William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

“Why don’t we just throw them all away, Dad?” she asked with the crystalline logic of a ten-year-old.

“It’s too late for that, Mo.” Her father’s voice carried the slightest touch of sadness, the first she had heard since her mother died. “The men can’t take away what they did in this room. They can’t uninvent what they invented. Now it’s up to the rest of us to learn to live with it. Most people choose to ignore it. I choose to deal with it, the only way I know how.”

“I’m going to die from it, aren’t I?” There was no alarm in the girl’s words. Just ten-year-old certainty.

“No!” The reply was an order, more sharp and stern than the eye command to the lieutenant, and the girl was taken aback, as if she had failed her father.

“That’s what all the kids say, Dad,” she continued cautiously. “They’re afraid of it. They said the world is going to blow up and we’re all going to die. Sometimes I have to fight with them.” She loved her father too much to tell him the fights were over him. But he knew.

“I’m sorry, Mo,” he said, his eyes drifting toward G. J. Loves J. J. “I’m sorry your friends are afraid. I’m sorry you have to fight. I don’t know if you can understand this yet, but fear is my job. It’s my job to keep everyone so afraid no one will ever use these bombs again.”

“How long do you have to do it, Dad?” she asked, eyes down, her small, fine hand picking at the old bomb crate.

“Forever, honey. Eternal vigilance, President Kennedy said. After me, someone else and then someone else and then someone else. Forever, into infinity.”

The girl continued picking at the crate. She remembered a talk with her mother, just before she died. How big is the universe, Mom? Eternal and infinite, her mother had answered. How big is that, Mom? Forever, child. But it must have some end, Mom. Don’t think about such things, child, because they have no answers and they will drive you mad. Her mother had sounded very sad.

“Mom said infinity can drive you crazy, Dad.”

Her father stood up very slowly and led her back to the jeep for the short, bumpy ride to the site of the Trinity explosion itself.

A solitary buzzard circled slowly ahead of them, then settled on one of the stubby Trinity crosses beyond the outer fence. Two fences surrounded the crater, the first with a sign that read “DANGER—RADIATION,” the second warning that no one was to stay inside longer than ninety minutes without protective clothing. The lieutenant opened both gates and led his visitors toward the center.

“What kind of radiation count are you getting these days?” the general asked.

“It’s still hot,” the young man answered, looking uncomfortable. “But less than a chest X ray if you don’t stay too long. The crater doesn’t really look like much now. Somebody bulldozed dirt into it years ago. The dirt settled, so you get this shallow dip like a saucer. After the explosion, the crater was green as an emerald. The heat fused the sand into green glass.”

“Brighter than a thousand suns,” the general said absentmindedly.

“The glass still works its way to the surface,” the lieutenant went on. “Trinitite, the scientists named it. Maybe we can find a piece for your daughter.”

At the center of the depression, the lieutenant stopped. “Just a pile of dirt now, sir, but this is ground zero. Everything vaporized here. The scientific gear. The steel tower. The concrete footings. Hard to imagine we make them hundreds, thousands, of times more powerful now.”

The girl kicked at the dead dirt in search of a piece of the green glass.

“The only part of the original crater is over there,” the lieutenant said, pointing at a low weathered hut that resembled a chicken coop. “They wanted to save it for the scientists. But nobody goes there now. Roof’s falling in. I guess we’ve got enough places to study this stuff now. We’ve dropped a helluva lot of ’em since Trinity.”

“Why did they call it Trinity, Dad?” the girl asked.

“I don’t know, Mo. Dr. Oppenheimer named it.”

“But Trinity means the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” she said, puzzled.

“Yes,” her father replied distantly.

“Did they think they were making another God?”

The general didn’t answer. He stared into the dark recesses of the Oscuros, against which the fireball and the mushroom had been framed. General Moreau had seen his own mushrooms, and his mind drifted now to Oppenheimer’s thoughts on that morning in 1945. At first the physicist had seen great beauty, and he recalled the lines from an ancient Hindu epic: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.” Then Oppenheimer had recalled the next lines of the epic: “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” The general sighed.

“I don’t know, Mo,” he said after a moment. “I really don’t know.” The wind whistled quietly in the desert. Ahead of him the lieutenant was pawing at the dirt for a souvenir for his daughter. He turned to get her, and she was gone.

“Mo!” he screamed, putting the lie to the image of total, steely discipline. He sprinted toward the sagging chicken-coop shelter. Through a gaping hole in the roof he peered down into the dark greenness. His daughter sat on the emerald floor, shuddering, her hands holding the broken remnants of a trinitite slab she had just crushed over the head of a rattlesnake. He leaped in, grabbed the girl, and thrust her out, following quickly.

In the hot desert sun the girl stood trembling, eyes brimming vith tears, one hand still full of her broken green prize.

“I was afraid, Daddy,” she whispered, struggling to control a sob. “He tried to bite me.”

“He was more afraid than you,” the father said, covering his own racking fear. He drew a deep breath, forced a broad grin, and scooped her into his arms. “Eternal vigilance,” he said.

She looked up at him reverently, the fear lost now in pride over belonging to a father who, to her, was half-god and who would, although she did not know how at the time, forever change her life. Behind them, the lieutenant rolled his eyes upward, catching the arcing shadow of the buzzard, which, as was its way, had lifted off the Trinity cross and circled now. Eternal vigilance, he thought.

“After you,” the girl said softly. “I’ll do it, Dad.”

Kazaklis reached for the radio dial, switched it to intercom, and bent over halfheartedly for his helmet. He brushed against the dirty flash curtain, jarring it into a slow, heavy ripple, and forgot the helmet. He called downstairs. “Okay, navigator, give me a course correction for an intercept point in twenty minutes. You heard Elsie’s coordinates, 124 degrees west at the circle?”

No reply returned.

“Tyler?” Kazakhs said.

“Timmie?” Tyler said.

Kazakhs turned toward Moreau, his look despairing. He took his right hand off the controls and rubbed it abrasively up the side of his face, as if he were scouring a frying pan.

“Tyler!” he ordered.

Below, Radnor looked curiously at his buddy. Tyler’s eyes were riveted again on his son. Cautiously Radnor reached over and nudged the navigator’s arm. Tyler turned slowly toward the nudge, but his eyes seemed focused far beyond the tight walls of their compartment.

“You want me to do it?” Radnor quietly asked.

Tyler seemed puzzled. “Do it?” he asked.

“The commander needs a new course to the IP,” Radnor said as unemotionally as he could manage. “Did you get the coordinates?”

“Oh, sure,” Tyler said blandly. “From the ground. Boy, this is a strange one, isn’t it? From the ground. This one’s really strange.”