Trinity's Child (19 page)

“One more thing, Yank. Think I'd haul ass if I was you.
Elsie's
motor is runnin' and she's low on gas.”

“The refueling plane is running out of fuel?” Kazaklis asked incredulously. “You got any more partly sunny news?”

“Oh, she's got some in the tank for you,
Polar Bear One.
Just not enough for the both of you. She was cruisin' around on a practice run when all this happened. That's why she's the only girl in town.”

“God. So when's the date?”

“Twenty minutes. Like I said, think I'd haul ass.”

“Haul ass? She's forty minutes away.”

“I got her headin' south soon as I picked you up on the screen. Intersecting courses, assumin' you know how to navigate that beast. Date's on. Twenty minutes.”

Kazaklis shivered. Refueling in midair with a troubled tanker. It was bad enough on a normal mission. But he was out of choices. Partly sunny it was.

Thanks, pal,” the pilot said. “Run on over to Ruby's and have a drink on me. Jack Daniel's.”

“Naw. I can use the overtime. Somebody's gotta watch the Pole for you guys. Don't think you need any Red Stars comin' over the top just yet. Thumbs up, Yank.”

Kazaklis felt the shiver run through him again. “Thumbs up, Canuck,” he said.

Eternal vigilance, Moreau thought bleakly.

In the New Mexico valley the Spanish called Jornada del Muerto, the journey of the dead, the heat storms roil out of the south, sucking up the dead mesquite and the fine sand particles in a choking desert wind that moves quickly through the wastelands and buffets finally into the deep-purple walls of the Oscuro Mountains. It started here, and even as a ten-year-old making an only partly understood pilgrimage with her father, Moreau knew that.

It was a forbidding place. The sandstorms could etch the skin off a foolish man. But by now, in the late sixties, the storms contented themselves with etching his relics instead, most of the foolish men having left long ago. In the loneliness, the winds carved at the stark, sun-petrified bunkers into which the desert rats darted for shelter at the first far-off whisper of the wind or visitors. The antelope bounded into the deepest purple clefts of the Oscuros. The buzzards, black scavengers of all desert foolishness, lifted themselves ponderously and reluctantly off the twisted scarecrow crosses, the Trinity crosses, from which the last men to work here draped their hearing wires a generation gone. The rattlers were the last to leave, catching the final rays of a sun that burned with the white-hot luminescence of dry ice. They slithered quickly into the snug safety beneath the rotting floorboards of man's most conspicuous relic, the old adobe house known as the McDonald ranch. Standing in the middle of the desert's hostile isolation, miles from any neighbor, the ranch house could be a testament to man's unceasing efforts to challenge and control nature's most unruly elements. But it isn't. In the old adobe house he assembled the first nuclear explosive and then moved a few miles past the buzzards to unleash those elements.

The sands had stopped now and the freckled young Army lieutenant swung the jeep to a bumpy stop among the greasewood scrub growing like weeds in the McDonalds' abandoned yard. The child eagerly hopped out first, racing straight for an old windmill which tilted precariously from neglect, dry skeletons of tumbleweed clinging to its ankles. The general went next.

The general was a strange cluck, the lieutenant thought, taking a kid to a place like this. But General Moreau was one of the cold war's living legends and the lieutenant imagined all such people were strange. He watched as the father tenderly took his daughter's hand. But General Moreau walked as if he had the child in one hand, the world in the other. He cut an imposing, intimidating figure, befitting a legend—walking ramrod straight and unswervingly, his coal-black hair infiltrated by the first bristling strands of iron gray, his eyes frozen blue in their certainty. The lieutenant wondered briefly if he held the world's hand as tenderly. The general made the lieutenant nervous. He accurately sensed the man wanted to be alone with his daughter, as if he had some private lesson to impart. But the young officer hurried after his two wards.

“What you want to see is in here, sir,” the lieutenant called out, cursing himself for what he thought was a squeak in his voice. He beckoned them back toward the sagging ranch house. “Watch your step. The porch is gone now.”

The general's eyes paused on him in silent intimidation and then swept past. The girl, long-legged, skinny, and lithe, bounded around him and darted through a door swinging loosely on one hinge. He started to warn her, then thought better of it. It was a father's place, dammit, to caution his kid against risks. The general said nothing and the two of them followed her into the empty living room.

She stood entranced. The windows were long gone, the panes ground by the desert winds into the dust from which they came, so that not even a glass shard remained. The ceiling rafters hung in cobweb shadows. The hardwood floors, once the pride of the McDonalds, were a swamp of dry-rot traps beneath which, the lieutenant knew, the rattlers still were curled up from the storm.

“You can almost feel the ghosts in here, can't you, general?” the lieutenant volunteered. “Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, Bethe. Even those who are still alive seem like ghosts. Haunted by what they did. Getting senile, I guess.” The lieutenant hesitated, trying to think of something to please the general. “Too bad,” he added. “It was mankind's greatest scientific achievement.”

The soldier moved gingerly across the floor, leading them into a second, smaller room.

“Critical mass room,” he explained. “Built the bomb—called it the gadget—up at Los Alamos, but this is where they got it ready for the test. Put the hemispheres together by hand. With a screwdriver. Imagine that. A few months later, when they were getting the Bikini bomb ready back up at Los Alamos, the screwdriver slipped. Guy reached in and pulled the spheres apart with his bare hands. Saved the barn, but he sure was a gone goose, even though it took nine days. Hair fell out, so they said, and his bones just turned to pulp. Helluva way to go.”

The lieutenant could see the general's back stiffen. Jesus, he was really blowing this.

The girl seemed oblivious to the tension between the two adults. She stared transfixed, as her father should have known a child would, at a far wall on which initials were carved crudely.

G. J. Loves J. J.

The general had been here before, not at the beginning but as a later visitor to the shrine. The initials left him vaguely uncomfortable. The ranch had been ignored for years, but it had remained deep inside the Army's top-secret White Sands Missile Range since the end of the Second World War, surrounded by miles of untracked desert which, in turn, was surrounded by guards and fences and sensors. But G. J. and J. J., two unknown kids, had slipped through all that, come in here and carved their own memorial on one of man's strangest monuments. You had to be a determinist, believe in man's ability to control events, to do what General Moreau did. The initials seemed so random, so unlikely. General Moreau did not like random events.

“Who was G. J., Dad?” the girl asked, brightly curious. “Did he make the bomb?”

“Made J. J., more likely,” the lieutenant blurted out, grinning at the father. The joke was a mistake. The general turned and stared hard and steely-eyed at him. Without another word, the flustered young escort saluted, turned on his heels, and hurried out to wait in the hot jeep.

The girl squeezed her father's hand. She held him in total awe. But he held her in awe, too. She was nature's grant of immortality, his only child, his only tie to the future, especially now that his wife was gone. He intended to give her that future intact. He also wanted her to take some responsibility for it, as he had taken it on himself. The two of them sat down on weathered old packing crates which lay broken open, the faded transit instructions still visible from the summer of 1945. Masking tape hung like flypaper from the ceiling where the physicists had sealed cracks against the blowing sands. The place looked as if the men had fled after their work was done, the girl thought, not bothering to clean up after themselves.

“The lieutenant isn't very smart, Dad,” she said. “Live men can't be ghosts.”

“They can lose faith,” her father replied. “That can make a ghost of a man.”

“Is that what happened to the men who made the atomic bomb?”

“Some of them. The men who worked in this room before you were born left a terrible burden for the world. I don't envy them.”

The girl frowned. She didn't understand. She knew her father carried the same burden; that, in fact, he carried atomic bombs around in his airplanes and directed men who sat underground with huge missiles with bombs on top of them.

“Why don't we just throw them all away, Dad?” she asked with the crystalline logic of a ten-year-old.

“It's too late for that, Mo.” Her father's voice carried the slightest touch of sadness, the first she had heard since her mother died. “The men can't take away what they did in this room. They can't uninvent what they invented. Now it's up to the rest of us to learn to live with it. Most people choose to ignore it. I choose to deal with it, the only way I know how.”

“I'm going to die from it, aren't I?” There was no alarm in the girl's words. Just ten-year-old certainty.

“No!” The reply was an order, more sharp and stern than the eye command to the lieutenant, and the girl was taken aback, as if she had failed her father.

“That's what all the kids say, Dad,” she continued cautiously. “They're afraid of it. They said the world is going to blow up and we're all going to die. Sometimes I have to fight with them.” She loved her father too much to tell him the fights were over him. But he knew.

“I'm sorry, Mo,” he said, his eyes drifting toward G. J. Loves J. J. “I'm sorry your friends are afraid. I'm sorry you have to fight. I don't know if you can understand this yet, but fear is my job. It's my job to keep everyone so afraid no one will ever use these bombs again.”

“How long do you have to do it, Dad?” she asked, eyes down, her small, fine hand picking at the old bomb crate.

“Forever, honey. Eternal vigilance, President Kennedy said. After me, someone else and then someone else and then someone else. Forever, into infinity.”

The girl continued picking at the crate. She remembered a talk with her mother, just before she died. How big is the universe, Mom? Eternal and infinite, her mother had answered. How big is that, Mom? Forever, child. But it must have some end, Mom. Don't think about such things, child, because they have no answers and they will drive you mad. Her mother had sounded very sad.

“Mom said infinity can drive you crazy, Dad.”

Her father stood up very slowly and led her back to the jeep for the short, bumpy ride to the site of the Trinity explosion itself.

A solitary buzzard circled slowly ahead of them, then settled on one of the stubby Trinity crosses beyond the outer fence. Two fences surrounded the crater, the first with a sign that read “
danger—radiation
,” the second warning that no one was to stay inside longer than ninety minutes without protective clothing. The lieutenant opened both gates and led his visitors toward the center.

“What kind of radiation count are you getting these days?” the general asked.

“It's still hot,” the young man answered, looking uncomfortable. “But less than a chest X ray if you don't stay too long. The crater doesn't really look like much now. Somebody bulldozed dirt into it years ago. The dirt settled, so you get this shallow dip like a saucer. After the explosion, the crater was green as an emerald. The heat fused the sand into green glass.”

“Brighter than a thousand suns,” the general said absentmindedly.

“The glass still works its way to the surface,” the lieutenant went on. “Trinitite, the scientists named it. Maybe we can find a piece for your daughter.”

At the center of the depression, the lieutenant stopped. “Just a pile of dirt now, sir, but this is ground zero. Everything vaporized here. The scientific gear. The steel tower. The concrete footings. Hard to imagine we make them hundreds, thousands of times more powerful now.”

The girl kicked at the dead dirt in search of a piece of the green glass.

“The only part of the original crater is over there,” the lieutenant said, pointing at a low weathered hut that resembled a chicken coop. “They wanted to save it for the scientists. But nobody goes there now. Roofs falling in. I guess we've got enough places to study this stuff now. We've dropped a helluva lot of 'em since Trinity.”

“Why did they call it Trinity, Dad?” the girl asked.

“I don't know, Mo. Dr. Oppenheimer named it.”

“But Trinity means the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” she said, puzzled.

“Yes,” her father replied distantly.

“Did they think they were making another God?”

The general didn't answer. He stared into the dark recesses of the Oscuros, against which the fireball and the mushroom had been framed. General Moreau had seen his own mushrooms, and his mind drifted now to Oppenheimer's thoughts on that morning in 1945. At first the physicist had seen great beauty, and he recalled the lines from an ancient Hindu epic: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.” Then Oppenheimer had recalled the next lines of the epic: “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” The general sighed.