Kevin Anderson - The Trinity Paradox

But that didn’t matter. She had to get the people out of the bunker. Feynman, Oppie, Groves, Fermi, von Neumann, a bunch of other Project scientists, a New York Times reporter, a dozen military men, all waiting for the Gadget to go off, and not even knowing they were sitting on another bomb themselves.

She spotted something—someone standing outside the bunker, as if he had just stood up and noticed the oncoming jeep. She tried to keep her hand on the horn, but kept bouncing up with the potholes. She steered with one hand and tried to swerve to miss a cactus the size of a tire, then ran over a broken mesquite bush instead.

The tire exploded, causing the jeep to lurch and bounce, barely avoiding a rollover. “Dammit!” she screamed, and tried to keep the jeep moving, but it caught in a pothole and spun around in the other direction.

Without a second to waste, Elizabeth leaped away from the steering wheel and ran toward the command bunker. She could see it just over the rise in front of her. She sprinted so quickly, leaning forward, that she sprawled on her face in the wet sand, got up again, then kept going.

“Get out of the bunker! Out!” She screamed until her voice fell hoarse. “Get out of there!”

Back at the bunker another person joined the first one outside, then another. One of them pointed at her, but the other two whirled around to look at the tower, then all three made frantic motions with their hands, urging her to hurry.

“No, you idiots! Not me!” Panting as if each breath were being ripped from her lungs, she grew closer. “Out of the bunker!” She had to make them hear her. She took a deep breath and put all her strength behind shouting one word. “Bomb!”

She scrambled ahead and could hear faint words called back to her. “Fifteen seconds until the bomb! Hurry!”

They were not thinking of the right bomb. With more energy than she knew she possessed, Elizabeth threw herself forward. She didn’t recognize the military men standing outside it, motioning to her. They had all turned to watch the tower. The countdown clicked off its final few seconds.

“Get out of the bunker! Please!” she cried. “Out!”

Several people heard her and came to the doorway. The military men ducked down. “Get them out! There’s a bomb! Sabotage!” Elizabeth said again, but she had little force left behind her voice. “They’re going to die!”

Feynman stepped to the doorway. He wore black sunglasses and had suntan cream smeared on his face. He saw her, frowned, and instantly recognized something was wrong. He turned back to the bunker entrance and shouted. Some of the people inside looked startled and reacted with alarm, moving toward the doorway.

As Elizabeth fell to her knees at the last embankments outside the bunker, she could see Oppenheimer and General Groves sitting side by side, ignoring all the rest of the commotion. Oppie turned to her, blinking at seeing Elizabeth there. “A bomb! Get out!” she said one more time, but Oppenheimer flinched and turned back to the slit window, staring through smoked glass and focusing all his attention on the shot tower. One of the military men reached out to grab the general’s shoulder.

“…one… zero!”

Far across the desert, a flash, bright enough to deaden all her senses, then everything went dark. At the same time, the bunker erupted like a volcano. She heard an instant of sound like the roar of a world breaking apart, then her ears were swallowed in a blanket of shocked silence.

Time seemed to go in slow motion. Elizabeth brought her other hand up to her eyes. Purple splotches filled her vision, like a thousand flashbulbs going off at once. Dirt filled her mouth as she rolled; a smell of gasoline seared her nose.

The ground moved from both explosions. Dirt, chunks of rock, shrapnel thanked to the earth around her. The packed sand gave a lurch, then settled down to a long rolling motion in the shock wave from the atomic blast, the same feeling as the San Francisco earthquake of ‘89, which she had felt back at Berkeley.

She could hear or see no other reaction from any of the gathered observers. Every person had to experience this alone, to deal with it in his or her own way.

And then the wind struck. A hot, smacking pop that grew and grew, and never seemed to quit. The wind howled, pushed her back, away from the tower, away from the bunker. Away from the bomb…

She forced her eyes open and tried to see, but still the purple-yellow splotches obscured her vision. She fought against the wind that tried to shove her away from the people she had been trying to save.

And just as suddenly, the wind reversed itself. It came as a shallow, haunting roar that tried to suck her back in the opposite direction, like an undertow into the sea, into the past, into the future.

But she could never go back. She had to live with what she had helped create.

She struggled to her knees. At her left came a growing heat. She turned, still unable to see. The blindness persisted. But as she faced the heat, she felt as if she could feel the growth of the fireball—it should have already risen thousands of feet by now, boiled into the upper atmosphere and spread out in a yellow-orange mushroom cloud.

The genie had escaped its bottle.

“I am become death, the shatterer of worlds,” Elizabeth said.

Oppenheimer was supposed to say that. She didn’t think he was around to quote from the Bhagavad Gita.

When the protester walked through the open door into Elizabeth’s art gallery, her radio in back was playing yet another Frank Sinatra song. She wondered if she would live long enough to hear Led Zeppelin, or even the Beatles.

The protester wore a neat skirt suit, but Elizabeth could spot her intentions immediately. She carried the leaflets under her arm like a weapon.

Elizabeth rocked back in her chair and watched her look around the small gallery, pretending to be interested in the pottery and sand paintings. Outside in the street a man and woman walked by with a small child. They were conservatively dressed in light slacks and billowing shirts, perfect for the Santa Fe summer sun but not for the cool evenings.

The protester glanced up to meet her gaze, smiling. She fidgeted; she was new at this, Elizabeth could tell. Elizabeth turned her head to the side so she could see her clearly, since she could never look at anything straight on again. Not since the Trinity blast.

The woman opened her mouth as if she were going to ask her a question, but when Elizabeth did not meet her gaze, she swallowed and pulled out one of her leaflets instead. Elizabeth’s offset gaze always disturbed people.

The center part of her vision was gone, and she could see only out of the corners of her eyes. She didn’t want to remember the old days, eight years before, but the Trinity test was burned in her memory forever, every time she opened her eyes. The towering, glowing mushroom cloud that branded itself onto her retinas so that she had seen it for days, while recuperating.

“Excuse me, ma’am. I was wondering if I could talk to you for a moment? It’s very important to the future of all of us.”

The piece of newsprint bore the words stop atomic warfare!

She replaced her shiver in her spine with a wry smile. “Of course I’ll look at it.” She held the paper to the side to read the words.