Stealing Trinity (19 page)

At five foot two, two hundred and five pounds, he had never been one to cut a dashing figure on the dance floor. Now, however, with a Navajo blanket draped around his shoulders and a huge sombrero atop his nearly bald head, he resembled a child's top -- thick, brightly colored, and spinning to a wobble before inevitably falling to the floor. It was a controlled collapse though, the physicist dissipating his kinetic energy without losing a drop of tequila from the bottle in his hand. Sitting in a heap, Heinrich snorted, took a swig, and yelled in a thick German accent.

"To the conservation of momentum!"

"To gravity!" someone countered.

There was a modest cheer, something less than what would have come an hour ago. Half the crowd had already left, and the remaining hardcores were rightly toasted.

Heinrich pushed himself to his feet as another song began. It had a catchy beat. "Now there is something to dance to!" he sang out. Heinrich scurried over and latched onto Marge, the sixty-year-old widow who ran the cafeteria by day, and dragged her to the center of the floor. She allowed herself to be taken and tried to keep up, but after five minutes she was out of breath. Marge edged aside to watch as Karl Heinrich twirled and shuffled his feet.

"I must have a partner!" Heinrich yelled. He grabbed Arne Pederson, an engineer, and the only man fatter than Heinrich himself. The crowd applauded as the two big men tried to keep time with the beat. Pederson only lasted a minute. Heinrich kept going. Sweat covered his face and neck, and his jowls jiggled. Once again the tireless little Bavarian, whose good-natured smile seemed permanently etched into place, was the center of attention. The crowd began clapping in rhythm to the music, and Heinrich again raised his bottle. "To Ernst Schrodinger!"

The name of the legendary physicist brought a mix of cheers and catcalls. Aside from a smattering of chemists, mathematicians, and the odd metallurgist, the scientists of Los Alamos fell into two overriding groups -- engineers and physicists. Each faction was naturally convinced of the superiority of its own discipline. The physicists, aided by Albert Einstein himself, had given birth to the project. In their minds everything relied on the basic theories and mathematical models they contributed. The engineers, on the other hand, insisted that theories were meaningless until applied. Anyone could imagine a bridge over a river, but to build one that wouldn't collapse -- that was something else.

As in most circles of academia, competitive banter was rampant. But high in the canyons of northern New Mexico, a new paradigm had been created. The Manhattan Project was a collection of mental talent perhaps unrealized in the history of mankind. Universities and industries across the world had been raided for the most gifted minds in existence. As the local jest went, "Here, university department chairs are a dime a dozen. Nobel Laureates a quarter."

Yet along with that intellect came a commensurate display of egos -- men and women who believed that they were the best in their fields. For the most part they were right, but it made for an insufferable social scene. The Saturday night "Potluck and Dance" get-togethers had emerged as the most casual affair. After a long week in the labs everyone was ready to blow off steam, though anyone who ruined a night by making an ugly scene was not invited to the next.

The music came to an end, and the room was lost to the familiar tic tic tic as the needle on the phonograph hit the end of the rotating album.

"More, Karl! More!" someone yelled.

Heinrich smiled and leaned against a wall. His plump chest heaved for air and his shirt was sodden with sweat. "Yes, yes," he agreed, "in a moment."

A young woman, a secretary from the director's office, moved unsteadily to the turntable. Many of the men watched -- while she wasn't particularly pretty, she was shaped along the lines of Rita Hayworth, and for a gaggle of love-starved scientists, many of whom had been forced to leave their wives and girlfriends behind, she was an eyeful. She also drank to excess.

"Any requests?" she slurred in a raspy voice.

"Something we can dance to!" came a shout.

"You drunk bastards can't dance when you're sober," the woman said. An instant later she stumbled, crashing into the table that supported both the phonograph and a ceramic toilet that served as a punchbowl. The whole lot clattered to the floor, alcohol-laden punch dousing everything. The woman was splayed out awkwardly, her white dress now wet and red. "Christ!" she sputtered.

A dozen men moved at the opportunity, but Heinrich was closest. He put down his bottle, scurried over and helped her up by the elbow. "Are you all right, dear?"

"Yeah, yeah," she said in a coarse East Coast accent. The woman rose unsteadily and looked at Heinrich with bland appreciation. Then a physicist from the explosives lab grabbed the other elbow. Heinrich knew he was a new man, from Vanderbilt, an expert in blast wave propagation. He was also six foot three and very handsome. The secretary immediately leaned away from Heinrich and swooned toward the Vanderbilt man.

"Maybe you should call it a night," the fellow suggested.

"Yeah, that's just what I was thinking," she agreed.

He leaned to her ear and spoke quietly, but Heinrich heard the words as he backed away. Can I give you a lift to your place?

Her reply was a smile and a nod.

The lack of music soon had a dampening effect. When the last two women left -- in protective company of one another -- the mood among the remaining men soured.

Forlani, an Italian mathematician, pointed to the toilet bowl that was cracked and surrounded by a sea of red. "You see? No woman can be around such untidiness. It goes against their nature." He went to the coatrack and made his grand proclamation. "J am going home."

Major James, U. S. Army Regular, and the only uniform in the place, picked up the tequila bottle Heinrich had put down in the ruckus. Heinrich rushed over and took it from the major's hand. "Oh, thank you, sir. I might need this later."

James laughed -- in the good-natured way that fellow drunks did -- and started for the door. Others followed. Heinrich and Peter Bostich, a Serbian colleague from the theoretical branch, were the last to leave.

The high altitude night air was cool and dry, even on the cusp of summer. The two engineers strolled a path that led to the housing community, gravel crunching crisply under their feet. Heinrich still carried his bottle, and Bostich cradled an armful of albums from his private collection, minus the one that had been lost in the disaster.

"It is amusing, is it not," Heinrich said, "that the creation of America's greatest weapon has been fueled so heavily by whiskey?"

Bostich laughed. "Yes, but it will not be so amusing if we fail." The Serb paused. "Will you be coming into the lab tomorrow, Karl?"

Heinrich's smile remained. "No, Peter. I will sleep rather late, I think." He had taken Sundays off this last month, a departure from the previous year when seven-day work weeks had been the custom. "Our share of the task is largely complete." He sighed. "Perhaps tomorrow I will go to church."

Bostich laughed. "I have never once seen you in church, Karl."

Heinrich put a hand to Bostich's shoulder. "We are close to our goal. Perhaps a little prayer to go along with so many calculations?"

The Serb nodded. "It is exciting, is it not, to be this near."

"Ja, ja. Only two more weeks."

"Will you go to the test?"

"Of course, Peter, I must see the result after so much effort."

"Oppenheimer seems nervous," Bostich said, referring to the director of the project. "Do you think the gadget will work?"

"Ah, the billion dollar question. Teller still insists it could ignite the earth's atmosphere," Heinrich prodded, a jibe at the famous Hungarian physicist.

"Teller still pursues his fusion miracle. Let us hope he is wrong on both counts."

The path gave way to a clearing where the housing compound lay. Heinrich gave Bostich a friendly embrace, noting the sour smell of old beer. "I will see you Monday, Peter. But call me tomorrow if anything arises."

The two parted ways, and Heinrich took a meandering path toward the back where his own room was situated. He often walked the woods at night, finding the evening air far less oppressive than that of the day. It sometimes seemed like the only time he could breathe.

Halfway to his room, Heinrich detoured momentarily into the low forest of squat pinon pines and emptied the water from his tequila bottle. When he had first arrived in Los Alamos he would never have considered such a ruse. In his initial weeks here he had cultivated a careful image -- outgoing, free-spirited, sociable. And not afraid to tie on a few drinks. His first dinner party at the club had not ended until the following morning, when he had awakened stark naked under the billiards table. The banging in his head had not been an element of the hangover, but rather the cleaning ladys vacuum striking him repeatedly on the crown.

He was amazed at how easily the Americans had taken to him. Karl Heinrich had made no attempt to hide his Germanness -- the accent would have been impossible to lose, and besides, many of the scientists here knew him from his teaching days at Oxford and Hamburg. There were other Germans here, and they all had two things in common. They were experts in their fields, and they professed a uniform hatred of the Nazi regime. Heinrich had never confided in any of the others, but he sometimes wondered if he was the only liar.

He had come late to the National Socialist movement. In the early 1930s he had been too consumed by his work to worry about politics. As a visiting professor at the University of Hamburg, he was a well-respected theoretical physicist, and Heinrich's lectures on alpha particle scattering were in high demand. His frustrations began in 1935 when an Austrian Jew, Simons, had beaten him to the punch by publishing the authoritative paper Mass Determination of Component Nuclei as Heinrich was nearing completion of his own parallel work. The field was one over which he had been considered lord and master, so the letdown was heavy. It was as if a renegade cardinal had usurped the pope's podium in Saint Peter's Square to issue Mass on Easter Sunday.

The next misstep involved one of his previous works, relating to the projection of mixed nuclei in a radiant beam. Errors were discovered in Heinrich's methods by another Jew (a graduate student no less), and while the basic principals were solid, a year's work previously thought to be groundbreaking had fallen suspect. Full tenure never came at Hamburg, and Heinrich began a nomadic series of "Guest Lecturer" appointments. It was in Bremen that he attended his first National Socialist rally. The message fed his suspicions about Jews. They were evil, inbred thieves. Destroyers.

On Hitler's usurping of the Sudetenland, Heinrich had found himself at Oxford, a German patriot watching from the other side of the fence. Two years on he was invited to Columbia University in America, and it was in early 1943, with the eastern war going badly for Germany, that Heinrich was invited by a colleague to join a group of scientists working on a "war project."

At the outset there were standard questions from the Army about Heinrich's sympathies, his political leanings -- but here he was rescued by his friends. The scientists of Los Alamos, dozens of nationalities among them, were a network of intellectuals who considered themselves above borders and politics. They righteously vouched for one another with blind confidence. In the end, it was this support, along with Heinrich's command of theoretical physics, that carried him past the Army and into the heart of the Manhattan Project.

He opened the door to his quarters and stepped inside, pausing to catch his breath. First the dancing, then the climbing -- if he didn't slow down, he thought, he was going to have a heart attack. The walk to his room had been uphill, and even after a year he was not used to the thin air at 7,300 feet above sea level. He would not miss it. Indeed, the entirety of this desert he would not miss. It was clearly America's dustbin, good as nothing more than a place to hide her defeated indigenous people. Round them up and put them on "reservations." Such a nice word, he'd always thought, as if a maitre d' was holding a table at a fine restaurant. The Germans used a different word, and of course it involved Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. Still, Heinrich reasoned, the concept was the same. And in all practicality, he did understand why the Manhattan Project had found its home here. Heat, dirt, wind -- who would bother looking for the world's greatest secret in such a place?

The room was a single, modest in size, situated at the end of a row of four identical dwellings. The adjacent apartment was occupied infrequently by Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist from the University of Chicago. Fermi had spent most of the last year at his university lab, and traveling to the other facilities in Tennessee and Washington. Lately, however, he'd been more of a regular at Los Alamos, probably because the project was reaching fruition. It made Heinrich's work that much more difficult.

He set a pot of coffee to brew on his electric hot plate before starting to work on the curtain. There was only one window in the place, and Heinrich was meticulous about sealing it off whenever he worked. Having lived for a year in England during the blitz, he was an expert at the task.

When he finished, the coffee was ready. Heinrich poured a cup and added a hearty serving of sugar. The mix gave him energy, acting as a catalyst to shift his mental transmission into a different gear. It was time to put the evening's frivolity behind.

Tonight would be strictly photography. At the start, a year ago, he had copied the critical elements of each document by hand before resorting to the camera. If the film should go bad or become damaged, he had reasoned, there would be a backup. Now there was simply no time. With the war nearing its end, Heinrich's days at Los Alamos were numbered. Over the last two weeks he had taken many risks, scouring records and files, secreting bundles to his room. The scientists here regularly brought work to their rooms -- though it was officially forbidden -- but none on the scale Karl Heinrich managed.