The Trinity Paradox (9 page)

Fox grimaced at the thought. He held the door open for her. Elizabeth waited until he had gone ahead, then closed it behind them as they left.

They found the civilian mess hall by trial and error, watching the flow of people on the street. Once Fox learned that Elizabeth was just as new to the Project, he opened up and began to tell her of his schooldays at Cambridge, how marvelous it had been to work on physics, the only place where political borders made no difference. He had even had a close German friend—until the war, of course, when secrecy had clamped down on everything Fox tried to do.

Elizabeth dug out the money Mrs. Canapelli had loaned her. The smells of the civilian mess didn’t make her any less uneasy about the food. “My supervisor warned me about this place.”

Fox shrugged and stared down at his tray as they stood in line to pay. “This is the American West, Elizabeth. According to your Hollywood movies, we are supposed to be eating beans cooked over a campfire. Therefore, I shall not complain.”

The military cashier tallied up her lunch: “Cheeseburger, twenty-five cents; fries, fifteen cents; Coke, a dime. That’s four bits, ma’am. Anything else?” The man looked barely old enough to be in the military.

“No, thank you.” She had to figure out in her head how much “four bits” was. As she paid, Elizabeth kept from shuddering at the grease glistening on her plate from the harsh light bulbs. The only fruits and vegetables laid out on the counter bore some sort of green mold. Probably oozing pesticides, DDT, whatever.

She joined Fox at an eight-person table. Three young men in white shirtsleeves nodded briefly as Elizabeth sat down, then returned to reading copies of
Physical Review
and a two-day-old
Santa Fe New Mexican
newspaper. The man reading the newspaper commented to no one in particular about how long he thought it would take the Allies to capture the Solomon Islands, over which air battles were now apparently taking place. Elizabeth didn’t remember anything about that part of World War II.

She cut her hamburger in two, then took a bite. She looked around the dining area. “See any mayonnaise?”

Fox glanced up from his meal. “For your hamburger? Is that how you Americans eat it?”

Elizabeth forced a swallow. “Of course not. Never mind.”

“I see.”

Elizabeth didn’t realize how hungry she had become. She had only pecked at Mrs. Canapelli’s huge breakfast of eggs, sausage, and hash browns fried in lard. Now removed from the matronly woman’s presence, Elizabeth tried not to gulp.

As she looked up, she saw the mysterious man who had helped her in the Admin building the night before. He turned from the cashier and looked at her. Elizabeth recognized the short, curly hair, the angular face, the broad smile. He raised one eyebrow and winked at her, taking his plate off to a different table.

Elizabeth grabbed Fox’s wrist. “Who is that? Do you know him?”

Fox looked around, took a moment to locate the man she meant, but shook his head. “Sorry, I’m new to all this.”

One of the others at the table glanced up from his technical journal and answered, “That’s Dick Feynman, a brilliant kid. A wise guy, too, from what I hear.”

Two of his companions chuckled. “He drives the security folks nuts—keeps breaking into safes, just to prove that anyone with brains and patience can outsmart any of their precautions.”

“I heard he has his wife tear up her letters to him in at least fifty pieces, then send the shreds here. The security guys have to put the thing back together before they can read it. Feynman doesn’t mind.”

“Uh, thanks,” Elizabeth said. “I talked to him yesterday but forgot to ask his name.” The other men had already become absorbed in their technical journals again.

Fox spoke around his meal after an uncomfortable silence. “I really imagined this place would feel like more of a university town.”

“What do you mean?” Elizabeth nodded to the men still immersed in their technical papers. “Seems pretty close to me.”

“No, not that. It’s
the feel
of it. Look around you. People are wrapped up in their journals or moving at breakneck speed. A university town is supposed to be more relaxed, a place where people can ponder the implications of their discoveries. Sit under a tree with a blade of grass between one’s teeth, and simply think about the nature of the universe. Here, everyone appears to have a hot foot all the time.”

Elizabeth took a deliberate bite of food. Sit around under a tree? Fox must not have been going for an MBA! She didn’t want to jump into a debate on what Los Alamos should be like—not at this point.

Fox pushed back from the table. “But on the other hand, I imagine the research here is more directed than what you’d find at a university. More focused.” He shook his head. “And if it’s all to beat the Nazis to the punch, then it’s probably the only way to run a research establishment. Too bad. With all these bright lads around, some pondering would probably be better for us in the long run.”

Elizabeth put down her hamburger. “Do you really think we have so much to worry about from the German atom bomb program?”

Fox snorted. “From what I hear tell, the Nazis are about to make a breakthrough. After all, they had a corner on nuclear physics, and a two-year start on us. All the great ones from Hahn and Strassman to Heisenberg are working on their project.”

Elizabeth shook her head, suddenly remembering her list. It wasn’t often she knew enough to say something in a conversation around here. “Don’t worry about Heisenberg. He’s screwed something up, cross-section data I think. Botched calculations.”

Two of the men at their table looked up sharply. Fox narrowed his eyes. “What? Where did you hear this?”

Elizabeth grew red. She lowered her voice, trying to back out of what she had said. “Oh, just a hypothetical situation. But it’s perfectly reasonable, isn’t it? I’m sure their program is going to fizzle.” Elizabeth returned to eating her sandwich. She felt herself sweating.

“Do you know what you said?” Fox persisted.

Elizabeth breathed deeply through her nose. “Look, I’m only a file clerk, remember? How the hell should I know?”

Fox kept quiet. She felt him studying her, trying to come up with an answer; but he couldn’t possibly guess the truth. Then he nodded and dropped his voice. “I think I understand.”

Glancing up, Elizabeth noticed that he no longer looked at her, but instead stared off at a blank wall, eyes focused to infinity. She could not tell how to interpret his expression. She never wanted to bring up the subject again.

5

Los Alamos July 1943

“In certain circumstances, this [proof of nuclear fission] might lead to the construction of bombs which would be extremely dangerous in general and particularly in the hands of certain governments.”

—
Leo
Szilard

“We take the liberty of calling your attention to the newest development in nuclear physics, which, in our opinion, will probably make it possible to produce an explosive many orders of magnitude more powerful than the conventional ones ... The country which first makes use of it has an unsurpassable advantage over the others.”

—
Paul Harteck and Wilhelm Groth, initial letter to the German War Office

R
and
R: Rest and Recreation. He would go crazy if he didn’t get away from the bloody Project.

The road out of the bustling, primitive town of Los Alamos plunged down the mesa like something constructed for an amusement park, then wound back up for the thirty-five-mile trek to Santa Fe. Graham Fox watched the landscape unfold as the dusty bus chugged past the small towns of Tesuque and Cuyamungue, then through the Nambe and Rio Grande valleys. As the bus strained up the last hill before Santa Fe, someone pointed out the silhouette of the Sandia mountains jutting up seventy miles to the south, near Albuquerque.

A few days ago the scenery had looked totally alien to Fox, something that existed only in cowboy movies. If he had seen a painting of the startling contrast between turquoise skies and red and golden clay, he would have considered the painter an impressionist with a garish palette. The air smelled sharp, the wind felt dry. His lips and hands had begun to chap as soon as he disembarked from the train in Santa Fe station.

This place seemed to belong on a different planet from serene, civilized Cambridge, England. At any moment he half expected a band of wild Indians to ride over the clipped-off mesas. But was a frontier town full of nuclear scientists any less bizarre?

Fox tried to tear his mind away from the letter in his pocket, concentrating instead on the distant mountains. In England the farthest distance he could see was up to the nearest grove of trees. The hills there had been soft, rolling, lush and green. In contrast, New Mexico had unlimited visibility, with a clean starkness that hurt the eyes.

But J. Robert Oppenheimer had found no better place to establish a new town whose purpose was to meet the grandest challenge of science. From his security indoctrination, Fox knew that the boys’ school on the site had been purchased in secret by the War Office, the solitary teacher and his small group of students packed off without any explanation, and Los Alamos had been set up virtually overnight. Right in the middle of America’s legendary wide-open spaces.

Maybe that was the real reason Oppenheimer had decided to set the Project here. Not so much for the solitude—from what Fox had heard, West Virginia or China Lake in California would have served as well—but other locations might place too much pressure on the scientists, box them into traditional ways of thinking. No, the limitless view had the psychological effect of keeping the scientists unbridled, uncontained with enormous ideas that could end up destroying the world. And Fox had been chosen to lend his talents, whether he wanted to or not.

Fox fingered his letter. The stationery felt thin and simple, but the words were so dangerous. Just bringing the letter out of the fenced compound went against all instructions the G-2, the Army Intelligence people, had been feeding him the past week. “All correspondence is to be submitted to the security detail with envelopes unsealed. Failure to cooperate will result in a direct violation of the Espionage Act.”

Espionage Act! The whole situation seemed ludicrous. Fox felt caught between paranoia and laughter at the absurdity of it. How could they in all honesty suspect a relationship that had already lasted fifteen years, one that had been cemented long before Chancellor Hitler began his rampage across Europe?

Fox’s Ph.D. studies at Cambridge had brought him into contact with several international students. After all, his teacher, Rutherford, was a world-renowned physicist; studying under him had marked Graham Fox as a rising star. It was something ordinary students only dreamed about.

Fox had become fast friends with Abraham Esau, a young German student. They had lived together in the boardinghouse, sharing the single water closet down the hall; they had played typical pranks together, until they had been sobered by the boating accident that left Esau’s lip scarred. Later, despite his growing preoccupation with the National Socialist Party, Esau had arranged for Fox to complete his post-doctoral work in Göttingen under Sommerfeld himself.

After Fox’s post-doctoral study, the two friends had corresponded for years, exchanging results of their latest work. They shared the excitement of Dirac’s relativistic field theory, the discovery of spinor mathematics ... to them, physics was apolitical, a true bridge between cultures. Did an atomic nucleus care about inequities in the Treaty of Versailles? No matter what governments might squabble about, physics remained immutable. Fox admired that. Esau had always agreed with him.

And now, because of the war, his friendship with Esau had become illegal. Fox wanted to write his old companion, tell him that their communications must stop, but he had reluctantly adhered to the rules. Letters between himself and Esau had dwindled over the past few years, since Germany had declared war on the U.S. after the Pearl Harbor attack. But Fox’s friendship had never stopped, and he knew Esau must feel the same.

A colleague at William and Mary College had agreed to mail Fox’s letters to another colleague in Mexico, where in turn they would be sent to Norway, then forwarded to one of the occupied countries. A letter might take months to cover this circuitous route, but Fox and Esau kept their communication open.

And pointedly nonpolitical.

Fox’s leanings were certainly not toward Germany—but they did not rest blindly with the Allies either. He had heard much talk of a single world government lately. In Fox’s view, any one independent government was as bad as any other, especially if both used their weapons for mass destruction. Look at the horrible poison gas weapons used during the Great War. The great physicist Otto Hahn himself had created those weapons—was that a fitting purpose for such a man to apply his mind?

As a physicist, he believed the world could flourish without political meddling. Governments demanded too much. Physicists knew how to handle relations between countries. After all, new scientific ideas and discoveries had been exchanged freely for years. It seemed that only the bureaucrats, the militarists, and—worst of all—the bean counters, could not accept the laws of Nature for what they were.