Kevin Anderson: The Trinity Paradox

The last vehicle pulled away from the ranch house and followed the others down the dirt path. She recognized none of the remaining scientists in the back. All of the camaraderie she had felt as the Project had come to its conclusion seemed to have flown away. Just as she had arrived here alone, now she stood with Fox—she might as well have been alone again. She didn’t want to be with him. Everything had changed, she had changed. She wasn’t sure she liked—or understood—what had happened to her.

The times with General Groves, Dick Feynman, and even Mrs. Canapelli had provided her with a means to cope with this new timeline. She would never have made it this far without the support she’d gotten from the others.

She had used Graham Fox as a crutch to help her after she had tried to assassinate Oppenheimer. That former Elizabeth seemed a stranger to her now. How could she have thought about murdering someone in cold blood? Hadn’t Fox himself mentioned it, if only in conversation?

Now that the bomb was about to detonate, now that the life she had lived for the past year was suddenly coming to a head, she had nothing that was her own. Nothing but the companionship of the one man here who resented the bomb as much as she once had. Now Fox hated it more. In his eyes she must be a traitor to what she had believed.

Oh, crap. She pushed back her hair and sat back in Fox’s jeep. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t know what you expect to accomplish.” Fox didn’t look at her as he gripped the steering wheel. His knuckles shone white as he gripped the shift lever.

Ten miles away, the blinking red light on top of the shot tower was barely visible. Elizabeth walked around the clunky-looking diagnostic electronics as Fox worked on his collection device. The equipment contained strip charts with red marker pens, vacuum tubes, and gauges with wobbling needles. A hundred-foot-tall telephone pole stood at her right, from which ran a bundle of wires. She could see a small package attached to every ten feet up the side of the pole. Behind her a tinny voice came from an Army field radio propped against the car. “Thirty minutes to zero.”

Fox wiped his dusty hands and joined her. He nodded toward the pole. “Each instrumentation package has a velocimeter, a barometer, thermometer, and flypaper.”

“Flypaper?”

“To catch radioactive debris in the wind. The other stuff is to correlate the wind velocity, pressure, and temperature of the blast wave. My flypaper will give us an idea of the total radioactivity in this part of the explosion.” Fox seemed disinterested in what he was doing, rattling off the information as if he were lecturing in front of a class.

Elizabeth turned back to the shot tower. She felt the tension like a knot in her stomach. A light glow appeared behind the mountain, where the sun struggled to come up over the horizon. The distant mountains looked like jaws ready to bite down on the dawn.

Fox didn’t speak much. The desert around them remained absolutely quiet. Elizabeth thought it strange not to hear at least some noise: for the past few days, sounds of hammering, sawing, welding, cursing, and nervous laughter had filled the camp. But now she heard nothing. The desert held its breath, waiting for the test, waiting for the world to change.

Fox fumbled in a knapsack. “Here. Use this suntan lotion. No telling how much protection we’ll need from this faraway.”

“What?” She grasped the bottle of sunscreen.

“We’re likely to get hit with a healthy dose of radiation centered about the ultraviolet. That means we could get sunburned from the blast.” He picked up a pair of sunglasses from the portable table. “And wear these. We must face the opposite direction until after the initial flash, but then we can turn around.”

“Twenty-five minutes,” the tinny voice said from the radio.

Elizabeth held up the glasses; in the darkness she could barely see through the dark lenses. She lowered the glasses. “Graham?”

“Yes?”’

“What’s with the bunker? Why this? Why did you need to take me out here?”

“What do you mean?” He avoided her expression and mumbled his words.

“You know damned well what I mean.”

Fox thrust his hands in his pockets and stared off toward the shot tower.

Elizabeth allowed him a minute of silence before speaking. “Then what is it? My God, you know it’s over between us. Give it up and quit resenting me.”

“Resenting you?” He whirled on her. “I opened myself up to you! I don’t make friends easily, but I let you in. I trust my friends. I value them. I can’t trust you anymore. You’ve changed too much. You’ve become one of them. You’re dazzled by all this, and you can’t think of the consequences anymore. You sold your conscience for a pat on the back.”

Elizabeth winced, then defended herself with anger. “Just because I slept with you a few times doesn’t make us soul mates. We’re too different. I don’t agree with—”

“Just because you slept with me? Is that all it means to you? An amusing little roll on the mattress?” Fox seethed with his anger, but then he lowered his voice in defeat. “I thought you were like me. I thought you understood exactly what sort of monster we were creating here. I thought you wanted to work with me from the inside, to stop it. Do what your conscience tells you to do—those were your own words, Elizabeth! But you change your conscience whenever it’s convenient—”

She slapped him, but didn’t know which of them felt the most stung. “It’s not like that. This test will go off, but I don’t know what will happen next. I used to know. New York never got wiped out. Germany surrendered. President Truman dropped the bomb first on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki. He used both the plutonium bomb and then the uranium bomb.” Elizabeth turned away from him and felt herself shaking. “This isn’t how it happened at all.”

Fox blinked in confusion. “President Truman? What are you talking about? Roosevelt and Truman lost the election. They want to use the bomb on Germany, not on Japan.”

“This is a different timeline! History has changed, somehow. I changed it. Everything is all messed up.”

Fox grabbed her shoulders. “Elizabeth, what on earth are you saying? Who are you? I thought you were planted here. A German spy or saboteur or something. I never reported you because I thought we were both working toward the same goals, but then you went over to them!”

Elizabeth pulled away from him in shock. “A German spy? You’ve got to be kidding! I’m from the future. The future! Or a different future, at least. I caused an accident, I woke up back here. I don’t know how it all happened. I wanted to change things, fix it for the better, but now I think maybe I should have left it alone, left everything alone. A spy?”

Elizabeth froze, about to laugh, but then her eyes widened. “Are yow?” She grabbed the front of his white shirt. She could see dust and sweat stains on the material. One of the buttons pulled off as she gripped him. “Graham, what did you do to the bunker? Tell me!”

“Elizabeth, you’re insane. From the future? You don’t know what’s happening here. You can’t understand—”

She struck him again across the mouth, hard enough to split his lip. “What did you do to the bunker?”

Fox flinched, then glared at her.

“Twenty minutes,” the announcer said.

He shoved her away. “Too late now anyway. Somebody must do something to stop the madness before it begins. Germany showed restraint. They proved they could control their destructive urges. I’m not at all convinced we can do the same. You’ve seen the look in General Groves’s eyes. He wants this weapon, he wants to see the blast. He wants to take over the world with it. He’ll have a better Big Stick than any other military commander has ever had.”