Joseph Kanon - Los Alamos

“Then why do you stay?”

Connolly didn’t know what to answer. “It won’t be much longer,” he said.

Oppenheimer did come, in the morning, with the sun cutting through the slats in the blinds. He took off his hat and stood for a minute at the door, appalled, then forced himself to cross to the bed. Eisler’s eyes were closed, his face immobile, stretched taut as a death mask.

“Is he awake?” he said in a low voice to Connolly.

“Try,” Connolly said.

Oppenheimer took Eisler’s hand. “Friedrich.” He held it, waiting, while Eisler’s eyes opened.

“Yes,” Eisler said, a whisper.

“Friedrich, I’ve come.”

Eisler looked at him, his eyes confused. “Yes. Who is it, please?”

Oppenheimer’s face twitched in surprise. Then, slowly, he let the hand go and stood up. “Yes?” Eisler said again vaguely, but his eyes had closed, and Oppenheimer turned away. He faced Connolly, about to speak, but instead his eyes filled with tears.

“Don’t go,” Connolly said.

“He doesn’t know me,” Oppenheimer said dully, and turned toward the door.

Connolly went over to the bed to wake Eisler, but when he looked back again Oppenheimer had gone, so he dropped his hand to his side.

“Yes?” Eisler said faintly, returning.

“It was Robert,” Connolly said, but Eisler seemed not to have heard.

“Robert,” Eisler said, as if the word meant nothing. Then his eyes widened a little and he felt for Connolly’s hand. “Yes, Robert,” he said, holding him.

There were two more days, as bad as before, and now no one else came at all. Connolly sat for hours by the bed, listening for breathing. Once Eisler came back, his voice clearer and his eyes steady, not moving as they usually did to avoid the pain.

“What is troubling you, Robert?” Eisler said, for Connolly was always Robert now.

“Nothing. Get some sleep.”

“No more questions? What happened to the questions? Ask me.”

“It’s all right.”

“Ask me. Can’t I help you?”

“You remember Karl?”

“Yes,” he said vaguely. “The boy.”

“The man you met-he was wearing workboots.”

“Workboots? I don’t understand.”

“Workboots. On the Hill. It doesn’t fit.”

“I don’t understand, Robert. Why are you asking me these things? What about the test? Trinity. Be careful of the weather. The wind-the particles. The wind will spread everything—”

“We’ll be careful,” Connolly said.

“Good,” he said, closing his eyes again. “Good.”

In a minute Connolly tried again. “Friedrich,” he said. “Please. Tell me. Who was driving the car?”

Eisler lay quietly, his eyes fluttering. “They stopped at the river, Robert,” he said, opening them. He looked at Connolly, troubled and confused, and Connolly leaned forward to hear him. But it was another river. “The Russians. They stopped at the river. Until the fighting was over. They wouldn’t cross. They waited till everyone was dead.”

Connolly knew then that the Hill had slipped away for good. He had lost. “In Warsaw,” he said, giving in.

“In Warsaw, yes. They waited. Till everybody was dead.”

Connolly watched his eyes fill with tears, a spontaneous sorrow. He wondered if everyone ended this way, overwhelmed with regret.

“Can you imagine such a thing?” he said. “The Russians.” Then, his eyes moving irrationally, he grabbed Connolly’s hand. “Don’t tell Trude.”

Connolly patted him soothingly. “No. I won’t.”

Eisler lay back, his eyes closed again, but he kept Connolly’s hand. Connolly, helpless to remove it, sat there feeling Eisler’s fingers pulse faintly, then clutch and relax, as if he were touching what was left of his life. Of all the strange things that had happened to him since he had come to Los Alamos, this seemed to him the strangest. The sour room. The swollen hand holding on to someone else he thought was there. The unexpected intimacy of death, confiding in an imposter. When Eisler clutched him tightly toward the end and said, “Was it so terrible what I did? Was it so terrible?” he knew he meant not this last betrayal but the ruined faith of a lifetime.

“No, not so terrible,” he lied, giving comfort to the enemy.

Groves used the funeral service as the excuse for his trip. The entire Hill closed down for the afternoon, eerie in the sudden stillness, like a forest in the absence of birds. Connolly had never realized before how noisy the place usually was, voices and motors and the clangs of the metallurgy unit vibrating in a constant hum. Now you could actually hear the wind blow across the mesa, a character in the creation myth. It was even quiet in the crowded theater, only a few whispers and scraping chairs until Professor Weber’s quartet filled the room with some mournful Bach. Afterward, Oppenheimer and Groves sat on the stage with the speakers, Groves in his tight, bullying uniform and Oppenheimer almost languid, the dark cloth of his suit hanging in folds over his gaunt frame. He had refused to speak, ceding his place to Weber as a gesture to the emigre community, and only Connolly was aware that it was a deft evasion, the maneuver of one practiced in compromise.

The speakers said the expected. Eisler’s contribution to science. His contribution to the project. His concern for humanity and the arts. His generosity. His ethical standards. Connolly looked around the room at the hundreds of people in varying stages of grief; Eisler had betrayed all of them. What if they knew? Weber broke down in the middle of his speech, weakened by genuine sentiment, and some people in the audience cried. Eisler was science at its best, the pure inquiry, the search for truth. He even-here Connolly, restless, almost rose to leave-died for it. Connolly thought that the hypocrisy of eulogies was a final mercy to the survivors. If people knew the truth, would there ever be kings? Tyrants were always praised for their love of the people, politicians for their vision, artists for their selflessness. Now Los Alamos had its own martyr, the one they needed, and he did them more honor than most. He had died for science. But Oppenheimer sat on the stage, his legs crossed, and did not speak.

Afterward Connolly walked with Oppenheimer and Groves out toward S Site, an inspection team of three.

“A little hot for a walk, isn’t it?” Groves said, wiping the back of his neck, his uniform already showing splotches of dampness.

“Connolly tells me people listen in my office. Bugs. I know you’d never allow that,” Oppenheimer said, mischievous, “but you know what the intelligence unit is like. Better to indulge them. Interfere with a delusional and they go stark raving. Or so I’m told. Why don’t you take off your jacket?”

Groves, choosing comfort over dignity, flung it over his shoulder and held it with his forefinger. Without the camouflage of the jacket, his stomach strained at his shirt buttons, spilling over his belt.

“You pick one heck of a time to make jokes. We’ve got a real mess on our hands here. I always said this would happen.”

“Yes, you did,” Oppenheimer replied.

“Foreigners and—”

“Would you feel any better if he came from Ohio?”

“All right,” Groves said. “Make your point.”

“These pesky foreigners are making your gadget, so don’t let’s start down that road again. It could have been anybody.”

“Well, you would think that,” he said, backing off but not mollified. “How’s the timetable? Still on track?”

Oppenheimer nodded. “Just. Five minutes’ leeway, give or take a minute. We can’t afford any time off,” he said, directly to Groves.

“That’s why I’m here,” Groves said. “So let’s get started. First, assess the damage. How bad is it? What do they know? Can they make a bomb?”