Kevin Anderson: The Trinity Paradox

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 this—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.”