Kevin Anderson - The Trinity Paradox

Esau sat staring at the clean top of his desk until long after he heard Speer’s staff car drive out of the courtyard. He could not do it! He had no way! They had no heavy water, no uranium, no supplies, no graphite. The remaining researchers were tired and ready to snap—and now they no longer had Heisenberg or Hahn, not even Diebner!

Esau removed some of the progress report files from the cabinet. He stared at the calculations, the projections, the overoptimistic estimates of all their work, cheerily faithful from the days when their biggest worry had been to get more attention, more priority, more funding. Now he wished he could take it all back.

Heisenberg himself had managed to fool everyone for a long time because of the mistakes in his calculations, because of neglecting certain ideas. Esau stared at the complicated numbers. Few people could understand all this. He himself needed to work very hard to put all the pieces together.

It had worked for Heisenberg.

He considered the idea again.

No one would know. It would buy him time. Esau needed time right now, although he didn’t know what to hope for. Perhaps another miracle. Perhaps the end of the war.

He took his pen and stared down at the numbers in the calculations and followed them with his fingertip.

As unobtrusively as he could, Professor Abraham Esau began to alter the data.

Elizabeth woke at the sound. Opening her eyes on the cot, huddled under an Army-issue blanket, she looked at Dick Feynman standing in the doorway. A few of the other VIPs had stayed in the refurbished rooms of the McDonald ranch house; the rest of the building had been turned into administrative headquarters for the Trinity test. Feynman cleared his throat a second time to make sure he had Elizabeth’s attention.

“What’s the matter?” She struggled to an elbow. As her sheet fell from about her, she glanced down. Mrs. Canapelli insisted that she wear a nightgown in the dorm, though Elizabeth had normally slept naked, back in her old timeline. She saw she was still wearing her comfortable clothes, though. It took her a moment to understand where she was, what was going on.

“The test. It’s going to be back on,” Feynman said. “It stopped raining. I thought you were just going to take a nap.”

Elizabeth tried to clear the sleep from her mind. She had been dreaming about something… Livermore, and the protest. Jeff had been with her; he had refused to get arrested. Why had she dreamed of that? It had been years since the demonstration.

And then she remembered where she was—Trinity site, the Gadget, World War II. This was the day! They had postponed the midnight shot because of a freak rainstorm across the desert. And now, by the darkness outside…

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Time to get up. They’ll restart the countdown soon, and we’ll have to get back out to the main bunker.”

She rubbed her arms, getting herself moving. The night before, everyone had been mesmerized by the whole thing, swept up in the final excitement that surrounded the test… and then about eleven o’clock the rain had come. Boiling clouds thousands of feet high had rolled over the dry Jornada del Muerto; lightning bolts lit up the sky, and the thunder tried to compete with the explosion men were waiting to make.

Elizabeth remembered now, the disappointment, the short tempers, the impatience among the scientists. Oppie and General Groves had gotten into a genuine shouting match at the bunker. Elizabeth herself had been dragging, depressed, uncertain. She felt her conscience clamoring, at war with itself. Nobody else knew what was about to happen, what new path they would set the human race on. And she had helped them with it. All her protesting to stop nuclear weapons after it was too late—and now she had had a chance to stop it from the beginning, and she had failed. She had become a part of what she hated… or had she just been brainwashed by the situation? Or had she been brainwashed before? She didn’t know how she could ever tell.

She had not slept well for several nights at the site. In the test bunker, with the countdown halted under the pouring rain and the scientists fidgeting, grumbling to each other, she had just sulked. Dick Feynman had encouraged her to go lie down when the rest of them traveled back to the ranch house to wait out the storm.

When she had leaned back on the old canvas cot, listening to water trickle through leaks in the old roof, smelling the drenched desert, she knew the test could not take place. The weather would have to be perfect. General Groves would want nothing to ruin his display.

Elizabeth blinked and looked at her grubby clothes. Feynman kept staring at her, flashing his cockeyed, suggestive grin. She felt stiff and dirty. How about a long hot shower, with plenty of lather, good shampoo, then a blow dryer? A blow dryer—she hadn’t used one in a year and a half. Even a shower in this desert hellhole seemed beyond all possibilities.

“How long to the detonation?”

“Two hours at the most. They haven’t officially announced it yet. Oppie wants a new report from the meteorologist first. The general looks like a kid who’s just had Christmas canceled on him.”

Elizabeth started to get up, but Feynman didn’t move to give her some privacy. She plucked at the buttons on her blouse. “Um, could you give me a minute to change into some clean clothes? Want to dress up nice for the atomic blast, you know.”

Feynman raised his eyebrows. “If you insist.” He backed to the door. “I’ll meet you outside.”

Once the door closed, Elizabeth struggled into her extra pair of khaki dungarees. She had gotten them from the PX at Los Alamos. Her one pair of blue jeans no longer fit her well. She had gained weight, sitting around too much, having a sedentary life, getting too comfortable.

Too comfortable, too accepting of what was going on. She had stopped fighting and surrendered. After the test, though, she could really begin her debate, to convince people never to use the terrible weapon they had developed. After their years of effort and billions of dollars of expense, Elizabeth knew the President would have to see the Gadget work. She just had to convince everyone not to use it on people, not on Germany, not on Japan. Somehow, she was trying too hard to make herself believe that General Groves and the others would listen to her.

She met Feynman outside the door. “Ready?”

“Yeah. Let’s check in with Oppie.” Feynman led the way down the hall to the living room.

Bright pools of illumination shone from trouble lights hooked onto the wall. Cigar smoke curled up to the ceiling in a blue haze. Elizabeth coughed, feeling her tired eyes stinging already; no one noticed that she and Feynman had arrived.

Serious-looking military officers stood at one end of the wall, fidgeting as if they were trying to be comfortable. Their close-cropped haircuts, identical long-sleeve khaki uniforms, and dark ties made them indistinguishable from one another.

A line of senior Project physicists faced the military men. The scientists also dressed alike—white shirts, dark pants, a few even wore ties, but they lounged in chairs. Oppenheimer and General Groves spoke quietly in the center of the room. Smoke rose from Oppie’s pipe and Groves’s cigar. Oppie kept waving his hands, holding them chest high in a gesture that made him look like a poorly made scarecrow.