The Trinity Paradox (3 page)

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

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

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

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

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

2

Los Alamos June 1943

“History again and again shows that we have no monopoly on ideas, but we do better with them than other countries.”

—
J. Robert Oppenheimer

“At present we can see no practicable technical method of producing an atom-bomb during the war with the resources available in Germany. But the subject, nevertheless, must be thoroughly investigated to make sure that the Americans will not be able to develop atom-bombs either.”

—
Dr. Werner Heisenberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She looked around.

Something else seemed wrong.

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

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

And then it hit her: the experimental site.

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

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

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

As if the site had never been here at all.

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

Maybe it was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Jeff would never be coming back.

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

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

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

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