The Trinity Paradox Read online

  Speer seemed unconcerned with Esau’s assessment. “I do not believe Diebner will be a problem. Not after tonight.”

  Saying nothing more, he stepped out the door. Puzzled, Esau took a last glance at the laboratory notebooks he had not yet checked, then hurried after the Reichminister to the courtyard outside.

  Heisenberg stood by himself on the muddy ground. Esau reveled in his sullen appearance—this humiliation would take the great physicist down a notch or two, make him more cooperative. Perhaps Heisenberg would stop worrying about esoteric theory and concentrate more on practicalities. Esau should find him much more manageable from now on.

  Major Stadt had arranged for the floodlights to be switched on, drowning the area in harsh white light. The Virus House and its outbuildings looked like something from one of Himmler’s work camps. The wood siding showed gaps where the uncured lumber had swelled with the spring rains. The barbed wire around the perimeter looked like silver spider webs in the night.

  When the other scientists had assembled outside on the spotty gravel walkways, Major Stadt trudged out to where Heisenberg stood alone. His boots made indentations in the soft ground.

  “I want you to pay close attention, all of you.” Stadt raised his voice, and Esau noticed from his mannerisms that he seemed to be imitating Hitler. A lot of people were doing that these days.

  “This man, your Professor Heisenberg, winner of the highest accolades your profession can bestow, is traitor to his country, to his Fuhrer, and to you all. He has committed grave sabotage against this project, which has the possibility of winning the war. He has delayed work, he has falsified laboratory results, and he has cooperated with the enemy in ensuring that Germany fails to develop an atomic bomb!”

  “That is not true.” Heisenberg drew himself up. It was apparent that he had said that same thing countless times to the Gestapo major, to little effect. Stadt ignored him.

  “Because of this man’s mistakes, because of his delays, and because of his treason, Professor Werner Heisenberg has caused the deaths of countless thousands of German soldiers. If this weapon had been available for our attack against Stalingrad, we could have captured that city without the loss of a single German life. We could have taken Moscow in a day, instead of months upon months of failure.”

  As Stadt spoke he stepped away from Heisenberg, marching back toward the gathered scientists. Esau waited beside Reichminister Speer, watching. He was beginning to think that this had gone too far. If Heisenberg were broken too severely, he might not be useful in further research.

  “All of these deaths, all of these failures, weigh on the shoulders of a single man. He is guilty of high treason.”

  Stadt turned to the two motorcycle guards and gestured offhandedly to the physicist standing alone on the barren ground. “ Shoot him.”

  The other scientists stood silent in shock, then muttering filled the air. Otto Hahn took a step forward in outrage. Heisenberg himself blinked in astonishment and stood up straight, but the protests seemed too many to come out of his mouth at once. Even Esau couldn’t believe what he had just heard. That wasn’t the point at all….

  But Reichminister Speer just stood in silence, as if he approved.

  The guards looked at each other in equal uneasiness. They had apparently never had to kill anyone before.

  “Shoot him!” Major Stadt shouted.

  One guard brought up his pistol while the other fumbled to pull it out of its holster at his hip. A shot rang out, a thin crack, deceptively small, and then a second shot sounded as the other guard fired.

  Heisenberg crumpled to the mud under the harsh floodlights. His face turned away as he fell. The gathered scientists let out an anguished murmur.

  “No more uncertainty about your principles now, Hen-Professor,” Major Stadt said.

  Esau felt himself trembling. Heisenberg lay motionless on the ground. He had been alive only a second before. All of his thoughts and ideas had vanished. Reichminister Speer spoke up. “Now perhaps the rest of you can make some progress.”

  Esau allowed himself to fly into a rage. He saw his chances of rapid success bleeding into the mud. “You just eliminated the most brilliant mind in our entire project! How am I to accomplish a breakthrough when you’ve just shot down the man most capable of doing so? I needed Heisenberg controlled, not destroyed!” He let his voice become icy and he turned toward Major Stadt. “Our task will be much more difficult because of this.”

  Stadt’s skin appeared corpselike under the garish light. He smiled as if he had just enjoyed himself. He spoke softly. “Ah, but we have given them incentive, Professor Esau.” He turned to look at the other scientists gawking in disbelief at Heisenberg’s body. “Incentive.”

  PART 2

  7

  Los Alamos

  August 1943

  “It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs.”

  —Stan Ulam

  Taking a brisk walk in the mountain air before breakfast made Elizabeth forget about many things. Cool morning wind rushed through the aspen trees; watercolored light splashed off the mesas and the Jemez mountains in the distance. It reminded her of why she had come back to New Mexico, leaving Berkeley and the California fast lane behind.

  She hated stepping inside the Project cafeteria for its semblance of breakfast. Cigarette smoke hung like fog in the air from packs of Lucky Strike Greens, the only brand available at the PX. The meal consisted of greasy eggs and bacon, potatoes fried in lard: a year’s supply of cholesterol every morning. It turned her stomach. She found no fresh fruit. Occasionally she managed to secure a bowl of sticky oatmeal or grits.

  All these brilliant scientists didn’t know the first thing about keeping themselves healthy and eating right. None of that stuff had been discovered yet—they hadn’t even learned about the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer until the 1950s, after those experiments with dogs hooked up to smoking machines.

  She might be looked upon as “queer”—and how even that word had changed!—in her other thoughts and actions as well. She was still trying to learn how to wear a dress again, and how to act around men. After a lifetime of treating her male companions as equals, she felt flustered when the Army men scrambled to open doors for her, or offered her cigarettes, or grinned at her like Howdy Doody every time she passed them on the dusty streets. I’m not a princess, for Christ’s sake!

  Mrs. Canapelli kept encouraging her to wear makeup, to do her nails with the rest of the women, to apply garish lipstick so that she left a bright red arc on the coffee cup each time she took a drink. “But you look so plain, dear!” Mrs. Canapelli said as Elizabeth left in the morning, before the other ladies marched over to breakfast. “Don’t you want the young men to notice you?”

  “I’ll do just fine,” she said. “And besides, I’m still grieving for Jeff.” After two months, Elizabeth thought. Two months!

  “I understand, dear,” Mrs. Canapelli said, and patted her wrist. “Fresh coffee?”

  “Thank you.” Elizabeth accepted the cup. Her morning walk provided an easy way to avoid invitations from the other “girls” to join them. They considered her aloof and grumpy; she considered them boring gossips.

  Mrs. Canapelli followed Elizabeth to the back porch of the wooden dorm. Elizabeth sipped her coffee; she had gotten accustomed to the odd taste of coffee beans blended with chicory to help with rationing.

  The back porch gave a panoramic view of the Sandia peaks. Elizabeth felt she could reach out and touch the desert sprawling below her. “I really appreciate all you’ve done for me. This payday I’ll make up the rest of the money you loaned me on my first night.”

  “No hurry, dear. I remember what I went through myself right after Ronald died. Besides, you should never try to pay people back—pay them forward by helping the next person in trouble.”

  “Thanks.” Elizabeth smiled as Mrs. Canapell
i turned back toward the dorm kitchen. It was really a sign of simpler days, to be so trusting and helpful to anyone with a little bad luck.

  Elizabeth had about fifteen minutes until she needed to head out; she could not tell for certain, since she kept her digital watch—sorely out of place in 1943—packed away.

  She sat back against the rough outer wall. She felt comfortable here, enjoying the morning. But behind her comfort nagged a feeling that she had begun to stagnate. She couldn’t keep telling herself that this was merely a delusion. And what did it matter if this was just a delusion, if it never ended?

  Two months. She had been following the news, trying to assemble the pieces of World War II—and she had to stop thinking of it by that name too, since no one yet called it a “world war.” Mussolini had been overthrown in Italy; the Allies were heavily bombing Germany, Italy, and the Pacific; and the fighting in the Solomon Islands seemed to go on forever. And here she felt so isolated from the rest of the world.

  Joining Johnny von Neumann’s calculational group had come naturally enough. Elizabeth didn’t mind the work, though she found it mostly repetitious: add, multiply, subtract, or divide a number that was given to her from the woman beside her. If she got lucky, she might be required to look up the logarithm, or even an exponential. Oh boy! She rarely saw enough of the entire problem to determine what the model was supposed to show, even when the physicists explained it before the calculation.

  She wished she had brought along her simplest calculator. She wondered how the Los Alamos scientists could ever overcome the theoretical difficulties of modeling an atomic blast if no one had invented a computer yet.

  Von Neumann himself would do that sometime later.

  But for the most part, the work was straightforward. Elizabeth had no trouble fitting in and doing her job—and that worried her. She enjoyed her life here. She enjoyed sitting with Graham Fox in the late afternoons, chatting or just relaxing in silence; he had never made a move on her, to her relief. Jeff still burned too close in front of her mind. But she and Fox had enough in common to hold fascinating conversations. He seemed too shy to express any romantic intentions.

  Other times, on her Sundays off, she would go hiking by herself throughout the mesas and exploring the areas where she had never been allowed to go in her old life. Mrs. Canapelli disapproved of her going out alone, but Elizabeth ignored her.

  With the exception of the Army grunts and some of the civilian workers, the Project people were all above aver age, both in intelligence and in the things that they did. Solving the problems of the universe gave them a passion in their lives, led them to push forward with the need to discover something new, because so much was left to be discovered. It was very different from her own physicist raining, where the all-knowing professors had basically told her How It Was, with no room left for questions, only a bit of fine tuning.

  She found the change refreshing, back to the sense of wonder she herself had felt when choosing science in the first place. She might have been able to forget about what was going to happen with the bomb and enjoy herself here. The frantic pace of developing the Gadget brought the men together in a team more intense than any research group before or since. These people were not competing for a Nobel Prize, or even a first publication—they were trying to win a war.

  She knew it would be extremely easy for her to be swept up in the group, drift along with the flow of the research; to forget about where she had been and what personal convictions had driven her here, since she had no hope of getting back to her own time. In the past month she had been thinking less and less about Jeff.

  And worst of all, she—Elizabeth Devane!—was contributing to the effort. She already knew how everything would escalate, letting the sleeping dog grow more vicious year after year; how the public would become immune to common sense; how it would all lead to her own desperate actions at the MCG site, and how it would cause Jeff’s death.

  Below her she heard the cantering of a single horse. Elizabeth stood, holding her warm coffee cup, and looked down the slope to see a rider come up the path. He rode an Appaloosa, guiding it up the side of the hill to a high point on the mesa where he could look back on the settlement of Los Alamos. Elizabeth saw his thin body, gangling arms, and hawkish nose. The man turned, flashed a smile at her, and waved.

  As he climbed, she watched his back, the faded red-flannel shirt he wore in the cool morning. When he stopped the horse and turned it, the man was silhouetted by the rising sun. His black outline looked like a scarecrow. He looked hauntingly familiar.

  “Oppie’s out for a morning ride again,” Mrs. Canapelli said beside her. Elizabeth had not heard her return to the porch. “He must be thinking of something pretty important.”

  Oppie. Oppenheimer—J. Robert Oppenheimer, the mastermind behind the entire atomic bomb project. In a flash Elizabeth remembered where she had seen him before: in footage of the original nuclear test, Trinity. In the light of the dying atomic blast, Oppenheimer had quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, a book of Hindu spiritual poetry—”Now I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” The expression on his face, the light behind his dark and too-intense eyes, had made him look like the most evil of all mad scientists.

  Shatterer of worlds. She thought of the wreckage of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the shadows of burned bodies cast on brick walls. She thought of Jeff lying dead with fused legs at a time twenty years before he was supposed to be born.

  Oppenheimer spurred his horse into motion. At a gallop, they sped over the rise and down the trail into the trees.

  “Shouldn’t you be getting off to work, Betsy?” Mrs. Canapelli asked.

  Elizabeth finished her cold coffee and handed the cup to Mrs. Canapelli. She needed to get to her work assignment, but she felt more worried about what she would do in the long term.

  John von Neumann stood tight-lipped at the front of the room. He had left all the windows closed because of the blowing dust from the streets. Metal fans clicked on empty desks around the room. The scientist with “The Problem Of The Day” paced just outside the door. Elizabeth couldn’t make out who he was.

  Thirty women, most of them younger than she by at least five years, waited at their desks for the morning instructions. They were arranged in five rows of six columns. Each desk sat a precise two feet from its neighboring desk, close enough so that when one woman finished her calculation, she would have no trouble handing her answer to the next woman in the queue.

  The simplicity of it all impressed Elizabeth. The whole process reminded her of a computer program—each woman would execute one line of the program, either by adding several numbers or performing some other mathematical operation, then hand off her answer to the next woman in line. The solution zigzagged around the room until the last woman tallied the final result.

  Once every woman had been briefed on the precise operation she was expected to perform, von Neumann would start off the process by handing the first woman a number written on a sheet of paper. He would continue to hand numbers to the first person in line, taking up all morning and afternoon.

  Most of the times the numbers were different, but often Elizabeth could remember identical numbers coming down the pipe. In his brittle Hungarian accent, von Neumann had explained that this was to double-check the accuracy of their calculations. He strode among the desks, looking down at them with his sad, dark eyes, like a Napoleonic schoolteacher.

  Before each morning’s session, one of the working scientists would give a short tutorial on what the women were calculating. Elizabeth looked forward to the lectures, eager to learn more about what paths the Los Alamos scientists were taking to design the Gadget and how far along they had come. At first she thought she would be amused at the relative naiveté of the old methods, but she quickly learned that the sophistication was high. Since no one could rely on supercomputers to check models, the Manhattan Project scientists displayed an uncanny intuitive feel for the pertinent physics.

  Once the calcula
tions room quieted down, von Neumann cleared his throat. His voice was rich and exotic, with an accent that made him sound like Bela Lugosi in Dracula. “Today’s problem will be covered by Professor Feynman. Dick?”

  Elizabeth slid down in her chair as Feynman entered the room. The young man’s infectious grin put the room at ease. He seemed to be flirting with everyone at once. Most of the women just wanted to get started.

  Feynman picked up a piece of chalk. He flipped the chalk as he walked around the front of the room, tossing it up and down and catching it precisely each time, though he seemed to be paying no attention at all. As he spoke, Feynman met the eyes of his audience, roving back and forth along the lines of desks.

  “We’re trying to overcome a problem of neutron absorption by some of the nonfissile materials. If you can imagine yourself as a little neutron being spit out of a newly formed nucleus”—he crouched low, then sprang high into the air—“and suddenly being grabbed by the wrong type of atom.” He landed on the floor and put his hands around his neck, gasping and choking. “Well, we’re trying to prevent that.”

  He released his hands from his neck and spread them wide. “Today you ladies are going to calculate what we call absorption probabilities. Most of the absorption is defined randomly, and the whole process is called the Monte Carlo method—Monte Carlo because it’s based on that famous casino city located in Morocco.

  “Anyway, you can look at this calculation as trying to see how many neutrons can survive being absorbed by the wrong material—like when you ladies first got here and fought off the Army types to keep yourselves available for a decent scientist, who would make a much better husband.”

  Some of the ladies laughed weakly. Elizabeth did her best to ignore it. Feynman didn’t even know where Monte Carlo was.