Los Alamos (2 page)

1

S
ANTA FE GAVE
its name to a railroad, but the train itself stops twenty miles to the southeast, at Lamy, a dusty town in the high desert that seemed to have been blown in by the wind and got stuck at the tracks. Michael Connolly thought he’d arrived in the middle of nowhere. The train had been crowded, a sea of uniforms and businessmen with travel priority and women holding children in their laps, but only a few got off on the sleepy platform. Beyond the buildings and the jumble of pickup trucks that had come to meet the passengers, there was nothing to see but scrub grass and sage until the tracks finally disappeared in the direction of the mountains. The young soldier looking eagerly at each face was clearly meant for him. He looked like a high school shortstop, jug ears sticking out of his shaved head.

“Mr. Connolly?” he asked finally, when the passengers had dwindled to an unlikely three.

“Yes.”

“Sorry, sir. I was looking for a uniform.”

“They haven’t got me yet,” Connolly said, smiling. “I’m just a liaison. Is this really Santa Fe?”

The soldier grinned. “It gets better. Help you with that?” he said, picking up Connolly’s suitcase. “We’re right over here.” The car was a Ford, still shiny under a blanket of dust.

Connolly wiped his forehead, glancing up at the cloudless sky.

“Nothing but blue skies, huh?”

“Yes, sir. Sunny days, cool nights. They got weather here, that’s for sure. Best thing about it.”

“Been here long?” Connolly said, getting into the car.

“Since January. Straight from boot. Not much to do, but it beats overseas.”

“Anything would, I guess.”

“Not that I wouldn’t like to see some action before it’s all over.”

“Better hurry, then.”

“Naw, I figure the Japs’ll hold out another year at least.”

“Let’s hope not.” It came out quickly, a kind of scolding.

“Yes, sir,” the soldier said, formal again.

“What’s on the program, anyway?”

“First we’ll get you checked in at Santa Fe. Mrs. McKibben will have your stuff. Then my orders are to get you up to the Hill ASAP. General Groves wants to see you before he goes back to Washington tonight.”

“Is ‘the Hill’ a code name?”

The soldier looked slightly puzzled. “I don’t think so. I never heard that, anyway. It’s just what everybody calls it around here.”

“I assume there is one—a hill, that is.”

“What they call a mesa. Spanish for table,” he said, a tour guide now. “That’s what they looked like, I guess—flat-topped hills. Anyway, there used to be a school there, kind of a dude ranch school for rich kids, I think. Sure doesn’t look like a school now.”

“What does it look like?”

The soldier grinned, breezy again. “Look like? Well, if you’ll pardon my French, like a fucking mess.”

Santa Fe, however, was pretty. The adobes, which Connolly had never seen, seemed to draw in the sun, holding its light and color like dull penumbras of a flame. The narrow streets leading to the plaza were filled with American stores—a Woolworth’s, a Rexall Drugs that had been dropped into a foreign city. The people too, dressed in cowboy hats and jeans, looked like visitors. Only the Mexican women, wrapped in shawls, and the Indians, nodding over their piles of tourist blankets, were really at home. The plaza itself was quiet, a piece of Spain drowsing in an endless siesta.

“That’s the Palace of the Governors,” the soldier said, pointing to the long adobe building that lined one side of the square. “Oldest government office in the country, or something like that. Project office is right around the corner.”

The sense of enchantment held. They walked through the quiet courtyard of a small adobe house where the only sound was the travelogue splash of a fountain. But America returned inside. A bright, cheerful woman, hair piled on top of her head, was busy on the phone as she arranged papers on the desk in front of her.

“I know space is tight, but he’s just got to have it.” She covered the mouthpiece and nodded to Connolly. “I’ll be with you in a sec.” Then, to the phone, “Edith, please see what you can do. He just won’t take no for an answer. Give me a call back when you hear, okay? Yes, I know. Bye now.” She smiled up at Connolly without pausing for breath. “You must be Mr. Connolly. I’m Dorothy McKibben. Welcome to Santa Fe,” she said, shaking hands. “You certainly have picked a crazy day. ’Course, they’re all crazy one way or another. I had to get all this together in a hurry, but I think it’s all here.” She handed him a manila envelope. “ID, ration card, driver’s license. No names, of course, we just go by numbers up on the Hill. Local stores are used to this, so you shouldn’t have any problem. Try not to get stopped for speeding, though—the police have a fit writing out a ticket to a number. You’ve been cleared for a white badge—that allows you into the Technical Area, so you’ll be able to go anywhere. I’ve included the army bus schedule into Santa Fe just in case, but you’ll have your own car.” She raised an eyebrow. “That’s pretty unusual around here, so you must be important, I guess.” She made a small laugh that said she was no stranger to importance. “Security office will give you your housing assignment up top. I’m sorry we couldn’t find anything at Fuller Lodge, but we’ve got wall-to-wall visitors for some reason, and it couldn’t be helped. If any of them leave, of course, we can reassign you right away. Let’s see, what else? All mail to P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe. No other address. You should know that mail is censored. We don’t like to do it, but it became a security issue. You get used to it.”

“Censored here?” Connolly asked.

She smiled. “Dear me, no. I’m not
that
much of a busybody. Army censors. Off-site. Wouldn’t be fair to have someone you know poking around in your mail, and of course I know everybody.”

“Of course.”

She blushed. “I don’t mean it that way, to brag or anything. It’s just what I do. That and try to find an empty seat when the general decides to fly out of Albuquerque on the spur of the moment and that means bumping somebody else, who’ll be madder than a hornet.”

Connolly smiled. “Well, there’s a war on.”

She smiled back. “You’d be surprised what little ice that cuts at the airport. I wish he’d take the train, the way he usually does. But we’ll get him on somehow.”

And of course she would. Connolly looked at her, surprised at how quickly he’d been taken in and charmed. Everything about Los Alamos seemed disjointed—the train that stopped somewhere else, this city that didn’t seem to be in America, and now this good-natured, competent woman who managed émigré physicists and army generals as if they were hungry customers at a church potluck supper. He wondered how much she knew, what she made of it all. A secret project that would help win the war—was that enough? Was that all she needed? According to his briefing, there were now four thousand people at Los Alamos. Mrs. McKibben had been there from the start, settling them in, handing out numbered identities. What did she think they were doing, all these people with unpronounceable names and housing problems, working into the middle of the night on a hilltop?

“Now, if you need anything else at all, you just let me know.”

“Thanks. I’m sorry to have put you to so much trouble.”

“That’s what we’re here for.” For a moment he thought he saw in her eyes the inevitable question: what are
you
here for, with your car and your wad of coupons? But if she wondered, she said nothing.

“The car. Where do I pick it up?”

“Why, you’ve been in it. That is, once the motor pool assigns it to you.”

“Which they will.”

“You bet. I signed the papers.”

They drove for almost an hour before they got to the long twisting road up the mesa. It was graded and paved now but still had all the debris and scattered equipment of a permanent construction site. Bulldozers and back-hoes perched at the edge of hairpin curves, and halfway up they passed a car awaiting rescue, one of its thinly patched tires finally done in by too many rocks and baked-over ruts. Once the road had all been dirt, a glorified mule track for pack trips up to the school, and even now it looked temporary and risky, ready at any moment to be reclaimed by scrub. It must be a hell of a drive at night, Connolly thought as he watched the soldier negotiate the curves, pulling hard at the wheel, an amusement park ride.

The landscape changed as they climbed, sagebrush and stunted junipers giving way to taller piñons and alpine trees. The air smelled fresh, as if it had been rubbed with astringent, and the bright blue sky went on forever. Connolly felt the alertness of higher altitude, awakened from Santa Fe’s timeless nap. There was traffic on the road now, trucks grinding up the steep grade or jerking and halting their way back down, and everything moved quickly. The entire hill was on the march. As they approached the east gate, the activity increased. Cars waited to be passed through security, and beyond the fence Connolly could see a giant water tower and the instant city, a jerry-built ant farm of dull green army-issue buildings, Quonset huts, and barrack apartments. They were still building it. The air itself seemed obscured by dust and tangles of overhead wires, noisy with construction and running motors. Men, mostly civilians, darted through the unpaved dirt streets with the quick steps of people who had somewhere to go. Connolly’s first thought was that a whole college had somehow been dropped accidentally into an army camp. While Santa Fe dreamed on below, up here in the high, cool air, everything was busy.

They passed through the tollbooth checkpoints and parked just outside the Technical Area, a group of buildings surrounded by yet another high wire-mesh fence with two strands of barbed wire running along the top. Connolly glanced up at the watchtowers, where bored MPs gazed out toward the mountains. It was an indifferent concentration camp, too cheerful to inspire any alarm. Girls in short dresses and sweaters, presumably secretaries, passed through the fence, barely flashing badges at the young guards. The two largest buildings were long barracks of offices, connected by a second-story covered passageway over the main road, which gave the town its own form of grand portal. It was late afternoon, and buses were filling with day laborers for the trip back home, down the mesa. Connolly noticed a busload of Indian women, with their stern faces and braided hair, pulling away toward the gate. In the most secret place in the world, there was maid service.

Connolly and his bags were deposited at the security office with Lieutenant Mills, tall, pencil-thin, and prematurely balding in his twenties, who smiled nervously and kept glancing away, as if he wanted to examine his new colleague from an angle before meeting him head on.

“Look, we’ve got a lot to go over, but General Groves wants to see you right away, so it’ll have to wait. I’ll show you around afterward. Colonel Lansdale’s away, as usual, so it’s just us. And the staff, of course.”

“How many?”

“Altogether twenty-eight military and seven civilians in G-2, but only four of us here.”

“Not a lot, then.”

“Well, we’ve never had any security problems before.”

“Do you have one now?”

Mills looked at him and took the bait. “I assume that’s what you’re here to find out.”

“But you haven’t been told?”

“Me? I just run the bodyguards. They don’t have to tell me anything.”

“Who gets the guards?”

“All the top scientists—Oppie, Fermi, Bethe, Kistiakowsky. Anyone considered vital to the project who needs protection outside.”

“Or surveillance.”

This time he didn’t rise to it. “Or surveillance.”

“That must make you popular.”

“The groom at every wedding.”

Connolly laughed. “Yeah, I’ll bet. Well, let’s see the boss. What’s he like, anyway?”

“Straight shooter,” Mills said, leading him out of the building. “Built the Pentagon in a year. Made this place out of nothing. Does drink, doesn’t smoke. Clean living. No detail too small.”

“That easy, huh?”

“Actually, he’s all right. This business with Bruner’s got him spooked, though, so give him a little room.”

“Generals are all alike.”

“Just like happy families.”

Connolly smiled. “You’ve been to school.”

“Here we are. Mind your head,” he said, opening the door.

Inside was a plain anteroom, barely big enough for the desk and the pink middle-aged woman who fluttered behind it.

“Mr. Connolly? Thank goodness you’re here. The general’s got a plane to catch, and he’s been asking for you all afternoon. I’ll just tell him—”

But there was no need, because the door behind her was opened by a big man in khaki who seemed to fill the entire doorframe, absorbing the space. He was not sloppy—he was tucked in as neatly as a hospital corner at inspection—but he had the pudgy flesh of an overweight businessman and his large stomach strained at his belt. There were damp patches under his arms, and Connolly imagined the Washington summers were torture for him. The overall effect was boyish, like someone who had ballooned out at puberty and couldn’t, even now, pass up a jelly doughnut. But the mustache in the middle of his round soft face was surprisingly trimmed and small, the borrowed look of a thin clerk.

“Good, you’re here. Connolly, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

He handed a sheaf of papers to the woman. “We haven’t got much time, so let’s not waste any. I’ve got to catch a plane in Albuquerque, and it’s a heck of a drive getting there. Betty, you’ll make sure the car’s ready? These are all okayed and ready to go. Be sure you get copies of the first two to Dr. Oppenheimer tomorrow—he’s been waiting. I’ll phone you from Washington about the plumbing contracts. Connolly?”

The office was simple, about the size of a large dormitory room, with a window looking out onto the busy main street and the Tech Area fence. There was nothing personal on the walls, just a photograph of Roosevelt and a map of the country, and the desk, piled with folders and contracts and a picture of a woman with two little girls, could have been that of any bureaucrat. Only the two black telephones, a wartime luxury, suggested any importance. Connolly knew instinctively that his real office in the Pentagon was probably no different—plain, pared down, as if he were determined to remove anything that could distract him from the job. In the wastepaper basket at the side of the desk Connolly saw the incongruous shiny brown of a Hershey bar wrapper.