Revelation

17 Los Alamos

The morning sun was already hot. The wind which gently shook the sign was tumbling sagebrush along the high desert landscape and Findhorn, feeling like a fried tomato after his six-hour taxi ride from Phoenix, was grateful for it. The cab trailed dust as it vanished, its driver weary but richer.

Two men were waiting just outside the barbed wire, next to a yellow sports car. One of them, surly, in a tan uniform with a black belt and bearing a holstered side-arm, appraised Findhorn with small, deep-set, suspicious eyes. The civilian was about thirty, tall, bespectacled, slightly stooped and had receding, balding hair. He also had stubble and the air of a man who hadn't slept overnight. A cluster of observatory domes glinted a few hundred yards away.

'Cartwright of The Times, I presume,' said the man. His handshake was tired, his hand clammy in spite of the dry air.

'My friends call me Ed or Eddie.'

'I'm Frank. I don't have any friends.'

Findhorn waved an arm towards the observatory domes. 'Isn't that where they hunt for threat asteroids?'

The guard looked as if Findhorn had just introduced himself as an armed terrorist.

'Hey, how did you know that?' White asked.

Findhorn smiled. 'That's another story.'

The guard wasn't returning any smiles today. 'Before this goes any further, let's see your ID, mister.' Findhorn produced passport and a hastily forged letter of authorization with a Times letterhead scanned in from the newspaper.

'Yes, that's one of the LINEAR telescopes,' said White, while the guard examined Findhorn's papers with an air of deep suspicion. 'Part of the Air Force GEODSS system. If you want clearance for a visit it'll take you two months and three layers of bureaucracy, and that's if you're American.'

'Listen, it's good of you to meet me down here. We're still about two hundred miles south of Los Alamos, n'est ce pas?'

The guard returned Findhorn's papers looking like a man who knows he's being conned but can do nothing about it. White motioned Findhorn towards the convertible Corvette, and waved his arm wearily at the receding guard. In the car, the black leather seat threatened to roast Findhorn's backside and thighs.

The little machine took off with a satisfying, sporty roar. Findhorn assumed that, this close to the ground, the alarming speed was an optical illusion.

'Sure,' White said. 'But you seemed in one hell of a hurry to write your piece about this Petrosian. And as it happens I had overnight business here.' The nature of the business went unexplained, but White added: 'We're only a mile from the Trinity Site. Now clearance for that…'

Findhorn laughed but the speedometer was showing eighty five and it came out a bit high-pitched.

Through the terracotta desert, with its wonderful pinks and purples, and distant mountains covered with snow. Past the Santa Ana Reservation, and the roadside Navajo women selling jewellery and rugs and Clint Eastwood ponchos.

Around midday, with the sun beginning to fry his brain, Findhorn was relieved to see a sign for Los Alamos.

'Most people like Los Alamos,' White was saying over a ninety-mile-an-hour wind. 'It looks for all the world like any university town. One thing about it you should remember, though.'

'The security?' Findhorn asked, his hair being pulled at the roots.

'The altitude. It's nearly eight thousand feet up. Unless you're acclimatised to that, you can't run.'

'Why would I want to run?'

White gave him a ghoulish grin. He dropped his speed, went down a gear, and in minutes they were trickling past pink and green adobe houses, and more jewellery and rugs. Near the town centre, the nuclear physicist squeezed his Corvette in between a battered yellow Oldsmobile and a string of motorcycles.

'Some people describe Los Alamos as the world's greatest concentration of nerds,' White complained. 'This is a grave injustice to Berkeley, California. But one thing missing from this community is mediocrity. It makes for a kinda skewed population.'

They were in the Blue Adobe on Central Avenue. It had walls three feet thick, and canned mariachi music, and the best air conditioning in the known Universe. Memorabilia and photographs from the Manhattan Project lined the walls. They had been lucky to find a spare booth in the crowded little restaurant. 'We have so many PhDs — the highest per capita population on Earth — that unless you're a physician you're called plain Mister. Outsiders paint us as overachievers, pressuring our kids, neglecting our wives.'

Findhorn, sensing an open sore, steered White back to the point. 'Petrosian…' he began.

A small, Hispanic waitress approached. She gave White a radiant smile.

'Rosa, my beautiful, what about a late breakfast?' asked White.

'For you, Francis, there are huevos rancheros, huevos borrachos or omelette.'

White translated: 'Ed, you can have eggs with green chillies, eggs with red chillies or an omelette. It comes with chillies.'

'I'll have a fried egg,' Findhorn said. On the wall opposite was a 1940s milk box from the Hillside dairy — From Moo to You was printed on its side. He added, 'And a glass of milk.'

'Me too,' White said. When Rosa had gone he said, 'To resume. Anything Petrosian did in the 1950s is ancient history. You're talking fifty-year-old physics. Holy moly, Ed, that was before quarks, gluons, QCD, string theory, superstrings. It was the steam age of nuclear physics.'

Findhorn mopped his brow. It felt hot to the touch. He took a shorthand notebook out of his pocket. 'How many particle types do you have?'

'Twenty-five. Everything you see around you, the whole caboodle — even the delectable Rosa — is governed by twenty-five fundamental particles. Don't ask me why twenty-five and not seven or fifteen. Nobody knows.'

'But still you have a theory for all this, the standard model. I never got beyond electrons, protons and neutrons, and of course light particles — photons.'

White nodded. 'The old timers. Use them as building blocks and you have water, C0₂, DNA, coal for your fire, brick for your house, gas for your car and medicine for your kids. The whole of chemistry comes out of combining just these four particles. Imagine Rosa as a shimmering mass of atomic particles.'

'So who needs the other twenty-one — quarks and the like?'

'You do.' White waved at the sunlight pouring in through the big windows. 'Unless you want to go around like some primordial slime, in pitch-black at absolute zero. Sunlight depends on nuclear fusion, right? Hydrogen combining to give helium with the mass surplus going off as energy? So how do the protons — hydrogen nuclei to you — combine?'

Rosa reappeared with plates of food covered with a red dust. 'You want more chilli on that?'

'People are big on chilli hereabouts,' advised White.

Findhorn nodded, and Rosa sprinkled a generous helping over his fried egg, which, in addition to the red dust, had come with a coating of red and green chillies and a blue corn tortilla. He said, 'I recall that the intense heat you get in the middle of stars is the same as you get in an A-bomb and this heat causes hydrogen atoms to fuse together. This fusing constitutes the transmutation of elements and when that happens it releases even more heat, whence the hydrogen bomb.'

'I'm asking you, why does the heat make the atoms merge?'

Findhorn shrugged, and White said, 'It's a lot of stuff about an up-quark converting to a down-quark and a hip bone connecting to a thigh bone. Then you're into the other twenty-one particles. But my point is this, Ed: you don't need to know. Because Petrosian didn't know either. Like I said, they were developing the Bomb in the steam age, when people hadn't gotten beyond nuclear binding energies.'

'I'm trying to follow you,' Findhorn said. Sweat was breaking out of his brow: he had started on his egg.

White waved a fork in the air. 'What I'm getting at is that Petrosian's world is understood. There's nothing new to be said about it. It's been raked over by three generations of physicists and all that can possibly be known about it is known.'

The restaurant was beginning to fill up with early lunchers. A bespectacled young man sat down at the table opposite them. He looked like an outdoors type, dressed in blue denim and with long, blond hair tied back in a pony-tail. In any other situation, Findhorn would never have noticed him. 'You're telling me that Petrosian can't possibly have discovered anything relevant to modern science.'

White nodded his agreement. 'Petrosian's world was one of protons, neutrons and electrons. Any discovery he made in that area would long since have been rediscovered by someone else. There are no surprises left in the nuclear energies the Los Alamos pioneers worked at.'

'And the new particles? The other twenty-one?'

'To see the exotic stuff, the quarks and so on, you have to look at cosmic rays on the way in or go to heavy atom smashers. These machines cost megabucks and they didn't even exist in Petrosian's day. Nobody could have predicted the world they uncovered. Any idea of the Lone Ranger getting some brilliant insight that leaped across three generations of nuclear scientists — look, it's nuts. Forget it.'

Rosa was bearing down at ram speed, wielding a bowl of chilli. Findhorn, in panic, asked for coffee. It took her by surprise and she retreated back to the kitchen.

On an impulse, Findhorn tried a gamble. He studied White closely and said, 'So how did the rumour get around?'

'What rumour?' White was looking genuinely blank.

'That Petrosian had discovered some new process.'

White's hesitation was tiny. It might just have been something to do with a throatful of Rosa's chillies. He tried to laugh, to cover it up. 'What sort of process? Where did you hear that?'

Findhorn touched the side of his nose, probed a little more. 'My source thinks there was a cover-up.'

White shook his head in annoyance. 'Sure, there's nothing like a cover-up story to sell newspapers. I suspect like the Roswell UFO incident, one or two bits of real information get distorted. Alien spacecraft, the face on Mars, energy from nothing, you name it, there's an audience out there eager to buy your conspiracy theory. And the more screwball it is the bigger your audience.' White tried a sympathetic tone. 'Look, Ed, this stuff's for our National Enquirer, not the English Times. Whoever your source is, this story about some new process has no foundation. No foundation in history, no foundation in science.'

'I'm chasing a chimera, then?'

'Absolutely.'

Findhorn tried to look convinced. 'What could have gotten the rumour started?'

White shrugged. 'You tell me.'

Findhorn gambled again. 'The process was supposed to be dangerous.'

This time White was ready. 'Your source is confused. There was a scare in 1942 that an atomic bomb explosion might ignite the atmosphere, create an uncontrolled runaway. Oppenheimer set up a task force to check it out. Their report was codenamed LA-602 as I recall. They found that the fireball couldn't quite pull it off. Petrosian was involved in these calculations.'

White was convincing, and seemed to be making sense. Hell, he thought, I'm getting into conspiracy theories myself. Findhorn closed his notebook and said, 'Okay, Frank, thank you for that.'

'I guess you've come a long way for nothing. Look, I could get you into X-2 if you like, I have Q-clearance —'

'X-2?'

'The design group for nukes. But it's just like any other office building. Apart from the guys with the AK-47s, of course.'

'I think you've just upset our surveillance,' Findhorn said, nodding towards the pony-tailed young man, who was staring at the menu with unnatural intensity.

White grinned. 'Anyway, I don't think anyone there could help you.'

'Post-SALT, do we need Los Alamos?' Findhorn asked, breathing air in gulps. He felt his lips beginning to blister with the hot chillies.

White leaned back in his chair, steepled his hands under his chin and looked over his spectacles. 'More than ever, pal. The world is more dangerous, not less, and it's getting worse. Iran will soon be stuffed with enough recycled nuclear fuel to start a significant nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein and his merry men had to be bombed to stop them developing nukes. India and Pakistan have already fought three wars with each other, and now they're squaring up with nukes. Nuclear smuggling out of Russia is a deadly serious worry — it's only a matter of time before the Ultimate Truth or the Martyrs of God or the Montana Ladies' Crochet Circle rigs up some device from instructions on the Internet.'

'Surely these are problems for the FBI or CIA.'

'But without guys who know about weapons, they wouldn't know what to look for. And what about our own stockpiles? Nuclear devices deteriorate. We need expertise to keep track of that too. It's a dangerous world out there, Ed, and a complex one.'

Rosa was serving the pony-tailed young man with a plate of little tortillas stuffed with pieces of fried fish, tomatoes, lettuce, sour cream and chillies.

'If it wasn't new science, what about new technology? Could Petrosian have thought of some way to make a bomb more effective? Say by miniaturization, or avoiding the need for plutonium?'

'Let me tell you about miniaturization, Ed. Ideas for it get developed all the time but we're no longer allowed to test them. These designs are as much art as science, which is why so many bomb designers in X-2 are women. They're more intuitive. But the complexity of a nuclear explosion stretches a Cray. No way could Petrosian have leapt fifty years ahead on that one either. As for by-passing uranium or plutonium, it's not an area I can talk about, or our surveillance, whose spectacles undoubtedly contain a microphone, would choke on his tortilla boats.' White leaned forward, lowering his voice. 'But there are some things you could work out from the public domain. Like, lithium is common in rocks on Earth, but astronomers don't detect much of it in stars. Why is that?'

'I don't know, Frank. Why is that?'

White leaned forward some more. 'Because it's easy to ignite, nuclear-wise. Hydrogen needs ten or twenty million degrees. Now lithium, that needs less than a million. If you could somehow reproduce stellar —'

'Could Petrosian have thought of some way to do that in 1953? By-pass plutonium, make a nuke from rocks?'

'As a concept, quite possibly. Now if you did that, if you found some way of extracting nuclear energy using just ordinary material, that would really open the lid. But as a hazard to civilization in 1953? Where would he get even a million degrees? Lasers weren't invented until 1960. Always assuming we needed high-energy lasers to attempt the trick,' White added hastily. His tired eyes held a gleam.

'Of course. Always assuming that.'

White looked as if he was about to drop with exhaustion. Findhorn waved at the waitress. He said, 'So he didn't have lasers but he had electricity. Maybe he thought of something crazy. Take the entire power supply for New York City on a cold night. Pulse all that electricity through a microscopically thin wire. Have the wire doped with lithium and anything else you need.'

White grinned. 'Ed, that wouldn't even get you to the foothills.'

Findhorn blew out his cheeks. 'So try one of Rosa's chillies.'

Findhorn thanked White and left him heading for the Western area of town and some badly needed sleep. He took a stroll, absorbing the sights and sounds of this strange town.

White's sermon was clear. Petrosian was a wild-goose chase, a piece of history with nothing to say of relevance to the new millennium.

There was, however, a problem with that thesis. Namely, the trail of mayhem which followed the diaries. Findhorn wondered whether White's sermon had been genuine, or an attempt to deflect further enquiry. And what, he wondered, if he kept digging?

He took a cab to the Los Alamos Community Reading Room and there asked a warm, curly-haired girl for information about the post-war activities of Lev Petrosian the atom spy. Without a blink she disappeared.

And Findhorn waited. For ten minutes, his speculations becoming increasingly wild.

He was beginning to wonder whether to get out of it when a library attendant, a squat, white-haired Navajo, approached and sat down heavily three desks away from Findhorn. At least, Findhorn assumed he was a library attendant. The man clasped his hands together and stared unblinkingly at Findhorn. And then, at last, the curly-haired girl was back at his desk with a sweet smile and a black binder.

The binder was heavy. There were research papers and there were notebooks. Findhorn started on the papers. These were in triplicate, a top copy and two carbons. Each had a number circled at the top of it. They were abstrusely mathematical, with titles like Quantum Tunnelling Probabilities in a Polarized Vacuum, or A Markov Chain Treatment of Ulam/Teller Implosion. Findhorn could barely make sense of them, except in the broadest outline. He wrote down the titles but had the feeling that they were no more than the bread-and-butter elements of the hydrogen bomb project; the appliance of yesterday's science.

The workbooks were fatter and more interesting. There were a couple of dozen, lined and bound in blue, soft-backed covers. They too were numbered; perhaps, Findhorn speculated, to stop a potential spy smuggling his own secrets out. Findhorn started on them systematically, opening at number one, page one. The small, clear longhand writing of Petrosian was unmistakable. The notes were in English and written in ink. There was a prodigious amount of scoring out and reworking. There were lots of doodles; Petrosian seemed particularly fond of little flying saucers, reflecting the UFO-mania of the day, but there were also cows and galaxies. He did a particularly good pig, sometimes with wings. Often little cartoon bubbles would come from the mouths of the animals, and they would enclose equations, or technical terms, or cryptic comments.

With a lot of tedious effort, Findhorn found he could relate the development of Petrosian's notes to the contents of the typed papers. Here and there, in the margins, there were scribbles written in faded pencil: 'Kitty, orchestra 7 o'clock'; or 'Colloquium 2 p.m.'; or 'coffee, beans, oil, milk'; or 'proofs deadline NOW.

In the late afternoon, one doodle in particular caught his eye. It was a little cartoon showing Albert Einstein smoking a pipe. A long stream of smoke from the pipe connected three large puffs of smoke, like clouds, over Einstein's head.

The date was Monday 30 November, 1953. The day after his diary recorded his high excitement.

The first puff showed a picture of a ship. Little bubbles were coming from its propellor. Next to it was written: 'HMS Daring 1894.'

The second showed a sort of golfball with a dozen legs sticking out of it. Next to it was written: 'Chase & Henshal'.

The third contained only the letters 'ZPE'.

Findhorn contemplated that. He copied the quirky little picture into his notebook.

Towards the evening, with his head reeling, Findhorn closed the last of the notebooks and sat back with a sigh and a stretch. The library attendant, if such he was, hadn't moved for the entire session. Findhorn returned the heavy binder to the curly-haired girl with the smile, and emerged into the warm evening air and a streetful of nerds returning from work on bicycles, skates and four-wheel trucks loaded with skis.

Findhorn now hired an RV with an unexpectedly throaty roar on a one-way drop. He drove south, with the lights of Santa Fe twinkling in the distance. The Jemez Mountains were still in sunlight to the west, and they were glowing blood red. His mouth was still burning. Ahead, Santa Fe was like a big Mongol encampment on a hillside, its lights a myriad of campfires.

Petrosian had been hiding something. He had been careful to erase all mention of his overnight inspiration from his daytime workbook, and all signs of the excitement which he confided to his diaries. It was as if there had been two Petrosians. And yet the little doodles were the windows to his soul. They were mind games, Petrosian at play. A purposeful play.

Findhorn struggled with the bizarre images: HMS Daring, 1894; a golfball with legs; ZPE. And they danced in his head with other, darker pictures: city-destroying fireballs; blazing oceans.

He looked in his rear mirror, and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled. The headlights were still half a mile to the rear, as they had been since Los Alamos.

He thought that it had to be coincidence, that jet lag and tension were bringing out some mild paranoia, that the claustrophobic atmosphere of security pervading Los Alamos made you think that way, that there was no possible way for White or anyone else in the States to connect Cartwright of The Times with Findhorn of the Arctic.

He thought all of that, and he congratulated himself on this triumph of pure reason over primitive, irrational fear. And he put his foot down.