The Trinity Paradox (21 page)

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am become death, the shatterer of worlds.

Elizabeth had a chance to wipe the chalkboard clean, start over with a new and better equation.

She squinted along the rifle barrel. She steadied it with her left hand and rested the stock against her shoulder. She felt her hands shaking. She would have only two shots.

She centered Oppenheimer’s head in the sight. Below, he waited for her, unsuspecting, enjoying the morning.

Oppenheimer was the fulcrum, Fox had said. His actions, his brilliance made the Manhattan Project work. He had known what he was doing as visions of nuclear fire danced in his head. Perhaps it was a game to him, an interesting physics question to see how much destruction one man could cause. She couldn’t think of him as a worthy human being. Right now, Oppenheimer was a target, a domino she was going to tip in the opposite direction, away from the chain of events she knew would happen if she didn’t act.

Mrs. Canapelli had chatted about being friends with Oppie and his wife Kitty back in Berkeley, how he had gotten her the job to chaperone the women’s dormitory after her husband had died. Mrs. Canapelli had spoken of him with fondness. Elizabeth found it difficult to imagine him as the same man, this madman.

Oppenheimer turned to look back toward the cliff dwellings. The hat cast his face in shadow, but she could see part of a smile.

Elizabeth tightened her finger on the trigger. It would be just like pushing The Button, the big red button that would launch the world into a nuclear holocaust.

Oppenheimer sneezed, startling her.

With a flinch, she recentered his head along the gun sight.

Oppie hesitated, looked around as if to make sure no one was watching, then wiped his nose on the sleeve of his red flannel shirt.

Elizabeth froze, paralyzed by the simple, human gesture. Oppenheimer blinked as if he were a little boy who had gotten away with bad manners, and then rode on.

Elizabeth couldn’t fire.

Her finger slid away from the trigger and she rested the rifle barrel on the sloping window opening. Her bones turned to rubber and she felt faint. Black spots danced in front of her eyes.

She had wanted to kill a man! The trigger had been a hair’s breadth away from sending a bullet through Oppenheimer’s head. Elizabeth began to shiver.

The rifle dropped out of her hand, slid along the adobe wall of the ruined dwelling and struck the rocks below.

The gun discharged, sending a sharp thunderclap through the narrow canyon.

Oppenheimer jerked up on his horse. He gawked around, frozen like a jackrabbit for an instant of terror, then wheeled his Appaloosa and rode off back toward the ranger station at full gallop. His hat flew off behind him as the horse kicked up snow.

Cursing herself, Elizabeth stood up, grabbed her blanket, and scrambled out the broken back wall of the An-asazi dwelling. She didn’t know how close the rangers would be. Stupid! Oppenheimer would send an entire hunting party after her. She had to hurry up the steep path along the canyon wall to reach the top, mount her horse and flee back to Los Alamos.

She didn’t know what she had done. Stupid!

She couldn’t take it back now. She had failed.

As she scrambled up the path, she kept shuddering, feeling her crisis, her indecision. “I’m sorry, Jeff,” she whispered, then hurried before she could hear the sound of approaching guards.

Part 3

11

Dachau Concentration Camp December 1943

“The focus of the problem does not lie in the atom. It resides in the heart of man.”

—
Henry L. Stimson, U.S. Secretary of War

“We technicians do not believe in miracles; we believe that success comes only as the fruit of unrelenting, purposeful labor.”

—
Professor Abraham Esau

A
white plywood sign
inside the barbed-wire fence proclaimed in bright red letters,
arbeit macht frei—
but it looked as if no amount of work could set free the skeletal Jewish prisoners who moved about like stunned marionettes.

Esau felt his body tremble with revulsion. No wonder Reichminister Speer had warned him to avoid the concentration camps. “How can you stand the smell?” he whispered. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Major Stadt, in his black SS uniform, wrinkled his nose and nodded. “Yes, they stink, don’t they? Jews! They
smell
when they’re alive, they smell when they’re dead, they even smell when they’re cremated. We killed seventeen thousand of them at Majdanek camp just last month. You should come here in the summer heat if you think this is bad!” He shook his head. “And they’re all crawling with vermin. The delousing stations can’t possibly keep up. I wouldn’t get too close if I were you.”

Professor Abraham Esau had no intention of getting too close.

Under the direction of Reichminister Speer, the SS had brought workers to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute to dismantle the experimental graphite pile. They took all the components—the carbon bricks, the uranium oxide, the uranium cubes, the neutron source—to erect a larger-scale pile, using more uranium procured from someplace Speer would not identify. After a month and a half of heavy Allied bombing, Berlin was no longer safe.

The SS had kept careful notes and drawings so they could rebuild the reactor where the production work could continue under absolute security, and where they would not need to worry so greatly about the safety of other citizens. Reichminister Speer had asked Esau to appoint an administrator to the project, someone who could supervise the reactor and deal with the uncertainties that were bound to arise.

“But I wouldn’t suggest you pick anyone you like,” Speer had said. “The reason will become obvious if you ever visit the site we have selected.”

“Where is it?”

Speer had raised his eyebrows and looked far away, as if troubled. “Near Munich, on the Amper River. A place called Dachau.”

“I believe I’ve been there. I like the area around Munich. It’s rather scenic.”

“It is not scenic there,” Speer answered, “no, not there.” He would say nothing more.

Esau had made the obvious choice for administrator. Dr. Kurt Diebner was delighted with his promotion and even said kind words to Esau, for the first time. Esau congratulated him and silently hoped the job would be as miserable as Speer had promised it would be. For the past month, Diebner had been in the Dachau camp, overseeing the construction of the new reactor building and the reassembly of the critical pile. When Esau had commended him for the speed of his progress, Diebner sent a cryptic answer via telegram,
no shortage of labor here.

Major Stadt walked ahead down the main thoroughfare and snapped his fingers for Esau to follow. All the snow had been swept away, and puddles of slush had refrozen. Esau’s nose felt red and cold. The sky looked too blue and bright for the barren sore of the camp.

Major Stadt swept his hand to indicate the masses of people huddled together like animals in a corral; others worked hauling buckets, cleaning up after the prisoners, doing menial tasks as guards stood by, shifting their rifles from shoulder to shoulder. Towers ringed the outer electrified fence, with men pointing machine guns down at the prisoners. One guard kept pointing his gun as if pretending to shoot people at random.

Esau had seen films of the resettlement camps for the Jews, showing hardworking people making uniforms for German soldiers and growing food under spartan but livable conditions. He had never imagined anything like this.

“Most of them are out on work details, repairing roads, manning munitions factories, cleaning up,” Stadt said, smug. “The Jews forced us into the war, you know. It’s only fitting that they should help repair the damage they’ve done. We’ve taken films of them at hard labor. Good Germans want to see them doing an honest day’s work for the food we give them.”

They passed the administration building, which was surrounded by more barbed wire and had bars on the windows. Esau tried taking shallow breaths, but the brittle air was thick with the stench of excrement and burning corpses. He hoped Stadt would take him into the main building so he could sit in a closed room, let his watery knees stop shaking for a minute.

Major Stadt, noticing Esau’s nausea, jokingly clapped a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll get used to it. You can get used to anything, you know.” Stadt brushed at his sleeve and strolled along. “When Himmler himself visited one of the camps, he stood too close to a line of prisoners about to be executed. Got brains splashed all over his jacket and face! Even
he
looked about to be sick then, but he got over it. Anybody can. Cheer up!”

Shots rang out from the other side of the camp. “Ah, and it looks as if we’ve got some executions today too. Happens usually on Thursdays, I believe. Your timing is lucky.”

Esau had forced himself not to notice, but now he squinted. Somehow a trench had been chopped out of the frozen ground. Prisoners filed into the cut and faced the earthen wall. The guards shot them. Even as the bodies crumpled, another row of prisoners shuffled in to take their place, nudged by bayonets.

“Why don’t they fight? Why don’t they resist?” Esau asked. “Are they so stupid?”

Stadt shrugged. “Where are they going to run? They are animals, like cattle in a slaughterhouse.” He kicked at the hard ground, knocking loose a small rock with the tip of his boot. “Look at this, ugly barren dirt. They’ve killed every blade of grass, every bush. This used to be a nice camp when we kept only political prisoners here. But once you start adding the homosexuals, the Gypsies, the Jews—well, look at what happens. It’s no surprise, really. It’s a good thing we’re purging them from our society.

“Would you like to see the crematoriums? Those trenches are more for show, not quite as practical. They fill up too fast. Now that you have a title of your own, Herr Plenipotentiary, I’m sure you’d like to observe other efficient operations.” He looked at Esau, then narrowed his eyes.

“You must treat such people as resources, nothing more. And because of the war, we must make the most of our resources, all of them. We make use of the spectacles they wear, the hair from their heads, the gold from their teeth, everything.”

Esau knew Stadt meant only to taunt him for the squeamishness he had shown, so he snapped, “I am not here as a tourist! I must make sure my reactor is running properly. Please confine your remarks to pertinent topics. Now, show me the nuclear pile.”

Stadt stiffened at being addressed in such a manner. But then Esau noticed the major was frightened of something else. “Professor Esau, I will explain the operations to you, but I refuse to go there, not inside and not much closer either. Right now we are upwind—that’s why I had you enter through the side gate.” He added self-defensively, “Even Dr. Diebner spends very little time actually in the reactor building.”

Esau felt outraged. “And why not? That is why he’s here!”

Stadt straightened the black SS hat on his head. “We constructed the reactor building in record time, Professor, and in bad weather yet. We had the pile functioning in a few weeks. We had no time to incorporate protection measures—
shielding,
Dr. Diebner calls it. It is not healthy for us to go near the place. The doctors know the radiation is dangerous, but they are running tests to determine exactly how dangerous.”

White steam boiled from four narrow smokestacks on the large building on the far corner of the camp. The steam looked insignificant compared to the black plumes from the massive crematoriums. Stadt had stopped walking and stood staring.

“We had work crews construct a canal from the Amper River, to bring water here which circulates in pipes through the pile to keep the components cool. The water is radioactive, and we use it for the prisoners, for showers and for drinking purposes.”

Esau nodded. Hahn had suggested the cooling system so the pile could run continuously. “And someone is keeping records of all this? The effects of radiation in the water and air, on the prisoners, I mean? The information could be valuable from a medical standpoint.”

Stadt brightened. “Oh yes, we have many skilled doctors here, and they are finding very interesting effects from massive doses. In fact, the radioactive poisoning seems to be nearly as effective as our firing squads, but costs us no bullets. The prisoners themselves think it’s just a cholera epidemic. Nobody understands what’s going on here.”

Stadt took two steps closer to the reactor building, but stopped again. “Obviously, the prisoners are expendable. We have them maintaining the pile, fixing the cooling system, performing routine measurements. We’ve just received a new shipment of processed uranium from the metallurgy plants near Joachimstal in Czechoslovakia. Every few days we have the prisoners disassemble the pile, remove the irradiated uranium slugs, and add fresh pieces. The irradiated uranium gets shipped off to a processing plant nearby, which is also operated with labor from Dachau.” He seemed very proud of that.