The Trinity Paradox Read online

  She had heard no sound, no sign of any traffic, though hours had passed. She decided to climb to the top of the mesa, away from the canyon floor, so as not to run into one of the Los Alamos scientists. When and if things got back to normal, she wanted the situation to be in her favor. And on her own terms.

  Exhaustion sapped at Elizabeth as she climbed back up the canyon wall, but still she made considerably better time in the daylight than she had last night. Even the chain-link fence was gone. She made her way down the canyon rim toward the Park Service road that would lead to the Bandelier Monument headquarters and visitor’s center where they had parked the Bronco.

  The second shock came when she couldn’t find the road.

  New Mexico State Road 4 should have been at the bottom of the canyon, winding its way to the national monument, looping around to the cluster of homes called White Rock, then back to the city of Los Alamos. She found only a faint horse trail disappearing into the distance. The New Mexican foothills showed no other sign of civilization.

  Elizabeth shrugged off her pack. Panting and sweating, she dug out the topographical map she and Jeff had used to plot their course to the back fence of the MCG site. Squatting in the dirt on the canyon rim, she oriented the green map toward the Jemez caldera. Mount Baldy lay to the right, sixty miles away, towering over Santa Fe. Behind her rose the Sandias and Albuquerque; half a million people within a hundred-mile circle.

  It just didn’t make sense. She stood and pushed back her reddish hair, then retied the leather thong. The central part of Bandelier National Monument, with its hiking trails and ancient Indian cliff dwellings, lay over the next two ridges. She was sure she had her bearings right. She would straighten this out sooner or later.

  But Jeff would never be coming back.

  Elizabeth shoved all those thoughts aside. Not now! She set off at a rapid, steady hiking pace. She had never felt so tired, or so overwhelmed.

  The sun was not quite overhead by the time she scaled the last ridge, looking over Frijoles Canyon, where the Bandelier parking lot, gift shop, and snack bar should have been. Even in the mountains the cool early summer air seemed heavy, making her perspire more than she should have.

  Elizabeth confirmed her location once again by lining up features on the detailed topo map before looking over the canyon rim. She scrambled up to the top and surveyed Bandelier. Caves dotted the far cliff walls. A partially excavated circle of boulders delineated the ancient Anasazi Indian settlement off to her right. And below her sprawled a wooden ranch house and stables, with dirt paths stretching from the buildings. She recognized the adobe visitor’s center buildings, but they looked different somehow, newer.

  Mouth set, she stared at the site. Nothing existed of the ranger station she had visited just a day earlier. She could not see any cars; even the Bronco she and Jeff had left by the cottonwood tree was missing. The Anasazi ruins looked the same, but everything else had changed.

  What is going on? she asked herself. Am I still dreaming?

  Jeff’s death had been no dream.

  Elizabeth didn’t spend time debating what to do. Explanations could be filled in later. She had to decide her next course of action. A jaunt down to the ranch house would prove nothing right now, only raise questions she didn’t want to answer. But a trip into Los Alamos would clear the air. She could figure out what was going on without causing too much of a stir. From the location of the sun, it didn’t seem to be more than eleven or so in the morning.

  Confusion and panic gripped her again. Her body still felt displaced and inside-out after the explosion. She remembered Jeff… then slowly regained control of herself.

  Clouds covered the top of Santa Fe Baldy fifty miles away, but it looked as if the good weather would hold. She should be able to reach Los Alamos by nightfall if it didn’t start raining again. She could get a newspaper. She could have a hot meal. Right now even Los Alamos’s limited selection of restaurants sounded appealing to her.

  She could go back and sleep alone, without Jeff. She could think of how she would explain his absence. Somehow, Elizabeth could not conceive of the need to report his death to the police. A dim part of her mind recognized that she was still in shock.

  But what in the hell was going on? It kept coming back to her as she walked. The simplest answer was that her mind was screwed up; the answer most difficult to swallow was that what she saw was real. But what had happened to everything?

  No fences surrounded the mesa or any of the designated Technical Areas. In her Bronco, she had driven around the restricted zones many times before, pretending to be a tourist. But now she saw no warning signs, no barbed wire. As she made her way through the foothills, Elizabeth kept careful track of her location. On the map a dotted red line clearly marked the laboratory limits: U.S.

  DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY RESTRICTED AREA. Though she must have crossed the line, she came across nothing that even resembled a boundary.

  A spring rain spread light mist, but Elizabeth kept on, wet and miserable now. Droplets glistened on her bare arms, and her jeans and hiking boots were nearly soaked through. She ate her last package of trail mix on the go; she could see no use conserving food. Her highest priority was to find out what was going on—and to keep from thinking too much about Jeff.

  Seeing the town of Los Alamos intact might jolt the imbalance from her. She wanted to think clearly again. By the time she reached the top of the mesa where the city lay, the clouds had darkened, sending down torrents of rain. Her feet squished with every step.

  She approached from the southwest, following the ridge line up to where the main lab complex should be. She quickened her pace when she spotted a barbed-wire fence running through the trees, extending into the dense undergrowth. She had never thought she’d be glad to see a security fence!

  Maybe the hike had cleared her mind. Maybe she had been too intense, had dwelled on the Los Alamos project too long. The explosion had sent her reeling. Perhaps her anger at the MCG experiment, and the lightning storm, and Jeff’s horrible death, had snapped her mind like a rubber band. Maybe she had imagined a Los Alamos without the lab, without the experiments.

  The rain made it difficult to see far. As she sloshed through the pines and cottonwoods, her hope continued to rise. Lights—she spotted a flickering source, then a glaring array between the trees. It was if the bulbs had been hung on a wire and strung over a clearing. Noise drifted through the downpour, diffusing into the rain.

  The first thing she’d do was get to a phone—call one of her friends back in Santa Fe. It would take a couple of hours, but Marcia would probably drive up, meet her at the coffee shop at the Los Alamos Inn. The news of the sabotaged MCG experiment must be all over the headlines by now. The United Conscience Group would treat her as a hero.

  As she reached the clearing she slowed her pace, not wanting to reveal herself. It sounded like a construction crew hard at work even in the bad weather. Saws buzzed, hammers pounded nails…

  As Elizabeth crept to the edge of the woods, her lips clamped. Her delusions crashed around her again.

  Mud covered everything. Aluminum-sided Quonset huts dotted the clearing in a haphazard order. Poles carrying electrical wires ran between the buildings. The few wooden buildings looked more like thrown-together shacks.

  This should have been downtown Los Alamos.

  Men wearing khaki uniforms and steel helmets directed traffic around the sloppy construction site. None of the roads looked paved, just mud and some gravel, with brown puddles in ruts, no sidewalks or gutters. Spattered jeeps drove up to the Quonset huts. And the other cars looked like they had been taken from old Untouchables reruns on TV.

  Elizabeth took an unsteady step backward. Her breath came in short, labored spasms. Mind games, she thought. I’ve gone completely bonkers.

  But yet… the impossibility of it all… the noises, the smells, the sights… if she didn’t know better, she could just as well be back in World War II. She couldn’t make up details like th
is—she didn’t know anything about history. But the activity surrounding the isolated mesa seemed more appropriate for wartime Los Alamos-

  She stopped. Fifty years ago this place had been wartime Los Alamos. And the height of the Manhattan Project. The birth of the atomic bomb.

  Elizabeth stepped back into the woods and sat on a boulder of crumbling tuff. Not a speck of graffiti marked the boulder surface, though it lay close to the main road.

  She couldn’t have been tossed back in time! That MCG explosion had somehow sent her back into the past? What about all those lectures in her undergraduate days as a physics major, talking about how time travel violated every principle of modern physics from entropy increase to causality?

  Yet she couldn’t deny what she saw. Something big was going on, right where Los Alamos should be, and the city itself had vanished. How many times had she driven past the sprawling administration building, pointing out the headquarters of the bomb factory to her activist friends? What if she had suffered some sort of concussion and was simply hallucinating? A simpler answer to accept, perhaps. For all she knew, she was still lying back at the explosive site, bleeding to death, while her mind refused to accept the inevitability of dying.

  Elizabeth chewed on her lip. The hunger in her stomach was real enough, as were the blisters on her feet. Maybe she needed to play this out, see what her subconscious had in store for her. Maybe it was trying to get her to accept Jeff’s death.

  Had he even died?

  She slapped her hand against the rough surface of the boulder. It stung. The rock seemed solid enough.

  She knew she couldn’t just sit there. Night was coming fast, and she needed to get into a shelter, find some food. Even if the whole thing was in her mind.

  Taking a deep breath, she set out in the rain, straight for the center of activity.

  “Over here, hon! Quick now—get yourself out of the rain!”

  Elizabeth could not make out any features through the downpour, but she spotted a tall woman motioning to her. “Can’t you hear me? You’ll catch your death of cold.”

  Elizabeth lowered her head and trudged through the mud to the woman, who fluttered around her like a clucking hen. “Put this blanket around you. Did you just get here on the bus? What were you doing out in the trees? Not a good day to take a walk, and you shouldn’t be out there alone.”

  “I can take care of myself.” Elizabeth pulled the green Army blanket around her and let the woman lead her into the building. “Thanks, though.” Thin and willowy, the old woman reminded Elizabeth of a sorority mother employed to keep watch on college coeds. She looked to be in her late fifties.

  “Look how you’re dressed! Dungarees? Now you get out of those clothes and hop right into the bath. We’ve still got some warm water left. Take advantage of it while you can.” The woman put a finger to her cheek. “Didn’t they drop off your luggage with you?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “My word, you’re the third person they’ve done that to this week. What in the world are they thinking down there in Santa Fe? Bring up the young ladies and treat them like soldiers. What’s going to happen next? I just hope the Army didn’t ship your belongings back home.”

  Elizabeth remained quiet and let the elderly woman go on. She would figure this out sooner or later.

  Just inside the veranda a row of metal beds lined a long room. The low ceiling rafters revealed a dormitorylike construction. Only about a quarter of the beds looked as if they were being used.

  On a flimsy table Elizabeth saw a ragged newspaper, shuffled and folded as if it had been read by a dozen people. The headlines spoke about Himmler ordering the liquidation of all Polish ghettos, someplace called Pantellaria had been captured, and the USAAF had attacked Wilhelmshaven—wherever that was.

  The date on the masthead read June 12, 1943. And the paper was new and white, not yellowed with age.

  Before Elizabeth could say anything, the old woman steered her to the back. “I’ll get you a spare bathrobe after you’re through with your shower, dear. I’ll notify the guard to send a runner for your luggage in the morning.”

  “But what is—” She caught herself. “I mean, thank you, Ms.… ?”

  “Mrs. Canapelli. My Ronald died five years ago. He was a handyman at the university, and we used to be friends with Dr. Oppenheimer and Kitty back in Berkeley. Oppie asked me to chaperone the ladies’ dormitory. I’m glad he remembered me, bless poor Ronald’s soul.” They stopped in front of the bathroom.

  Oppie? thought Elizabeth. Yes, that Oppie. She felt dizzy. So this lady was friends with Oppenheimer, the man responsible for the Bomb. “Thank you, Mrs. Canapelli. Uh, can I get these clothes dried? Do you have a laundromat?”

  “A what? Why don’t I just hang them up for you. The humidity here is very low, and once the rain stops, your clothes will have a chance to dry out. We can get you an iron to use if you’d like.”

  “No thanks, they’re permanent press.” Elizabeth never bothered with clothes she had to iron.

  “Permanent press?” Mrs. Canapelli inspected Elizabeth’s jeans and plaid shirt. “You really took the Project at their word, dressing for the country, didn’t you? Where did you say you came from? And I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Elizabeth Devane, and, uh, I’m from… Montana. I always dress like this.” She closed her mouth, not wanting to get caught up too much in her lie. Montana was about as far removed from anything else she could imagine, and it might explain some of her unusual behavior.

  Elizabeth backed into the small bathroom and started taking off her clothes. Mrs. Canapelli continued to chatter. Elizabeth normally would have resented the company, but since Mrs. Canapelli mentioned everything from in-processing to Project rules, she ended up filling in Elizabeth with the details she would need for getting around. Elizabeth listened and stored the information.

  It might be useful until she woke up and ended this hallucination.

  Elizabeth never thought an Army cot could feel so good. She rolled over and felt only the sharp edge of the cot, not Jeff’s warm shoulders. The realization jarred her awake.

  It had been at least twenty-four hours since she and Jeff had climbed down into the MCG test site. Twenty-four hours, some twenty miles of hiking. And maybe fifty years of… time travel.

  Elizabeth snorted. Time travel. The human mind is far more complex than most people give it credit for. If she woke up tomorrow still in the Los Alamos women’s dormitory, then she had to make a concentrated effort not to keep thinking about the impossibility of it all. Obviously her mind wanted her to experience something in this era—best to go along with the flow and live it out. That way, at least her body could heal while her mind put things in order.

  It made sense to her. Putting the blame on her psyche and leaving it time to heal. But if it was only a hallucination, she wished she could imagine Jeff back into it somehow.

  The officer squinted at Elizabeth. He wore military insignia on his collar—two parallel silver bars. She didn’t know anything about ranks, but Elizabeth thought she had heard someone call him a captain.

  The rain had disappeared, leaving a sunny spring morning, but the mud remained. Brown muck spattered everything; even the soldier’s khaki uniforms seemed a part of the mess.

  Elizabeth tried to keep the notion that she was hallucinating out of her mind as she explained her situation. She silently thanked Mrs. Canapelli for droning on the night before, feeding her tidbits of information.

  “No, sir. My papers were with my luggage. I was told to board the bus in Santa Fe. And until the Army can locate my things, I don’t have any other documents or even items to wear. Mrs. Canapelli says I should be able to arrange for some clothes through the PX…”

  Trucks rumbled past; a dozen soldiers leaned out the back and whistled at her. The three people in line behind her tapped their feet in the dirt.

  The captain held up his hands and rolled his eyes in good-humored exasperation. “Okay, okay, I understan
d! It’s just that you’re the third person in four days with the same problem. I’m trying to prevent it from happening again. Look Miss Depine—”

  “Devane,” said Elizabeth. “And it’s Ms. Devane.”

  He looked up sharply. “Yes. Miz Devane.” He muttered to himself, “Must be from the South.” He opened his hand and ticked off the rationale on his fingers.

  “Okay, your papers must have been in proper order or they never would have let you board the bus in the first place. Otherwise, you never could have gotten up here, since there’s only one road. Therefore, something must have happened to your paperwork after you got on that bus. Maybe someone else picked up your suitcase and it’ll turn up before long? Did you have your name in it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Guess you’ll just have to wait and keep your fingers crossed, then. I’m sorry, Miz Devane, but until your paperwork comes through, the only thing I can do right now is assign you to the in-processing center as a clerk.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Clerical work, of course. What else would you want to do?” The captain looked astonished.

  “How long will I be there?”

  “If your paperwork is just misplaced, it may be only a couple of days. If it’s really lost, we have to go all the way back to Washington. And that may take until the end of the summer.”

  End of the summer? Is that the timescale I have here, going crazy for three months? I thought I’d wake up tomorrow.

  “So until then, there’s nothing more I can do.” The captain raised a finger. “Except I have to restrict you to the Project. Can’t allow you to leave the grounds until we’ve got something back on you.”

  Elizabeth set her mouth, unwilling to make a commotion. What difference did it make? Where would she go anyway?

  “Thank you, Captain. I appreciate your help.” She turned and left the wooden administration building. On her way out, she noticed that the Assignments and In-Processing rooms were across from each other.