The Trinity Paradox

1 Los Alamos, New Mexico June

Five hundred feet above the bottom of Ancho Canyon, Elizabeth Devane lay behind a screen of scrub oak and pinon, wondering if she could really stop the newest weapons test. Living among the other protesters in Santa Fe hadn’t helped her confidence in actually accomplishing something. She was fed up with pointless arguing, passing out leaflets, getting the brush-off from people.

Elizabeth didn’t like to call it “sabotage,” but this time the end would justify the means.

“What do you think?” Jeff’s voice came from behind her, carrying a nervous bite. “I see a rent-a-cop and a few guys packing up.”

Elizabeth didn’t turn. “Can you tell if they’re getting ready to leave?” She barely heard a sound as Jeff Maple crawled up beside her on his elbows. Thunder from an early New Mexican storm, still miles away, rolled into the canyon.

“Looks like they’re done with that NCP thing.”

“MCG,” corrected Elizabeth. “Get your acronyms right.” She squinted, wishing that she had packed her own pair of binoculars.’ ‘I can’t tell if they’re done with it or not.”

The Los Alamos workers moved away from the MagnetoCumulative Generator and stood at the edge of the concrete pad. A cement apron stretched fifty feet on a side with the MCG in the center. The ten-foot-long explosive generator looked like a fat cigar with thick cables wrapped around its circumference; the wires ran across the pad to a conduit that plunged into the ground.

All details of the MCG test were classified, so Elizabeth didn’t really know what she and Jeff would be destroying—only that it was important.

Several of the men walked away from the pad to a bunker in the shadow of the canyon wall. Elizabeth rubbed her eyes and tried to make out the figures in the dimness, but the sun was just over the top of the Jemez mountains, shining between clouds into her eyes. She shook her head in disgust and took out her canteen. “I can’t see what they’re doing.”

“Whatever it is, they’re done for today. Do you think they’re going to shoot the test tomorrow?” Again Jeff’s voice sounded nervous.

“If they’re on schedule. That means we’ve got to do our work tonight.”

Jeff nodded. For now, they would have to wait. Nobody could see them this high up the canyon. She wished Jeff had known how to ride a horse; then they would not have needed to backpack all the way around the rear of the canyon, coming down from the narrows, to where the Los Alamos security strung only barbed-wire and chain-link fence to keep intruders away.

Elizabeth looked down at her freckled arms, trying to see if she had been sunburned during the day’s hike. Her skin was pale, and with her reddish hair she burned easily, but she had used liberal amounts of unscented sunblock. She tied her shoulder-length hair back with a leather thong to keep it away from her neck.

The men below moved out of the bunker shadows, unrolling a tarp over the scrub-covered ground. They raised two metal poles in the center and secured the tent over the MCG, protecting it against rain. Finally finished, the workers stepped over a small stream that ran through the canyon, then made for gray government pickup trucks parked in the dirt. Snippets of conversation drifted up from the canyon floor, echoing off the rocky walls. Everyone left; not even the rent-a-cop remained behind. The lab workers wouldn’t expect that anyone could get past the five-hundred-foot cliffs. Elizabeth waited until the last man left the pad, then rolled over to her side.

Jeff continued to watch the experimental site as Elizabeth studied his face. His red-framed glasses contrasted with tanned and dusty skin. A sheen of sweat lingered in his curly brown hair. She remembered how his little body had moved against her the night before, for the first time in many years. “Glad you came down from Berkeley, Jeff,” she said.

Jeff hesitated, then said softly, “Yeah, it’s nice to see you again. I still think about us a lot.”

“I knew I could count on you to help. Everyone else is just talk.”

“That’s what you always said about me.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Not having second thoughts, are you?”

He snorted, then reached out to grasp her shoulder. “No way.” But his hand shook as he squeezed.

He looked up suddenly and extended his arm. “Look, I found an easier way to get down. Once it’s dark we can get going.”

“Yeah, if we can beat the rain.”

She turned back to the canyon. Wisps of white steam-probably liquid nitrogen venting—came from the cables that ran up to the MCG under the tarp. Shadows extended over the entire mesa as the sun set; it looked like a race between the darkness and the clouds. The cliffs appeared steeper in the dusk.

As the last truck pulled out from the test site, guards chained and padlocked the gate behind them. Elizabeth waited for the truck to disappear from sight down the winding canyon road—it was a three-mile drive down to the main security gate at the highway.

“Still time to back out,” Jeff said hopefully.

Elizabeth’s eyes widened and she snapped at him. “I’m not backing out! If you and I don’t go tonight, all this testing is never going to stop. We have to make our point now, show them that we won’t stand for bigger and better weapons—the world doesn’t need the stuff anymore.”

Jeff smiled in the impish way that could always mollify her. “Just making sure you haven’t gotten too tainted by your trendy Santa Fe activists.” He didn’t sound convincing.

“Wimps,” she said with a scowl.

He surprised her by putting his hand behind her head and pulling her face to his. It was a spontaneous kiss, but not at all tentative. His skin was warm, and she ran her hand along his arm. They brushed tongues, lingered a moment, then broke off at the same time. “If we go now, we’re in it for good.”

“Then let’s get going,” Elizabeth said. “There’s nobody else around.”

The news of the accidental deaths at Los Alamos had shocked her—not so much from learning that the accident had been connected with the National Verification Initiative, but from the callous way in which the debacle had been covered up. A technician and some old scientist had died in the equipment foul-up; three other workers had suffocated when a fire-suppressant system dumped Halon into the sealed bay.

Five human beings had given their lives so a “test” of weapons technology could proceed. And what was the point anymore? The Berlin Wall had come down, the Iron Curtain rusted away. Iraq had been defeated in only a couple of months. Nuclear stockpiles were being dismantled around the world, and the U.S. and the Soviet Union behaved like friends. So why spend billions more dollars to develop super weapons? Were they afraid Brazil might send up a defensive shield to keep the U.S. from launching its own rockets?

She and her Berkeley activist friends, or even the Santa Fe members of the United Conscience Group, had different ideas about what the money might better be spent on— whether social programs, or AIDS research, or assisting the development of Third World countries. Even paying off the national debt would be a better use of the money!

After a beer or two Jeff would argue that the real fear now lay in the second-generation players in the nuclear game, Iraq, South Africa, Libya, North Korea. Simple nuclear weapons technology was well-known and available, and if not for the extraordinary difficulties in extracting fissionable material such as uranium-235 or plutonium, any tin-pot dictator could make his own Bomb. By this point in his conversation, Jeff’s voice was usually rising. Any resourceful terrorist could put together a “crude” Scotch-tape-and-bubble-gum bomb that had a yield larger than the one dropped on Hiroshima back in 1945.

Elizabeth agreed it was only a lucky fluke that the United States and the Soviet Union had survived their nuclear adolescence; she wasn’t confident that every other country would be so well-behaved. She wished the things had never been invented in the first place. But how could you close Pandora’s Box after the lid had been blown sky-high?

Weapons scientists, like the ones at Los Alamos, continued to develop new methods of destruction, opening new Pandora’s boxes so that all generations to follow would have more and more to fear. The designers kept at their work, even after disasters like the recent capacitor accident, even if it required them to ignore the threat to human lives.

The official Los Alamos press release implied that nothing serious had happened. When the Challenger had exploded, NASA shut down for over a year—but when a major weapons program went wrong, the work barely paused. According to the news, a safety inspection and official inquiry would be scheduled “in the near future.”

It was just like the cover-up in Los Angeles. Ted Walblaken had been an old friend when Elizabeth had worked the books for United Atomics. But she had left the giant defense contractor right after Ted’s death, after United Atomics tried to assure the press, and Ted’s fellow employees, that it could not be proved a work-related radiation exposure had caused his cancer.

That had been a turning point for her. She felt as if someone had shaken her awake from a nightmare she hadn’t even known she was having.

And now this Los Alamos test was scheduled, hardly a week after five people had died in a lab accident. Shouldn’t all research have been shut down and reassessed? Nobody seemed to care.

Elizabeth had stood in the Santa Fe office of the United Conscience Group, her fingers clenched around the newspaper clipping. The office had little furniture, a phone and a few desks, a poster on the wall showing the burned corpse of a Nagasaki victim sprawled above the slogan, “Technical Excellence Brought to You by the Los Alamos National Laboratory.” The United Conscience Group looked like a fly-by-night company in a low-rent office, but they had been active since the Gulf War.

Elizabeth scowled. If you could call this “active.”

Dave, Tim, and Marcia all reacted with suitable outrage at the news of the lab accident, then they made the appropriate “You’re not serious!” response when Elizabeth told them that the other weapons tests were going to continue on schedule at Los Alamos. She knew what would happen next.

Dave rubbed his hands together. “All right, people, we’ve got to get moving on this! Let’s contact the local radio stations, Albuquerque too, to see if we can get on the air. Tim, why don’t you draft a few letters to the editor? Marcia, you want to draw up some flyers and get them printed? We’ll have to go out and hit the street corners. I’ll get on the phone and round up all the help we can get. Let’s nip this in the bud—time to make ourselves felt!”

Rah, rah, Elizabeth thought, then left the office before Dave could assign her some insipid duties. Letters to the editor? Flyers? Yeah, that would sure make people tremble in their seats and change the world; these guys must have thought they were back in the sixties. The United Conscience Group had never done anything but talk, and as the cliché said so appropriately, actions speak louder than words.

That afternoon, she and Jeff had scaled the ten-foot-high fence that encircled the remote testing site. The canyon terrain was too rugged for most people even to attempt to hike, though the restricted area lay only a few miles from the wilderness of Bandelier National Monument. No one had questioned Elizabeth and her companion as they left the old visitor’s center building, setting off for the backcountry.’

From their resting spot partway down the canyon wall, Elizabeth surveyed the surrounding terrain. In the coming darkness, it was impossible to see into the depths of the canyon. “Keep a watch for headlights coming up the road. Patrols are the only surveillance they’ll use.”

“Yeah.”

Elizabeth pulled her backpack over her shoulders. The equipment inside clanked together. Jeff turned her around and fumbled with rearranging the chisels, hammer, and several sharp spikes so they would make no more noise. They each ate a trail bar in silence, then Jeff led the way down the tortuous route he had spotted.

She heard only his breathing as the two of them moved into the falling darkness. The shadows stretched longer, making it more difficult to find the appropriate handholds and footholds. The rocks felt warm against her skin, but they would cool rapidly at night. In little hollows along the cliffs, evening birds began to chatter with the sunset.

Time contracted for her. She followed Jeff, made sure she did nothing clumsy or stupid focused her concentration on the ominous MCG equipment sitting under the tarp. She thought of it as a dragon waiting to be slain.

They finished their descent without incident. She shot a quick glance up to the top of the cliffs—she couldn’t see the craggy steepness they had just negotiated.

Rumbles from the approaching storm rolled down the canyon. Light from the full moon peering over the canyon rim splashed over the ground, lighting the rocks with an eerie glow. As the moon slipped behind the clouds they had to make their way by touch the last few hundred feet.

Jeff stood beside her on the cement pad, catching his breath. The tarp stood high enough on its metal support poles that they could easily stand under the rippling cloth. He flicked his glance from side to side. “Feels like we’re on stage. Let’s hurry up.”

Elizabeth shrugged the pack from her shoulders. She flicked on a flashlight and unzipped the back pocket, pulling out a pair of cotton gloves.

“What are those for?” Jeff whispered. She didn’t know why he kept so quiet—they would be making enough noise in a few minutes.

“They’ve got my fingerprints on file, when I was arrested at Livermore, remember?” She felt a flash of annoyance. The arrest had been a source of friction between them, over who was willing to go furthest for their beliefs.

Jeff didn’t reply, but stepped to the MCG. He put his hands on his hips; from the taut muscles on his back, Elizabeth could see he was angry. The tarp flapped in a breeze, making the support ropes creak.

The explosive device looked like a torpedo lying on the pad. Elizabeth walked around it, stepping over the thick cables that ran up from a manhole to the device. Jeff squatted by the opening and directed his light down inside.

“The wires run underneath the pad. Probably to the bunker.” One of the thick hoses leaked white vapor. He ran a hand along the hose, then jerked it away. “It’s cold as an iceberg!”

“Probably liquid nitrogen.”

“Is it dangerous?”

She made a deprecating comment about Humanities majors, but Jeff didn’t hear her.

Elizabeth touched the MCG itself, half expecting the cylinder to rear up, expose teeth and devour her. Nothing happened. She glanced back at Jeff. “Come on. Looks like this is all set up. Keep away from the wires and just smash as much as you can.”

“We should have brought those explosives.” He looked at the large machine. “Would have made this a lot easier.”

“This will be more… personal. Think of it as smashing an abandoned car.”

Elizabeth took the hammer and chisel and a handful of spikes from her pack. Jeff had a hand sledge and a rubber-handled hatchet. She followed the vapor-emitting hose to where a series of wires ran around the MCG’s circumference. She wanted to destroy the thing, but her own curiosity made her try to figure everything out. She had enough of a physics and engineering background that she should be able to identify the pieces of equipment at least.

Though her MBA had come after she left United Atomics, after Ted Walblaken had died of his cancer, Elizabeth had taken an undergraduate degree in physics from Berkeley. She knew the basics behind the MCG. Explosives compressing magnetic fields could be used to power exotic strategic weapons. This device here would be only a simple test run before the big scale-ups to be conducted at the Nevada Test Site. But she and Jeff could never have broken into the giant Nevada complex. Here the security seemed ridiculously lax.

But why use liquid nitrogen in the setup? The MCG didn’t need it. Unless it was for something else…

She followed the cable to the front of the device. The cable split off to an array of solenoid rings.

Jeff joined her, no longer sounding nervous; he hefted his sledge. “Let’s do it.” The tarp ropes made sharp noises as the wind gusted. A growl of thunder rumbled far overhead. “That storm is going to make this like something out of Wagner.”

“I’d rather hear Rush,” Elizabeth said. “Their song about the Manhattan Project might be appropriate right now.” She pointed at the array. “I bet that feed line supplies liquid nitrogen to this solenoid—a superconducting magnet. Whatever they’re testing needs this to drive it.”

“I’ll start at the other end.” He didn’t seem interested in what the device did or how it worked. That didn’t surprise her.

Elizabeth turned for her tools as thunder exploded from the clouds above. Picking up the chisel and hammer, she decided to keep the nitrogen line intact—let that be the finale—and go after the magnet. Whatever damage she could do to the delicate magnet section would slow down the test. And if Jeff could smash the MCG itself, then the Department of Energy would have to invest time and money in constructing another one. A breach of the vacuum chambers, a distortion of the conducting walls, severed wires—anything could cause enormous damage to such a complicated setup.

Maybe by then somebody would get the point.

From the size of the device, the Los Alamos scientists must have packed a thousand pounds of high explosive around the various sections. The explosive must be nonvolatile, she thought, with the way the men had worked around the area. And if they had left it overnight, then it must not be any worse than leaving TNT secured. Nothing to worry about.

Outside, the wind whipped through the canyon, rattling the brush and creaking the tent poles. Hadn’t there been a big storm the night before the first atomic test back in World War II? She seemed to recall they had almost canceled the shot because of it. If the Manhattan Project scientists had failed back then, she mused, she would not need to be here now.

Elizabeth used the chisel to pry away the casing surrounding the magnets. She could hear Jeff banging away at the bottom of the MCG, tearing insulators from the conductive layers. Broken glass tinkled as he brought the sledge down on a diagnostic panel. The storm covered their noises, but it would be hell to climb back up the canyon wall.

Jeff pounded the long spikes through the vacuum chamber walls. Elizabeth jammed her chisel into the magnet and pried down on the solenoid connections. She looked up and saw Jeff raising the sledge above what looked to be the self-contained core of the MCG device, the chamber that held everything trapped within. A volley of lightning skittered across the sky, backlighting the scene with a silver and white glare. Jeff had a studied look on his face as he brought the sledge down…

Her eyes barely had time to react to the explosion belching along the metal cylinder as everything blew up around Jeff. Blue-white afterimages mixed with the purple splotches blazing from inside her eyes. She couldn’t hear a thing—it all happened so fast. A wave of distorted force swept over her, like a gigantic fist hurling her out of the universe—

2 Los Alamos June 1943

Daylight again. It had to be—nothing could be that bright with her eyes still closed. But why did the light seem to come from inside her head?

A splitting headache ran from the back to the front of Elizabeth’s skull. Her side ached, and she had trouble breathing. She felt giddy, as if she were spinning on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Her eyes wouldn’t work. What frightened her most was that her body wouldn’t stop twitching, as if every fiber had been stretched on a rack, and the nerves kept misfiring.

At least the ground was soft. She must have been thrown clear of the concrete pad when the MCG… exploded. MagnetoCumulative Generator…

Everything fell into place. The explosion, the lightning, Jeff standing with his sledgehammer held high like Conan the Peace Activist.

She had to get up. She had to move. Someone must have seen the explosion. She and Jeff had to climb back out of the canyon, hide from the security guards. They had to run, to get out of the storm.

She couldn’t even manage to open her eyes. But it felt like sunshine warming her skin.

As Elizabeth drifted back to unconsciousness, she still couldn’t tell what exactly had happened….

Elizabeth woke with a start. Try it again. She had no idea how much time had passed.

She forced her eyes open and saw that she lay on a slope, her feet pointing uphill. She wondered if Jeff had dragged her away from the MCG site, into hiding. One arm flopped behind her head, numb with the ice prickles of impaired circulation. She tried to move, but her muscles felt so tired they hurt.

The ground smelled damp. The storm had passed by, but clouds still covered the sky. Whatever had happened must have knocked them both senseless. She couldn’t hear Jeff beside her.

The implications hit her at once: the Los Alamos scientists would be returning with the guards. They would find their test apparatus ruined. Security should have been here already.

“Jeff—” She coughed from the dust in her throat. Where was he? She tried to turn her head, but black fuzz obscured her vision. As she lifted her left arm she yelped in pain. She flexed her wrist—the arm didn’t seem to be broken. She pushed up on the opposite elbow. Her eyes wouldn’t focus properly.

“Jeff!” Elizabeth sucked in a breath, and at last her vision cleared. Her heart skipped a beat at what she saw.

Jeff lay crumpled on the ground thirty feet away. Not moving.

Elizabeth struggled onto her hands and knees. It took a second for the dizziness to pass, but she focused on Jeff and crawled over to him on all fours. “Jeff?” She slowed as she approached, then stopped a yard away, ready to retch.

His legs beneath the knees were… missing; but no blood flowed from the wound. His legs looked as if they had been fused together. He lay at the lip of a shallow crater ten feet across, as if he had been caught at the edge of an explosion, too close to the fury that had knocked her senseless. His red-rimmed glasses lay undamaged beside him in the crater.

“Oh, God. Jeff.” Elizabeth ignored her pain and knelt beside him. She fought to keep her consciousness. Tears stung her eyes and she trembled, just looking at him. Reaching out with one hand, she ran a hand over his chest, then knelt and put an ear to his mouth. Nothing. Touching the artery in his neck gave the same result. He felt cold to the touch.

She checked again, then pounded on his chest, more in despair and frustration than in any attempt to revive him.

Elizabeth dug her fingers into Jeff’s curly hair, her face close to his. Tears gathered, and a paralyzing flow of memories overwhelmed her. Living with him in a small flat near the Berkeley campus. Arguing about political issues. Working on her MBA while he studied history, or poetry, or whatever he fancied that semester. They both played guitar on the doorstep, watching bicyclists or joggers go by.

She had not seen him for several years after their breakup, not until she had called him to come down to Santa Fe. To come help her with this, and maybe rebuild their relationship. Now weapons research had claimed another victim….

Elizabeth looked around, her shoulders trembling. She tried to swallow, and her throat ached from the dryness. But she began to think clearly. Jeff always admired her for that; even when she got emotional about the issues, she could somehow step back and take matters in hand. No matter how badly she was hurting.

But not now. She couldn’t move. She stared at Jeff’s lifeless body for a long time. No one came—no security forces, no scientists, nothing. She forced her eyes from his legs. The sight was all wrong; it just did not belong. Something very strange had happened.

Elizabeth didn’t know how much time passed before she snapped out of her daze and felt engulfed in panic. She had to do something, get him out of here. They couldn’t be caught now, not like this. She didn’t want the security forces to find either of them. It was a felony simply to trespass on federal grounds.

“Jeff…” She leaned over to kiss his forehead. Dust stuck to his open eyes, and she brushed the lids closed.

Jeff would have been disappointed with her if he knew she’d risked getting herself caught because of sentimentality over him. She had to smother the grief for now. Let it come back a little at a time, when she could afford it.

With an effort, she visualized herself shifting into high gear, shutting down the unnecessary thoughts like extraneous subsystems. Survival of the fittest. She could do nothing to help Jeff now. She had to start thinking about herself.

That was what he would have said to her. She would mourn later, Elizabeth told herself again, when it was safe.

She looked around.

Something else seemed wrong.

From the location of the sun, it had to be early morning. She might have time to drag Jeff’s body out of the way, maybe hide it and come back later after the scientists had left. No, the security crew would get here and comb the area once they found the wrecked apparatus. Someone should have been here long before to check if the storm itself had caused any damage.

She could never carry Jeff far. There were thousands of places to hide, little cave notches in the cliffside, if she could only get the body far enough from the experimental site—

And then it hit her: the experimental site.

Even if the MCG explosion had sent them flying a hundred yards, she still should have been able to see the concrete pad, the dirt berm covering the explosive facility, even the road that ran down the canyon to the chain-link gate.

Elizabeth got to her feet, swaying with dizziness as she surveyed the canyon. She spotted the ledge at the top of the cliff where she and Jeff had waited, the stream winding down the canyon floor, pinon and scrub brush. Everything looked unchanged.

Except that every trace of human influence had vanished. It was as if someone had come along and completely cleaned up the MCG apparatus, the pad, the road, everything.

As if the site had never been here at all.

Elizabeth had never done drugs back at Berkeley, so this wasn’t some sort of flashback. Maybe she had hit her head in the explosion, she thought. Maybe none of this was really happening.

Maybe it was.

She took care to hide Jeff’s body in one of the natural caves that dotted the cliff wall, shallow impressions weathered into the soft tuff. The rock was too hard to dig. She couldn’t find any way to bury him, no way to keep the animals away. It made her sick to think of leaving him there, unprotected, unmarked. Not unremembered. She tried not to look at his fused legs or the blood splotches on his tan shirt as she piled rocks beside him. It took an hour to cover up the shallow depression in the rock, a cairn for him.

When Elizabeth was done, she stared tight-lipped at his makeshift grave. She stood for several moments, then whispered, “Good-bye, Jeff,” and turned away while she still could.

She had heard no sound, no sign of any traffic, though hours had passed. She decided to climb to the top of the mesa, away from the canyon floor, so as not to run into one of the Los Alamos scientists. When and if things got back to normal, she wanted the situation to be in her favor. And on her own terms.

Exhaustion sapped at Elizabeth as she climbed back up the canyon wall, but still she made considerably better time in the daylight than she had last night. Even the chain-link fence was gone. She made her way down the canyon rim toward the Park Service road that would lead to the Bandelier Monument headquarters and visitor’s center where they had parked the Bronco.

The second shock came when she couldn’t find the road.

New Mexico State Road 4 should have been at the bottom of the canyon, winding its way to the national monument, looping around to the cluster of homes called White Rock, then back to the city of Los Alamos. She found only a faint horse trail disappearing into the distance. The New Mexican foothills showed no other sign of civilization.

Elizabeth shrugged off her pack. Panting and sweating, she dug out the topographical map she and Jeff had used to plot their course to the back fence of the MCG site. Squatting in the dirt on the canyon rim, she oriented the green map toward the Jemez caldera. Mount Baldy lay to the right, sixty miles away, towering over Santa Fe. Behind her rose the Sandias and Albuquerque; half a million people within a hundred-mile circle.

It just didn’t make sense. She stood and pushed back her reddish hair, then retied the leather thong. The central part of Bandelier National Monument, with its hiking trails and ancient Indian cliff dwellings, lay over the next two ridges. She was sure she had her bearings right. She would straighten this out sooner or later.

But Jeff would never be coming back.

Elizabeth shoved all those thoughts aside. Not now! She set off at a rapid, steady hiking pace. She had never felt so tired, or so overwhelmed.

The sun was not quite overhead by the time she scaled the last ridge, looking over Frijoles Canyon, where the Bandelier parking lot, gift shop, and snack bar should have been. Even in the mountains the cool early summer air seemed heavy, making her perspire more than she should have.

Elizabeth confirmed her location once again by lining up features on the detailed topo map before looking over the canyon rim. She scrambled up to the top and surveyed Bandelier. Caves dotted the far cliff walls. A partially excavated circle of boulders delineated the ancient Anasazi Indian settlement off to her right. And below her sprawled a wooden ranch house and stables, with dirt paths stretching from the buildings. She recognized the adobe visitor’s center buildings, but they looked different somehow, newer.

Mouth set, she stared at the site. Nothing existed of the ranger station she had visited just a day earlier. She could not see any cars; even the Bronco she and Jeff had left by the cottonwood tree was missing. The Anasazi ruins looked the same, but everything else had changed.

What is going on? she asked herself. Am I still dreaming?

Jeff’s death had been no dream.

Elizabeth didn’t spend time debating what to do. Explanations could be filled in later. She had to decide her next course of action. A jaunt down to the ranch house would prove nothing right now, only raise questions she didn’t want to answer. But a trip into Los Alamos would clear the air. She could figure out what was going on without causing too much of a stir. From the location of the sun, it didn’t seem to be more than eleven or so in the morning.

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.”

Elizabeth remained quiet and let the elderly woman go on. She would figure this out sooner or later.

Just inside the veranda a row of metal beds lined a long room. The low ceiling rafters revealed a dormitorylike construction. Only about a quarter of the beds looked as if they were being used.

On a flimsy table Elizabeth saw a ragged newspaper, shuffled and folded as if it had been read by a dozen people. The headlines spoke about Himmler ordering the liquidation of all Polish ghettos, someplace called Pantellaria had been captured, and the USAAF had attacked Wilhelmshaven—wherever that was.

The date on the masthead read June 12, 1943. And the paper was new and white, not yellowed with age.

Before Elizabeth could say anything, the old woman steered her to the back. “I’ll get you a spare bathrobe after you’re through with your shower, dear. I’ll notify the guard to send a runner for your luggage in the morning.”

“But what is—” She caught herself. “I mean, thank you, Ms.… ?”

“Mrs. Canapelli. My Ronald died five years ago. He was a handyman at the university, and we used to be friends with Dr. Oppenheimer and Kitty back in Berkeley. Oppie asked me to chaperone the ladies’ dormitory. I’m glad he remembered me, bless poor Ronald’s soul.” They stopped in front of the bathroom.

Oppie? thought Elizabeth. Yes, that Oppie. She felt dizzy. So this lady was friends with Oppenheimer, the man responsible for the Bomb. “Thank you, Mrs. Canapelli. Uh, can I get these clothes dried? Do you have a laundromat?”

“A what? Why don’t I just hang them up for you. The humidity here is very low, and once the rain stops, your clothes will have a chance to dry out. We can get you an iron to use if you’d like.”

“No thanks, they’re permanent press.” Elizabeth never bothered with clothes she had to iron.

“Permanent press?” Mrs. Canapelli inspected Elizabeth’s jeans and plaid shirt. “You really took the Project at their word, dressing for the country, didn’t you? Where did you say you came from? And I didn’t catch your name.”

“Elizabeth Devane, and, uh, I’m from… Montana. I always dress like this.” She closed her mouth, not wanting to get caught up too much in her lie. Montana was about as far removed from anything else she could imagine, and it might explain some of her unusual behavior.

Elizabeth backed into the small bathroom and started taking off her clothes. Mrs. Canapelli continued to chatter. Elizabeth normally would have resented the company, but since Mrs. Canapelli mentioned everything from in-processing to Project rules, she ended up filling in Elizabeth with the details she would need for getting around. Elizabeth listened and stored the information.

It might be useful until she woke up and ended this hallucination.

Elizabeth never thought an Army cot could feel so good. She rolled over and felt only the sharp edge of the cot, not Jeff’s warm shoulders. The realization jarred her awake.

It had been at least twenty-four hours since she and Jeff had climbed down into the MCG test site. Twenty-four hours, some twenty miles of hiking. And maybe fifty years of… time travel.

Elizabeth snorted. Time travel. The human mind is far more complex than most people give it credit for. If she woke up tomorrow still in the Los Alamos women’s dormitory, then she had to make a concentrated effort not to keep thinking about the impossibility of it all. Obviously her mind wanted her to experience something in this era—best to go along with the flow and live it out. That way, at least her body could heal while her mind put things in order.

It made sense to her. Putting the blame on her psyche and leaving it time to heal. But if it was only a hallucination, she wished she could imagine Jeff back into it somehow.

The officer squinted at Elizabeth. He wore military insignia on his collar—two parallel silver bars. She didn’t know anything about ranks, but Elizabeth thought she had heard someone call him a captain.

The rain had disappeared, leaving a sunny spring morning, but the mud remained. Brown muck spattered everything; even the soldier’s khaki uniforms seemed a part of the mess.

Elizabeth tried to keep the notion that she was hallucinating out of her mind as she explained her situation. She silently thanked Mrs. Canapelli for droning on the night before, feeding her tidbits of information.

“No, sir. My papers were with my luggage. I was told to board the bus in Santa Fe. And until the Army can locate my things, I don’t have any other documents or even items to wear. Mrs. Canapelli says I should be able to arrange for some clothes through the PX…”

Trucks rumbled past; a dozen soldiers leaned out the back and whistled at her. The three people in line behind her tapped their feet in the dirt.

The captain held up his hands and rolled his eyes in good-humored exasperation. “Okay, okay, I understand! It’s just that you’re the third person in four days with the same problem. I’m trying to prevent it from happening again. Look Miss Depine—”

“Devane,” said Elizabeth. “And it’s Ms. Devane.”

He looked up sharply. “Yes. Miz Devane.” He muttered to himself, “Must be from the South.” He opened his hand and ticked off the rationale on his fingers.

“Okay, your papers must have been in proper order or they never would have let you board the bus in the first place. Otherwise, you never could have gotten up here, since there’s only one road. Therefore, something must have happened to your paperwork after you got on that bus. Maybe someone else picked up your suitcase and it’ll turn up before long? Did you have your name in it?”

“Of course.”

“Guess you’ll just have to wait and keep your fingers crossed, then. I’m sorry, Miz Devane, but until your paperwork comes through, the only thing I can do right now is assign you to the in-processing center as a clerk.”

“Doing what?”

“Clerical work, of course. What else would you want to do?” The captain looked astonished.

“How long will I be there?”

“If your paperwork is just misplaced, it may be only a couple of days. If it’s really lost, we have to go all the way back to Washington. And that may take until the end of the summer.”

End of the summer? Is that the timescale I have here, going crazy for three months? I thought I’d wake up tomorrow.

“So until then, there’s nothing more I can do.” The captain raised a finger. “Except I have to restrict you to the Project. Can’t allow you to leave the grounds until we’ve got something back on you.”

Elizabeth set her mouth, unwilling to make a commotion. What difference did it make? Where would she go anyway?

“Thank you, Captain. I appreciate your help.” She turned and left the wooden administration building. On her way out, she noticed that the Assignments and In-Processing rooms were across from each other.

She experienced a sinking feeling in her stomach. After all her efforts protesting nuclear weapons research, now she found herself in the middle of the Manhattan Project itself. And they expected her to work for them.

Two o’clock in the morning, and sleep would not come. A single white light blazed outside the women’s dormitory, throwing deep shadows across the row of beds. Outside, moths and insects whipped around in the light. Snoring came from the cot next to hers. A guard’s footsteps crunched between the buildings on the other side of the window. Elizabeth turned over and tried to make herself comfortable. The sheets smelled like bleach and felt too hot, even in the cool mountain air.

Growing up in Albuquerque, Elizabeth had dreamed of leaving New Mexico, getting out of the sleepy nowhere city and tackling the real world. Berkeley had afforded her the chance. On a scholarship, she thrived in the intellectual community by the San Francisco Bay. The Northern California lifestyle opened her eyes, though she still spent much of her time with her nose in the books.

After graduating in physics, securing a job with United Atomics in Los Angeles came naturally—it allowed her to use her knowledge and at the same time take advantage of everything L.A. had to offer. She enjoyed her life alone, from hiking in the San Bernardino mountains to body surfing off Manhattan Beach.

One day she realized that she needed an MBA to get ahead, to move out of the population of “techies” and into the higher-paying levels of management. That decision ushered in the end of her innocence. Ted Walblaken’s death shortly thereafter, and United Atomics callous attempt at a cover-up, was the last weight that tipped the scales for her.

Her move back to Berkeley and subsequent enrollment in the Management School left her jaded. She had more time to experience the Berkeley environment, get involved in the really big issues: biogenetics, the end of the Cold War, and the disarmament of America.

The 1983 Livermore protest had nailed it down—she could never return and work for big industry after allowing herself to be arrested for her principles. And then there was Jeff… but the backward allure of New Mexico had become enchanting to her again, a simpler way of life where she would not have to support the bottom-line-only businesses she abhorred. Elizabeth’s only regret was that Jeff didn’t want to come with her.

Santa Fe, only seventy miles north of where she had grown up, beckoned as an ideal place to settle. With her completed MBA and her experience in finance, she had no problem getting a job keeping the books for a Santa Fe art gallery— Nambe on Canvas. Elizabeth loved the chic gallery, the circle of friends who were also concerned about important issues. Her private accounting business grew, and she settled in the comfortable life as a professional.

But now she seemed anything but comfortable. To top it all off, with her years of specialized education, she had been assigned as a file clerk! If she weren’t in such a screwed-up situation, the whole thing would be funny.

Elizabeth pushed back the sheets and sat up on her cot. She stared at the bed next to her. The girl slept without a worry, confident that the “powers that be” would find a way to defeat the evil Japanese, the terrible Nazis, and then steer the world toward an endless supply of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. All because of the Manhattan Project.

Elizabeth swung her feet over the side of the cot, trying not to wake the others. How many times had she heard the expression “If I only knew then what I know now”? How many people would really be content to go on with the atomic bomb project if they really knew what was to come. The Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam. The Arms Race. Star Wars. The Gulf War. The capacitor accident at Los Alamos. The homeless, and the people dying of AIDS, because too much money had been spent on defense.

But how could they know? And what was better—for her to stay and do nothing, to ride out the tides of time, or try to actively change things? As a clerk in the in-processing center? Get real.

She wasn’t sure exactly how she would do it, but if she could get transferred into something more important— somewhere that made a strategic difference—then she might be able to see where things had gone wrong.

The wooden dormitory floors didn’t creak as she crept to the bathroom. Quickly changing into her own clothes, Elizabeth debated if she should wear some kind of camouflage, something to help disguise her in case she was caught. She thought better of it. Anything unnatural would only draw attention if she were spotted.

She had heard that other women sometimes left during the night and returned clandestinely, slipping past Mrs. Canapelli—midnight liaisons had not been invented in Elizabeth’s generation, after all. Too many single young men were housed at the Project, and the women of 1943 had been fed propaganda that they were supposed to adore brave soldiers in uniform. Leaving the dormitory would be tolerated, if she could stay discreet.

Elizabeth jiggled the door to the administration building. The door opened with a squeak. Surprised to find it unlocked, she held her breath. It seemed that the sound had echoed across the muddy encampment. But no one came running down the street brandishing weapons. So far, so good.

The sound of a jeep came from across the compound. Pools of yellow-white headlights turned down another un-paved road and continued up the bill. Elizabeth crept inside the Admin building and closed the door, hoping the jeep engine would mask any noise she might make. She debated whether she should lock the door in case one of the guards came to check. She decided against it; besides, she saw no key on the inside.

This left her momentarily wondering why security should be so lax—but she didn’t dwell on it, concluding that the administration areas must not rate as high in the hierarchy as the scientific part of the Project.

Elizabeth made her way down the hallway, relying on touch to get her past the large foyer. Only a few well-placed lights from the outside managed to cast their glare into the building. The site’s blackout regulations dictated only minimum lighting, not visible from the air.

Once she had negotiated the foyer, she managed to keep from knocking over a trash can by first feeling it with her shoe. The hallway led to a set of double doors. In-processing should be two doors down, across from the Assignments section. If she were going to do this right, she needed to do more than forge her papers and add them to the file—she also had to make sure that her physics background was documented.

Even at the B.S. level, with a physics degree granted thirty-five years in the future, her knowledge ought to count for something. But that opened up another set of problems entirely. How many women were on the Project now, serving in a true professional sense? There must be some, but probably fewer than she could count on her fingers. It would only draw more attention to herself, raise too many questions.

And what if she let something slip, some bit of knowledge that hadn’t been discovered yet? Her own physics studies had ignored historical perspective altogether; none of her professors bothered to add any kind of context to their explanations of important theories. According to her schooling, there was Newton, then Einstein and Dirac, and a whole bunch of equations with people’s names on them magically appearing in the interim.

How could she explain that two or three of the scientists working on the Project now would be her guest lecturers at Berkeley three decades from now? No, she had to keep this simple, mark it down in her records that she had some business experience, some mathematics. Maybe that would let her work on the sidelines, where she could watch, observe.

Elizabeth moved toward the Records section. She pushed the door open, half expecting someone to be waiting for her with gun drawn. A row of Army-gray file cabinets lined one wall like a battalion of metal soldiers. The Project personnel had made no attempt to safeguard the personnel information. And this place was one of the most secret places in the nation? The Army must have been working on the principle that the threat was entirely on the outside and not from within.

How could people be so naive?

She found a blank form, personnel qualifications. Bending over a patch of light on a cluttered metal table, Elizabeth penciled in a mathematics degree along with her business experience. That should satisfy any routine checking once she switched jobs. Filing her records, Elizabeth made her way to the Assignments section. Time to get herself a new job.

She crept through eerie hall shadows. The air felt stale. She had heard no other sounds since the jeep went by. She thought about the guards—would they really not patrol the buildings at night? She drew in a breath and looked around. Why was it so quiet? When she reached the door to Assignments, she slid inside the opening and pulled the door partway closed.

Elizabeth glanced around. The room showed even more paperwork chaos than Records. Piles of paper three feet high sat on each desk. Yellow pencils covered the windowsills, and red or black ink pads littered the floor.

Her heart sank. How in the world am I going to even find the right form in this mess? She didn’t know where to start.

She picked up a paper from the nearest desk and squinted in the dimness. It looked like an alphabetical list of people in one of the divisions. Her frustration grew. Trapped, years in the past, and knowing the outcome of a no-win situation, didn’t help her spirits any. She rummaged through another pile, sheet after sheet after sheet—nothing.

She couldn’t go back to her own time. She had no idea how. She would have to watch the Manhattan Project without being a player. Did she even want to be a player? What else could she do? The paperwork and bureaucracy here seemed just as screwed-up now as what the government had to offer in the future. The rosy picture of “all for one and one for all” painted of this war effort didn’t include the times like this.

She stopped. Something just outside in the hall. A footstep, a scratch at the door.

Elizabeth held her breath. She started to duck down, out of sight behind the desk and its column of paper. The security guards—what would they do if they found her there? Did they shoot on sight? The thought chilled her. The nation was at war, when people accepted even the atrocities of penning up American-born Japanese. Being executed for breaking into the Manhattan Project records, no matter how innocuous, no longer seemed unlikely.

Someone stepped through the door. Elizabeth ducked lower.

“Excuse me.” The words came out in a whisper. She looked up. A man stepped behind the stacks of paper and looked down at her, as if he had known her hiding place all along. “Ah, do you need any help?”

Elizabeth caught a hint of a chuckle. She strained to see the man’s face, but the light coming from the window shone behind him. She saw only his silhouette.

Elizabeth slowly stood. Her arms and legs trembled as cold sweat broke out on her skin. Her stomach knotted, but she didn’t understand. “I… I… ” She couldn’t make the words come out.

“It’s okay. Really,” he said.

Elizabeth sucked in a breath. “Oh, damn.” She glanced around, pulled up a metal chair and sat down. “So what are you going to do with me?”

“Eh?” The man moved around so that the light shone on his face. He appeared young, not more than twenty-five or so. His hair was cropped short, curly. “Do with you? My, that opens up all sorts of implications, doesn’t it? I just thought you needed help getting around in here.”

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. She sat straighter in the chair. “Help?”

“Sure. Going through those paper piles.” He jerked his head at a particularly large heap in the corner. “Can you believe all this? This is a scientist’s nightmare and a bureaucrat’s dream. Paperwork heaven. One of those Admin clowns could die in here and it would take them a month to find out he was even missing.”

Elizabeth stifled an uncertain laugh. This man didn’t seem bothered that she was here in the dark; he didn’t appear to be a threat. “You’re probably right.”

“About you needing help?”

“No. I mean yes, I need help. But about this being a paperwork nightmare, or heaven, or whatever.” She stopped, tongue-tied. She felt angry at herself, but forced it down. She couldn’t believe any of this.

“Good.” The man cracked a smile. “Then what are you looking for?”

“Something to get me transferred. Whatever paperwork I need.”

“You want to move to another job.”

“That’s right.”

“Gosh, I can’t imagine anything being misplaced around here.” He snorted with derision. “Don’t you like what you’re doing now?”

“Typing and shuffling paperwork isn’t my strong point. I mean, that isn’t the reason I was brought here. I’ve got a good background in mathematics. It’s a terrible misuse of talent.” Elizabeth held her breath and hoped that the man wouldn’t press for details—or that she wouldn’t tie herself up in a lie she couldn’t get out of.

“Makes sense. Maria Goeppert had the same problem. One of the best minds in the country, and people would rather shove her off making coffee than using her talents.”

Elizabeth kept quiet and allowed the man to continue. She kept taking peeks out the window, afraid that their whispered conversation would draw attention. The man, whoever he was, seemed content just to sit and chat away.

“Actually, if you knew where the forms were…”

The man stood. “I don’t, but I bet if I thought as a bureaucrat would… “He looked around the room. Elizabeth’s eyes had become accustomed enough to the dark to see where he was looking. “Umm. Let’s see. This is the Assignments section, so you’d think that assignments would be on the top of their priority list. Now all we have to do is figure out where they would think of putting their important stuff. Which means…”

He strode around to the front of the office, lifted up a small pile and revealed an in basket. He fished around and pulled out a dark, half-page form. “Aha!” He looked as if he had just cracked a mystery. “The only people who really bother these folks are the ones they try to transfer. Which means that if the transfer form is located near the door, then they can get rid of the people faster. Lessen the amount of hassle they get.”

Elizabeth pushed up from her chair and moved to the front. “I don’t know how to thank you—”

“Well, if you insist… no, I mean, nonsense! I know it’s impossible to get things done during regular hours around here. You have to do things yourself sometimes. Where are you trying to get transferred to?”

“Uh, I’m not really sure. Somewhere that could use my abilities. My math background, I mean. I used to teach high school math before I joined the civil service.” Oh boy, she was going to have to remember that one.

“Ah, so that explains why you’re here. Johnny von Neumann is getting together a group to grind through some intensive calculations.” He cocked an eye at her. “You aren’t familiar with hydrodynamics are you?” He shook his head before she could answer. “Never mind—it doesn’t really matter. But if you’re a math whiz, we could sure use some talent in von Neumann’s group. Here.” Elizabeth took the sheet of paper as if it were a nugget of gold.

“Thanks!” Von Neumann… the name sounded familiar to her. Hadn’t he invented the first computer or something?

“Just put down T-Division as your reassignment. That’ll get you there.”

They deposited the official transfer form in the front office. Elizabeth crept along beside him, fearful that his cavalier attitude would get them caught, but they negotiated the building without bringing attention to themselves.

She wanted to ask the man who he was, but since he had kept his nose out of her identity, she decided to do likewise. Whoever he was, he was one strange duck-getting his kicks out of playing jokes on the paper pushers.

The man steered her to the side door. “Go ahead on out—I’ll lock up behind you.”

Elizabeth started for the door. “But it was unlocked when I got here.”

“I know.” The man grinned and pulled a long wire from his pants pocket. “I broke in and left the door open in case I had to make a quick escape. It’s great, isn’t it? Drives the brass bananas when they find out I’ve been drooling over their paperwork. Not that it’s important or anything. What really drives them crazy is when I break into the safes and leave them little notes.” He creaked open the door and peered outside. “Go ahead, it’s clear.”

“Uh, thanks again—”

“Just get going.”

“Yeah.” Elizabeth slipped outside. She moved around the mud puddles that dotted the streets and kept to the building shadows. When she finally reached the women’s barracks, the long row of cots looked inviting. She had had enough excitement for one night, and just hoped her transfer would go through without anyone questioning it.

Breaking and entering wasn’t her style. Maybe she was better off with the United Conscience Group, passing out leaflets and doing nothing significant. The MCG debacle had shown her the worst of what could happen. Jeff had paid with his life.

Once was enough, no matter how high the stakes.

3 Berlin June 1943

His own stationery had finally arrived from the printer. He had needed to pull the rank of his new position in the Reich just to get something this simple done on time. It didn’t bode well for the more serious things he would have to do.

He rocked back and admired the printing: dr. Abraham ESAU, PLENIPOTENTIARY FOR NUCLEAR PHYSICS.

The bold Fraktur type made his promotion, achieved at long last, seem all the more official. They couldn’t take it away from him this time. Things would start to change now. No matter what the others might say.

Esau took the top sheet, careful not to smudge the ink, then snapped the ivory paper. Crisp, decisive movements always made points with his superiors. Esau had learned such details years before when he started his rise in the party as a Brown Shirt.

He sat back in the leather-covered chair, swiveling around to look at the office he’d recently commandeered. He had come in with the appropriate bustle and appearance of authority—another thing he had learned in the National Socialist Party, that the appearance of authority carried nearly as much weight as authority itself.

He had ordered several lesser workers to move the desk and the chair into the office he selected, the one with the best view of Berlin. He had never bothered to check whose office this was; the Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics claimed it now.

Though the day was cold for early summer, he left the window open to clear the air of stale cigarette smoke. He heard street sounds outside, the vehicles, the people going about their business even during wartime.

He noticed dust marks on the bookshelves from where the previous occupant had kept his library. Esau’s own boxes were piled in the hall outside the door. Sooner or later he would have someone unpack them, make this look like a proper office.

He thought of his cramped dormitory room in Cambridge back when the world was different, back when the unfair Treaty of Versailles remained a festering sore for Germans but not yet cause for a renewed war. German physics held the reins of science, and universities such as Gottingen held the greatest minds of philosophy, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Esau had pursued studies in high-frequency electronics as a guest in Great Britain, eventually gaining some fame in the early days of wireless telegraphs and television.

His English friend and companion, Graham Fox, had assisted him in his studies, and they had both gone far. Rutherford taught at Cambridge, with its meadows and tree-shaded river. Niels Bohr himself came to give guest lectures. The Cavendish Laboratory, where Chadwick had discovered the neutron in 1932, had been the best equipped in all of Europe.

Abraham Esau had engaged in innumerable discussions, not just within classes, but also in their favorite meeting place, an old cafe’ in a remarkably clean alley. Other students gathered there to argue over their own imaginary problems. Scribbled mathematical formulae covered the marble-topped tables, and the waiters had strict instructions never to wipe away the marks without special permission. Unsolved problems left on the marble were often completed by other students who came in later. Esau smiled to himself; those were heady days. The vivid memories held many distinctive colors, sounds, and odors for him—but the world had since gone flat.

He had not seen Graham Fox for many years. They had grown apart as Esau absorbed himself in party politics, working his way up in the German government. His calling had been to use his knowledge and talents to help resurrect Germany from its economic death. He had been appointed President of the Reich Bureau of Standards, and later head of the physics section of the Education Ministry’s Reich Research Council. Abraham Esau, with his cursed Jewish-sounding name, had stumbled through many pitfalls, back-stabbings, and political maneuvers to get to his position now. It had made him many enemies, and few friends.

Esau straightened the photograph on the corner of the desk. He had no wife, no children—this was a picture of himself. One party weekly described him as “a thickset man with a tough farmer’s skull” and had made fun of his peasant ancestry, his East Prussian accent. Even his competency in physics. Too many people enjoyed picking on Abraham Esau.

In the photograph, though, Esau looked impeccable, wearing a gray wool jacket, neat tie, crisp white collar. He kept his steel-colored hair trimmed well above the ears and oiled into place so that it showed the parallel lines of combs’ teeth. He had one eyebrow raised, pale irises the color of water. An intelligent-looking man, a powerful man, with an upturned sneer caused by a tangled scar on his upper lip—the mark of a boating accident when he and Graham Fox had gotten a bit drunk and gone out on the river when they shouldn’t have.

Esau laid the stationery back on the desktop. Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics. The title had so many trappings, held so much power.

It had not seemed surprising that a German, Otto Hahn, would announce the discovery of the fission of the atomic nucleus in 1939, the year war broke out. Hahn had been unable to believe his own results for the longest time, probably sabotaged by his Jewish assistant Lise Meitner before she fled Germany. Finally, when he could no longer refute his astonishing results, Hahn had published his discovery in a public forum for all the world to see.

Esau found it remarkable how things had changed in only four years. Now open dissemination of such important information was unheard of. All German nuclear work—and no doubt all American and British as well continued at a frantic pace, but those discoveries were carefully hidden behind the shield of secrecy.

As Plenipotentiary, he now had to reconcile all the disparate work on nuclear physics in Germany, but he did not know how to do it. Certainly, their own researchers were among the most brilliant in the world; but they were scattered, each one working on his own pet project. It reminded him of horses pulling a cart in opposite directions, getting nowhere.

Three separate German teams worked on the same problem, and each team refused to cooperate with the others, and each received funding from different ministries.

The experimentalist von Ardenne operated the smallest program under the auspices of the Ministry of Posts—a more unlikely sponsor Esau could not have imagined. But von Ardenne had done what he found necessary to implement his ideas. Esau admired that. He himself had done a similar thing, back in 1939, when the Reich Ministry of Education appointed him to look into the possibilities of developing energy from the atomic nucleus. Hahn had just announced his discovery of fission, and physicists worldwide were falling all over themselves to be first with the next breakthrough.

On his own initiative, Esau had stockpiled all uranium available in Germany. When the Joachimsthal mines in Czechoslovakia came under German control, Esau immediately requested samples of radium from the mines. He had worked hard, he had shown his mettle, his persistence, and his vision. But instead the Ministry of Armaments had decided to start its own nuclear research program behind Esau’s back.

They appointed Dr. Kurt Diebner to do their work. Diebner had been whining for years to get something like this, and now he had stolen it from Esau. Abraham Esau was ordered to cease his own atomic research and to stop questioning orders. They told him to surrender his carefully stockpiled reserves of uranium to Diebner. He had no choice in the matter.

But now, three years later, the roller coaster of political machinations had left Esau in a position to step up, to become the new Plenipotentiary. Now he oversaw Diebner’s work, which, with his group of physicists at Göttingen, was the second prong of German nuclear research. Esau despised Diebner, with his thick black glasses, sloping forehead, and ponderous speech. Diebner had once accused Esau of stealing his work, claiming that he himself had been working on the problem since 1938… which was absolutely absurd, since Hahn hadn’t even discovered nuclear fission until the year after that.

Diebner’s team seemed the most productive of the three, but Esau knew that was only because Diebner had confiscated the cyclotron from Frédéric and Irene Joliot-Curie in Paris, when the Nazis had overrun France. Diebner had taken Joliot-Curie’s work; he had copied the Frenchman’s ideas and implemented them himself. Whose ideas would he steal next?

The third and most impressive arm of nuclear research was led at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin. Its most prominent member was Dr. Werner Heisenberg, the scientist who had developed the famous quantum Principle of Uncertainty, for which he’d won the Nobel Prize in 1932.

Heisenberg was the darling of the theoreticians. His fame was greater than any of the others, yet he was quiet, firm, not as much a prima donna as so many of the other researchers. Heisenberg kept his voice low, his words clipped, his thoughts very clear. Esau didn’t care for Heisenberg personally, though he respected the man.

A few months earlier, when Abraham Esau had called a conference to discuss nuclear physics work with the Nazi high command, he invited many important people in the party, as well as a great number of prominent German physicists. The idea was for the first day to be an overview, a sales pitch to the leaders of government about what exactly the research teams were working on, with subsequent days devoted to in-depth secret discussions and papers among the nuclear physicists themselves.

Goering had curtly declined Esau’s invitation, as had most of the others. Not until much later did Esau realize that his own secretary had bungled her job and mailed the wrong schedules, inviting the government and military representatives to a long agenda of technical papers with nonsensical titles, making no mention of the general overview. No wonder so few of the important ones had showed up.

Still, the room was crowded. The physicists milled around, uneasy in such a large crowd. A handful of men in military uniforms sat at a long table and in wooden chairs near the wall.

Esau ignored the physicists and spent his time making sure the officials remained comfortable, that they had coffee to drink, that someone attended to them immediately if they had questions. Perhaps, even though their superiors had not bothered to come, Esau could impress upon them what his section was doing for the war effort, what this strange nuclear physics was about. But how was he to explain atomic fission to people who did not even know what an atom was?

“Gentlemen,” Esau said. He paused, waiting for those gathered in the room to fall silent and turn their attention to him. Self-consciously, he straightened his tie. The physicists, dressed in street clothes rather than uniforms, continued to rustle about; they had no interest in what Esau would say, since they already knew more about the subject than he did himself. Let them act snobbish, Esau thought— they wouldn’t get far in their research without his support.

“Gentlemen,” he said again, focusing especially on the ranking man there, Air Marshal Erhard Milch of the Luftwaffe. “You are familiar with presentations of enhanced explosives and new ways to fashion artillery—but I guarantee that you have never before heard how German science can unleash an entirely new destructive power, one as limitless as the universe itself. It is a power that springs from the most fundamental particle of all matter—the center of the atom itself.”

Esau held up a clenched fist. “In 1938 our esteemed Otto Hahn discovered how the nucleus of the uranium atom can be split, releasing the energy contained within.” He held up a second clenched fist against the first, put them in front of him, then violently snapped them apart. “This suggests the possibility of a superbomb, a weapon based on atomic energy.

“Upon learning of this, I myself stockpiled all of Germany’s uranium resources, because the uranium nucleus is the only one that exhibits this phenomenon of fission. But alas, it is not even that simple, because only a very special type of uranium is susceptible. This type of uranium, an isotope with an atomic weight of 235 instead of the more usual 238, is exceedingly rare. Out of every thousand grams of purified uranium, only seven are of the proper type, and even then, the uranium-235 is completely mixed with the rest. We are developing techniques to separate it out.”

Esau was losing his audience. He saw them scowling, skeptical; this was not what they wanted to hear. He did not want to discuss the many failures so far, but to emphasize the possible results.

“Lest you be discouraged, let me point out that a single bomb made with uranium-235 would be more powerful than a thousand of the best bombs we have available now. The successful completion of this project will more than compensate for the difficulties. Because of this, we believe nuclear investigations should be given the highest priority from the Armaments Ministry and Education Ministry. We can win the war as soon as we overcome this obstacle of separating out the special uranium.”

“And what is so difficult about that?” Air Marshal Milch said. He remained seated. He clearly knew that he outranked everyone in the room. Insignia decorated his shoulders and his breast. His cheeks were chubby, his eyes small and dark. He puffed on a deep brown cigarette, as if to flaunt that he could obtain good Turkish tobacco even with rationing. “German chemical workers pride themselves that they can process any material.”

Esau nodded soberly, though it was a stupid question. “It is not so simple, Herr Marshal. We cannot use a chemical process because there is no chemical difference between the isotopes—they are both uranium, as far as the chemistry goes. We must find a physical method. We are working with devices such as cyclotrons, a new instrument called the ultracentrifuge, another called the ‘isotope sluice.’

“The actual difference between the good uranium and the bad uranium, if I may call it that, is infinitesimally small. Let me use this comparison: imagine you are on top of the Cologne Cathedral, looking down upon a crowd. You are given the task of finding the one man who has an odd number of eyelashes in his left eyelid… and you have only a pair of dirty binoculars to work with. That is the magnitude of our task.”

The physicists in the room seemed amused by the comparison, and a few applauded. Air Marshal Milch scowled. Esau continued rapidly, “The Fuhrer has requested that we find a way to utterly annihilate Great Britain. This bomb can do it! We can bring even America to its knees. But we can do this only if we receive the fullest support for our work.”

Esau knew he had to make his point with Milch. Armaments Minister Albert Speer had not bothered to attend the conference, but Milch had his ear and would report back, favorably or unfavorably.

Air Marshal Milch got to his feet. Esau recognized why the man usually remained seated, because he was relatively short and stockily built. He set his smoldering cigarette on the edge of the scarred table, then looked across the room. “And such a weapon—Professor Heisenberg, tell me, how big would a bomb have to be to destroy a whole city?”

Esau’s fingernails dug into his palms. Heisenberg, always Heisenberg! Why hadn’t Milch bothered to ask him?

Heisenberg shrugged, then answered after a moment of pursing his lips in thought, “About as large as a pineapple.”

“So.” Air Marshal Milch sat back down. His face seemed to be carrying a smile.

Esau cringed, suspecting that now they would be given the order to produce such a bomb and have one ready within a few months. Obviously, Heisenberg was a theoretician—he had no common sense. If he had any background in party politics at all, he would have learned never to make promises that might later backfire….

Somehow the conference had achieved its aim. Word trickled up the chain of command. Armaments Minister Speer and Deputy Fuhrer Goering had become interested in the project, though Hitler himself had taken no notice. Esau had been appointed Plenipotentiary of Nuclear Physics.

Now he stood up from the desk in his new Berlin office, went to the hall and called for someone to bring his boxes into the room. He wanted to unpack. He knew he would be staying awhile. This project still had an enormous amount of work to do before it could accomplish its aims.

Was it something to be proud of, Esau wondered, to oversee this broken-up nuclear program, with its offshoots of scattered research? With physicists squabbling over minimal resources, duplicating each other’s work?

The whole thing seemed impossible. It would take a miracle.

4 Los Alamos June 1943

Mud still covered A Street, but the mountain morning shone blue and crisp. Though the research town was a mere shadow of what it would become decades later, Elizabeth thought the place had a greater intensity to it, a desperate frenzy that kept everyone working their hardest. Jeeps sped by carrying loads of uniformed soldiers; bespectacled men picked their way across puddles to the Tech Area.

All the women wore dresses. Mrs. Canapelli had loaned Elizabeth a dress, a gaudy green flowery print that probably would have looked better on a sofa, and she had mentioned the best days to look at new bolts of material at the PX—as if Elizabeth had any intention of sewing herself a dress. Elizabeth hadn’t even worn a skirt in years, but at least now she felt part of the crowd. Mrs. Canapelli had also loaned her bobby pins and barrettes for her hair. Better to avoid calling attention to herself any more than she had to. Elizabeth intended to keep hiding in the woodwork as long as she could—at least until she figured out what she wanted to do.

Keeping to the side of the street, she made for the administration building. Groups of men passed her on the way. Several smiled a wordless greeting, one man whistled loudly. She wasn’t supposed to mind that sort of thing in 1943.

She clutched the paper given her by the shift captain. Working the In-Processing desk should be easier now that she knew the position would be only temporary. Someone would find her paperwork, though it had been right on top of the In box, and the transfer to von Neumann’s computations group would no doubt take a few more days, even with expedite stamped on the form.

She entered the administration building through the same door she had crept into the night before. She slowed as she walked in, trying to be nonchalant. After the bustle on the street, the place seemed deserted. Until another busload of Project volunteers arrived, In-Processing probably had time to catch up with some of the paperwork.

A young woman smiled at her from behind a stack of papers. She had tightly curled hair and wore thick red lipstick, which smeared the butt of the smoldering cigarette in a metal ashtray on her desk. “Good morning. Did you come up on the bus last night?”

“Actually, the day before yesterday, but I forgot to check in. My luggage was lost with all my papers.” The story rolled more easily off her tongue after she had practiced it several times. “I was wet and tired, and just went to the dormitory. Sorry about that.” She handed over the assignment papers the captain had given her. “I guess I’m supposed to help you out here until my transfer comes through.”

“Good luck! This is where they always stick their loose ends. You’re the second person this week they’ve stashed here until her papers were found. I can always use some help, but don’t plan on staying around for more than a few hours; they always seem to straighten things out just when the work is about to be finished.”

Elizabeth hoped for exactly that, but she forced a smile. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and they won’t find my papers.”

“Fat chance,” laughed the woman. She stood and extended a hand. “By the way, I’m Holly Vanderdeem.”

“Elizabeth Devane.”

“Nice to meet you. Do you go by Liz? Betty? Betsy?”

“Betsy?” She raised her eyebrows. You’ve got to be kidding! “Elizabeth will do just fine, thank you.” She forced another smile. “I’m not much on cute nicknames.”

“Sorry.” Holly got up to the crowded file cabinets and began to search in the D drawer. She took her cigarette along. Elizabeth tried to blink the smoke from her eyes. “Where were you supposed to be assigned?”

“Uh, to one of the computation groups. At least that’s why I was recruited.” She went over and opened one of the windows to let in some fresh air. Outside she heard a man shouting orders to a construction crew.

“Well, let me show you around the office for now. You can help me a bit. The work is mostly routine. Things tend to happen in spurts up here, mostly when the bus from Santa Fe brings in a new batch of workers. Sometimes a whole day will go by without anyone coming in. Every once in a while we get a real doozy—like that Russian physicist who could barely speak English.” She looked around and lowered her voice. “Have you had the security indoctrination yet?”

“No.”

“You’ll find out you’re not even supposed to say ‘physicist’—they’re all called engineers.” She straightened. “Anything out of the ordinary goes to the captain. The rest of our time is spent filing the new assignment actions.” She nodded to the pile of paper by the back window. “I’m way behind on that, so if you don’t mind helping me file them…”

“It’ll keep me from going crazy.” Unless I’m already crazy, dreaming I’ve been thrown back in time to old Los Alamos.

Holly tried to glance at Elizabeth’s finger. “Not married, huh? Plenty of available men here if you want to grab one and settle down.”

For some reason Elizabeth felt like an old maid. “No, I’m not married.” And I think I’ll refrain from “grabbing a man and settling down” for the moment, she thought with annoyance. “How about yourself?”

“My Eddie heads up the Chemical Nuclide Division. We were at Cornell when he got tapped for the Project. It’s all so exciting, and it’s great to be doing something, you know, important for the war effort.” She laughed. “It was bad enough dragging me away from Louisiana to go to New York in the first place. But now, bringing me to the Wild West, I guess I shouldn’t have bad-mouthed the Northeast. Where are you from?”

“Montana.”

“Jiminy! I didn’t know they even had universities there. What on earth is Montana famous for?” Holly looked shocked, then suddenly apologetic. “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that.”

Elizabeth smiled tightly. “That’s all right. My, er, husband was a professor at Montana State, and I used to be involved with the ladies’ club there.” She had to force the words out of her mouth. Emotions welled up in her, cutting off her voice, but she dug her fingernails into the meat of her palm. She had to keep up the act. “After Jeff died, I was asked to come here, get my mind off him.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. How did he die? In the war?”

Elizabeth winced, then turned away. “I’d, rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.”

Thinking of Jeff, knowing he was lying somewhere in a shallow cave in a canyon wall, made pain rise up in her again. But the ease with which she fabricated her story surprised her. Thank you, Mrs. Canapelli. Now she had the perfect alibi for being here, unless someone else showed up from Montana State—which seemed unlikely from Holly’s reaction.

Holly fidgeted in her chair. “You poor dear. Here, let me show you what to do.” The simple instructions lasted another five minutes, repeated and stressed, though Elizabeth had figured out the task in thirty seconds. Holly asked no further questions about her personal life, and Elizabeth did not encourage conversation.

As she started filing, Elizabeth felt thankful that it would give her a chance to glance through the personnel files and help her get a better grasp on what this era was like, who else was here.

In the back of her mind, she tried to recall everything she knew about World War II and the Manhattan Project. She found her mind wandering, mixing up dates, so she tried to write down snippets of facts on a sheet while filing people’s folders. She kept the notes in her own shorthand code, something cobbled together from years of college note-taking. If somebody else found it, the scribbles would seem nonsensical.

After three straight hours of filing and no one entering the office, Holly stood and put a hand to the small of her back. She carefully touched her hair. “I’m running down to the lodge. Do you want to come and take a break?”

“The lodge?”

“Fuller Lodge has the only real meal in town, until they get the cafeteria built. If you want to chance the food at the civilian mess, that’s up to you. But if you can’t eat at the dorm, I’d stick to the lodge.”

Elizabeth straightened and surveyed her pile of paperwork, half as high as it had been when she entered the room. She wanted some time alone, so she could snoop around. “Tell you what,” she said, “if you’re right about my reassignment coming today, I won’t be able to finish this. Why don’t you just bring me back something and I’ll try to get done here.”

“You’re a gift, Elizabeth. I really appreciate this.” Holly rummaged for her purse. “What should I bring you?”

“Oh, a salad is fine. With ranch dressing on the side.”

Holly stopped and stared, then a wry smile spread across her face. “A salad— what a riot! You’re starting to fit right in! What in the world is a ranch dressing? How about a cheeseburger or a hot dog? Depends what they have warmed up.”

“Yum.”

Holly didn’t notice Elizabeth’s lack of enthusiasm. “I’ll spell you when I get back. That way you can catch lunch and take the afternoon off after your papers arrive.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

As Holly left, Elizabeth blinked and thought to herself that she couldn’t even take the food here for granted. Cholesterol city—no low-fat, no high fiber, everything loaded with preservatives. No diet drinks—or else they’d probably be filled with saccharine—no caffeine-free drinks, and no mineral water for sure. She felt her stomach turning already.

Once Holly left, Elizabeth moved to the back of the office and pulled out her list. She skimmed her cribbed notes:

Elizabeth sent a thousand silent curses to her former high school history teachers. She had never been an expert in history, but her years at Berkeley had given her the basics of when the major scientific advances had occurred. The time working for United Atomics, although in the fusion reactor group, helped her get comfortable with the jargon; and the real education started with the protest work, the Livermore incident and her time in New Mexico with the Santa Fe activists.

She felt a knot growing in her stomach, and not just at the thought of a greasy cheeseburger or a goat-meat hot dog. I’m letting this get to me! she thought. Relax, it’s only my mind. I couldn’t screw up if I tried. None of this is really happening.

She would still have to return to the MCG site soon and look around. Maybe she had missed something there and could figure things out. She also had to find a place to bury Jeff, before the coyotes found him. She pushed that thought from her mind and tried to concentrate on her list. Jeff had always called her a pragmatist.

I have to know more than this about World War II! But she didn’t. She knew a bunch of movies, but who could tell how accurate they were? The list served only to orient herself, anchor her mind so that whatever happened was consistent with what she remembered about history. If her mind was undergoing some sort of healing process, then this experience would feel as true to her as anything her memory could dish out. But yet… the urgency of the people around her, what else could it be? If it wasn’t her mind, she kept getting the same damned answer of time travel, but didn’t want to face it—

“Excuse me. Would this be In-Processing?”

Elizabeth jumped in her chair. She crumpled her list in a ball and rose from her chair.

“The door says this is In-Processing,” the man said, as if pointing it out to Elizabeth. His words carried a British accent.

A thin man, wearing an oversized coat and a narrow black tie, twisted a hat in his hands. His elbow held a manila envelope to his side. His eyes darted around the cluttered office, and when they rested on Elizabeth, they revealed a sad look. Elizabeth could see deep lines of experience etched onto his face.

“Yes, what can I help you with?”

“Thank heavens.” The man smiled nervously. He slapped his hat against his leg and entered the office. “What with all the commotion outside, I wasn’t certain which way was up. I’m from the British MAUD program, sent here to help out. Some of my fellows came a few weeks ago, but I had to take a side trip to Princeton. Szilard was still there and wanted to see me.” He smiled, focusing on her again. “Your office looks to be rather deserted compared with the rest of the camp.”

“It is.” Elizabeth smiled. She tossed her crumpled list along with a couple of used forms into a wastebasket stenciled burn. “May I help you?”

“Most certainly.” The man fumbled with the manila envelope and withdrew some papers. He held them out to her. “I’m Graham Fox, Doctor Graham Fox, actually. The MAUD people had me doing setup studies for them for the past year. Imagine my surprise when I discovered they were shipping me to this, er, enchanting place with the rest of the MAUD chaps. Didn’t even bloody bother to ask.”

Fox’s lack of enthusiasm struck a chord with her, though she didn’t know what in the world a MAUD was—the code name for the British nuclear program?

“How did you get up here, Dr. Fox? Did another bus pull up?”

“No, they told me it would be another day until the next one. I obtained a military taxi this morning. Santa Fe failed to excite me. Is it like most towns out here in the West?”

Elizabeth looked over Fox’s papers. She didn’t have a clue about what she should do next—maybe send him over to Assignments. She could always find an Expedite form to assign him to the Project.

The Project.

She found herself doing it. Give the work a nice plain euphemism and nobody will think about what it is they’re trying to accomplish. Maybe it took away some of the inhumanity from the whole idea—did these people really think about what they were doing? They had no idea how their work would snowball, what would happen a half century after they had opened Pandora’s box.

The Project.

“From far away the town looked pleasant enough,” Fox muttered. “But the buildings were made of adobe—just mud, like wattle and daub huts you see in the National Geographic magazine!”

Fox kept complaining, but Elizabeth turned to glance over his form. He had received his Ph.D. at Cambridge in 1935, directed by Rutherford—that name sounded familiar; a post-doc came next under Sommerfeld. The curriculum vitae listed his age at thirty-six. Though two years older than her, Graham Fox looked more like ten. Maybe the “eggheads” of this era squirreled themselves away and didn’t get out.

“Where do I go now, Miss…?”

“Devane. Elizabeth Devane.”

“Yes, most pleased to meet you. But might I ask where I should report next? I’m rather hungry and would like to relax a bit.”

Elizabeth looked around the room. She had almost finished the filing—and she knew her own nonexistent papers and baggage would never be found. It wouldn’t hurt for the office to be closed. She extended a hand to Fox.

“My supervisor can’t help you until she returns. I was just going to lunch myself. Would you care to join me?” Fox might prove to be as much a source of information as Mrs. Canapelli; he could tell her everything official new arrivals were supposed to know. Besides, he seemed as displaced as she was.

His puppy-dog eyes lit up. “I’d like that very much, Miss Devane.”

“Elizabeth. Please, call me Elizabeth.”

“Thank you. The British are supposed to be stodgy, but I go by Graham.” He stuffed the papers back into his manila envelope.

Elizabeth nodded to the envelope. “You don’t want to lose those. I learned the hard way. I came here to do calculations, but they have me filing instead. Paperwork mix-up.”

Fox grimaced at the thought. He held the door open for her. Elizabeth waited until he had gone ahead, then closed it behind them as they left.

They found the civilian mess hall by trial and error, watching the flow of people on the street. Once Fox learned that Elizabeth was just as new to the Project, he opened up and began to tell her of his schooldays at Cambridge, how marvelous it had been to work on physics, the only place where political borders made no difference. He had even had a close German friend—until the war, of course, when secrecy had clamped down on everything Fox tried to do.

Elizabeth dug out the money Mrs. Canapelli had loaned her. The smells of the civilian mess didn’t make her any less uneasy about the food. “My supervisor warned me about this place.”

Fox shrugged and stared down at his tray as they stood in line to pay. “This is the American West, Elizabeth. According to your Hollywood movies, we are supposed to be eating beans cooked over a campfire. Therefore, I shall not complain.”

The military cashier tallied up her lunch: “Cheeseburger, twenty-five cents; fries, fifteen cents; Coke, a dime. That’s four bits, ma’am. Anything else?” The man looked barely old enough to be in the military.

“No, thank you.” She had to figure out in her head how much “four bits” was. As she paid, Elizabeth kept from shuddering at the grease glistening on her plate from the harsh light bulbs. The only fruits and vegetables laid out on the counter bore some sort of green mold. Probably oozing pesticides, DDT, whatever.

She joined Fox at an eight-person table. Three young men in white shirtsleeves nodded briefly as Elizabeth sat down, then returned to reading copies of Physical Review and a two-day-old Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper. The man reading the newspaper commented to no one in particular about how long he thought it would take the Allies to capture the Solomon Islands, over which air battles were now apparently taking place. Elizabeth didn’t remember anything about that part of World War II.

She cut her hamburger in two, then took a bite. She looked around the dining area. “See any mayonnaise?”

Fox glanced up from his meal. “For your hamburger? Is that how you Americans eat it?”

Elizabeth forced a swallow. “Of course not. Never mind.”

“I see.”

Elizabeth didn’t realize how hungry she had become. She had only pecked at Mrs. Canapelli’s huge breakfast of eggs, sausage, and hash browns fried in lard. Now removed from the matronly woman’s presence, Elizabeth tried not to gulp.

As she looked up, she saw the mysterious man who had helped her in the Admin building the night before. He turned from the cashier and looked at her. Elizabeth recognized the short, curly hair, the angular face, the broad smile. He raised one eyebrow and winked at her, taking his plate off to a different table.

Elizabeth grabbed Fox’s wrist. “Who is that? Do you know him?”

Fox looked around, took a moment to locate the man she meant, but shook his head. “Sorry, I’m new to all this.”

One of the others at the table glanced up from his technical journal and answered, “That’s Dick Feynman, a brilliant kid. A wise guy, too, from what I hear.”

Two of his companions chuckled. “He drives the security folks nuts—keeps breaking into safes, just to prove that anyone with brains and patience can outsmart any of their precautions.”

“I heard he has his wife tear up her letters to him in at least fifty pieces, then send the shreds here. The security guys have to put the thing back together before they can read it. Feynman doesn’t mind.”

“Uh, thanks,” Elizabeth said. “I talked to him yesterday but forgot to ask his name.” The other men had already become absorbed in their technical journals again.

Fox spoke around his meal after an uncomfortable silence. “I really imagined this place would feel like more of a university town.”

“What do you mean?” Elizabeth nodded to the men still immersed in their technical papers. “Seems pretty close to me.”

“No, not that. It’s the feel of it. Look around you. People are wrapped up in their journals or moving at breakneck speed. A university town is supposed to be more relaxed, a place where people can ponder the implications of their discoveries. Sit under a tree with a blade of grass between one’s teeth, and simply think about the nature of the universe. Here, everyone appears to have a hot foot all the time.”

Elizabeth took a deliberate bite of food. Sit around under a tree? Fox must not have been going for an MBA! She didn’t want to jump into a debate on what Los Alamos should be like—not at this point.

Fox pushed back from the table. “But on the other hand, I imagine the research here is more directed than what you’d find at a university. More focused.” He shook his head. “And if it’s all to beat the Nazis to the punch, then it’s probably the only way to run a research establishment. Too bad. With all these bright lads around, some pondering would probably be better for us in the long run.”

Elizabeth put down her hamburger. “Do you really think we have so much to worry about from the German atom bomb program?”

Fox snorted. “From what I hear tell, the Nazis are about to make a breakthrough. After all, they had a corner on nuclear physics, and a two-year start on us. All the great ones from Hahn and Strassman to Heisenberg are working on their project.”

Elizabeth shook her head, suddenly remembering her list. It wasn’t often she knew enough to say something in a conversation around here. “Don’t worry about Heisenberg. He’s screwed something up, cross-section data I think. Botched calculations.”

Two of the men at their table looked up sharply. Fox narrowed his eyes. “What? Where did you hear this?”

Elizabeth grew red. She lowered her voice, trying to back out of what she had said. “Oh, just a hypothetical situation. But it’s perfectly reasonable, isn’t it? I’m sure their program is going to fizzle.” Elizabeth returned to eating her sandwich. She felt herself sweating.

“Do you know what you said?” Fox persisted.

Elizabeth breathed deeply through her nose. “Look, I’m only a file clerk, remember? How the hell should I know?”

Fox kept quiet. She felt him studying her, trying to come up with an answer; but he couldn’t possibly guess the truth. Then he nodded and dropped his voice. “I think I understand.”

Glancing up, Elizabeth noticed that he no longer looked at her, but instead stared off at a blank wall, eyes focused to infinity. She could not tell how to interpret his expression. She never wanted to bring up the subject again.

5 Los Alamos July 1943

R and R: Rest and Recreation. He would go crazy if he didn’t get away from the bloody Project.

The road out of the bustling, primitive town of Los Alamos plunged down the mesa like something constructed for an amusement park, then wound back up for the thirty-five-mile trek to Santa Fe. Graham Fox watched the landscape unfold as the dusty bus chugged past the small towns of Tesuque and Cuyamungue, then through the Nambe and Rio Grande valleys. As the bus strained up the last hill before Santa Fe, someone pointed out the silhouette of the Sandia mountains jutting up seventy miles to the south, near Albuquerque.

A few days ago the scenery had looked totally alien to Fox, something that existed only in cowboy movies. If he had seen a painting of the startling contrast between turquoise skies and red and golden clay, he would have considered the painter an impressionist with a garish palette. The air smelled sharp, the wind felt dry. His lips and hands had begun to chap as soon as he disembarked from the train in Santa Fe station.

This place seemed to belong on a different planet from serene, civilized Cambridge, England. At any moment he half expected a band of wild Indians to ride over the clipped-off mesas. But was a frontier town full of nuclear scientists any less bizarre?

Fox tried to tear his mind away from the letter in his pocket, concentrating instead on the distant mountains. In England the farthest distance he could see was up to the nearest grove of trees. The hills there had been soft, rolling, lush and green. In contrast, New Mexico had unlimited visibility, with a clean starkness that hurt the eyes.

But J. Robert Oppenheimer had found no better place to establish a new town whose purpose was to meet the grandest challenge of science. From his security indoctrination, Fox knew that the boys’ school on the site had been purchased in secret by the War Office, the solitary teacher and his small group of students packed off without any explanation, and Los Alamos had been set up virtually overnight. Right in the middle of America’s legendary wide-open spaces.

Maybe that was the real reason Oppenheimer had decided to set the Project here. Not so much for the solitude—from what Fox had heard, West Virginia or China Lake in California would have served as well—but other locations might place too much pressure on the scientists, box them into traditional ways of thinking. No, the limitless view had the psychological effect of keeping the scientists unbridled, uncontained with enormous ideas that could end up destroying the world. And Fox had been chosen to lend his talents, whether he wanted to or not.

Fox fingered his letter. The stationery felt thin and simple, but the words were so dangerous. Just bringing the letter out of the fenced compound went against all instructions the G-2, the Army Intelligence people, had been feeding him the past week. “All correspondence is to be submitted to the security detail with envelopes unsealed. Failure to cooperate will result in a direct violation of the Espionage Act.”

Espionage Act! The whole situation seemed ludicrous. Fox felt caught between paranoia and laughter at the absurdity of it. How could they in all honesty suspect a relationship that had already lasted fifteen years, one that had been cemented long before Chancellor Hitler began his rampage across Europe?

Fox’s Ph.D. studies at Cambridge had brought him into contact with several international students. After all, his teacher, Rutherford, was a world-renowned physicist; studying under him had marked Graham Fox as a rising star. It was something ordinary students only dreamed about.

Fox had become fast friends with Abraham Esau, a young German student. They had lived together in the boardinghouse, sharing the single water closet down the hall; they had played typical pranks together, until they had been sobered by the boating accident that left Esau’s lip scarred. Later, despite his growing preoccupation with the National Socialist Party, Esau had arranged for Fox to complete his post-doctoral work in Göttingen under Sommerfeld himself.

After Fox’s post-doctoral study, the two friends had corresponded for years, exchanging results of their latest work. They shared the excitement of Dirac’s relativistic field theory, the discovery of spinor mathematics… to them, physics was apolitical, a true bridge between cultures. Did an atomic nucleus care about inequities in the Treaty of Versailles? No matter what governments might squabble about, physics remained immutable. Fox admired that. Esau had always agreed with him.

And now, because of the war, his friendship with Esau had become illegal. Fox wanted to write his old companion, tell him that their communications must stop, but he had reluctantly adhered to the rules. Letters between himself and Esau had dwindled over the past few years, since Germany had declared war on the U.S. after the Pearl Harbor attack. But Fox’s friendship had never stopped, and he knew Esau must feel the same.

A colleague at William and Mary College had agreed to mail Fox’s letters to another colleague in Mexico, where in turn they would be sent to Norway, then forwarded to one of the occupied countries. A letter might take months to cover this circuitous route, but Fox and Esau kept their communication open.

And pointedly nonpolitical.

Fox’s leanings were certainly not toward Germany—but they did not rest blindly with the Allies either. He had heard much talk of a single world government lately. In Fox’s view, any one independent government was as bad as any other, especially if both used their weapons for mass destruction. Look at the horrible poison gas weapons used during the Great War. The great physicist Otto Hahn himself had created those weapons—was that a fitting purpose for such a man to apply his mind?

As a physicist, he believed the world could flourish without political meddling. Governments demanded too much. Physicists knew how to handle relations between countries. After all, new scientific ideas and discoveries had been exchanged freely for years. It seemed that only the bureaucrats, the militarists, and—worst of all—the bean counters, could not accept the laws of Nature for what they were.

No one government should have an upper hand, an ace in the hole it could use to dominate anyone else. It would be like two men standing in a room with loaded pistols aimed at each other. No sane person would pull the trigger, for fear that both might die. But if only one man held a gun, he might be tempted to take a preemptive action. He would feel superior, with nothing to worry about…. How could the U.S. be trusted with a doomsday weapon such as the atomic bomb, when no other country could?

Fox feared the pace the American program was setting. Did the Germans know that Enrico Fermi’s reactor, constructed in secret under the squash court at the University of Chicago, had achieved a self-sustaining nuclear reaction? It had never been done before, and marked a true milestone in the history of physics—but the results had remained a tight secret. Such breakthroughs were not to be kept under lock and key!

Fermi had used a common substance—graphite of all things!—as a moderator to slow the neutrons down in natural uranium, making it possible for them to split the uranium-235 isotope and create more neutrons to keep the reaction going. Some nuclei of the overwhelming majority of uranium-238 absorbed a neutron, thereby transmuting into a new element, one step higher in the periodic table.

Thanks to the efforts of Leo Szilard, and his constant harping for secrecy from the Germans, the news that would ordinarily be reported in Physical Review now was shared among only a few scientists whose political views were considered acceptable. What trash! German scientists like Esau might never know the simple technique, and the warring countries would continue to threaten each other with nearly completed “secret weapons.”

He had been strongly tempted to write Esau then, to tell him of Fermi’s chain reaction. He had sweated for days, changing his mind over and over again, until finally his own fear had won. But the innocuous remark that woman Elizabeth Devane had made set him to thinking again. What if Werner Heisenberg had somehow mucked up the data? What if he had miscalculated cross-sections? It was certainly possible, even for a Nobel Prize winner. Normally the physics and experimental data would be checked and cross-checked at every point when such an important application hinged on the results. But when the most respected of all German physicists, the creator of the quantum Uncertainty relation himself, stood by his results, no one chose to question him in the secrecy of war.

Fox snorted. Elizabeth Devane would have had no way of knowing… yet she had struck him as odd, the carefully prepared and trained person, so cleverly disguised that no one would suspect. Wasn’t that the way spies worked? In an undertaking as huge as the Manhattan Project, Fox thought it unrealistic that the Nazis had planted no informant. And what better cover than as an unobtrusive filing clerk who happened to have a physics background much more extensive than seemed reasonable for a simple woman? Elizabeth could quietly keep track of everything going on at Los Alamos and report back to Berlin at her convenience.

He mused about what she had said. What if Heisenberg was working for the Allies, sabotaging his research to keep Hitler’s work far behind what the others could accomplish? What if Elizabeth’s information went to the wrong people, the true Nazi warmongers, not trusted scientists like Abraham Esau?

The whole idea was preposterous. But yet… how had Elizabeth even imagined such a thing? What did she know?

That image of two men with loaded pistols seemed dangerously stabilizing when compared with a monopoly of power on either side. Equally matched, the two sides would be forced toward peace; given a bigger stick than anyone else in the world, even the most democratic nation would turn into a playground bully.

Fox knew it was dangerous to contact Esau at all, but this new insight was just too important not to pass on. The news of Fermi’s reaction had almost been enough incentive, almost, and Elizabeth’s comment had added the extra bit to tip the scales. He tucked the letter back in his jacket pocket.

The bus jarred Fox as it hit a pothole. The windows rattled and the springs creaked. Santa Fe spread out in front of him in all its historical aplomb. Brown adobe buildings lined the street, splashed with color from bundles of red chili pepper hung by doorways. Colorful Mexican tiles encircled the round-cornered windows. As stark decoration, black wrought-iron gates and bars adorned some of the houses.

A young man stood up at the front of the bus. Although dressed in typical civilian attire of white shirt, baggy gray pants, and a thin dark tie, the man seemed out of place. His mannerisms gave off an invisible signal that said “military,” G-2—not just another Nice Young Man who seemed anxious to help the scientists feel at ease on their R-and-R outing. This was, after all, the American celebration of Independence Day. Independence from Britain—Fox found that ironic. The G-2 man would probably have every person on the bus watched all day. The man cleared his throat and tried to speak over the grumbling of the bus’s engine.

“We’ll stop at 109 East Palace, Mrs. McKibbin’s place, where you all checked in before coming to the Hill. The bus will head back at 1900—that’s seven o’clock tonight, for you civilians.”

Or for anyone not used to European time, Fox thought.

“If you need assistance,” the man continued, “Mrs. McKibbin can help you. Remember not to talk with strangers about who you are or what you do. Have your new name ready in case you’re asked. Don’t reveal a whit—not even if you get arrested. We’ll take care of everything. Remember, German agents have probably infiltrated Santa Fe, and we don’t want to give them any more information than they already have. Any questions?”

Fox fingered his letter to Abraham Esau through his pocket; the note seemed to burn a hole in the material. What if they searched him? He tried to breathe normally, not to give a clue that anything was the matter.

This must be the last of it, he vowed to himself. No more. If I’m found even holding this letter, my head will be on the chopping block.

He had thought about getting to Albuquerque to mail the message, but transportation there was very limited. He couldn’t slip away for so long, not with badge checks and accountability back on Project. Military G-2 types were probably stashed away at the bus depot and the train station, just watching. Any attempt to leave Santa Fe would no doubt bring them running.

Fox fidgeted in the cold sweat of fear. Through the briefings and cautions he had received, the seriousness of the situation had never seemed real. It had been like a child’s game of I’ve Got a Secret—keep quiet and tell no one what you’re doing, then everything should turn out all right.

But now, faced with the possibility of getting caught, he felt a knot in his stomach. Was this worth the trouble? Yes, Fox thought. The balance of the world is at stake.

He forced himself to look out the dusty window as the other scientists and Army workers filed off the bus. Fox ignored the smiling young man standing at the front, still waiting for anyone to ask him a question.

The bus had pulled up to 109 East Palace. Fox had been there only a week before. Departing from the train that had taken him cross-country, he had asked directions until he found the quaint adobe house. At that address he had introduced himself to a Mrs. McKibbin; though the woman didn’t know him from Adam, she had made him feel at home. She hadn’t been expecting him in particular, she said, but so many people came and went, with her as their contact point, that she couldn’t keep track anymore. And everybody traveled under false identities anyway.

Fox stepped off the bus in the middle of the crowd. He avoided the other people’s eyes—particularly the Nice Young Man who watched the scientists disperse into the Santa Fe streets. Most of them would be going to cafes, or shopping trips, or to spend some time in an approved club drinking to the Stars and Stripes or arguing about the continuing American assault on the Solomon Islands.

Dust swirled through the air, kicked up by a summer wind that tumbled down from the mountains. The stinging dust forced people to duck their heads and keep the dirt out of their eyes. A newspaper skittered by. Fox held a hand up to his face. The bus was virtually invisible in the sudden storm.

He took advantage of the cover and strolled away from the activity. Narrow unpaved streets ran at crooked angles to East Palace. He turned at the second street—an alley—and quickened his pace. He could ask directions and find his way back later. Now he just wanted to be out of sight.

He pushed through a throng of Indians heading up the alley. They were loaded down with blankets, silver and turquoise jewelry, probably on their way to the plaza. The Indians moved aside without comment, looking to the ground. One of the women stared at him with such fierce intensity that Fox had to hurry his step. He saw no young men among them.

Another street; he passed it by, as well as the next, then stepped into a maze of side alleys. He stopped, expecting pursuit, but no one came chasing after him. The wind blew small bursts of dust around the corner. Fox caught his breath. It had been so easy. Had he been imagining pursuit in the first place? Nothing breeds paranoia better than fear. And nothing would draw attention to himself more than acting suspicious.

A door slammed behind him. Fox whirled. Two dark-haired boys ran from a house. Tattered curtains covered one of the windows; inside the house a dog yipped. The boys ran across the narrow street, laughing and barefoot. The door continued to bang as an inner spring bounced it back against the frame.

Fox wet his lips; they felt so chapped in the desert dryness. His whole situation seemed suddenly out of hand, unfolding as quickly and as uncontrolled as one of Fermi’s chain reactions. Fox tried to calm his breathing, slow his heart rate.

Looking down the street, he saw no one following him. Except for the two boys bouncing a ball against an old mud wall, the narrow alley was deserted.

Then he noticed the mailbox.

It hung by a single nail on the side of a house. Painted black with rust showing around the edges, the container held two letters sticking up from the inside.

Fox’s eyes grew wide. He clutched the letter in his pocket and took an unsteady step toward the mailbox. The boys ignored him—the mailbox seemed to recede from him with each step he took.

If he could only get to the damned box, get this poison letter out of his pocket… it all seemed a challenge now, narrowed down to just getting the letter mailed, into the post office where it would be swallowed up in an anonymous pile of similar letters.

Fox reached out and placed the envelope into the box with the other two outgoing letters, then stepped away.

Still no one came running down the street.

A ball bounced against a wall. Muted voices drifted from the buildings on either side of the street.

Fox stared at the black mailbox. He had placed an innocuous return address on the envelope—1953 Rodeo Road—an address he had made up, yet he felt sure it would draw no attention. If he had neglected to add some return address, the letter might have aroused suspicion. All mail entering and leaving the Hill was opened, inspected by the censors; Fox had no doubt that suspicious items from Santa Fe would be detained as well.

A letter to Williamsburg, Virginia, should draw no attention, though. Sitting with two other letters, his final communiqué with Esau waited in the warm desert sun. Fox felt the weight lifted from his shoulders. He had done everything he could, just a small thing. Now Abraham Esau would have to make use of it. Graham Fox had done his part.

Fox spent the rest of the afternoon walking around, poking his head into the shops that peppered the Plaza. Around the plaza groups of Indians sat on colorfully woven blankets, watching in silence as white people shopped for jewelry, picking over the silver and turquoise creations scattered in front of them. Santa Fe’s pace seemed so serene compared to the frenzy on the Hill. Fox caught himself daydreaming, actually wishing that his life could be as uncomplicated as the locals’.

He spotted the bus parked at the end of the avenue. With an hour and a half remaining before it departed, Fox turned into the La Posada Hotel and sought out the bar. Even in the low light he recognized several clusters of men from the bus.

No one invited him to their table, but he didn’t feel like socializing anyway; nor did anyone else, it seemed. Each one seemed to want a last few minutes of refuge before heading back to the Project. Fox still felt his own body trembling from the tension he had just put it through.

For all his paranoia, he had seen no indication of G-2 representatives in his wanderings. Maybe the ubiquitous intelligence force was not as thorough as had been rumored. It had been easy to mail the letter. This time.

He could not afford to do it again. He had already done enough. Or perhaps too much. For a moment he thought about running back to the mailbox, snatching the letter away—but he did not have enough time. The wheels had been set in motion.

A waiter took his order for a gin and tonic as Fox relaxed in his chair. He would have to do his Project work now. He had nothing else he could do, and he would have to try his best. He just wished the war would be over before the question of using the atomic bomb—if they managed to develop it—ever came up.

Fox swallowed a mouthful of his gin and tonic. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light in the club, he spotted another person with the same out-of-place aura as the Nice Young Man from the bus, sitting in a corner and looking over the crowd. How long had he been there? Had he followed Fox all afternoon?

Feeling suddenly reckless, Fox raised his glass and toasted the G-2 man.

The man looked away.

6 Berlin—the Virus House August 1943

Gravel crunched under the wheels of the staff car as the driver turned off of the cobblestoned streets. They proceeded to a less-traveled area of the Berlin suburb of Dahlem, then turned down the damp road to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute. The stolid construction of the Institute for Chemistry and the Institute for Physics was overbearing, designed at the turn of the century to please the rigid tastes of the Kaiser. Now, in the August rain, the trees and the flower boxes appeared subdued. Wet streaks ran down the stone walls as water splashed out of rusting gutters.

The driver of the staff car activated the windshield wiper, but it merely smeared a thin film of mud. Ahead of the car rode two motorcycle guards hunched over their handlebars. The motorcycle engines popped and puttered from the alcohol fuel.

Although he now held the upper hand, Professor Abraham Esau fidgeted in the back of the staff car, wondering if he would triumph as planned or if everything would backfire on him. The drive had not been long, but it was uncomfortable. Reichminister Albert Speer sat beside him, straight-backed and silent, staring ahead. The Minister of Armaments must be preoccupied with something other than the secret Nazi research center known as the Virus House.

Beside the driver sat Major Wilhelm Stadt of the Gestapo, dressed in a black uniform with SS armband. Major Stadt was rude, fast spoken, with an air of confidence that bordered on impatience. As did so many of the young officers, the major sported a small toothbrush moustache like Hitler’s and Himmler’s. He had his pale hair shaved severely up around his ears and the back of his neck, making him appear to be wearing an overlarge Jewish skullcap. Esau did not dare make such a comparison aloud; the SS major would not have found it amusing.

Major Stadt spoke to the driver, telling coarse stories and Jewish jokes, acting friendly toward the lower ranks—after all, wasn’t Gestapo head Himmler himself a former chicken farmer? But Stadt’s casual attitude seemed a ploy to Esau, a practiced interrogation technique. Every third or fourth comment, Major Stadt would turn around to look at Reichminister Speer, as if searching for some reaction. Occasionally Speer would nod, or smile if that seemed appropriate, but he said few words.

Esau knew that Speer had never wanted his position as Minister of Armaments—he was an architect who had served Hitler well, but he had been astonished when Hitler promoted him after the previous minister had been killed in an airplane crash. Speer had done his best in the position, but the German war effort seemed to be flagging. Mussolini had been overthrown in Italy, and a humiliating and disastrous Allied bombing raid had just turned the city of Hamburg into a firestorm.

No matter. From Esau’s work here at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, both he and Reichminister Speer could become heroes. The firestorm of Hamburg would be nothing compared to the devastation a German atomic bomb could deliver. The other scientists would not be so smug and uncooperative with Speer standing beside him. Esau now had the crowbar he needed to consolidate the nuclear physics research firmly under his own custodianship.

Werner Heisenberg would not be expecting them; Esau wanted that as part of their surprise. Heisenberg lived in Leipzig with his family, but took the train to Berlin twice a week to continue work at the institute. Esau had taken great care to be sure they arrived on a day Heisenberg would be at the Virus House.

The motorcycles ground to a halt. The staff car pulled up in front of a complex of wooden buildings surrounded by a gate and a sagging barbed-wire fence. One guard, wrapped in a rain shawl with a machine gun over his shoulder, stepped forward to inspect the papers of the motorcycle riders, who gestured him toward the staff car. The driver wrestled with the crank to turn down the window.

“This is a restricted area. May I see your papers please?” the guard said, pushing his head in and dripping water on the driver’s shoulder.

When he saw Reichminister Speer and Major Stadt in their respective uniforms, the guard stiffened, but held his ground. For security reasons they had not marked the staff car to announce the ranks of its occupants.

Major Stadt remained silent, and Esau waited as the guard checked them through. Any other behavior by the guard would not have been tolerated. The guard returned the folded papers to the driver, then trudged off through the mud back to his windbreak shelter beside the barbed-wire gate. The two motorcycle riders kicked their engines into life again, then proceeded through the gate. The driver of the staff car kept the window cracked open, allowing damp air to purge the atmosphere inside. They drove into the grounds of the Virus House.

In July 1940 the researcher Karl Wirtz had built a small laboratory on the grounds of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Biology and Virus Research, adjacent to the Institute of Physics. All power and water for the new establishment came from the institute’s large virus growth laboratories. But Dr. Karl Wirtz was no biologist. The ominous name “Virus House” was prominently displayed only to keep the curious away, and to mislead any spies about the actual research conducted there.

At the beginning of the war, Reichminister Speer’s predecessor had been skeptical about the nuclear physics program, since it then appeared the Blitzkrieg would give Germany victory over Britain long before nuclear physicists could develop a new weapon. Nevertheless, a research program was set up. The head of the institute, the Dutch experimental physicist Paul Debye, was told that he must either become a German citizen or leave his post, because no foreign national could be allowed to work on a secret military project. Debye had chosen to leave, departing to go on a “lecture tour” to neutral America.

That was in January 1940. The Armaments Ministry tried to install Dr. Kurt Diebner from the military as Debye’s replacement, and this the rest of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute resoundingly opposed. But they had not yet realized how much times had changed. Finally the institute accepted Dr. Diebner as a provisional head, until such time as Paul Debye returned from his lecture tour.

But Diebner’s career had not survived political machinations in the following years. Other scientists, such as Karl Wirtz and Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker had schemed to draw Werner Heisenberg into the institute, where he became titular head of nuclear physics work-subordinate to the Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics, of course, Esau reminded himself.

Esau had been to the Virus House on official visits, but he had accomplished nothing. The program remained as scattered and uninspired as ever, the scientists more concerned with maintaining their reputations than with winning the war.

Now, though, Esau was bringing them sufficient inspiration, thanks to Graham Fox.

He allowed himself to smile as they drove into the muddy courtyard outside the wooden barracks. Dark stains showed where rain had soaked through the plank walls. All around, the city of Berlin pressed close, too close perhaps for such dangerous research as this, but it did make a perfect hiding place.

A dim shadow behind one of the windows watched the staff car pull up, then ducked back. Esau hoped the observer would inform the rest of the physicists exactly who had arrived for a visit.

They had come to accuse Professor Werner Heisenberg of treason.

A week before, when the Reich post had delivered a letter with Belgian postmark, Professor Esau took notice. He held up the stained envelope and frowned; it looked like cheap stationery inside. He did not recognize the bold handwriting on the address with its excessive loops and flourishes. With a letter opener he slashed open the edge.

He recognized the handwriting on the letter inside immediately. Graham Fox! It was impossible, but he could not stop himself from a smile such as he had not worn since his student days at Cambridge. He wondered how Fox had managed to get a letter through the postal blockades to Germany. But none of Esau’s initial astonishment compared to what he felt upon reading the terse but profound message.

… So, my dear friend, Fermi has achieved a self-sustaining neutron reaction moderated by graphite blocks. By virtue of Germany’s superior physicists, Heisenberg’s group should have come to this discovery on their own—could he perhaps be leading you down the wrong path? After all, no one would question Heisenberg’s claims. I will do what I can here because we must maintain parity. All humanity is at risk. Must count on you, Abraham.

At that moment Esau’s secretary—the same one who had bungled his invitation to the physics conference, and then bungled his subsequent apology letter—appeared at the door with some inane question. Esau’s shouting fit sent her scurrying back into the hall. Her heels echoed on the tile floor like gunshots.

Esau clutched the letter with sweaty fingers. A nuclear reaction moderated by graphite! Esau was astounded. According to all their careful studies—no, he corrected himself, not careful enough—they had thought heavy water was the only substance that could appropriately moderate a reacting pile. How could they have missed something as simple and common as graphite?

A nuclear reactor could produce a different element, a new element beyond uranium on the periodic table, that could be used as a substitute for the rare isotope uranium-235 in an atomic bomb. In 1940 the American Edwin McMillan, working at the University of California at Berkeley, had artificially created “element 93” by bombarding uranium with neutrons. Since uranium had been named after the planet Uranus, McMillan had decided to call his new element “neptunium” after the planet Neptune.

But physical theory predicted that the next artificial element in the series, element 94, would be a candidate for fission, just like uranium-235. Element 94 did not exist in nature, but in all likelihood could be made in the laboratory. But only if they could keep a nuclear chain reaction going. Continuing the scheme of using planetary names, this element should be named after the newly discovered ninth planet Pluto. Plutonium?

If they could produce enough of this new plutonium, Esau would not need to worry about the incredible difficulties of separating uranium-235 from the rest of the ore. They could have a German bomb sooner than expected.

But for that they needed a working reactor to “cook” the uranium until it became plutonium… and to achieve a functioning reactor, Esau had thought he needed enormous quantities of heavy water, which was exceedingly rare and precious. Even then it remained a matter for conjecture, because they had never been able to obtain enough heavy water to test the theory.

The difficulties continued to tangle worse and worse as the war went on.

Germany’s only source of heavy water had been the Norwegian Hydro Works at Vemork—and the Allies had recently destroyed the plant, bringing all heavy water production to a halt. Allied saboteurs had even sunk the ferry carrying the last few drums of dilute heavy water rescued from the ruined factory.

Esau had seen no future for the possibility of reactor research. It had left them with nothing to try but the impossible isotope separation.

Now, though, Fox’s letter implied that perhaps graphite—simple carbon—could be used instead of heavy water. Esau could not comprehend why his own researchers had ignored the possibility. Especially with the great Heisenberg at the helm.

Feeling his cheeks flush with a growing anger, Esau dug through the files and progress reports describing aspects of his disjointed program. He loathed this clerical work—he could never find anything. Progress reports had been falsified, or not submitted on time, or written in such terse, vague language that he couldn’t understand what the physicists were talking about. He had not unpacked and organized the files completely, and he did not dare risk asking his inept secretary to help him. Some of the files were from Diebner’s tenure over the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute; others had been culled from the Armaments Ministry itself, or even von Ardenne’s work for the post office.

Surely someone must have tested graphite.

He found the records after an hour of searching. He snapped the thin file away from the stack with a brisk gesture that betrayed his own impatience. Outside, an automobile horn blasted three times, and Esau made an annoyed comment to himself. He took the papers back to his desk and spread them out, piling everything else on top of his unopened mail.

Professor Walther Bothe had made the analysis. At Heidelberg, Bothe had used a sphere of high-quality graphite larger than a meter in diameter, submerging it in a tank of water to measure its neutron absorption cross-section. According to Bothe’s test results, graphite was indeed a poor choice, swallowing far too many of the available neutrons. For the nuclear reaction to be successful, the moderator needed to slow down the neutrons to the proper speed so they could cause fissions in the uranium—slow them down, not take them out of the reaction entirely.

But if the Americans had succeeded in creating a self sustaining chain reaction using graphite and uranium, then Bothe’s results must be wrong. Wrong!

Esau squinted and rubbed the scar on his lip. The car honked again below the window, but now he no longer heard it. What if Bothe had not used pure enough carbon? Graphite had a tendency to be contaminated with boron— and other results had plainly shown that boron acted as one of the most voracious neutron swallowers. What if carbon was indeed an efficient moderator, but Bothe’s result had been masked by boron contamination? The pile would then defeat its own reaction, not because of graphite—but because of the boron poisoning.

Carbon was trivial to obtain. Absolute purification would be somewhat difficult, but vastly simpler than manufacturing heavy water or finding some way to separate the uranium-235 from the rest of the natural uranium.

This changed everything.

Esau read Fox’s letter again. This also meant the Americans were far ahead of them. Despite a German head start at the beginning of the war, the Americans had already achieved a self-sustaining chain reaction. That, too, changed everything.

Reichminister Albert Speer did not take either Esau or his nuclear program seriously. But perhaps this news would make him pay attention. If the Americans had jumped headfirst into developing an atomic weapon, could Germany afford not to do the same?

Esau imagined different ways to approach Speer with Fox’s information. Such a simple letter from an old friend, but it would gain him a great deal of respect. It demanded immediate action.

The two motorcycle guards dismounted and propped their vehicles against the wooden railings. Side by side the two marched up the steps of the Virus House and stood beside the door, waiting for Reichminister Speer and Major Stadt to emerge from the staff car. The driver opened the doors for them. Esau followed Speer, hurrying to keep up with the man’s pace.

Speer was a tall, quiet man, soft-spoken but highly intelligent. He had staged and organized Hitler’s spectacular Nurnberg rallies and had become one of the Führer’s closest companions. Speer bore a superior air, a frowning disregard for Esau. But that would pass. Esau had earned a new reputation for himself.

The guards tracked mud inside the barracks as they led the way. The academics had bemoaned the presence of Nazis in the institute years before. This time, though, the visit would have a different flavor.

Esau stomped his shoes on the mat, then hurried as Major Stadt led them on a snap inspection of the facilities. At first glance the Virus House had an acceptable appearance of austerity, as all good war projects were to have. The physicists and lab assistants, startled from their routine, scurried about, trying to understand what the guests wanted, trying to hide whatever they suspected might be considered wrong. No one actually greeted the visitors.

Stadt opened random doors and peered inside rooms. He seemed uninterested in what he saw, which made Esau realize that the Gestapo major knew nothing about nuclear physics and simply expected to intimidate the researchers into showing some sign of guilt or collusion.

They found blackboards, equations, men arguing about a crude pencil sketch. In one part of the building they found a brick-lined pit two meters deep and filled with water. One abandoned experimental area left its laboratory equipment sitting idle. Idle! Esau fumed. It would reflect badly on his own credibility if his people weren’t even bothering to make a sham of ongoing research. Speer raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

“This is not the only facility where our experiments are being conducted,” Esau said. “Dr. Diebner has another group working at Göttingen.”

“Indeed,” Speer replied quietly. “And is he getting any work done?”

“That is the problem!” Esau tried to master his impatience. “They are scattered and they can play games like this because I cannot watch them all. One of Diebner’s men, Dr. Paul Harteck, wanted to do an experiment with uranium oxide moderated by dry ice. He had secured an entire trainload of dry ice and needed as much uranium oxide as possible—but at the same time Heisenberg insisted on having half of it himself for a different experiment here at the Virus House.” Esau scowled and met Speer’s gaze. The Reichminister didn’t seem to understand.

“You see, with this nuclear physics, it is all or nothing—you cannot have a partial reaction. You cannot split the resources in half. The result was that both experiments failed due to lack of materials.” He cleared his throat and straightened. “That was before I became Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics.”

“And now everything has been straightened out completely, I am sure,” Speer said with a maddening lack of sarcasm.

“It will be,” Esau muttered. He now had a blackmail

grip on Heisenberg. After bringing the Nobel Prize winner

in line, he could begin to get other things done.~

As they approached, Dr. Werner Heisenberg emerged from the door of his main office. He bore a false expression of welcome on his face; Esau could see he had made a quick attempt to straighten his clothes. His reddish hair glistened with dampness, as if he had just combed it.

“Welcome, gentlemen,” Heisenberg said, rubbing his hands together, then turned to Speer. “You are the Reichminister? I have seen photographs of your Nürnberg rallies. Most impressive.”

“Will you be offering us tea next?” Major Stadt said. “After all, you don’t appear to have anything better to do.”

Heisenberg froze, as if it had finally occurred to him that he might be in some sort of trouble. Esau wanted to watch him sweat for a moment. It would be good to diminish that ego.

“What can I help you with, Herr Major?” Heisenberg’s voice had a slight edge. Esau felt immediately left out of the conflict.

“We have received some troubling information about your activities, Herr Professor,” Reichminister Speer said. He removed his overcoat. Heisenberg reached out to take it, but Speer handed it to one of the motorcycle guards instead.

“We would like to inspect all of your experimental records,” Major Stadt said. “You will provide them, please. Professor Esau will scrutinize them to determine the accuracy, or lack thereof, in your results.” The Gestapo major’s voice began to grow louder. “We wish to find out if your inability to make progress is a result of simple incompetence or plain treason.”

This appeared to astound Heisenberg. “But Herr Major, I assure you—”

“You can assure us with your records. If you are innocent of trying to sabotage German nuclear research, you should have nothing whatsoever to hide, eh?”

Heisenberg did not answer; there was nothing he could have said.

The silence lasted too long. Esau had just begun to clear his throat when Heisenberg seemed to crumple. “Certainly. Follow me and I will get everything for you.”

In the hall, Esau watched other researchers standing indignant but afraid to say anything. He recognized Dr. Karl Wirtz, the man who had built the Virus House, and Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker, Heisenberg’s brilliant young assistant; the other technicians were unknown to him.

Back in Heisenberg’s office—Esau noted with satisfaction how inferior it was to his own new office—the renowned physicist hesitated beside a scarred safe that looked as if it had survived an Allied bombing raid. He acted more troubled with each passing second.

“Is there any work in particular you wish me to produce?” he asked.

“Everything,” Major Stadt said. Speer gestured vaguely at the safe.

Heisenberg set his mouth and opened the safe. He withdrew stacks of lab reports, handwritten journals, and letters between himself and the other researchers. Major Stadt nodded to one of the guards, who snatched the records from the physicist’s hands.

“Give those to Professor Esau,” Reichminister Speer said. “He will search for inconsistencies, errors, or omissions.”

Heisenberg’s voice carried only a hint of his complaint, but he flashed Esau a look of pure outrage. “I do not believe Dr. Esau is quite of the same… caliber as myself. I doubt his ability to question my competence.”

“In such grave circumstances, Professor Heisenberg,” Major Stadt said, “you would be wise to keep quiet unless specifically answering a query put to you by either Reich-minister Speer or myself.”

Esau took the stack of papers, and Speer dismissed him with a casual motion. Esau said, “I shall need all of his derivations for cross-section calculations—”

“Then find an office for yourself. Take the one next door, in fact. Meanwhile, Major Stadt has some other information he would like to discuss with Professor Heisenberg.”

One of the guards opened a leather satchel and withdrew a sheaf of papers bound with a red ribbon. “The Gestapo has compiled its own file on you, Herr Professor,” Stadt said. “Dr. Esau’s new information was the last straw.”

Heisenberg looked truly baffled. “Am I accused of something?” He reached up with a hand to run it through his bristly red hair, but stopped himself.

“Accused? No. Guilty? Most likely.” Major Stadt sat down in Heisenberg’s chair behind Heisenberg’s desk, brushing aside notebooks without regard to what they contained. “You will sit in front of me and you will answer my questions. To cross-check the record, my guards will take notes. Reichminister Speer will ensure that none of your coworkers leave the Virus House until we have completed our investigation.” He snapped a glance over at Esau, still listening by the door. “We would like you to begin today, Professor Esau!”

Esau hurried out of the room as the Gestapo major began his questions….

He found it difficult to concentrate on Heisenberg’s tight, narrow handwriting. Half of Major Stadt’s interrogation was discernible through the walls and through the half-open door of the adjacent office. Esau imagined Reichminister Speer sitting in silence, watching the Gestapo officer ask his questions.

“We have on record your attempts, time and again, to defer scientists from active service in the military. For the betterment of the Reich, you say! To keep technicians working rather than shooting the enemy, you say! And who are you to decide how best we can implement our armed forces?”

Esau took out sheets of clean paper and used a fountain pen to check calculations, trying to unravel Heisenberg’s chain of reasoning. Several times Esau lost the thread of what the physicist meant, what he was trying to show. He paused between written lines, puzzling over how Heisenberg had made an intuitive leap. Back in Cambridge, in the coffee shops, Esau and Graham Fox had played similar games, trying to out calculate each other. It had been so long since he had seen Fox….

Stadt raised his voice in the next room. “But he is a Jew! I don’t care if he is one of your colleagues—we aren’t interested in Jewish physics here! You were ordered to ignore Jewish physics.”

Heisenberg began to answer, but Major Stadt interrupted him. “We have your attempt on record. Look, here are your own letters, signed by your own hand, requesting that the parents of one Samuel Goudsmidt be released from a concentration camp. Who are you to decide these things? We decide! Himmler decides! You have only one task—to develop a new weapon. And you cannot even manage that!”

Heisenberg mumbled something Esau couldn’t hear. Esau tried to maintain his concentration as he tallied a column of figures. Heisenberg himself had scratched out one answer and written another on top. An attempt to camouflage results? Or a simple mistake?

Reichminister Speer said one word, clearly heard: “Bohr.”

Major Stadt immediately spoke up. “Yes, that brings us to an interesting situation, one of the most damning we have about you. Witnesses say that you left Germany, went to Copenhagen, and met with Niels Bohr, a half-Jew with known Allied sympathies. In fact he is even now believed to be in hiding in America, working on their atomic bomb project. Yet you had a private conversation with him, you were seen together, talking. We have everything on record. Now tell us—what were you doing there?”

“I had a troubled conscience.” Heisenberg’s voice sounded shallow and defeated. “I wanted to ask—”

“Ask? No doubt you wanted to tell him everything about our program, so he could share it with the Americans! We know you are falsifying your own experiments, disrupting progress on our nuclear program, trying to make us lose the war.”

“That is not—”

Major Stadt cracked something hard against the desktop, then lowered his voice below hearing again.

The interrogation went on. Distracted, Esau continued his inspection. He stared at the numbers, at the comments jotted down in the laboratory. He tried to find flaws in Heisenberg’s work. He was too afraid even to get up and find a cup of tea for himself. None of Heisenberg’s fellow scientists were likely to be in a helpful mood at the moment.

Hours later he felt hunger biting at his stomach. The other scientists paced the halls in silence, unwilling to talk to each other. They did no work the entire day, and it had passed the time when they usually went home to their families. Some had trains to catch, but they could not depart until Reichminister Speer allowed them to leave.

Otto Hahn appeared at the door, scowling but looking dapper with his intense and bright eyes set under bushy eyebrows. His graying moustache was clipped so close as to seem a mere smear of stubble on his lip. “Excuse me, Dr. Esau. We were wondering if some sort of dinner might be provided? My technicians have not eaten all day.”

Esau looked up at him, amazed—Otto Hahn had discovered nuclear fission in the uranium atom, and now he stood timid, asking a simple favor of Esau.

“You have no food here in the laboratories?” He had wanted something to eat as well.

“Not with all the uranium we keep, Herr Professor. Many of the things here are highly poisonous. We thought it best to prohibit eating in the area.”

Reichminister Speer and Major Stadt had closed the door to maintain privacy in their endless interrogation. Esau did not dare interrupt them to ask for permission. Then he realized his own foolishness. After all, wasn’t he the Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics? Didn’t he have the authority to make certain decisions? Hadn’t he been the one to point out Heisenberg’s intentions?

“Gather some of the workers in the hall,” he said. “I will select one at random and he will go to the commissary of the institute to get enough food for all of us.” Otto Hahn looked relieved and nodded as he backed out the door. Esau had just proved he could be reasonable. That was good, since he would have to make these people work with him.

Later, as he worked red-eyed and far into the night, sipping on the cold dregs of a cup of tea, Esau sat up as Heisenberg’s door snapped open. One stack of laboratory records sat to Esau’s right; a few more, scattered in front of him, still needed to be checked. In front, on a sheet of his personal stationery, Esau had written a list of errors he found. The fountain pen left blobs toward the bottom of the page, when he had been too tired to worry much about penmanship.

Major Stadt stepped out. His black SS uniform looked no worse after his hours of interrogation. “Professor Esau,” he said, “have you finished? What do you have to report? You have found a substantial number of errors?”

Esau stood up and peeled the scratch paper from the desk blotter. “Yes, Herr Major. Here is a list of inconsistencies I have found. I cannot tell if these are malicious mistakes or simple sloppiness.”

Or because my own eyes are so bleary from staring at them so long, Esau thought. He couldn’t tell if he’d made the mistakes or if Heisenberg had.

But that was enough for Major Stadt. His lips made a tight smile. Reichminister Speer came out of the office beside Heisenberg. The great physicist looked defeated, confused. When he stumbled, Speer made no move to touch him.

Heisenberg splayed his fingers on the desk in front of Esau, brushing his own damning lab records aside. Esau could smell the sweat on the man, could see how rumpled his clothes had become.

Major Stadt found a ruler from the desk and smacked it against the wood, then against the doorjamb. He raised his voice to be heard throughout the halls. Speer flinched from the racket.

“Attention! Attention!” Major Stadt called. The two motorcycle guards reappeared, blinking and bleary-eyed, anxious to see what was wrong. The other scientists, no doubt unable to sleep, emerged from their rooms, Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker beside Otto Hahn and Karl Wirtz. They continued to stare at the floor; the other lab assistants studiously avoided drawing attention to themselves.

“We will assemble in the courtyard. We have important business to conclude this evening, and I am certain you will all be anxious to return to your research immediately. You have been idle all day!”

The scientists went back to their lockers to get overcoats, to close their offices. Major Stadt grasped Heisenberg’s left arm and ushered him to the door. Esau swallowed the remains of his cold cup of tea.

Reichminister Speer stopped next to him. “Things must change around here, Professor Esau. I am hereby instructing you to consolidate all German nuclear research in this one place. No more competing with separate groups. No more sharing of minimal resources. I want everyone here, everyone working, and everyone cooperating. You will supervise them directly, and you will be housed here yourself, as well.” Speer looked around the unattractive barracks. He scowled in distaste, but made no comment about it.

Esau felt a rush of triumph. He had been pushing for this all along. Now he could get things done. Now he had the authority to make great strides in nuclear research. Perhaps they would even beat the Americans in developing an atomic bomb.

“I will need that in writing, Herr Reichminister,” Esau said. “Von Ardenne should be no problem—in fact, I think he will be glad to be under more appropriate auspices than the Postal Ministry. It will lend legitimacy to his work. But Diebner will not cooperate. He insists on working independently with his own men. I have had trouble with him before.”

Speer seemed unconcerned with Esau’s assessment. “I do not believe Diebner will be a problem. Not after tonight.”

Saying nothing more, he stepped out the door. Puzzled, Esau took a last glance at the laboratory notebooks he had not yet checked, then hurried after the Reichminister to the courtyard outside.

Heisenberg stood by himself on the muddy ground. Esau reveled in his sullen appearance—this humiliation would take the great physicist down a notch or two, make him more cooperative. Perhaps Heisenberg would stop worrying about esoteric theory and concentrate more on practicalities. Esau should find him much more manageable from now on.

Major Stadt had arranged for the floodlights to be switched on, drowning the area in harsh white light. The Virus House and its outbuildings looked like something from one of Himmler’s work camps. The wood siding showed gaps where the uncured lumber had swelled with the spring rains. The barbed wire around the perimeter looked like silver spider webs in the night.

When the other scientists had assembled outside on the spotty gravel walkways, Major Stadt trudged out to where Heisenberg stood alone. His boots made indentations in the soft ground.

“I want you to pay close attention, all of you.” Stadt raised his voice, and Esau noticed from his mannerisms that he seemed to be imitating Hitler. A lot of people were doing that these days.

“This man, your Professor Heisenberg, winner of the highest accolades your profession can bestow, is traitor to his country, to his Fuhrer, and to you all. He has committed grave sabotage against this project, which has the possibility of winning the war. He has delayed work, he has falsified laboratory results, and he has cooperated with the enemy in ensuring that Germany fails to develop an atomic bomb!”

“That is not true.” Heisenberg drew himself up. It was apparent that he had said that same thing countless times to the Gestapo major, to little effect. Stadt ignored him.

“Because of this man’s mistakes, because of his delays, and because of his treason, Professor Werner Heisenberg has caused the deaths of countless thousands of German soldiers. If this weapon had been available for our attack against Stalingrad, we could have captured that city without the loss of a single German life. We could have taken Moscow in a day, instead of months upon months of failure.”

As Stadt spoke he stepped away from Heisenberg, marching back toward the gathered scientists. Esau waited beside Reichminister Speer, watching. He was beginning to think that this had gone too far. If Heisenberg were broken too severely, he might not be useful in further research.

“All of these deaths, all of these failures, weigh on the shoulders of a single man. He is guilty of high treason.”

Stadt turned to the two motorcycle guards and gestured offhandedly to the physicist standing alone on the barren ground. “ Shoot him.”

The other scientists stood silent in shock, then muttering filled the air. Otto Hahn took a step forward in outrage. Heisenberg himself blinked in astonishment and stood up straight, but the protests seemed too many to come out of his mouth at once. Even Esau couldn’t believe what he had just heard. That wasn’t the point at all….

But Reichminister Speer just stood in silence, as if he approved.

The guards looked at each other in equal uneasiness. They had apparently never had to kill anyone before.

“Shoot him!” Major Stadt shouted.

One guard brought up his pistol while the other fumbled to pull it out of its holster at his hip. A shot rang out, a thin crack, deceptively small, and then a second shot sounded as the other guard fired.

Heisenberg crumpled to the mud under the harsh floodlights. His face turned away as he fell. The gathered scientists let out an anguished murmur.

“No more uncertainty about your principles now, Hen-Professor,” Major Stadt said.

Esau felt himself trembling. Heisenberg lay motionless on the ground. He had been alive only a second before. All of his thoughts and ideas had vanished. Reichminister Speer spoke up. “Now perhaps the rest of you can make some progress.”

Esau allowed himself to fly into a rage. He saw his chances of rapid success bleeding into the mud. “You just eliminated the most brilliant mind in our entire project! How am I to accomplish a breakthrough when you’ve just shot down the man most capable of doing so? I needed Heisenberg controlled, not destroyed!” He let his voice become icy and he turned toward Major Stadt. “Our task will be much more difficult because of this.”

Stadt’s skin appeared corpselike under the garish light. He smiled as if he had just enjoyed himself. He spoke softly. “Ah, but we have given them incentive, Professor Esau.” He turned to look at the other scientists gawking in disbelief at Heisenberg’s body. “Incentive.”