change the world.

“We request that you leave these premises,” the guard said. “If you choose to remain, we can arrest you. Will you leave voluntarily?”

She realized he was speaking to her. She heard the engine of the car in front of her and smelled the mixture of gasoline and exhaust. In the background she could hear the song begin yet another chorus.

“I can’t just sit in silence anymore,” she muttered.

“This is your second warning.” She hadn’t noticed any time passing at all, but out of the corner of her eye she saw another officer staring at his watch. The first man recited lines from a California statute. Her conscience counted more than any laws. Laws promoting research that led to mass murder were immoral, and she could not be held accountable by them.

“If you choose to remain, you will be arrested. Do you choose to remain?”

“I can’t just sit in silence anymore,” she said again, as if it were a chant. She was doing something. She would make some sort of difference, some sort of statement for everyone to see. Jeff didn’t matter at all anymore.

“You are under arrest.”

She hadn’t even seen the officer’s face. Strong hands grabbed her arms, but she refused to stand, refused to cooperate in any way whatsoever. Every part of her felt numb, but euphoric. Two guards picked her up by the arms in a skillful carry; as time went on and they got tired, no doubt the handling would get rougher. She let her shoes drag on the pavement, making it difficult for them to haul her off. A third guard picked up her legs. Everything felt very careful. Too many cameras were watching.

From the sidelines others cheered and continued to sing. The Bay Area Baptist Peacemakers went into a hymn, which overlapped with the continuing chorus of “Give Peace a Chance.”

In the group with the other arrestees, a woman guard wrapped Elizabeth’s wrists with plastic handcuffs, a thick band like a tie for a garbage bag. The guard’s belt had a clip holding about a hundred sets of cuffs. Elizabeth couldn’t snap out of the restraints; for mass arrests the plastic cuffs were as effective as but much cheaper and simpler than metal handcuffs.

She waited for over an hour as more people came into the detaining area. It still hadn’t sunk in yet. She rode the crest of her feelings. Everyone around her seemed to be in a similar daze.

Processing started without delay, with clerks in guard uniforms filling out the arrest forms and going through the bureaucratic ritual. Some protesters remained militant and gave blatantly false names, false Social Security numbers, false addresses—but Elizabeth thought that was stupid. They had already made their point, and misinformation would only delay their own release. Resisting now harmed no one but themselves.

At last, late in the morning, the arrestees were loaded on buses, then taken to nearby Santa Rita prison. Elizabeth sat uncomfortably in her seat, with the plastic edge of the handcuffs chafing her skin. The bus felt crowded and stifling, filled with the odors of too many sweating and nervous people.

The worst part of all was enduring how badly she had to go to the bathroom after gulping so many cups of coffee....

At the time, back in 1983, Elizabeth felt she had made the supreme sacrifice. She had committed civil disobedience for her cause. She had allowed herself to be arrested for something she believed in, and she hoped her one gesture among all those others would matter for something. She hoped it would be enough.

But it had done nothing. None of it mattered now, as she stood outside the wooden pre-fab buildings in old Los Alamos, watching the scientists go about their work of designing the first atomic bomb, the initial domino in an endless chain of weapons. That first protest at Livermore had set her on a path that brought her back to New Mexico, that brought her out to sabotage the MCG site at night, that resulted in Jeff’s death and threw her back in time.

Now she had a chance to do something much more than protest, something more drastic.

Something that would make a real difference to all of history.

9

Berlin
—
the Virus House October 1943

“If we look at past scientific progress, pursued with ever-increasing speed, we may reasonably expect future research workers breaking down or building up atoms at will, to be able to achieve explosive nuclear chain reactions. If such transmutations can be propagated in matter, we can envisage the enormous liberation of useful energy.”

—
Frederic Joliot-Curie, acceptance speech
for
his 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics

“Professor Heisenberg had not given any final answer to my question whether a successful nuclear fission could be kept under control with absolute certainty ... Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star.”

—
Albert Speer, Nazi Minister of Armaments

The truck pulled up
with the last shipment of graphite blocks. Professor Abraham Esau stood in the doorway of the Virus House laboratory, watching it stop in front of the wrong building. Two other technicians ran out in the cold autumn drizzle to direct the driver toward the main bunker. The armed guards on the truck raised their rifles and aimed at the men hurrying toward them; the technicians stopped just in time, waving their arms.

In a way, Esau found it ludicrous, squadrons of guards flanking a graphite truck. Why would any outside saboteur want to steal a shipment of
carbon!
He’d had an extremely difficult time convincing the German graphite manufacturers—who had never seen more than a minimal war demand for their product—of his need for absolute priority. When orders on his “Plenipotentiary” stationery proved ineffective, Esau had obtained a direct letter from Reich-minister Speer. Finally, things got done properly.

Esau had used Speer’s authorization letter several more times, first to insist on delivery within weeks rather than months, then to force the companies to manufacture graphite with a process that used petroleum coke rather than mineral coke. The new process proved much messier for the manufacturer and cut production in half—but the mineral process always contaminated graphite with boron, the neutron absorber that had ruined Walther Bothe’s initial measurements.

Esau hated it when people, through their own laziness, tried to deceive him. “It cannot be done!” the manufacturers said. But Esau was aware of the petroleum process because some British factories produced ultra-pure graphite for specialized use in electrode tips. He and Graham Fox had required those elements for their experimental work back in Cambridge.

“It will be done,” he muttered to himself outside the Virus House, then pulled up the collar on his jacket and hurried over to the truck.

The driver and the guards worked with Virus House technicians to unload the crates and take them into the bunker building. Esau watched them work. The drizzle could have ruined some of the shipment, but someone had thought to wrap the boxes in waxed paper, which kept everything dry. Other technicians emerged from the bunker, their faces looking comically black from carbon dust.

Esau waited by the truck cab in the shadow of the rain until the workers had finished unloading. “I am Professor Esau. Do you have a receipt for me?” he asked the guard captain.

“Yes, sir.” The guard fumbled inside his wet leather jacket and withdrew a folded set of papers.

Esau took them and removed a fountain pen from his pocket, looking for a flat surface on which to write and finally settling on the wet side of the truck. He scrawled his initials and then carefully printed his full title below. “Now we have everything,” he said to himself.

“Heil Hitler!” the guard said, tucking the papers back inside his pocket.

Esau responded, then walked back toward the bunker. He didn’t listen as the motorcycles started and the truck ground its gears, backing up in the mud and gravel where Heisenberg had been shot two months before.

Inside the bunker, Esau approached the researchers and their assistants. The interior walls had been knocked down by scientists with sledgehammers, leaving only support beams at regular intervals throughout the room. Near the door, Esau stepped around crates filled with ultra-pure graphite bricks, all cut to size for the appropriate lattice spacing.

Much of the floor had been torn up in the center; long wooden planks with protruding nails lay piled against one wall. Construction workers had dug a large pit in the ground, lined it with concrete and then with plates of beryllium metal to reflect back neutrons that tried to spill out of the growing pile.

Down in the pit, three workers had placed a layer of carbon bricks along the bottom. Others passed more of the black, shiny blocks down in a fire-brigade line. Smashed fingers occurred regularly as the workers fumbled with the slippery graphite.

Dr. Kurt Diebner, Esau’s former rival, was one of the men down in the pit doing menial work. Esau smiled, considering it good for the man to get his hands dirty. And dirty he certainly was—his face, his balding head, his thick black glasses, his hands, his neck—everything was covered with shiny black dust that stuck to his sweat, clung to his pores.

All of the scientists from the scattered groups of German nuclear research had been summoned here to share offices in the Virus House. Esau himself had moved away from his precious office in the Federal Building downtown. Now, in the unimpressive barracks, he occupied Werner Heisenberg’s former office. He did that intentionally for its psychological effect, to emphasize who was in charge and what he could do if the other researchers displeased him.

He had assigned Diebner to share an office with Manfred von Ardenne, the man who had convinced the Reichpost Ministry to fund his private nuclear research. Von Ardenne was a pleasant, quiet, but brilliant researcher— probably the only one who could tolerate Diebner’s excessive ego for any length of time.

Diebner and Paul Harteck—the two dynamos behind the Göttingen research group—stuck together in their clique, working on their solo research and keeping their secrets. Or at least they had tried to—Esau had put a stop to it immediately. No longer were they petty factions competing against each other. They were competing against the Americans, who, according to Graham Fox’s message, had already succeeded beyond anything the Germans had accomplished.

The floor in the bunker felt slick from the fine black dust that clung to everything. While the graphite bricks had been cut to proper size, the workers used modified woodworking tools to cut notches for the uranium cubes. Each of the lattice holes had to be customized, because Esau was using all the uranium and uranium oxide he had cobbled together from the scattered experiments of the other research teams.

Uranium metal cubes would be scattered at six-inch intervals in the graphite material, but Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker’s calculations had shown that this would not be enough to make the reaction self-sustaining. Within the growing pile, they would add a circular array of uranium oxide in long tubes. In the center of this they would drop the neutron source that should trigger the whole reaction.

Von Weizsacker climbed out of the pit, saw Esau standing there and walked over to him. “I now recall the papers I discussed with you earlier, Professor Esau, the last open reports about the American nuclear research.” He wiped his blackened hands on his blackened coveralls.

“They were published in
Physical Review,
in English. I remember reading them on the underground railway in Berlin. I believe I received a few suspicious glances when people saw me poring over an American periodical. This was in June 1940, I believe. Some scientists had reported using Lawrence’s cyclotron at Berkeley to create element 93 by bombarding uranium. But element 93 is unstable and undergoes beta decay, turning into element 94. That is the one we want. Element 94 is fissionable, and stable, and chemically different from uranium. We can make your weapon. If we can get this pile working.”

Esau could sense von Weizsacker dancing around the real issue. He felt impatient. By focusing on the optimistic good news, von Weizsacker implied that he also had something bad to say. “I know all that. So what is the problem?”

“Well, it will be very difficult for us to make sense out of our measurements from this pile we are building,” he said with no other preamble. Specks of graphite blackened von Weizsacker’s teeth, but the smudges could not disguise his boyish features, his statue-perfect Aryan appearance.

“We are mixing the sizes of the uranium cubes, adding the uranium oxide to the metal, changing the spacing. Too many variables in everything. Normally, we would build successive piles, each one simple and straightforward, with conditions we could understand and attempt to predict. With successive attempts we can add new twists and see how that affects the readings. We will never be able to understand
this
reaction. It is too complicated.”