The Trinity Paradox

21 Trinity Site November 1944

The trip from Los Alamos took three hours in the unmarked government car, and Fox sweated in the autumn sunshine every minute of the dusty journey south. The two military policemen accompanying him didn’t blink as the car passed through the Albuquerque city limits without slowing. If a traffic policeman stopped them, Fox would have to show his unmarked and unsigned driver’s license; he was not allowed to divulge his name or his purpose. His MP escorts would see to that.

Fox swallowed in a dry throat. The three of them had emptied their thermos of coffee half an hour before. He didn’t dare suggest that they stop, not even for some refreshment. The orders were clear enough: no stopping allowed on the way to Trinity site, near Socorro.

He had insisted on being the driver, despite what General Groves said about the poor road skills of the scientists. Fox only had to remember to drive on the right side of the pavement.

Fox treated the two MPs coolly, not partaking in their stilted argument about the presidential election. Politics and Washington, D.C., seemed so far away, so irrelevant. He was going to help set up a test to explode an atomic bomb.

He kept his responses to their questions on the level of a grunted yes or no. He felt too uncomfortable with his own reservations to speak pleasantries with the young men. Somehow he suspected that these innocent-looking escorts had really been assigned to G-2 to watch him, not simply for his “protection.” What if they were sent out to make him trip up, spill something that he ordinarily wouldn’t divulge? What if they suspected that by now Graham Fox abhorred everything about the Manhattan Project and what it was bound to unleash on the world?

He remembered the day he had sent the letter to Esau, how the Nice Young Man from G-2 had seemed to sense that Fox had circumvented the security regulations. Nothing had happened in the intervening months, but Fox couldn’t shake the feeling that he was still being watched, observed. The paranoia stirred up feelings of guilt, like looking in the rearview mirror and seeing a police car following too close, just waiting for it to flick on the flashing lights.

But he had only himself on this end, now that Elizabeth Devane had… changed, throwing her assistance in with the Project itself. She had been gone for nearly two months with General Groves—talk about going off with the devil himself! Fox had always assumed she was a well-hidden German sympathizer, perhaps even a spy; he hadn’t wanted to know what she really was, so long as she felt the way he did.

“You can’t listen to anybody else when it’s your own conscience at stake.” She had said it herself, the first night they had made love, almost a full year before. “Do what you have to do. Damn the consequences.” But now that had changed. She had changed.

He would take her earlier advice, whether or not she still believed it herself. He knew Abraham Esau would be trying his best on the German end. The fact that no further radioactive attacks had occurred on American cities implied that Esau had convinced the Nazi high command to stage a warning shot. Esau would not allow the development of a full-scale bomb such as this one they were about to test at the Trinity site.

The plutonium bomb, based on the implosion concept Elizabeth had suggested herself, had been designed and completed. But no one knew if it would work. The assembly used explosive lenses to smash a hollow sphere of plutonium into super criticality, and it should function, according to all the calculations and models. But Edward Teller had been killed in an experiment that had also been proven, according to all calculations and models. Theory made mistakes. A successful test would put all doubts to rest.

Fox’s duty was to manage part of that test.

He tried to concentrate on the driving. He kept his eyes on the road and his hands upon the wheel, but the turn of events at Los Alamos kept creeping up on him. After New York, after Elizabeth had suggested the implosion scheme for the plutonium bomb, the entire Project had seemed reborn. There could be no stopping it now.

Unless he could do something. His new assignment might afford him an opportunity. Could he allow the warlords to up the stakes a thousand fold?

Fox hadn’t minded being taken off the radionuclide team; he realized that the importance of his group had diminished with respect to the overall Project goals. But being placed under Kistiakowsky’s high-explosive group had angered him. What did he know about shock physics? Hydrodynamic motion? Detonation waves? “If you don’t know it, learn it!” Oppie had said. The same thing had happened repeatedly over the years, with scientists forced to become instant experts in fields where they had no background. But somehow it worked.

Lucky that the crazy Ukrainian had realized Fox’s predicament and had suggested that Fox be sent down to coordinate a simulation for the actual test. To provide a benchmark to compare the blast of the plutonium bomb, one hundred tons of high explosives were going to be detonated in the desert. A radioactive source would be placed in the high explosive, and the debris would be tracked. Fox was going to put counters at various distances from the explosion, then would run around in a jeep to take readings afterward.

Fox thought about the chance he had missed to join a few outspoken colleagues who had left the Project in protest. But he thought he might have a greater chance to influence events from inside. As if that would make a difference to the world at large.

Once south of Albuquerque, the MP escorts began to relax. It seemed as if everything north of the city had served as a testing ground to see how well they could follow directions. Or maybe they assumed that the clumps of sagebrush held innumerable spies close to the Project, but now they had traveled far enough to be safe. Their conversations grew less strained; Fox still didn’t join in. No doubt the military police thought all the Project scientists were weird anyway.

As they headed into the flat volcanic basin south of Albuquerque, the two-lane road wound along the Rio Grande. Grande—a true misnomer; the muddy channel seemed to hold no more than a bathtubful of water. There was no comparison with even the Thames. But in an area of the country where water was as scarce as here, perhaps a tubful of water did deserve to be called “Grande.”

The sun shone into the car, and hot wind rushed through the open windows. General Groves had insisted on strict observance of all speed limits. Fox fidgeted, and increased his speed anyway.

An hour later Fox found them leaving the small town of Socorro, a smudge of a village that marked the last town of any appreciable size before the site. Ten miles south of Socorro the MPs had Fox slow down for the three buildings called “San Antonio, New Mexico,” a laughable image of its Texas namesake. No sooner had Fox turned off the highway than the military policemen exchanged looks.

The man stretched out in back pushed his head up next to Fox’s. “Ah, Dr. Fox, you know once we get to Trinity, we’ll be stuck with mess hall food.”

The MP in front twisted his body and joined the conversation. “And since it’s one o’clock, that means at least another four hours until we get to eat.” The backseat MP grinned. “And we would hate for one

of the lead Project scientists to go hungry.”

“Especially with such an important test coming up.”

Fox slowed the car down. On the left a small adobe house sat with a sign dangling on rusted chains from a wooden arch.

The backseat MP said, “Why, look, Dr. Fox. There’s a restaurant right now!”

His partner responded too quickly. “Good idea!”

Fox badly needed to stretch, though he didn’t feel very hungry. His stomach had been upset for days. “How much farther to the site?”

“Uh, at least another hour.”

“Maybe two.”

“If not more.”

Fox hesitated. “The orders were not to stop—”

“Except for necessary bathroom stops and emergencies.”

“And this certainly qualifies, doesn’t it?” The two MPs looked at Fox hopefully. “You’re the driver, though.”

The two couldn’t have been older than twenty, not at all like the steely-eyed G-2 agents he imagined them to be. They were really just adolescents. Growing boys. Fox pulled into the dusty clearing in front of the Owl Cafe.

Minutes later they sat in the dim bar, the only customers in the place. A large dark-skinned man grinned at them from the grill. Long tangled hair hung around his shoulders and gold-plated teeth filled his mouth. Turquoise hung from his neck and adorned his rings. He flipped three half-pound hamburgers, scraping with his spatula and sizzling them back on the grill. The MPs and Fox sipped on long-necked bottles of Mexican beer.

The cook slipped dripping green-chili burgers in front of the men, and both MPs grabbed for theirs. Huge cut french fries filled the remainder of the plate. Fox picked his up, looked around for a napkin, but found none. He wrapped his mouth around the bun; biting down and feeling hot juices squirt into his mouth. American food.

The Indian leaned back against a post that bisected the bar. “Lot of visitors coming through lately. You fellas lucky to catch me open today.”

Fox swallowed a mouthful of chili before answering. “What’s the occasion?” He had to catch a gulp of beer to wash down the burning in his throat.

The Indian nodded to a row of bottles behind the bar. “I’m moving them to the rear of the cafe\ Some Army types told me they all might get knocked down the next couple of weeks by some sort of explosion. Never can tell what they’re doing out in the middle of the desert. Know what that desert’s called? Jornada del Muerto—The Journey of Death. Dead Man’s Trail. Don’t know what they’re doing out there.”

Fox choked on his food. The two MPs ignored the exchange and kept to their lunch. Fox finished chewing so he could swallow, then asked innocently, “When did you hear about this?”

“The explosion?” The Indian picked his teeth and shrugged. “Let’s see—one, maybe two weeks ago.”

“And when is it supposed to happen?” Fox tried to sound disinterested so that he wouldn’t raise suspicion. One of the MPs kicked him under the table.

“Sometime this month. Doesn’t matter to me. That’s the Alamogordo Bombing Range out there anyway, always something blowing up.” The large Indian laughed. He leaned forward, propped his elbows on the bar and whispered loudly, “They say they are building windshield wipers for submarines, or an electric airplane.” He made a small circle in the air with his finger next to his ear. “I think they are putting me on, so I figure that I might humor them.” He straightened and spoke louder. “And if moving my bottles keeps bringing the Army guys in, hey, what does it matter?”

Fox smiled and nodded. Releasing knowledge of the impending explosion was strictly forbidden, but warnings were always mixed with the “official” cover stories and staged rumors that filled the streets of Santa Fe.

But the whole incident left Fox certain of one thing: the MPs were definitely not G-2 agents—otherwise they would have shut the Indian up the second he had mentioned an explosion. Perhaps the two young men were exactly what they appeared to be, simple military escorts.

Fox muttered a thanks to the Indian and pushed back from the bar, leaving half his meal on the plate. The MPs looked up at him, their mouths full of hamburger.

“I’ll be by the car. Just need to stretch my legs a bit. All that driving, you know.” Fox left before the men could answer.

He stepped into the dusty road. The blue sky arched out in front of him. To the west enormous thunderclouds built up on the horizon, the top of their anvil-shaped heads spread out as far north as he could see. It looked like they were going to get one hell of a cloudburst by the end of the day, which was unusual for late autumn. They should be able to make it the rest of the way to Trinity before the rain started.

Fox lit up a cigarette and drew in a lungful of smoke. The exchange with the Indian had set him to thinking. How many people really suspected that something big was going to happen here? The through traffic alone would have set off the residents of sleepy San Antonio.

The village wasn’t more than a hundred yards long—some of the other scientists had used the term “spitting distance.” How many trucks, jeeps, and unmarked cars had passed through on their way out to the Trinity Site? How many people connected with the atomic bomb test had made unofficial stops at the Owl Cafe?

And if the residents of this flyspeck town knew about the test, then how many others would know? It seemed to prove something to Fox: no matter how much the government wanted to clamp down on keeping the information secret, people were still going to find out, one way or another.

He drew on his cigarette. An atomic bomb. Unleashing the unimaginable forces that held all matter together—how could any person be trusted with such power, much less someone like General Groves? As the frenzied campaigning between Dewey and Roosevelt showed, with American politics throwing a new President on the scene every four years, it would be only a matter of time before some man got elected who wanted to take over the world.

Oppenheimer kept trying to wash his hands of responsibility, claiming that the scientists’ job was simply to design and build the thing, to let other people decide how to use it. But now that they were so close to having the bomb, what would happen next? Would every country want to have its own weapon?

Germany had the capability. With the Allied invasion of Normandy a few months before, piercing Fortress Europe and driving the German army back, with the Allied landing in southern France in August, with Romania and Bulgaria also declaring war on Germany, the Nazi house of cards was crumbling. And if they still refused to use the atomic weapon that they must have…

With each passing day the Germans did not strike, their psychological and military advantage slipped away. Germany would surrender soon. And the Japanese had also begun to fall in the Pacific, with American forces taking Guam in July, Peleliu in September, and then finally crushing the Japanese fleet in the Philippines in the Battle for Leyte Gulf only a few weeks before.

America did not need this bomb. But still they wanted to play with their expensive new toy. Fox could only hope that someone among the scientists would see reason and put a stop to everything. Someone, perhaps, like himself?

You can’t listen to anybody else when it’s your own conscience at stake.

Fox drew in a breath, closing his mouth against the dry, dusty air. His nose and chapped lips burned. The taste of the green chili made him even more thirsty.

The Project was quickening its pace, and there seemed to be no end to its momentum. Could he prevent it? Maybe the Gadget wouldn’t work. If it did work, he could not possibly prevent the knowledge of the bomb from seeping out. Everyone would know how to crack the atomic nucleus, and someone would destroy the world with that knowledge.

“How do you close Pandora’s box?” he muttered to himself. Fox flinched and dropped his cigarette. The tobacco had burned down to his fingers. He put his finger to his mouth.

“Hey, Doc—you missed some really good beer. The Injun brought out his special reserve.”

The second military policeman burped. “We’ll have to pick up a case of that stuff on the way back up. We can’t bring it onto the site.”

“Right-o. Let’s get moving.” Fox slid into the driver’s seat. Waves of heat rippled up from the cloth seat covers— they were black, of course. He could smell the hot fabric, and winced as he sat down, wiggling to keep from getting burned. “You chaps ready?”

“Yeah.”

Fox pulled out onto the dirt road; the motion sent hot wind and brown dust into the car. San Antonio vanished behind them in less than a minute.

As they headed east, toward a small line of hills, Fox realized that they had been the only traffic through the village in the entire time that they had been there. That’s right, he thought. There’s no way to keep this thing quiet.

Black lava peppered the side of the roadway. Fox wanted to stop and pick up some of the hardened lumps, but the MPs pointed out that their stop at the Owl Cafe had put them behind schedule. The road dropped into a valley, leaving the black lava behind. About five miles ahead of them Fox spotted a tiny building by the side of the road.

“What’s that?”

One of the MPs leaned forward and squinted. “Guard shack. We take a right when we get there. Trinity site is about twenty miles southeast.”

“This truly is out in the middle of nowhere.” Even though he had grown accustomed to the sparseness of New Mexico over the past year and a half, this made the rest of the desert look lush by comparison. He drove the car south through the valley. To their left rose the rugged San Andreas mountains, stark and brown, devoid of any vegetation. Sheer peaks jutted up, lining the valley with a natural wall.

Scrub brush, cactus, and weeds dotted the desert floor. Heat shimmered off the road in the distance. If Fox had ever imagined what hell must look like, the area surrounding Trinity Site came close. In his mind this place already looked as if it had been devastated by an atomic bomb. Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of Death, the Indian cook had called it—an appropriate name.

They traveled nearly fifteen miles before coming to a road. A weather-beaten sign stuck up from the ground. Paint peeled off the wood, and sand covered most of the lettering, but Fox could distinguish project y and an arrow that pointed to the left. As they turned for the site, Fox saw a cloud of dust ahead. He squinted. It looked like a flurry of activity: trucks, cars, cranes, and tiny dots that had to be people.

As they drew closer, the MPs straightened their uniform ties and ensured that their shirts were tucked in. “It’s bad enough with all the officers around,” one of them grumbled, “but knowing that General Groves can show up any minute makes it worse.”

“Sometimes I think they’re more worried about the way we look than how we do our jobs.”

Fox all but ignored the chatter. Didn’t they realize what they were doing here, what was about to happen? How the world was going to be changed forever?

They passed another hot and sweaty guard standing in the afternoon sun. After the guard waved them in, Fox drove slowly into the complex. Wooden buildings and rounded Quonset huts were scattered about the area. An old ranch house sat near the commotion; far away from all the buildings a metal tower rose up in the middle of the desert.

The MP in the front seat pointed to a row of cars up ahead. “You can park there. They don’t want any cars running around the site—they break down too easy. Take a jeep if you need one.”

As he turned into the dusty parking lot, Fox noticed a row of low-slung buildings in the distance, made of concrete with mounds of dirt pushed up around their backs. He saw military guards all over the place; several of them kept watch over two flatbeds covered with tarpaulins.

Why bother? he wondered. If anyone wanted to get in and sabotage something, he would never get out alive.

As Fox cut the ignition in the car, the two MPs sprang out and stretched their legs. An Army officer walked up to the car. The MPs snapped to attention. “We’ve got Dr. Fox, sir.”

The officer waved the men away. Fox climbed from the car and put on his hat. He debated removing his tie, but he saw that the young officer had kept his tie on even in the stifling heat, so Fox decided to loosen his instead.

“Dr. Fox, I’m Lieutenant Johnston. I’ve been assigned to run interference for you.” Tall, sandy-haired, and armed with an infectious grin, Johnston looked affable enough.

“Excuse me?” Fox shook the man’s hand. “I don’t wish any interference.”

“No, run interference. Like in football.”

Fox made a small smile, but he still didn’t understand. American football was quite different from soccer. “I see. Does that mean you’ll assist me with the high-explosive test and cut through the paperwork so I can get my work done?”

“Or whatever else you need to do.”

Fox retrieved his jacket from the front of the car, dusted it with the palm of his hand, and slung it over his shoulder. “So where do I start?”

“Have you been to Trinity before?”

“No, but I’ve seen a sketch of the general layout.” He paused. “Can you tell me why they call it Trinity? What’s the significance?”

“Beats me.” Johnston shrugged. “You’re about the fiftieth person to ask that. Dr. Oppenheimer thought it up, and he’s not telling. But so what’s new? Everything else about this place is a secret.” The lieutenant turned and motioned for Fox to follow him. “Let me point out a couple of spots to you, and you can start whenever you’re ready.” Johnston nodded to the big white house. “The McDonald ranch will be your headquarters. The high-explosive test will take place on that wooden tower.”

“How is the real test of the Gadget coming along?”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that, sir.” The lieutenant’s answer came too quickly, like a memorized answer. Fox stopped and waited. Johnston shrugged. “I hear it’s all on schedule. We’ve got one more bunker to finish. The first one is five miles away from the shot tower and will be the closest to the actual test. That’s where Dr. Oppenheimer and most of the senior scientific staff will stay when the Gadget goes off. They all want the best seats in the house.”

Fox stopped and tried to find the fortified bunker in the distance. It was barely visible from where he stood across the flat nothingness. He could make out two more bunkers in the desert.

“All the senior staff will be present? General Groves as well? Watching the bomb go off?”

“Well, assuming it does go off. Somebody said it might rip away the whole atmosphere, but the general said to go ahead anyway.”

Fox drew his lips tight. “What about the risk?”

“I really don’t know much about it, sir. The general said the models had predicted enough margin for error.” Johnston kept walking toward the ranch house. “Please follow me, sir.”

Margin for error? Fox couldn’t believe it. After the miscalculations had caused Teller’s death, he thought the scientists wouldn’t put so much faith in models anymore. And they would all be up front, closest to Ground Zero, watching to see what their Gadget would do.

Once the genie was released from the bottle, it could never be stuffed back in. But if the wizards who conjured up that genie were destroyed, then perhaps no one else would be able to command it.

Do what you have to do. Damn the consequences.

The entire senior staff.

If he somehow prevented the Manhattan Project from ever following through on their Gadget, and if the Germans would never use their own device, then the world would truly be safe. People needed time to grow and learn to deal with holding such power. He could not stop it forever, of course, but he could buy time. Let people deal with such knowledge during rational years, after peace had come and the world had learned its lessons of war. He would have to bankrupt the Allied “brain trust.”

“Dr. Fox, I almost forgot—see these flatbeds?”

Fox looked again at the canvas-covered flatbeds he had seen upon driving in. “Yes?”

“It would sure make everyone a lot more relaxed if you would do something about them. Now that you’ve arrived, you’re officially in charge over there.”

Fox frowned. “What do you mean? I don’t even know what they are.”

“Your explosives—a hundred tons of H.E. for the benchmark test. It’s keeping the guards a little nervous.”

Fox stared at the shapeless masses under the tarpaulins. A hundred tons of high explosives, at his disposal.

“Yes, I can see how they might be nervous about it.” He nodded. “Don’t worry. I’ll see to everything.”

22 Los Alamos November 1944

The newspapers hadn’t come up from Santa Fe yet, but the little Los Alamos radio station broadcast the news immediately. For those without radios switched on, the loudspeakers around the camp made the announcement.

“Dewey wins the election! Roosevelt has lost in a landslide on his bid for a fourth term at the presidency of the United States. Dewey vows to put an end to the war. What this means to the Project, ladies and gentlemen, is anyone’s guess.”

Elizabeth had arrived back in the mountain city after being gone for months, traveling around the country with General Groves, accompanying him back to Washington, D.C., and now returning to Los Alamos while the general went down to Alamogordo to set up the Trinity test. It took Elizabeth a long moment to understand the mood of the people moving down A Street, but then the loudspeaker repeated the announcement.

“Dewey has won…”

Yet another change, she thought. It was an endless spiral going nowhere. She couldn’t keep up with what she remembered about how the events should have occurred.

Groups of Army men marched in close-order drill at one end of the encampment; jeeps carrying uniformed officers roared by, spewing dirt from the unpaved streets; the officers hung onto their hats. The localized public address system was in constant use, paging one person after another.

Elizabeth moved her bags to the side of the administration building. It felt good to be away from General Groves. Now maybe she could catch a breath of air, preferably one untainted by cigar smoke. The time she had spent with Groves seemed a million years away—as distant as her old life in her original timeline.

Along with the bustling activity, an extraordinary number of vehicles filled the center of Los Alamos—trucks, jeeps, and cars in every conceivable parking spot, stashed behind the dorms and along the barbed-wire fence of the Tech Area.

Before heading back to the dormitory, she decided to check in with Feynman’s office. She had missed working with him, his jokes and his laughter. She didn’t want to miss what caused the excitement around the camp. Groves had told her about the scheduled test of the implosion device. The Trinity test. The theoreticians had worked even more overtime than usual, and Hanford had shipped down barely enough plutonium to make the bomb’s core. Something in the back of her mind suggested it wasn’t right. Didn’t the explosion happen next year? In 1945? Still… it was all going to end soon.

And then it would just begin. She could no longer guess what might happen.

Everywhere she walked, red-eyed intensity shone on the scientists’ faces. Everyone seemed on the verge of snapping at anything that stood in their way, but they all looked to be bearing the weight of something important.

But what if Germany surrendered soon? she wondered. What if Dewey refused to continue funding the Project? They would have only another two months before Roosevelt handed over the presidential reins. Any advantage she might have had in predicting the future had dissolved with the bombing of New York.

Elizabeth stepped up her pace to Tech Area 1, back to her old working place. Feynman was nowhere to be seen. His office lay in its usual cluttered state, and even her desk had papers strewn all over the place, as if Feynman had used her room as a holding tank for his notes. She wrote a scribbled message, tacked it to the back of his chair, then made her way to the applied mathematics area.

John von Neumann’s computation group was grinding away, furiously trying to complete several sets of computations, double-checking parameters for the upcoming test. The physicist passing out the initial values hadn’t seen any members of the senior staff. Some of the gathered ladies in the room looked up at the disturbance—Gladys what’s-her-name scowled at her—but Elizabeth left.

She made her way back to the Admin building. After being at the center of things during Groves’s trip, she felt discarded. They could have at least left a message for me. But she tried to rationalize to herself that the Project didn’t revolve around her. She had served when she was needed, but that didn’t give her the right to an inside track to what was going on.

Still, she felt empty, left out.

She picked up her bags and started for the ladies’ dormitory. The dry autumn had left Los Alamos basking in heat. She remembered the first rainstorm and the muck covering all the streets. The place looked no more civilized, but she realized that it did feel like home.

Elizabeth hauled her luggage and kept to the side of the street. A military jeep sped by, then stopped. The driver craned his neck around and gunned the engine, sending the jeep roaring back toward her. “Need a lift, ma’am?”

“Sure.” Elizabeth pushed her bags into the backseat before the driver could get out to help her. She climbed into the front.

“Where you going?”

She pushed back her hair. “Women’s dormitory-Second Street.”

The driver jammed the jeep in gear and set off before she had a chance to say thanks. He wore standard khaki military dress along with the ubiquitous tie and overseas cap. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen years old, and noting the absence of military decorations, she thought he was probably a new clerk assigned to the Project. She had to hold onto the side of the jeep as they spun around a corner until the driver stopped directly in front of the dormitory.

“Here you are, ma’am.” The serviceman’s eyes seemed bright, as though he was privy to some sort of exciting secret. He helped her take the luggage to the dormitory step.

Elizabeth extended a hand. “Thanks. Are you going down to Trinity for the test?”

“Me?” The young man looked shocked. “No ma’am. They don’t need me down there. But, you know, if the test is successful, then we’ve practically won the war! Everybody knows that.”

“And what if it’s not successful?”

“Uh?”

“The test. What if it fails?”

The young man appeared shocked. “It can’t. I mean, all these smart professor types holed up for all these years—there’s no way the test is going to fail!”

“Do you even know what’s supposed to happen?”

The G.I. shook his head and took a step back. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” As he hopped back in the jeep he brightened. “Don’t worry, those guys know what’s going on. After all, our government wouldn’t waste all this manpower on a dud, would it?” He waved, and left Elizabeth standing in a whirl of dust.

The government wouldn’t waste things. Boy, has he got a lot to learn. But she couldn’t fault an optimistic young man for having faith in his government, especially not during the most devastating war in history. There was no comparison to what she remembered about Vietnam here— it was literally life or death for these people.

For her as well.

And it wasn’t just him. It was everyone around here. The secretaries, the scientists, and worst of all, the military men. They all believed in these physics wizards who promised an atomic bomb that might destroy Europe. The magic that would solve their problems, end war forever because with an atomic weapon America could enforce peace throughout the whole world. Everything depended on the success of this test, two weeks from now.

She felt surprised at herself for having these thoughts, the first doubts and cynicism since… when? Since she had failed to assassinate Oppenheimer? What would have happened if she had succeeded? Time would have changed in some other unpredictable fashion. She no longer had the temporal hindsight to determine if anything had changed for the better. She could barely remember how things were supposed to be.

Her past reality seemed farther and farther away. She knew she would never return to the world she had known. She had to live here, and now.

So why not give in, move ahead and go with the flow? Her early effort to change things only mucked up history itself. Would she do even more damage if she tried to change things again? New York had been bombed, Teller had died, Dewey had won the election… how many more things could she hope to change—would she change?

Elizabeth turned to stare at the encampment again. She had been gone so long. The Tech Area remained out of sight from where she stood by the dorm, but she could just make out the top of the administration building. To her right the Jemez mountains showed her where she had stumbled in from the rain a lifetime before, just after Jeff’s death, to see Mrs. Canapelli waving her into the warmth and shelter of 1943.

So why couldn’t she just live things out like a normal person? Forget about changing the world—she already knew that life was a lot more complicated than she gave it credit for. “Do what you gotta do. And damn the consequences,” Ted Walblaken had said. Was he even alive in this timeline? He would probably be just a baby. The thought made her shiver.

Some things had to be immutable, no matter how she tried to change them. But was the war one of them? Already, she had forgotten to think of it as World War II. Had she set into motion inexplicable forces that could not be turned back? What if Germany really did win this war? That didn’t seem possible, given the turn of events lately, according to the newsreels—but what if more things happened later? What if the Cold War got worse, and the Cuban Missile Crisis did escalate into a full-scale nuclear war? What if the world did not survive to see the days of glasnost and perestroika, to see the Berlin Wall come down and the Eastern bloc cracked open?

The thought didn’t cheer her, but she couldn’t do anything to change what she had already set into motion. She stooped to pick up her bags, more confused than ever about what she wanted to do. Mrs. Canapelli opened the screen door as Elizabeth stepped for the dormitory.

“Welcome back, hon! You look absolutely exhausted. Why don’t you come on in and take a bath, soak your feet for a while. This time of day we might be able to get a little hot water for you.” She bent to help Elizabeth with her luggage, then started talking at her usual speed.

“Things have been racing so fast since you left. The Project is quite abuzz with something happening. I suspect there’s going to be a big climax or something, and soon.” When Elizabeth was inside, Mrs. Canapelli suddenly stopped her chatter. She reached inside her apron and pulled out a sheet of paper.

“I almost forgot. Dr. Feynman dropped this by this morning, and wanted to be sure you got it. He knew you were coming back today.”

Elizabeth opened the envelope with shaking hands. All the self doubts and worries she had experienced just moments before melted away. She tried to read the letter through Feynman’s chicken-scrawl handwriting. After typing so many of his notes, she had learned to interpret his words.

Elizabeth,

By the time you get this we’ll be on our way to accomplishing the test. I have taken the liberty of sending your security clearance to Trinity; please come as soon as you can. Oppie has authorized your presence. Implosion was your idea, after all!

Dick

Mrs. Canapelli raised an eyebrow as Elizabeth looked up. “Well? Is everything all right?”

She couldn’t understand whether she felt proud of herself or nauseated at what she had done. It was your idea after all! But she had been invited to witness the test, and if the test device worked, then the end of the war with Germany wouldn’t be far behind.

Elizabeth smiled, keeping the note to herself. “Everything is fine.”

Graham Fox worked late at the Trinity site, but that was not an unusual occurrence. Everyone worked late, every night, sometimes until four ill the morning, when they would stagger off to bed, only to awake three hours later and start all over again. The deadline approached, and excuses were not acceptable. Standing outside, under the infinite starry skies of the desert, feeling the cold autumn wind ruffle his hair, Fox could clear his thoughts, harden his resolve, and go back to what he had to do.

Once the last technician had left, staggering down the wooden steps of the shot tower, Fox continued working. A half-empty thermos of weak tea sat among the clutter on the planks of the detonation platform. On the main surface of the platform the high-explosive bricks were arranged in thick blocks and staggered into a huge hemispherical dome that rose fifty feet above the desert sands. A white tent like structure surrounded the setup.

Alone now, Fox allowed a half hour to pass before he stopped his own work. Looking down to the ground, he saw nothing in the glistening darkness. The moon lit everything with a watery gray-blue. A guard sauntered past on the dirt road a hundred yards to the east. Fox listened, but could make out no other sounds.

He was alone. No one could see him.

He ducked into the tented area and stuffed five bricks of high explosives into his satchel. He didn’t relax until he had zipped the satchel shut.

For the fifth night in a row he had managed to slip some H.E. blocks out of the test area.

He had one more stop before heading for his quarters to snatch a few hours of sleep before piling the explosive bricks under the harsh morning sun. As project manager for the H.E. simulation, it was his responsibility to check on all aspects of the upcoming test. That included visiting the observation bunker the senior staff would inhabit.

23 Trinity Site November 1944

Mrs. Canapelli peered over a stack of bleached white towels at Elizabeth. “Have a good trip down there. It sounds exciting. I wish you could just stay for a day or two and rest!”

Elizabeth helped Mrs. Canapelli carry the towels back into the dorm. “Yeah, it sure would have been nice to settle down for a while. I’ve been on the road so much that I can’t seem to figure out where I am anymore.”

“Well, you must be doing something right, Betty. All these important people keep asking you to accompany them.”

Elizabeth laughed. “I don’t know about that.” She bent to pull out her old blue jeans—”dungarees”—from the bottom of the drawer. She shook them out and looked wistful. She hadn’t put them on since the day she had tried to shoot Oppenheimer.

“You aren’t thinking of wearing those, are you?” Mrs. Canapelli wrinkled her nose.

“White Sands isn’t the place to wear a dress.” Mrs. Canapelli looked blank. Elizabeth explained, “I mean the Trinity site.” That’s right—White Sands missile range probably wasn’t established until the fifties or so!

“You’ve been down there before?”

“No, but some of the guys here told me about it. Trying to scare me with stories about rattlesnakes and tarantulas and scorpions.” Mrs. Canapelli cringed, but Elizabeth used it to her advantage. “So you see, that’s not the place I want to be having bare legs.”

Mrs. Canapelli still looked skeptical. “If you say so. I suppose that you’re used to wearing that sort of clothes, being from Montana and all. But to tell you the truth, you really don’t look very feminine in those dungarees.”

Elizabeth smiled to herself at Mrs. Canapelli’s concern. Self-doubt about her femininity was the least of her concerns. She wondered what Mrs. Canapelli would think in twenty years when women started wearing hip-huggers and burning their bras.

“Tell you what—I’ll change when I get down there. Okay?”

“You know best. Just be careful. And good luck with whatever it is you’re doing down there.”

“Thanks.” Elizabeth closed her suitcase.

A horn honked from outside the dormitory. Mrs. Canapelli squinted out the window. “Oh, it’s your ride. They’re waiting for you.”

Elizabeth swung her bag from the bed. “Thanks again. With any luck I’ll be back within a week.”

Once in the black government-licensed car, Elizabeth settled back for the ride down to Trinity. She recognized the two other passengers as physicists from their interactions with Feynman; she thought one might be Enrico Fermi, but she didn’t recognize the other. They politely nodded to her and went back to reading their journals. Everything seemed so calm—the driver didn’t speak either, but Elizabeth didn’t mind. She hoped to catch a long nap on the drive down. It would be a nice change from accompanying General Groves.

Elizabeth stared out the car window with her eyes half closed, lost in thought. As the car wound its way down from the mesa, they passed cliffs that jutted up hundreds of feet and boulders bigger than houses. Pinon pine, Douglas fir, and blue spruce hung onto rocky ledges.

Although no one spoke, Elizabeth sensed a subdued excitement in the car, and it kept her awake. The rugged landscape seemed to magnify the tension. The bomb could have been developed in no other place, nowhere that matched the grandeur of northern New Mexico, the limitless boundaries that allowed physicists to tinker with the forces at the heart of the universe.

In another few days everything would reach its climax. The goal to which they had devoted years of their lives would be wrapped up in the detonation of one sphere of plutonium.

And then what? What would happen when Pandora’s box was finally opened for all the world to see? Would all nations react the same way as they had in her original timeline? The bipolar split of the USSR and U.S.? Would it still take fifty years for those old wounds to heal? Or would everything get worse?

Elizabeth then wondered about her own life. What was she going to do with herself after the test succeeded and the urgency of developing the bomb went away? One way or another, the war would soon be over. Someone would eventually discover that she had no birth certificate, no real identification. She didn’t know how much longer she could fast-talk her way through everything.

She couldn’t stay at Los Alamos. Even though she had helped develop the weapon in the first place, she couldn’t keep helping to make it worse and worse. Or would even that conviction change? At times she hated herself and her weakness. Germany would be stopped, and hopefully America would have enough sense to get rid of the weapon once and for all.

In her old timeline she realized that some people had accused the U.S. of racism by dropping the bomb on Japan. It was all right to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki because the Japanese were “different.” Japanese-Americans were thrown into detention camps; German-Americans never were. No matter how terrible the Nazis were, they still looked like Americans. What would the public think if they saw radiation-crisped blond-haired babies lying in the rubble of a nuked Berlin?

It would never be Harry S Truman’s decision now. It fell into the hands of President Dewey. She had no idea what the man would do.

With her knowledge of how things might have turned out, maybe she could start something that would force the U.S. to ban further work in nuclear weapons. Some of the other scientists had expressed doubts. She might even have to talk to Graham Fox again, try to resolve things with him. One person should be able to make a difference. Look at what Ralph Nader had started, back in her timeline, overturning the whole safety industry.

She knew the U.S. had experienced food riots and some war demonstrations in the past, but they were nothing like the major protests in the sixties, or even her Livermore demonstration. Maybe she could change things, help keep the world on the razor-thin path that would let them survive the next fifty years.

Elizabeth set her mouth, unable to sleep in the car as she considered the possibilities of all she could do.

They ate a late lunch at a run-down place called the Owl Cafe, which was one of only a few adobe buildings that collectively called themselves a town. Several cars and jeeps were parked at the small restaurant; the longhaired cook appeared frantic but delighted by the unexpected flood of business. Half the people were civilians, the other half military. As the only woman in the place, Elizabeth felt many gazes turned to her, but she ignored them. Her eyes stung from the cigarette smoke floating in the claustrophobic room—that was one thing she still had not been able to get used to, even after all this time.

She and her companions ate quickly and managed to get back on the road before many of the other diners had finished. When they turned south for Trinity, time seemed to slow. The scenery looked blasted and monotonous. She felt eager to get to the place, but also uneasy about being part of the atomic test. Elizabeth kept looking at the driver, trying to urge the man to drive faster, but the desert miles crawled.

Elizabeth squinted at the horizon. A dust storm shrouded the base of the mountains, obscuring the view. The car shook as they drove along the bumpy road, making it even harder for her to see. They crept over a sloping hill, and the dust lowered like a veil. Not more than two miles in front of her stood a metal tower, alone in the middle of the desert.

It rose over a hundred feet from the ground. Four legs supported the structure with pipes crisscrossing the middle. A tent covering of canvas billowed in the wind on the top, shielding whatever the tower held.

Elizabeth’s chest started to hurt; she realized she was holding her breath. She breathed deeply and looked around the car. No one else had seemed to notice the site. Fermi glanced up from his journal.

“Ah, is this the shot tower?” he said in his thick Italian accent.

The driver cleared his throat. “Yup. You shoulda seen it a week ago, when they blew up a test shot. A hundred tons of explosives, they said. Boy oh boy, it looked like Hell on Earth, with dust and smoke flying up into the sky. We were so far away down in the base camp that we couldn’t hear the boom for five seconds or so.” He lowered his voice. “And I heard that’s gonna be nothing compared to this real shot.”

“If it works,” Fermi said.

“It will work,” Elizabeth muttered. Fermi stared at her, but seemed to dismiss her comment.

Elizabeth looked back at the tower. So this is it. Everything they had been working for on the Manhattan Project—and every reason why she had first gotten involved in the antinuclear movement. The Livermore Challenge Group at Berkeley, the United Conscience Group at Santa Fe, she and Jeff climbing down the canyon during the storm to smash the MCG setup… this flimsy tower looked too frail to even hold the weapon.

In the next few days the precious plutonium core would be driven down from Los Alamos under heavy escort. In the desert heat a few men would begin the final assembly of the test device. Until now the tower sat like a rifle with no bullets—it needed to be loaded with the Gadget before it was complete.

The driver proceeded past the front guard shack, then circled around the settled area of the site, keeping at least half a mile from the structure before they pulled up to an old wooden farmhouse in the middle of the barren area. The driver pulled the car to a stop and spoke. “We’re here. Old McDonald’s farm—ha, ha, I mean ranch.”

Elizabeth barely noticed the joke, thinking how glad she was that he had remained quiet during the journey. The driver opened the trunk and started removing their luggage.

“A jeep will come around and take you to the tents. That’s where you’ll be staying until the test.” He nodded to her. “I think Oppie wanted to put you up in the ranch house, ma’am. I’ll get someone to help with the bags.”

A voice came behind them. “No need for that—I’ll take care of it.”

Elizabeth turned, startled. Graham Fox stood with his hands in his pockets, a thin, uncertain smile pressed on his lips.

“Hello, Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth nodded, trying not to show any emotion. “Graham.”

“General Groves mentioned that Oppie had invited you down for the test. He asked me to show you around, take you under my wing, as it were.” Fox put his fingers on Elizabeth’s elbow and steered her away from the others. They walked across the packed brown sand, stepping over clumps of scrub and cactus.

“How thoughtful of him.”

“It wasn’t my idea, Elizabeth.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t.” She stopped and held a hand in front of her eyes to shield them from the sun. They had moved a good twenty yards away from everyone. “Graham—things have changed. I’ve been gone a long time. I don’t know what you expect of me.”

“I know—”

“I just wanted to make sure you knew.”

Fox held up his hands. “Fine. I have no problem with that.” When Elizabeth didn’t react, he nodded away from the ranch house. “Come along, we can talk.”

She followed reluctantly; they walked until they were well away from anyone. She frowned and tried to interpret Fox’s reactions. “Graham, you don’t understand. Our relationship isn’t the only thing that’s changed. I’ve been doing some thinking. About this weapon, what we’ve developed.”

“Yes, you certainly had a hand in its success, didn’t you?” His voice dripped bitterness.

In her mind Elizabeth saw the image of the little girl wailing in the crowded New York subway, sitting cross-legged beside her dead mother. She saw the footage of the plane passing over deserted, poisoned streets.

“You know, I’m not sorry for what I did. Germany hasn’t surrendered yet. For all we know, the Nazis are ready to hit us again with another shower of radioactive dust, if not a bomb of their own.”

“They wouldn’t do that!” Fox said, grabbing her arm. She pulled away. “Every day that passes without Germany using another weapon means that their scientific staff have managed to circumvent Hitler’s wishes! They have controlled themselves. They won’t do it. You know damned well that Hitler isn’t refusing to drop another weapon because he’s a good little boy. Think, Elizabeth. The only reason why we haven’t been hit again is because they have physicists like me over there, people willing to stop this madness—I thought you were one of them too, but I guess I was wrong. They know what’s at stake.”

“Are you sure that’s the reason?”

“It must be! And you know that once the Americans have a working atomic bomb, somebody’s going to drop it. We could have used our own radioactive dust weapon at any time, but we wanted something bigger! More destructive! To show the Germans we could be even more horrible than they were.”

Elizabeth fell silent. She did know what would happen. She knew what the President had done in her timeline. After spending two billion dollars on developing a new weapon, they wanted to make some use out of it.

Fox lowered his voice. “What was it you told me about following your conscience, doing what you had to do? I’m listening to your own advice—or was it all just empty words to console a man you had just slept with?”

Elizabeth stiffened and snapped at him. “Don’t bring that into it! That doesn’t have anything to do—”

Fox shook his head. “No, I suppose it didn’t have anything to do with me, with my thoughts. I suppose it didn’t mean much to you either.” He swallowed and started walking again. When he spoke, he seemed to be talking to himself. “I can’t allow it to happen, Elizabeth. Our German colleagues are risking their lives to prevent their bomb from going further. They’re in a much more dangerous situation than us. I have to do my part.”

Elizabeth snorted. She started walking back toward the ranch house. “So what are you going to do? The test is going to go on, Graham, no matter what you think. I’ve got work to do.”

As she turned, Fox called after her. “Elizabeth…”

She stopped, looking down at the sand, but didn’t turn to face him. “That’s it, Graham. No more.”

“Elizabeth.” He stepped toward her. “Where are you going to watch the test from?”

“The test? I don’t know. I’ll be with Feynman, I suppose.”

“Please watch it with me. I’ll be in a safe place.”

“No, I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

He shuffled his feet. “Well, don’t go to the bunker during the test.”

“Why not?” She sounded tired, was tired—of putting up with him, of listening to his reasons why she should help him, because they sounded too close to what she wanted to hear. In a way, he reminded her of the people she had known in Santa Fe who were all talk and no action.

“Just… don’t, that’s all.”

Elizabeth balled her fists and stepped up her pace.

24 Berlin—the Virus House November 1944

Professor Abraham Esau stood by the flyspecked window in Heisenberg’s old office. He felt numb; only the nervousness and terror in the pit of his stomach reminded him that he was alive.

He stared out into the courtyard. Shrubbery dotted the barren spots. The gravel walkways looked more permanent now after a year and a half, different from that dark, wet night when Werner Heisenberg had been executed. If Heisenberg were still alive, perhaps he could think of some way to salvage the situation. They would never develop their atomic weapon now; they could not even use the radioactive dust again.

Esau watched the black staff car sit where it had parked. Shadows moved inside as the driver shut off the engine then emerged from his door, hurrying around to open the back. Reichminister Albert Speer stepped out, moving stiffly, like a puppet. He had aged a great deal in only two years. He stood, staring at nothing, and removed his hat. He pulled off his black gloves and stuffed them in the pocket of his uniform jacket.

Speer glanced around at the buildings of the Virus House, the chain-link fences, the wooden construction. Nothing had been improved since the establishment of the nuclear physics research group under Esau. The rest of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute looked imposing and Prussian, with tall buildings, stone edifices, and ornate facades. The Virus House, though, looked like a place where “ugly” research was conducted.

Speer turned and gazed straight toward Esau’s window. Though the glare from the sunshine would drown out any shadows of himself inside the room, still Esau cringed back. Speer had come for him. Esau hadn’t thought it would happen so soon.

On weak legs Esau walked back to the desk and set to work, straightening the papers on it. He closed the drawers of his file cabinet with a sense of finality, locking away all the failures, all the ideas they had developed.

From the top corner drawer of his desk, he removed his remaining stack of engraved stationery that proclaimed him as Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics. Tilting his hand, he let the buff-colored paper slide a few sheets at a time into the waste can.

He recalled hearing Major Stadt’s voice snapping an order for his two guards to shoot. In the darkness, under the glaring floodlights, Heisenberg crumpled to the mud. His shock of brownish-red hair looked dull compared to the bright red splotches on his chest.

Esau ran a hand over his own heart. He wondered if the same fate waited in store for him. He had failed. All of Germany was falling. They would put him to death.

The meltdown disaster and fire at Dachau had wiped out nearly everyone in the concentration camp. Those who had survived the initial massive dose of radiation were sure to die soon. This included the guards, all the Jewish prisoners, the camp staff, and a large fraction of the population in the surrounding towns. Within twenty-four hours Kurt Diebner had died in a small local hospital where the doctors had no idea how to treat his sickness.

The disaster had ruined all of their processed uranium, all of their purified graphite. They had nothing left of the entire reactor, and it would be a long time before they could gather the material to make a replacement.

Dr. Otto Hahn had insisted on going to the site himself, armed with a Geiger-Müller counter to mark the spread of the radioactive contamination. Hahn had kept a careful journal, recording every reading. He had toured the ruins of the Dachau camp, remaining less than an hour as he looked at the unburied bodies struck down by radiation sickness.

Many of the prisoners had fled the camp and wandered away, searching for an escape—but they were walking dead. And they died scattered across the countryside.

Otto Hahn had seen all this, and he had also found the people dying in their homes in the surrounding villages. He had seen horses lying dead in barns. He had seen vehicles stopped as their drivers, too sick to continue, crashed into trees.

Perhaps Hahn had been reminded too much of the deaths caused by his own development of poison gases in the Great War. Gas warfare had been his idea, after all. All those people had died because of his invention—and now he saw a slaughter of even greater magnitude. Perhaps it had been too much for his conscience to handle.

Hahn had left his journal behind and he had fled. Nothing had been seen of him for more than a week, and Esau did not expect him to be found ever again.

Now, without Heisenberg and without Hahn, Esau had been deprived of his two brightest stars. When times were more desperate than ever, he had no hope. The nuclear physics solution to this war, the awesome secret weapon Hitler would spring on the world, was no longer viable. They had gained time, with the successful attack against New York, but they had lost all their progress.

He heard footsteps in the hall. Esau remained with his back to the door, staring at the file cabinets. The footsteps stopped, but the visitor said nothing. Esau spun around to face him. “Reichminister Speer, how good of you to visit,” he said in a flat, uninflected voice.

Speer’s pale blue eyes widened at the cold tone of the greeting. “Herr Plenipotentiary, I am sorry I could not inform you of my coming. It is better for you to receive this in person.”

Esau felt a cold twist in his stomach. He wanted to wince and cringe backward, but he held himself firm, as all his party training had shown him. “What is it, Herr Reichminister?”

Speer reached inside his breast pocket and withdrew a folded letter. With one hand he waved it in the air to unfold it. “I have in my hand a personal letter from the Fuhrer himself.”

Esau held his breath.

“It is a letter of commendation. The Fuhrer has seen photographs of all the deaths in New York City. He is very pleased with this radioactive weapon of yours that kills people—that kills the enemy, but does not damage property. I must admit that I am fond of this too. You know of my own interest in architecture. It pains me to see how the indiscriminate bombs dropped on Berlin are destroying some of our greatest historical landmarks.

“Your radioactive dust weapon does not do this. The Fuhrer wants to implement a large program, and he wishes to have dozens of these radioactive bombs after all. We will scatter them over Great Britain. We will wipe out London, we will wipe out Coventry and Birmingham.”

Esau stammered, unable to believe his ears. “But that isn’t possible! Such bombs will contaminate the whole area for years, decades, perhaps even a century.” He lowered his voice. “You saw what happened at Dachau.”

Speer nodded. “The Fuhrer perhaps does not understand this, but these are his orders. He believes that within a year or two the winds will blow the contamination away, leaving the cities free for us to inhabit. Ready-made lebensraum, he thinks. We will not even need to build new places for ourselves. Everything will be there for the taking.”

Reichminister Speer handed over the letter. “Once again we are very satisfied with what you have done for our efforts. The Fuhrer himself has seen to it that you receive a medal of commendation.”

Speer sat down without being asked. He folded his hands in his lap, and his bright eyes took on a sudden focused intensity. “Now then, tell me how soon we can have these other weapons in production. I must have results and I must have them soon.”

Esau felt his throat go dry. “But have you not been informed of what happened at Dachau? We can no longer produce anything! Our uranium is gone, our graphite is destroyed, our reactor has burned. We have no more material to work with!”

Speer froze and, without moving in his seat, his knuckles whitened. He spoke again, keeping his voice low, the pacing of his words even. “I cannot accept that answer, Professor Esau. The Fuhrer wants these bombs. He must have the results soon—it could well be the last chance for the Third Reich. It is my responsibility as Reichminister for Armaments.”

Speer pursed his lips and remained silent. Esau felt too distressed to say anything.

“If I tell the Fuhrer to forget his only hope, I have no doubt that I will be removed from office. I believe I am his friend and confidant, and he depends on me. My predecessor in this post was killed in a sabotaged plane. I don’t want to end up in the same fashion—and believe me, if that fate is in store for me, I will make sure it is in store for you as well.”

Esau felt his skin grow damp and clammy. He sat down behind his own desk—Heisenberg’s old desk. He answered slowly, making up the phrases as he spoke. “I will have to… discover new methods of working. I will have to obtain new resources of purified graphite. I will have to command all production from the Joachimstal uranium mines.”

“You shall have it,” Speer said.

Esau cleared his throat, but averted his eyes. “You realize that the Americans are no doubt much farther along than we are. We have had numerous setbacks. Now that we have used our weapon, you can be sure the Americans will use theirs before long. We have no defense against it.”

“That is why we must hurry.” Speer stood. “Do not let me down.” He turned to leave, then stopped. “And by the way, congratulations on your commendation.”

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

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

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

It had worked for Heisenberg.

He considered the idea again.

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

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

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

25 Trinity Site November 1944

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

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

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

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

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

“What time is it?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How long to the detonation?”

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

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

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

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

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

She met Feynman outside the door. “Ready?”

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

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

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

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

The scene looked like a confrontation between two teams in some sort of battle. And in a way, that’s exactly what it was—the academicians against the soldiers. They didn’t yet know just how much at odds they would be. Right now their goals were in harmony: to stop Nazi Germany. But soon, Elizabeth knew, the two camps would split and champion different goals.

Elizabeth could not see Graham Fox among the scientists, but he would be out at his observation station to take readings from the test. Several other solo researchers had been placed at various distances from Ground Zero to measure the blast.

She stood quietly in the hall and tried to catch what the men were discussing. The front door of the ranch house stood open, letting a cool wet breeze float inside. The rain had stopped, and the sky showed patches of black sky and speckles of stars. Only the sound of water dripping from the roof gave any indication of the storm. Elizabeth wished a breeze would enter the room and clear the air of smoke.

Groves raised his voice. “Every day we delay—”

“I know, I know.” Oppenheimer sounded exhausted, ready to crumble. “Every day takes us farther from victory. We’ll do the test today, General. Just give me five more minutes for that wind check downrange. At least make sure the people and towns downwind from the blast are shielded from fallout. We don’t want to make another New York disaster out here in the desert.”

Groves blew cigar smoke into Oppie’s face. “I know when you’re exaggerating, Dr. Oppenheimer. We’ve discussed the worst-case scenario before, so don’t go trying to scare my staff.” Groves glanced back at his men. They stood placid; their faces revealed nothing. Elizabeth could tell that the last remark had been more for Groves’s own men than as a retort to Oppenheimer.

Oppie waved the cigar smoke away from his face and sucked on his pipe. “I just wanted to make sure that we’re both aware of the consequences.”

“Damn right we are. You’ve got your own calculations to prove it.” Groves shifted his weight. As Elizabeth knew, he was a man not used to waiting for what he wanted.

“Oppie?” An enlisted man entered the ranch house, out of breath. The rank insignia on his arms showed him to be a private. His boots were covered with mud and wet sand, but the rest of his uniform was dry. He strode into the room, then stopped as he caught sight of Groves. He snapped to attention.

“Morning, General.”

“Get on with it,” said Groves after returning the salute.

The enlisted man held out a paper to Oppenheimer. “The winds have died down. Meteorology forecasts no weather coming in for at least the next three hours.”

“Thank you.” Oppenheimer beamed. “That takes care of it, General.” He raised his voice and clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention. “Looks like it’s a go!”

Groves snatched the paper from Oppenheimer, grinning. He looked at Elizabeth, but didn’t seem to recognize her. “Let’s do it,” he said.

Oppenheimer studied his watch. “An hour and a half. That’ll give us time to run through the check one more time.”

“Right.” Groves whirled and snapped to his men. “You heard him. Ninety minutes.” And he was out the door with a graceful, rolling gait despite his girth and his obvious weariness.

Elizabeth expected some excitement after Oppie had made his announcement. The men all looked to be asleep on their feet, feverish and ready to curl up on their bunks. They had been working nonstop for days on the final preparations.

The support crew filed out of the ranch house and headed into the dark night. They each had their specific task to perform, even if just to observe the test. No one spoke; they must know to save the cheering for later. Somehow it seemed appropriate to set off the world’s first nuclear explosion in the darkest hours before dawn.

Elizabeth and Feynman waited until the last man had left. Feynman rubbed his hands together, then squeezed her shoulder. She wondered how he had been so certain that the test would proceed. “The Army’11 be making a last sweep of the area to make sure no one’s left around.”

“Do you have anything left to do?”

“Me? A theoretician! Theoretical physicists are useless when things get practical.” He thought for a moment. “I had an advisor once who told me that when he caught himself doing anything useful, he knew it was time to change fields.” He grinned. “Come on, join me in the command bunker. I’m sure there’s enough room.”

“Okay.” He put his arm around her as they left the ranch house; she managed to discreetly extricate herself from his touch.

They made their way to a convoy of jeeps just outside the ranch house. They tried to avoid the mud and fresh puddles from the storm. The hard sand surface had absorbed most of the moisture, but in some spots the ground had left pools of water. The air smelled fresh, rinsed clean of the dust that had been whipping around the test site for the past week.

The jeeps sat parked in a long line, their engines running as the support crew climbed in. Sunrise would not come for another hour or so. Long pencil beams of light came from the sets of headlights, making the convoy look like a glowing caterpillar. As she and Feynman approached, a figure stepped from the shadows behind the first jeep. Elizabeth recognized his profile, the thin body, the tense way he held his shoulders.

“Elizabeth…”

“Hello, Graham.” Elizabeth stopped walking.

Feynman placed his hand behind her back and urged her forward. “Dr. Fox—you’ve heard the shot is back on?”

“Yes.” Fox’s eyes didn’t move from Elizabeth as he answered. They glittered in the glare from the headlights.

Feynman said, “Hey, you can join us in the bunker. I think we’ve got room for one more.”

Fox shook his head. He spoke so low it was hard for her to hear his words. “Elizabeth, I shall be with my radionuclide collection experiment. Were you still planning on joining me? I came back to fetch you.”

The suggestion startled her. She had never agreed to be with him for the test. “Well, Oppie is expecting me in the bunker.”

“I was planning on having you help me—none of the technicians is free. These measurements are crucial.”

Elizabeth swallowed and tried to think of a way out. Fox worked his mouth but said nothing else. She felt very uncomfortable.

Feynman dropped his hand from her back. “Oh, go ahead, Elizabeth. You’ll be able to see the test much better from out there. Too many big heads crammed in the command bunker. We’ll be up to our necks in IQs.”

Elizabeth drew in a breath, stalling for time. What was going on here? Why was Fox so insistent?

“We must hurry, Elizabeth,” Fox said, touching her elbow. “The test is set to go in eighty minutes. I’ve still got to check out the radiometers.”

“He’s right.” Feynman gently pushed her from behind. “You’d better hurry.” With that he turned and climbed into one of the jeeps. He called back as the jeep started to move. “Keep your fingers crossed!”

“I will,” Fox said.

As the jeeps moved off, Elizabeth frowned at the vehicle’s sour exhaust fumes over the fresh smell of rain. One by one the jeeps sped off along the dark road toward Ground Zero. In the backs, men hung onto their hats.

Fox pressed his lips together. He watched her for a moment. Neither of them spoke. Finally, as one of the last vehicles pulled out, he said, “Let’s go. I brought my own jeep.” Swinging into the driver’s seat, he checked out the gear shift and waited for Elizabeth to join him.

Elizabeth hesitated. Fox’s attitude didn’t leave room for questions. He had tried to talk to her several times in the last few days, but she had ignored him, though she watched him growing more and more desperate. She looked around. She brushed away a few spots of standing water in the passenger seat, then climbed into the jeep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Flypaper?”

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

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

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

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

“What?” She grasped the bottle of sunscreen.

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

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

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

“Yes?”’

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

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

“You know damned well what I mean.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fox flinched, then glared at her.

“Twenty minutes,” the announcer said.

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

“Graham, it doesn’t happen that way. We survive it. Times get ugly and paranoid for a while, but we survive. You can’t uninvent something!”

“But I can certainly delay its progress. That’s the beauty of having a classified program, Elizabeth—only the senior staff know how the entire project fits together. Once you get rid of most of the people who know how to make the Gadget—”

“Get rid of… ” She glanced at the jeep and started to move toward it. Her heart pounded. Fox grabbed her arm, squeezing and digging in with his fingernails. “Don’t touch me!”

“You’re going to stay right here. You can’t make it back to the command bunker before the detonation.” He looked ludicrous with white suntan cream smeared on his cheeks and nose. But his words frightened her very much.

Fox turned back to look at the tower. In the distance the first rays of the sun had just begun to peek over the San Andres mountains. It would be several minutes yet before the light hit the ground around the base of the mountains.

“Fifteen minutes,” the radio said.

Elizabeth whirled and lashed out, jerking herself from his grip. He clung to her blouse so that it ripped along one seam. “You cannot make it!” he said.

She started for the jeep again, but Fox tackled her. Sharp rocks and sand stung her face, and she coughed, trying to wheeze her breath back. Fox held her down. She squirmed and kicked.

“It is already done, Elizabeth. Everything is in place. I hid some of the test explosives inside the command bunker, then wired the detonation to occur in parallel with the bomb. They’ll never even feel it.”

She thought of Oppie and Groves and Feynman and all the other scientists in the command bunker, leaning forward, waiting to see the flash that would be brighter than a thousand suns.

“No!” She moved sideways and brought her knee up, jamming it between Fox’s legs, then punched him in the larynx, using the sharp edges of her knuckles. Being a student in Berkeley had taught her plenty of self-defense techniques.

Fox mewled and turned to jelly. She scrambled out from under him and crawled toward the jeep.

“Too late,” Fox wheezed behind her.

“Oh shut up!” Elizabeth threw a glance at the radio. The Army field unit was propped up against one of the muddy tires. Painted a khaki green, it was as big as a large knapsack.

“Ten minutes,” the voice said. “Minute by minute countdown starting now.”

The dials looked incomprehensible to her; she couldn’t make out any of the settings. Nothing came from the speaker box except a quiet hiss of background static. Elizabeth dropped to her knees and started flipping dials. “Hello, can anyone hear me? Hello?” She leaned into the device. “Answer me!” She smacked the radio with the flat of her hand.

Fox’s voice came from behind her. “There’s no microphone, Elizabeth. They didn’t want the scientists to inadvertently compromise the test by breaking radio silence.”

She scrambled back over and grabbed his hair to smash his head down on the sand. “Then give me the keys to the jeep. Now!”

Fox grunted and tried to claw at her with his hands. She pointed her fingers straight out and held them like an icepick in front of his wide, glazed eyes. “Give me the keys, dammit, or I’ll gouge your eyes out!”

He tried to roll her off of him, then groaned in his own agony.

“All right, we’ll do the left eye first!” She drew back her hand.

Fox gasped his words. “No, no!” He seemed to realize he couldn’t get away. “Jeep… doesn’t have keys!”

Elizabeth leaped to her feet, feeling stupid. Of course, the Army Series M vehicles used only a starter button. She thought about kicking Fox one more time in the kidneys for good measure, but sprinted for the jeep instead.

She threw herself behind the steering wheel and fumbled for the starter button. She pushed her hair out of her eyes. In the distance the area around the shot tower remained deserted. Nothing moved as far as she could see, where moments before the area had been a flurry of activity—jeeps had bounced across the desert, carrying last-minute dispatches; scientists had set up their diagnostics. Now nothing moved as far as she could see. The desert waited for a second sun to rise.

Setting the choke, she pushed the starter button. The engine caught, and she jammed it into gear. The vehicle lurched forward.

And then Fox stood there, somehow getting to his feet and throwing himself in front of the jeep. She swerved, ran into a rock and bumped over it. The front headlight struck Fox and sent him sprawling back to the sand. She could see blood in the dim dawn light. Fox screamed in pain, then shouted a last, plaintive “Stop!”

She gripped the steering wheel and did not move for a fraction of a second. Fox was hurt. He needed help. She remembered holding him, talking with him, making love to him.

She recalled sitting in front of a car, skier 4, in the Livermore demonstration. She had trusted civil rules of protest. Instead, she had now run down Graham Fox.

You gotta do what you gotta do, and damn the consequences. She should stay with Fox, take care of him, see what she could do to help him. What if he was dying? What if she had killed him? She didn’t have time to prevent anything back at the bunker anyway. She couldn’t stop the explosion from killing all the scientists. She had to get her priorities straight.

“I can try,” she said to herself, and left Fox lying there as she let up on the clutch. The jeep jerked as it moved into first gear, but she managed to keep it moving. The stick shift wasn’t too different from what she had learned to drive, but it took most of her remaining energy to jam the clutch to the floor.

The jeep sped off, spewing wet sand from its tires. Fox raised a hand, trying to call her back, but she ignored him. She had made her choice. His wasn’t the only life at stake.

Things had changed from what she thought. These people were not the historical monsters she had imagined them to be years ago when she was with the Livermore Challenge Group or with her Santa Fe activists. Flesh, blood, feelings—and things were different here.

The jeep picked up speed as she ran through the gears. Her body smacked against the side of the vehicle as she hit a depression; she clung to the wheel to keep herself from bouncing out. She could hardly see the road. She fumbled for the headlights, but they helped little in the growing glare of sunrise. Still, she kept the jeep pointed toward the command bunker, a good five miles away from her, from Ground Zero.

She had to punch the vehicle to over sixty miles an hour. Could an old Army jeep even go that fast? It had to. She had less than ten minutes. She pressed the pedal to the floor. Over the bouncing she could make out that the wobbling speedometer read a maximum of fifty miles an hour. The rough desert road made her bones rattle in their sockets. She didn’t have any idea how fast she was really traveling, but she prayed that there would be time to reach the bunker.

She didn’t want to be caught in the open when the blast went off. In her mind she saw a snippet of one of the silly civil defense films from the fifties, with cartoon ducks singing a ditty about how to “duck, and cover!” if you happened to be away from a fallout shelter during a nuclear air raid.

As she came closer to the bunker she blasted the horn and yelled at the top of her lungs. “Come on, somebody let me know you’re hearing me!”

She couldn’t tell how far she had gone, or even how far she had left to go. The bunker seemed to sit fixed on the horizon with the tower standing vigil five miles farther away.

She didn’t even know if they could stop the test.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“…one… zero!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The genie had escaped its bottle.

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

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