The Trinity Paradox

15 Los Alamos May 1944

“Attention in the area! Attention in the area!” The site-wide public address system was rarely used, but when the speakers awoke from their silence, the message usually proved to be important.

Damn! Elizabeth glanced up from her desk, having lost her place in the intricate calculation. The other women in the computations room put down their pencils and started to chat with each other. Someone stood up and looked out the window. Three women lit up cigarettes.

“All project scientists, staff members, and other personnel are to attend an immediate mandatory meeting in the Tech Area,” the tinny voice on the loudspeaker said. “I say again… ”

Elizabeth stared down at her paper. The equations were becoming longer and more difficult to solve, and an independent team rechecked everything, so introducing errors would be pointless—if she even wanted to keep doing that. She had already caused the death of Teller, could not force herself to assassinate Oppenheimer. She didn’t know anymore what she wanted to do. After living in the past in the constant turmoil of a bloody war for nearly a year, her own convictions had grown fuzzier.

Around her the scientists felt greater pressure as they fell behind their milestone. They had two options for making a bomb core—uranium-235, which was nearly impossible to separate from natural uranium, and the new element plutonium. But now the theoreticians had learned that their so-called gun design would never work with plutonium, something to do with ambient slow neutrons that would cause the reaction to fizzle. Frantically, they returned to the drawing board to develop new models from scratch. For a uranium core, a simple gun assembly shot one small mass of uranium into a larger one, making the combined sphere into a critical mass. For plutonium they would require something much more complicated.

Elizabeth watched her pencil roll off her desk to the floor. It gladdened her to observe their difficulties anyway. She had already proven to herself that she couldn’t do much more than observe.

It looked as if they would be receiving plutonium from the Hanford, Washington, plant sooner than Oak Ridge could provide any uranium-235. The scientists needed to have a plutonium bomb design ready immediately. Elizabeth thought she remembered the Manhattan Project scientists had worked on two different designs, but her memory of the other timeline had been getting worse with every day she remained here.

“Don’t you want to see what’s up?” It was Gladys something-or-other drawling into Elizabeth’s ear. Elizabeth had never gotten to know the woman well, content to nod at her in the morning and ignore her in the afternoon.

Elizabeth tried to listen to the rest of the message as it repeated. “They want us to go too, huh? You think they’re going to treat us as human beings for a change?”

Gladys looked at her. “You heard him—all personnel. That’s us too, Betty. It might be something exciting.”

Gladys pushed away as von Neumann entered the room from his office. He clapped twice to get their attention. With his short build, dark hair, and sharp Hungarian accent, von Neumann reminded her of a puffed-up dictator. “Quickly now. You have heard the announcement. Everyone assemble at the meeting hall. We will redo your calculations after the meeting.” He whirled and strode out the door before anyone had a chance to react.

Gladys popped her gum. “You can sit by me if you want. Harvey will probably be too busy with the other eggheads.” Gladys spent every afternoon incessantly talking or complaining about her husband Harvey, a member of the University of Chicago group.

Elizabeth turned over her sheet of calculations before leaving. “I wonder what’s going on.”

“Probably another one of Oppie’s pep talks. Harvey says he’s getting under the skin of the professional staff— the scientists, that is. Says Oppie might be pushing things a bit too much. The krauts are losing anyway, and we’re mopping up the Japs in the Pacific. We’ll never get done in time.”

Don’t be so sure, Elizabeth thought, but followed Gladys out the door, trying to lose herself among the other women hurrying to the meeting hall. She frowned at how they all acted like high school cheerleaders.

Outside, the late spring sunshine felt good; another month and the scrub oak would be full and turn the top of the mountain deep green. Elizabeth made an effort to hurry her step so that she could avoid sitting next to Gladys.

The meeting hall was nearly filled when Elizabeth reached the entrance. She had never seen so many people from the Project assembled at one place before, and this was much different from Oppenheimer’s weekly scientific colloquia. The cafeterias held only a hundred or so people; even the ubiquitous ball games, pitting the eggheads against the doughboys, pulled in no more than a few hundred bystanders. Now all the chairs were taken, and late arrivals crowded inside the doors and along the walkway.

“Miss, over here.” An Army type rose from his chair and offered it to her. She started to refuse, but then thought better of it. No telling how long the meeting might last, and she would rather be sitting down… even if it meant she would probably have to endure the young man’s shuffling his feet, blushing red, and asking her to meet him at the movies sometime.

But when she turned to thank him, he had already disappeared into the crowd. Elizabeth sat down, struck by his politeness, the sexist kind that would have always annoyed her before. But she had been gone for so long now that she had forgotten how she was accustomed to having men act. She had been caught up with working on the Gadget.

She stopped her own thoughts. Gadget. Just as they refused to call the Manhattan Project for what it was, they continuously referred to the atomic bomb as a Gadget. Dehumanizing the weapon, painting warheads pink.

A year ago her blood had boiled at the dehumanization, making her go to extremes such as sabotaging the MCG test. Five months ago she had attempted to assassinate Oppenheimer. But Jeff’s death, and her inability to harm the Project director, had killed something inside her. The simple black-and-white answers from before now seemed muddied into shades of gray.

The past few months had started to catch up with her. She didn’t know whether she herself had changed or if somehow the Project itself had wavered in its course. With everyone else at Los Alamos, she had seen the regular newsreels—colored with optimism and filled with silly propaganda, but still holding a bit of truth. She had watched World War II proceed with a horror greater than she remembered feeling about the news footage of the Vietnam war. In her mind she still recalled the horribly burned corpses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but now she watched other footage: the Pearl Harbor attack, the death march of Bataan, the abused POWs found in Burma. Nobody knew the full truth about the Nazi concentration camps yet.

She thought she understood her attitude change, and she accepted it with trepidation—she had immersed herself in this culture and had begun to see things from their point of view. Her daily life had started to get in the way of the larger things, the important things such as her ideals, her morals.

But Elizabeth knew deep inside that she would never change, even if it meant she had to take a different approach. History could be changed—she had already proven that. When the Germans inevitably surrendered, she would be one of the first to insist that the Gadget not be used. Many of the Manhattan Project scientists would also be very outspoken—they were the first antinuclear protesters. She could feel the backlash bubbling and waiting to be released. Graham Fox would probably be among them. She couldn’t see him in the auditorium.

Oppenheimer, standing like a scarecrow in front of the crowd, rapped on the podium at the front of the hall. Everyone quieted down. Oppie crushed out a cigarette in the ashtray and coughed for their attention. He looked as if he had been stunned. The strain showed on him more than on any of the other workers.

Elizabeth shifted her head to try and get a better view. She remembered him sneezing in the canyon, wiping his nose on his sleeve. She closed her eyes to clear the thought. As Oppenheimer waited, two men in Army uniforms struggled with a canvas, erecting a movie screen. Elizabeth sat up straight to see over the heads of the people in front of her.

Oppie leaned forward and raised his voice. “I know it’s hot, but please bear with us. We’ll have to close the doors in a moment to show a film, so the heat is going to get worse. But not as bad as what we’ve got to show you. This is extremely important.” When the murmuring stopped, Oppenheimer nodded to his right. “General Groves.”

A burly man in uniform stood up from his seat and walked over to the podium. “Thank you, Dr. Oppenheimer.”

General Groves had been given the responsibility to develop the Gadget at all costs, no matter how much money he required, how many people he needed to commandeer. Few people liked the chubby and overbearing man who demanded two hundred percent from every worker on the Project. Though the general had been in and out of Los Alamos over the past year on frequent inspection tours, Elizabeth had not actually seen him until now.

She would have to fight against Groves after Germany surrendered. She studied his lantern jaw, his crest of dark hair edged with gray, and his peppery moustache. She would have to work to convince him to do a demonstration shot rather than annihilate human beings.

That was her next chance to change things.

Groves cleared his throat and gripped the podium as if he wanted to break it. He wore his khaki dress blouse. Semicircles of sweat stood out under his arms in the heat, but he showed no sign of discomfort.

“All right, everyone on the Project! I didn’t pull you away from your work to mince words, so I’ll get straight to the point. Straight to it. You’re all aware that what you’re doing, developing the Gadget, is the most noble and patriotic act your country could ask.”

Oh brother, here it comes, Elizabeth thought. She tried to remember exactly when Germany had surrendered. Maybe that was the announcement. The war had already been going badly for Hitler, if she could believe the non-objective newsreels. She thought the war in Europe had not ended until sometime in mid-1945, but could things have been changed by her presence?

She had tried to alter events here, but her actions appeared to have had no immediate effect. She couldn’t conceive of anything she had done having repercussions around the world. Could Germany have surrendered early, thus invalidating the need for the Project? Was Oppenheimer upset now because he had not completed his Gadget in time for it to be used in this war? She forced herself not to smile. Too bad, Oppie, she thought.

Groves turned around to look at the blank screen. “They say a picture is worth a thousand words.” He pointed to his aide. “Kil1 the lights.”

As the lights went off, officers standing by the outside doors swung them shut, plunging the hall into darkness. Elizabeth saw a match flare up, then a red glow as someone lit a cigar at the front of the hall. Groves’s voice came from the direction of the cigar.

“I flew into Albuquerque this morning, direct from Washington. These films have been shown exactly twice— first to the War Department, then an hour later to the President. The rest of the country is going to know soon. We might be able to hide a town the size of Los Alamos, but we can’t possibly keep New York City a secret. Go ahead and roll it.”

A movie projector at the rear of the hall spewed a ghostly light as smoke shot up from the incandescent bulb. The makeshift screen displayed an aerial view of buildings and streets, endless rows of suburbs and identical All in the Family style houses, that showed how little New York had changed over the years. In the background, Elizabeth could see the famous city skyline, which the camera approached.

“You’re looking at reconnaissance photos from a modified Army Air Corps P-51, traveling close to three hundred knots a thousand feet off the ground. We didn’t know how safe it was to fly over the area, but we needed to get in close. We had a few dozen volunteers to go in on the ground, and doctors are being flown in from around the country.”

The black-and-white film jumped, then settled down as the aircraft soared into the air. Elizabeth caught a glimpse of what looked like a bridge—the Brooklyn Bridge?—but she couldn’t see any signs of activity. The view jumped to an overhead of downtown Manhattan and Wall Street. But again the streets appeared deserted.

“At three thousand feet, you can’t tell anything unusual. Unless you know New York.” The film jumped again. This time the view was from the plane racing not more than fifty feet above a wide avenue. Broadway? Elizabeth knew only the landmarks she had seen on television.

Gasps of disbelief and astonishment broke out in the crowd. She felt her own horror building.

No traffic moved. No pedestrians ran across the pavement. Smoke rose from cars that had crashed into streetlights. The scene looked more powerful in black and white than any color splatter movie she had ever seen. She saw a body sprawled here and there. The pictures seemed to go on forever. Then the view swayed as the plane turned tightly in the air and just missed a tall building.

“Two nights ago the Germans launched three new bombs over New York. We believe a U-boat slipped into the harbor. Only one person died from shrapnel—all three of the bombs exploded in midair. We thought they were failures. We couldn’t figure out what the point was.”

The plane made another run over a different street. The desertion looked the same.

“By the next morning a lot of people were very sick. The worst ones died within hours. The doctors didn’t have any idea how to treat them. Vomiting, diarrhea, massive skin damage like burns, hemorrhaging. Many of them died on the street, taken so quickly that they couldn’t get anywhere. That’s what you see in the pictures. Nobody wanted to go back in and get the bodies.

“Then panic set in. The mayor decided to evacuate the city. Most of the casualties occurred in the frenzy to get away.”

The film changed to a different shot of a hospital filled with moaning patients. The camera showed lines of beds, many of which held two patients. Other people lay on the floors, in the corridors. Then the scene jumped to a subway station, also filled with sick-looking people. Doctors, nurses, priests, nuns, and any other healthy-looking person tried to help the sick, but they didn’t seem able to do anything but console them. A little girl sat bawling in abject grief beside her mother, who lay wide-eyed and motionless in death; the woman’s skin looked horribly burned.

Someone got sick at the rear of the hall. Wedges of sunlight spilled into the room as several people fled outside. Elizabeth could smell vomit.

“At first we thought the krauts were using some new kind of poison gas. We sent teams in to study it. What they found surprised us all.” The film showed soldiers walking cautiously down the deserted streets, wearing gas masks, holding Geiger counters in front of them. A close-up of the counter showed the needle pushed to the top of the scale.

“The Geigers went nuts,” Groves continued. “We don’t know exactly what happened, but I think we can make a good guess.”

The picture jumped, then went black. Bright light blazed on the screen. The sound of the loose end of the film flapped on the reel, but it took the stunned operator a moment to shut off the projector.

“Hit the lights,” Groves said.

Overhead, the bulbs shone down. Army officers swung open the doors, allowing sunlight and fresh outside air to enter the room.

Groves waited a good ten heartbeats before speaking; no one in the hall moved during the wait. A few groans and outraged comments came from the audience. Elizabeth found herself drawing in short, quick breaths. Her heart raced and she couldn’t slow it down. She kept picturing the little girl screaming beside her mother in the crowded subway tunnel.

“We’ve already got an estimated five thousand dead, the ones who received a massive dose in the first day and the ones killed during the evacuation. You know as well as anyone that ten times that number will probably die within the next couple of weeks. Worst of all, New York City will not be habitable for years.”

Groves smashed his fist down on the podium and made a startling, animal sound of anger. “You have just witnessed actual, uncensored photographic evidence of the Nazi nuclear research effort. Their weapon was directed against the millions of men, women, and children in New York City. But it was also to show us how far ahead they are. They have scared the pants off of me!” He lowered his voice. “No doubt they have the capability of using it again. Whenever and wherever they want.”

A murmur swept through the crowd. Groves rapped on the podium. “All right, now listen up. You men up here on the Hill have a reputation around the White House of being prima donnas, living in your own little world and pouring two billion dollars down a rat hole while the rest of the country struggles with real problems to win this damned war. In fact, other than yourselves, I don’t think there’s more than a handful of people who actually believe you can do it.”

Groves lowered his voice. “But thank God Almighty the President is one of those people who does believe.” His voice trailed off. Then, stiffly, “If you need a pep talk after seeing that film, if you need someone to come around and kick you in the butt to get you working harder on our own Gadget, then you are in the wrong place. You’d better practice your sieg heilsl

“The Germans have hit us hard, and unless you… ‘wizards’ can come up with something and do it fast, we might as well roll over and play dead. Because I guarantee you that the krauts aren’t going to stop with New York.”

Groves motioned for Oppenheimer to stand beside him on the stage. “I don’t care how you do it—just do it. Those boys fighting in Europe need you. Our Pacific forces need you. Your country needs you—” He hesitated as his gruff voice fell to a whisper, “And I need you. This may be it. Don’t let us down.”

He abruptly strode out a side door of the meeting hall. “Dr. Oppenheimer, let me see you in your office.”

The audience sat stunned for countless moments, trying to think of what to say, how to react, and what to do. The scientists stood up and broke into heated arguments. A cacophony of foreign accents filled the room, with many of the émigré” scientists lapsing into languages other than English.

“At least there was not an atomic explosion! None of the buildings were leveled—”

“What else could it have been? Fairy dust? Something killed those people—”

“Chemical weapons?”

“No, no, no! Think of the Geiger counter readings! What about radioactive dust? Do you think it’s possible”

“But why? If they were working on their own Gadget… ”

Elizabeth stared at the blank screen; vivid memories cascaded through her mind in a jumble of terror. New York City had become a radioactive wasteland. Much worse than Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. Groves had guessed that thousands more would be dead within a few weeks, but Elizabeth knew they couldn’t be counting on all the cancer deaths in the coming years. This one attack would last for decades and decades. Even in World War II, this made Pearl Harbor look like a picnic.

But what about comparing it to her own memories of Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Those images seemed too dim now, the horrors too displaced. Was it really that different?

She squeezed her eyes shut and wished she could be holding Graham Fox again. Or Jeff.

This seemed worse man what she knew of the two Japanese cities that would be bombed. Those other occurrences had been historical events, gruesome snapshots of people who had died long before she was born.

Hadn’t Japan at least been warned, to surrender or else? As far as she could remember, several cities including Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been notified days before that an attack was going to take place. But New York—had the Nazis warned America? She tightly shook her head.

Yes, there was a difference between America and Germany—like the difference between a fencer and a mad dog. The swordsman fights with finesse and honor, but the mad dog attacks indiscriminately, savaging any target in sight and stopping only when someone puts it down.

Hitler could strike again at any time.

So what would the Project do now? They were far behind with uranium-235 separation at Oak Ridge, and the theoreticians had not yet developed an alternative to the gun concept for the plutonium weapon. It looked as if they would not develop the Gadget anytime soon.

But this wasn’t as she remembered it at all. While not an expert by any means, she did have some knowledge of the bomb program because of her protest work. The scientists were supposed to be converging on the best of two solutions, not chasing after a single concept. Not just the gun.

What was it… the names of the two devices? She knew there were two, one plutonium and one uranium. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And they had to prove the plutonium design at the Trinity test down at Alamogordo, New Mexico. She had written down the names of the bombs on that damned sheet of paper a year ago when she had first showed up at the administration building for work.

Fat Man—yes, Fat Man and Little Boy! Two bomb designs. But why were they only pursuing the one design, when they knew it wouldn’t work with plutonium? Teller had died—did he have anything to do with them neglecting one of the concepts?

She remembered something about an… implosion scheme…

.Elizabeth pushed out of the meeting hall, leaving the crowd behind. She held her hand to shade her eyes in the brilliant sunlight. She wanted to find Graham Fox, but she didn’t know what to tell him.

She drew in a breath of pine smells and flowers that had remained in bloom late in the spring. The outdoors seemed to cleanse her, soften the guilt and hurt from the films she had just seen.

She felt all mixed up inside. Nothing was simple anymore, nothing was assured—she had not felt so devastated since Jeff had died, or maybe not since she had tried to kill Oppenheimer.

Living in the past had been predictable up to now. But the New York City attack put an entirely new parameter on how she viewed things, how she lived. And what she lived for.

How could she reconcile working for the Project? Especially when the stakes had changed so drastically? How could she reconcile not working for the Project, knowing what the Nazis might do now? And it scared her.

She turned to the women’s dorm. She needed a long walk. Some time to be alone, maybe even get back out to visit Jeff’s grave, or to Bandelier. She had avoided the place since that morning the previous December.

A memory of Oppenheimer flashed through her thoughts—watching his horse approach over the virgin snow, sighting Oppie’s angular head along the line of her rifle barrel—

“Oops!” She ran into another man wrapped up in his thoughts. Elizabeth drew back. “Sorry. I wasn’t looking where—” She looked up and reddened. “Oh, Dr. Feynman. I’m sorry.”

“Ah, please call me Dick, my dear. Allow me to get out of your way.” He made a dramatic show of stepping aside. “Especially if you’re heading for the Admin building. This just might be a good time to forge another reassignment, get out of the Gadget-building business.” He stepped aside and grinned; but the sparkle had gone from his eye.

Elizabeth lowered her shoulders. “Things aren’t going all that well, are they?”

Feynman cocked an eye at her. “Why do you say that?”

“The calculations you’re giving us. The theory group, that is. I mean, everything used to be so straightforward, calculating small variations of one design. But now the designs are changing radically, they get much smaller or bigger. And you haven’t got the right idea yet.”

Feynman looked alarmed. “You picked all that stuff up just from the numbers we were giving you?”

Elizabeth swallowed, wondering how much of the “dumb girl” charade she should keep up. “It wasn’t hard. Not if you pay attention to the lectures at the beginning of the day, and if you watch the parameters change.”

Feynman jammed his hands in his pocket. “My, my. What’s G-2 going to do when they discover we’re teaching a bunch of housewives how to build atomic bombs?”

He remained silent for a moment, while Elizabeth resented being called a housewife. Glancing around, Feynman seemed satisfied that no one was looking in their direction. He lowered his voice. “Yes, we are having some difficulty. We can’t use our main design for a plutonium Gadget, and Oak Ridge is having trouble with the isotope-separation process for uranium-235. “He looked glum.” There’s got to be a simpler way to do things.”

“Then what about the implosion scheme?” The one you’re going to use for Fat Man, she added silently.

“Uh?” Feynman frowned. “Which design was that?”

Elizabeth closed her eyes and swallowed, all too afraid of what she might be doing. “Implosion—you know, take a spherical shell of plutonium that’s subcritical, then crunch it together into a solid sphere that is critical. You can use symmetrical high explosives to do the compacting.” You’re going to do it anyway! she thought.

Feynman spoke slowly. “Betsy, where in the hell did you hear that? And what makes you think an implosion would work?”

Elizabeth opened her eyes, acting innocent again. “You’re the physicist, you tell me.”

Feynman’s eyes widened. He took his time thinking things through. Finally, he nodded to himself. “This is right up Neddermeyer’s alley.” He reached out and squeezed Elizabeth’s shoulder. “We’ll look into it. You’re pretty bright. Uh, thanks. And anytime you want a new job—”

“Right. You’ll break into the Admin building and doctor the papers for me.”

“No. Really.” Feynman put his hands on his hips. He looked serious for the first time she’d known him. “I can get you transferred out of Johnnie’s group just as easy as I got you transferred in. You’re too bright to be a cog in a wheel. I can use a good math assistant, someone to help me on these analytic solutions. Or maybe just to keep track of my notes.”

“Ah, surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” She paused, then mumbled, “Never mind, you wouldn’t understand.”

“No, I’m serious. You know, helping me with my research, the stuff Oppie wants recorded?” She waited for him to drop to his knees or something. “Won’t you at least think about it?”

Embarrassed, Elizabeth set her mouth. “Why me? I’m not that good.”

Feynman let a smile spread across his face. “I don’t know. Maybe I believe in luck too much—but you’ve got something special going for you, and until I figure it out, I want to tap into it. Maybe you can really help the Project.”

Elizabeth thought quickly. Things were moving so fast. She felt she had to jump onto the bandwagon before it rolled on and left her in the dust. This wasn’t a time she wanted to be left behind—not with the timeline turning out so differently from what she remembered. “Okay.” She stuck out a hand. “See you tomorrow?”

“I’ll clear it with Johnnie. Just report to the design group tomorrow morning, my office.” He shook her hand and was off. “Implosion!”

Elizabeth watched Feynman as he ran back toward the Tech Area fence. She didn’t know whether to feel like a savior or a traitor.

16 German U-Boat 415 May 1944

Captain Hans Werner gripped the iron rail on the edge of the deck, steadying himself though the sea remained calm. Wrapped in an old sheet, the corpse of First Watch Officer Tellmark looked like a shapeless blob of bread dough.

Two of the remaining men coughed; they appeared to be waiting for something. Werner realized he had said no eulogy yet, and he tried to concentrate, pulling his mind away from the agony in his body. In the past handful of days, he had exhausted all of the eulogies he could imagine.

“May the sea take this man and keep him. Let the currents carry him to a grand reunion with all the other brave submariners who have died in this miserable war. And may God have mercy on the rest of us.”

The other two men rolled the sheet-covered body off the edge of the deck. Tellmark made a deep, soft splash as he struck the water, then bobbed on the surface, slowly sinking. The knocking diesel engines carried the U-boat away from where the corpse disappeared.

Captain Werner had delivered sixteen similar eulogies in the past week. Another twenty of the crew lay deathly ill, retching and crapping blood into the bilges. The U-boat did not have enough bunks for them all—the men were supposed to alternate shifts, some sleeping while others worked. But out of his crew of fifty, only fourteen remained functional enough to perform their duties.

They were all dying, trapped in a metal drum the size of two railroad cars. Below, the air smelled with a fantastic stench of sickness and death.

By the time they had begun to chart their return journey across the Atlantic, away from New York harbor, the crew members all looked alike, smelled alike, acted alike. Being imprisoned in such close quarters for so long, many mannerisms, curses, and facial expressions had become identical. Each man’s individual habits became known intimately among the entire crew—how they snored, how they laughed, how they ate. They were a close team; only two had felt sick with what seemed to be a severe flu.

On previous voyages, Werner had enjoyed that supernatural rapport, that sharing of secrets no other human beings could understand. But now it worked against them, because the entire crew knew, to a man, that they were doomed. The sickness ran rampant in the great iron coffin of U-415.

Werner descended into the submarine, using each rung of the aluminum ladder. His trembling legs would not let him slide down to the deck plates as he had always done before. Inside the conning tower, three men shared a cigarette, keeping it protected from the breakers and spray that too often extinguished a smoke. The acrid smell of burning tobacco struck Werner as refreshing compared to the fetid air inside the boat.

He removed his white cap and found that clumps of his beautiful dark hair had stuck to the sweat inside. Werner had given his mother a lock of hair before departing on this voyage; she had pasted it in her keepsake book…. Most of the crew had patchy baldness, skin sores, nausea, and terrible dysentery.

His executive officer, Gormann, had been one of the first. Days before, Captain Werner had knelt beside Gormann’s bunk, whispering to him. Gray and clammy, the exec was surrounded by an awful smell. He looked as if he had been boiled alive in some caustic substance.

Gormann spoke, saying what Captain Werner himself feared. “It’s the Americans—one of their secret weapons. It is some kind of plague. They must have immunized all their own people, and now we have been infected. All of us breathed the air. How many have been struck down already? How many of the crew are as bad as me?”

Werner pressed his lips together. “Don’t worry. Rest now.”

“How many!”

“Eleven, so far. Many of the others are feeling sick. I myself seem to be feverish and ill.”

“As I thought.” Gormann let the silence hang for a long moment. Werner heard only the incessant banging of the engines, groans from sick men, and subdued conversation from the other crew members. The exec reached out a hand that clenched with spasms. “You cannot bring the boat back to Germany, Captain. You cannot bring the plague with you.”

Werner straightened. “What are you saying?”

“Do you want to do this to all of Europe? This way the Allies can wipe us out without spilling any of their own blood. It will make the Black Death look like a minor unpleasantness.”

Werner brushed Gormann’s remaining hair away from his sweat-glistening forehead. “Don’t think about that now. Just close your eyes.” The exec complied.

Werner tried to speak of something more pleasant to occupy Gormann’s thoughts. “Think about your Academy days—do you remember them? I went to the Naval Academy in Flensburg, had about six hundred in my class. After basic schooling, I went off for half a year on a small minesweeper, then rejoined my classmates by Christmas.” Werner sighed. “Already by that time four of my classmates had been killed in action. We were all nineteen. The rest of us were promoted to ensigns. Double-breasted blue uniforms—can you remember how it felt to wear one for the first time?”

Looking down, the captain saw a smile on Gormann’s face.

“When we finally got sent out on our first assignment, they packed us off in crowded train cars and made us ride through the night up to Kiel. Crammed in such a small space… I guess it was training for life aboard a U-boat, eh? We thought it would be just as Jules Verne described in his book, not like this.

“Remember all the silly things you were afraid of on your first voyage: Would your life preserver save you? How long would it take the boat to fill up with water if a depth charge cracked the hull? If you escaped from the boat at a depth of three hundred meters, could you make it to the surface before you drowned? The admiral spoke to us before we went to our boats. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘this day Germany expects every man to do his duty.’ We’ve done that, haven’t we?”

Gormann had fallen asleep, but his peaceful expression had lapsed into a half grimace.

Werner stood up, blinking fuzziness from his eyes. He held his stomach. He wished they could receive some word about what had happened to New York, if they had been successful with the rockets, or if they had sacrificed themselves for nothing.

The exec never woke again. By the next morning five other crewmembers had been incapacitated by the plague, including the radioman.

Werner himself tried to contact any nearby U-boat in the western Atlantic, but could get no response. As another day passed, he sensed the rest of the crew verging on panic. And he could do nothing to console them.

As U-415 worked its way back toward the home port, day and night, the crewmembers grew more lax in their observation. Much of the German submarine fleet had already been destroyed by Allied defenses, but the sea was still filled with enemy destroyers. Werner felt it was only a matter of time before someone spotted U-415.

He didn’t know anymore if that would be such a bad thing.

In his bunk, Werner woke from a feverish dream of his second season of vigorous training. Ice covered Pillau harbor with a layer a third of a meter thick; ice-breakers chugged back and forth to keep the channel clear for small boat traffic, for U-boats to come and go, for the exercise to take place. The training submarines went to sea and back, day and night, letting the cadets assume roles as captain or engineer. The seasoned instructors ordered crash dives, signaled emergency drills, caused accidents that the cadets would have to fix. Werner had performed well, doing everything right, but no matter how perfect his actions, in his dream the U-boat kept sinking, and he couldn’t save his crew….

Dark hair clung to his comb when he tried to make himself presentable before pushing aside the green curtain that gave the captain’s space a little privacy.

He learned that two more men had died in the night.

The boat swayed in the uneasy sea, making the men groan. Some vomited into the bilges. Werner stood under the periscope, holding on, trying to determine his best course of action. He could barely take three steps without stumbling.

It made him smile for a moment. When submariners got into port, they always had a great deal of trouble walking—not just because of the drinking binges, but because they were not accustomed to walking on solid ground that didn’t sway beneath their feet. Now the whole world seemed to be swaying.

At the navigator’s table the captain tried to write a full entry in his log, but he could no longer remember how many of his men had succumbed to the plague. He wanted to document everything, tell each symptom, tell how long it had taken them to feel the effects.

Condensing moisture dripped from the overhead pipes, splashing on the table, making everything damp. His pencil would not write well in the logbook.

Werner couldn’t understand how the Americans had developed such a terrible weapon, and how they knew that the plague would not backfire on them.

It had to be the Americans, didn’t it? U-415 had brought nothing with it, only their three experimental rocket weapons from Peenemunde. He remembered touching the warhead end of the rockets, how warm and feverish it had felt. Surely the developers would have provided protection for the U-boat crew.

It had to be the Americans.

His unsteady hand made his handwriting illegible in the log, and he soon gave up, letting himself drift off into bleary reminiscing. How long had it been since he had fun, since he had been a carefree man who enjoyed life?

He recalled coming back to Brest, or Kiel, thinking fondly of the women ready to greet them—Suzette? Maryanne? No, Suzanne! That was her name. Making love with a desperation and a sense of abandon, focusing on ignoring everything but the next second. He tried not to let any feelings of romance intrude, because all the while he was on top of her, feeling her skin against his, listening to her whispers of passion—he knew that a different man had been inside her the night before, and she would not remember his name as she whispered the same noises in the ear of someone else tomorrow.

He would be death to Suzanne now. He could never go back. Only the ocean remained for him, and its cleansing depths.

Werner wanted to die in peace and silence. Another few days had passed, and he could take it no longer. He shut off the diesel engines himself. Together with the four still-functional men, he secured the hatches of U-415 and prepared to dive, tilting the submarine at an angle that would take her all the way to the bottom. He nudged the electric motors to their full speed of nineteen knots.

The boat held only an eerie silence of impending death. Werner turned to the men who had joined him. “Gentlemen, you are relieved of duty. Your service has been exemplary. “

One man slumped into a cross-legged position on the floor plates, as if duty had been the only thing that had kept him on his feet. Two others shuffled to their bunks to die with their eyes closed. One stocky man—Werner could no longer remember anyone’s name—chose to remain at the bridge.

“This day Germany expects every man to do his duty,” the admiral had said before Werner’s first voyage four infinite years before. He closed his eyes, trying to think of women, of birthdays, of his family. He wanted bright memories.

His fondest recollection was of the Hotel Beausejour after fifty days of patrol, and the ecstasy of shaving, of standing long under the pounding spray of a hot shower, breathing deep of the steamy, clean air, and then sprawling out on the shamelessly spacious bed with its crisp white sheets. He would miss that.

Blinking, he stumbled his way toward the rear of the boat, his boat. The floor tilted from the submarine’s descent, and the effort of climbing uphill exhausted him. But Werner hauled himself through the last hatch to the engine room, where the three torpedoes waited.

The engine compartment reeked of fuel oil and grease and smoke, but now the electric engines hummed, sucking power from the batteries, turning the screw that drove the boat downward. Werner stopped, reeling as the black gulf of unconsciousness swelled around him. Intentionally, he smashed his knuckles against a bulkhead, and the stinging pain snapped him back to awareness. Nausea threatened to cripple him, but he managed to force it down.

The three aft torpedoes waited in their tubes, and it took all his strength to open their hatches. Steel-gray arrows, they looked small and familiar compared to the red-and-black rockets he had fired at New York City. These gray weapons had been his companions. They had helped him sink dozens and dozens of enemy ships. He called on them to perform one more service.

“We must all do our duty for Germany, gentlemen,” Werner whispered to the first torpedo casing. “I know you are hungry for the hull of a British ship. I’m sorry I must keep you here. It is a difficult thing to ask.”

He set the timer for the scuttling charges on all three torpedoes, then made his way downhill back to the control room.

Werner wanted someone to shout the alarm one last time, to spot an oncoming destroyer after U-415 had sunk another supply ship. They would make a crash dive and slip to safety under the waves. All his crew would be back alive and working together.

The U-boat always slid into the invisible depths while they could hear the whir of approaching ships above. They would brace themselves, knowing a spread of eight or sixteen depth charges would come floating down, racing the descent of the boat. Asdic pulses would ping on the hull like hammers trying to break in. The shock waves of exploding depth charges would send the men reeling along the floor plates, searching the hull seams for any fresh leaks. Werner would order drastic course changes, trying to fool the enemy above with a meandering course.

Sometimes it took hours or even a full day before the destroyer above gave up looking for the great raft of air bubbles gushing to the surface that would signify the destruction of a submarine. But they always gave up, and Captain Werner and his U-415 always survived.

Those had been years of glory.

The boat continued to descend, deeper than it had ever gone. At a depth of four hundred meters the hull groaned and squeaked as the underwater pressure worked to crumple the steel shell. The bottom of the Atlantic remained a long way below.

The creaking sounds made Werner think of all the good men who had died at sea. Their ghosts swam in the depths too dark for any sunlight. Did his own fallen companions wait for him even now? He thought of them swimming outside the U-boat, shadowy and formless, with tattered uniforms, accompanying his submarine, escorting it to its final resting place.

The hull plates shrieked from the strain. Somewhere in the aft compartment a rivet popped free with the force of a bullet, pinging and ricocheting three times before it clattered into the bilges.

Werner could hardly breathe. The sounds of the outside depths and the humming of the electric motors seemed to be the whispers of dead men.

He didn’t know how long it would take for the pressure to destroy the boat—five hundred meters deep now, he saw—or if the scuttling charges would detonate first.

He would know in a moment.

17 Los Alamos July 1944

Elizabeth rolled over and tried not to disturb Graham Fox. He made no sound as she moved away from him. She patted her clothes in a pile on the wooden floor beside the bed, searching for the clunky watch she had bought at the PX. Holding it up in the moonlight, she squinted to see the time.

Two a.m. Sleep had escaped her for the last three hours, but it seemed later than that. Then she noticed the second hand had stopped. She had forgotten to wind the damned thing again. Elizabeth really missed her LCD digital watch. No telling what time it really was. At this rate she’d be dragging by morning, and probably wouldn’t be able to slip back into the women’s dormitory in time to get past Mrs. Canapelli.

She had had the nightmare again, recalling the film General Groves had shown about the New York disaster. As she had expected, another twenty thousand people had died from radiation exposure in the following month and a half, but the Germans had failed to strike again, sending everyone into panicked speculation.

She still saw the low-altitude footage of deserted streets, the little girl crying beside her dead mother. It seemed so unreal. She couldn’t believe what the Nazis had done. It was inhumane, something that she had never confronted on such a scale. These people played with radioactivity, but had no fear of its dangers.

At times like this she could understand why she had told Feynman about the implosion scheme. She still had not been able to admit that to Graham Fox. She didn’t know what he would think of her hypocrisy. He grew more resistant toward the Project work day by day.

Elizabeth tried to convince herself. Would the method really have been overlooked if she hadn’t brought it up? Somehow she doubted it—the theoreticians kept dabbling with new and exotic ideas, and sooner or later they would have had the inspiration.

But would it have come in time?

It didn’t matter now. The point was that she had let the genie out of the bottle, and she couldn’t stuff the horror of nuclear warfare back inside. You can’t close Pandora’s box. If it hadn’t been Germany, then someone else would have abused the new knowledge of the atom. Before the war nuclear physics had been esoteric stuff, full of theory and empty of practical use, while geniuses strolled along under tree-lined lanes chatting about the possibilities. Nuclear Metaphysics?

If Germany did have the capability to dump radioactive dust on American cities, would they issue an ultimatum to President Roosevelt, force him to surrender? Even now Roosevelt was campaigning against Dewey for his fourth term, but the aftereffects of the New York disaster didn’t look good for him. The war continued to go badly for all sides, and Dewey’s rhetoric had grown ugly. The Los Alamos scientists muttered among themselves, but went back to work. Dewey knew nothing about the Manhattan Project. FDR’s own vice president, Henry Wallace, didn’t even know about it, unless secrecy had changed since the New York attack. If Roosevelt lost the election, the existence of Los Alamos might be in question.

But the election remained three months away. Would a change of power cause Hitler to issue an ultimatum? Elizabeth shuddered, thinking of life in America under a Nazi regime.

She rolled back over on Fox’s bed and stared at the ceiling. No wonder she couldn’t doze off, thinking about saving the world—or at least what was going to happen to it.

“Can’t sleep?” Fox’s voice was quiet. He didn’t sound groggy, so he must have been awake for a while.

“No.”

“What’s wrong?”

She answered too quickly. “Nothing.”

He rolled to the side. “I’ve been listening to you tossing and turning for the last hour.” He was silent for a moment, then reached over to caress her arm. “What’s wrong?”

Elizabeth turned so that she faced him. She could barely make out the outline of his head in the dim light. Oh, damn, she thought. She had tried to keep her thoughts about Fox detached, to prevent getting close to him. It had been more than a year now since Jeff had died.

Jeff. The memory of him seemed far away. She couldn’t even place his face in her mind. What color eyes did he have? Curly, dark brown hair, red-rimmed glasses, but his features escaped her—she just couldn’t see him.

And Fox. Sure, she had slept with him, but what did that really signify? She needed companionship, and she liked him. But that didn’t mean she shared every little thought with him. Often, Fox looked at her strangely, as if he suspected something, but he seemed to have drawn his own conclusions about who she was. She didn’t want to tell him the truth.

Too much Father Knows Best mentality filled Los Alamos—commitment, religion, obedience: Truth, Justice, and the American Way. She was a product of the eighties, after all, when everyone was in it just for themselves. You didn’t have to pledge heart and soul just to sleep with someone—she was living a way of life half a century before her time!

But sometimes it became too much for her to handle. She needed someone to talk to, and she couldn’t alienate Graham Fox. He would find out for himself soon. She bit her lip and whispered, “Feynman. I’m the one who explained to him how to make the Gadget work.”

“Certainly. Now go to sleep.” He smiled at her.

“Graham, listen to me.”

A moment passed. His puppy-dog eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

Fox sat up in bed, tangling one arm in the sheet. “What?”

“I told him what was wrong, how they could get it to work.”

Fox’s breath quickened. “I never asked you how you know so much. I always thought—I mean, how could you? Can’t you see what’s going to happen now? Someone will drop the atomic bomb on Berlin. The Germans used only fission by-products when they attacked us. Many people died, yes, but it could have been so much worse! They must be just warning us that they could annihilate us anytime they like. But they haven’t! Abraham Esau wouldn’t do that! They haven’t come back with another weapon in months—what makes you think they will? But if the U.S. goes on the offensive, it’s never going to end!”

Elizabeth shook her head and tried not to listen to his reasoning, or what he had said. She didn’t know who Abraham Esau was, didn’t know how Fox could have figured out so much. “It’s not like that.”

Fox sighed, but she could still hear the anger simmering behind his words. He avoided touching her as he sat on the narrow bed. “What did you tell Feynman?”

“Nothing he wouldn’t have figured out in time.”

“What did you tell him? Is that why he wanted you as his assistant? What’s going on here? Are you sleeping with him?”

Elizabeth got up from the bed and stood naked in the warm room. She opened the blind a little to let moonlight splash across her skin. “Graham—”

Fox leaned over and grabbed her wrist. “Elizabeth, I need to know what—”

She twisted away from him. “Implosion physics, Graham. Implosion. They would have figured it out sooner or later. Until they get enough U-235, they’ll never get the gun method to work on plutonium.”

“You let Feynman know that? He’s one of the brightest men around! I thought you wanted to stop the madness too!” His voice was rising, and she let her own anger boil, feeling defensive, not wanting to hear the argument she had already had with herself.

“All I did was give them a hint, a head start.” For all she could remember, the implosion method should have been considered long before now, so somehow she had managed to change something else in history…

Fox reached up and grabbed her shoulder. His fingernails dug into her flesh. His voice came as a hiss, sounding alien to her. “You’ve destroyed any hope of us halting this insanity. Now it’s going to escalate who knows where. The war was winding down. We couldn’t take any more, but now we’ll have a whole new array of weapons to use. Wonderful, is it not? Why didn’t you tell me? I might have been able to get the information back to Germany, to keep things equal again—”

Elizabeth struggled away. She stood at the edge of the bed. Pushing her hair back, she glared at Fox’s silhouetted figure. “Let the Nazis know? Are you crazy? Look what the bastards have already done. Didn’t you see those films of New York? You don’t even know how many people are going to die of leukemia in the next decade or so! It’s not over—it’ll keep getting worse and worse.”

As if he hadn’t heard her, Fox kept his voice cold. “Elizabeth, working with Feynman will only accelerate the completion date of the Gadget.” He stood up and took a step toward her.

“Keep away from me. Want me to start screaming—or would you rather I just kick your testicles up into your stomach?” Her words shocked Fox, but she didn’t care.

She breathed deeply through her nose, feeling the adrenaline pump through her veins. Fox wanted to contact Germany? What did he mean? What did Fox think she was, a Nazi spy? Was he? Her eyes went wide and she clenched both hands to her side. When Fox didn’t move, she backed away, keeping her eyes on him.

Picking up her clothes, she quickly dressed.

“Elizabeth,” he said, “wait—we haven’t finished this.”

“Don’t come near me.” She whirled and left the tiny apartment, leaving the door wide open.

Elizabeth hadn’t seen Richard Feynman for more than ten minutes at a time in the full month she had been working for him. He’d fly into his cluttered office like a whirlwind, hand her a stack of scribbles to transcribe, breathlessly answer a question about his notes from the previous time, then get pulled away as another physicist collared him.

“Implosion is the word!” he hollered to her once as he hurried off to yet another meeting. The delay from the Oak Ridge uranium isotope-separation plants had sent the Hill into a funk. Feynman’s revelation of an implosion process for the plutonium device revitalized the Project. None of the physicists were free for more than minutes in the hectic new schedule imposed by Oppenheimer and General Groves.

This made Feynman’s notes even more crucial—Elizabeth had to transcribe scrawled shorthand that covered entire research notebooks into a coherent flow for the other Project scientists to follow. With her background in physics, she was the ideal transcriber—helped along by the fact that she was not getting the information cold. As a result, she established herself in less than five weeks as an invaluable link between Feynman’s group and the rest of the Project.

Meanwhile, she kept to herself, sitting alone at meals and making sure that Fox did not bother her. She felt totally justified in her decision to help Feynman, and her feelings could not be swayed by more rhetoric from Fox. He frightened her, now that she had seen an entirely new sliver of fanaticism peeping out from him. Or maybe she was hiding from a similar streak in herself.

Things changed—circumstances and people. In her younger days she could not have imagined anything worse than nuclear proliferation as the ultimate crime against humanity. A year ago—six months ago, in fact—she could not have foreseen herself supporting the Project to the degree she was now.

She would never believe in the bomb as the ultimate peacemaker, but now the country had to protect itself from another Nazi attack. The U.S. needed to keep the bomb as a defense, not to explode it on already-pounded Japanese cities just to show off the nifty toy they had concocted.

The cafeteria in Tech Area 1 had previously closed at eight p.m., but now stayed open twenty-four hours a day—one of General Groves’s incentives to keep the scientists working round the clock. They could work however and whenever they wanted, as long as they worked all the time.

Elizabeth’s eyes widened when Feynman dragged Oppenheimer into her work area. She felt all her muscles lock. She had never met the man face to face. In her mind she saw him riding his Appaloosa in the morning snow. Legs trembling, she started to rise when they entered.

Oppenheimer took charge; even Feynman seemed cowed in the director’s presence. “Please sit, no need to stand. Betsy, I don’t think we’ve formally met. I’m Robert Oppenheimer.”

“Dr. Oppenheimer.”

“Please, call me Oppie. Everyone else does.”

“Then call her Elizabeth,” said Feynman, “not Betsy.”

Oppie’s dark eyebrows shot up. He looked genuinely upset, as if he had not been thoroughly briefed about an important subject. “I’m sorry—”

Elizabeth extended her hand. Her skin went clammy, but she forced herself to meet the man’s eyes. “A common mistake these days.”

Oppie offered a firm grip, his fingers long. “But it’s a mistake that should be avoided. Thank you.” He tapped his pipe against his palm and looked around the cluttered office. “Dick tells me you’re doing a smash-up job for him.”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.” Elizabeth tried to behave appropriately demure.

Oppie found the edge of a desk and sat on a stack of handwritten papers she had not yet transcribed. Feynman flopped down in a chair and just smiled, showing white teeth, content to have the director do the talking. Elizabeth got the strange feeling that this wasn’t going to be one of Oppenheimer’s infamous pep talks. He sucked on his unlit pipe, looked at it, then continued in his soft voice, taking special care to pronounce every single word correctly.

“To the contrary, Elizabeth, I think it’s extraordinary to make sense out of any physicist’s notes—especially to the point of finding flaws in equations and writing a logical sequence of conclusions. And when you throw in the fact that it’s Dick Feynman’s penmanship…” Oppie pulled the pipe from his mouth. “I’d say that we’ve found a real gem in you.”

Elizabeth started to argue, but caught a glimpse of Feynman nodding. She suddenly realized she was being set up. She said slowly, “I don’t see what you’re getting at, Oppie.” She couldn’t help the edge of sarcasm in her voice; it felt like a defense against her fear of him, and her shame at what she had tried to do.

Oppenheimer set his pipe beside him on Feynman’s desk and said pointedly, “I think you were too modest describing your background, Elizabeth. A typical faculty wife never gets a scientific background like yours. It’s a shame that your records were lost, otherwise we might have spotted your experience and put you to work helping out the Project in a more meaningful manner.” He held her gaze. “By the way, what is your background? Montana State University can’t find a copy of your transcripts. They say they would have sent their entire file if the Army requested it.”

Elizabeth noticed that Feynman watched her intently. She attempted to make herself blush. She couldn’t tell if Oppenheimer was trying to frame her, to catch her at her lie. Had Feynman told Oppie about finding her breaking into the administration building a year before, falsifying her records?

“Well, I was always close to Jeff’s work—he was my husband. You probably don’t remember him, but he says he met you once or twice. He was a student at Berkeley when you were there.” Elizabeth tried to draw from all the details she had heard about the director.

“I can’t say I remember him too clearly, but I’m sure I would if I saw his picture. I taught a lot of students.”

“Jeff was pretty shy,” Elizabeth said, feeling weak inside. “Not having children gave me an opportunity to attend classes in the department. Montana State was not very strict about who audited what.” She shrugged. “I helped Jeff grade papers as well, so I guess I just picked up most of my physics background.”

“Impressive. You really should be proud of yourself.” Oppenheimer fell silent for a moment. Elizabeth glanced at Feynman; he gave her a thumbs up and grinned his support. He fidgeted in the chair.

Elizabeth pushed back her hair, adjusting a barrette that itched. “So what’s up? You didn’t come here just to compliment me on transcribing Dr. Feynman’s notes.”

“You’re right. I didn’t.” Oppenheimer stood up from the desk, looking like a gangling marionette with flopping stick arms. He started to pace about the room. “The Project has a chance to achieve its goal with this implosion concept. Our other theoreticians have solved the predetonation problem with uranium-235. Everything up here at Los Alamos is falling into place. Except we still have one problem—our liaison with the places making the material. General Groves is hot to get out to Hanford and Oak Ridge to chew some of the contractors out and get things into higher gear.”

“So why does this concern me?”

Oppenheimer shot a quick glance at Feynman, who stared at the floor. “The general needs to leave directly from here to Washington State. And he wants someone knowledgeable about the physics of the Gadget to accompany him. We’ve got everyone I can spare on this implosion scheme, and pulling any of the scientists off that project might be disastrous. We’re spread very thin here, and every man has his particular area of expertise. If I send the wrong man away with Groves, and we end up needing his experience…” Oppenheimer shrugged. “It could set back the Project, give the Nazis time to hit us again.”

“You want me to accompany Groves?” The tubby, overbearing man had rubbed her the wrong way each time she had seen him. He reminded her of a gravel-voiced drill sergeant, an impatient man always one cup of coffee behind being cured of his grouchy mood. “Um, I’m not sure I know enough about the Gadget to give him any advice.” And he probably wouldn’t listen anyway.

“You know just the right amount, don’t worry,” said Feynman. “Most people here are only concerned about their specialized part. When you’ve been transcribing my notes, you’ve been concerned with the Gadget as a whole.”

“It will be a good opportunity for you,” Oppenheimer said.

“Opportunity for what?” She felt defensiveness rise up again, some of the old annoyances that had been building for the past year. She had tried to ignore them, to adapt to the 1940s environment. “How is General Groves going to react to having a woman along with him, especially a smart woman?”

Oppenheimer looked to Feynman, trying to understand Elizabeth’s complaint. “The general usually has a woman accompanying him, his own secretary. She happens to be in Washington, D.C., at the moment, so we’ll have you fill in.”

Elizabeth scowled. “Oh boy, I get to be the general’s personal secretary. Are you sure he doesn’t want me locked in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant?”

Feynman hesitated. “You’ve done secretarial work for me here, Elizabeth. We’ll skip the barefoot and pregnant bit.”

“Is Groves going to expect me to talk when I’m spoken to, and shut up when he’s through listening to me? If I’m going along as an advisor and a personal secretary, I can do what’s required for the job. But he has to order his own meals and lay out his own bedclothes.”

Oppenheimer hesitated. “The general is a busy man… ”

Elizabeth only glared at him with an icy expression.

“I told you, Oppie,” Feynman mumbled out of the corner of his mouth. Then he reached out to pat Elizabeth’s arm. “You’ll be General Groves’s technical point of contact. It’s an important spot, and that’s your duty. You and he will have to work out the details, but we’ll warn him about some of the things he’ll have to do by himself.”

“And he calls the scientists prima donnas!” Elizabeth said.

“Dick will prep you the next twenty-four hours before you leave,” Oppenheimer said.

Elizabeth stood and walked to the window. The morning sun had fully risen, bathing the mountain mesa in fresh light. Sounds of people hurrying to their jobs in the Tech Area were tempered by the birds chattering to each other. As she glanced up the hillside, she saw a sudden movement—a white-tailed mule deer bounding out of sight. She would miss this place. But it might be good to be away from Graham Fox for a while.

“How long am I going to be gone?”

“You’ll leave in about a week, by train from Albuquerque,” Oppenheimer said. “Total travel time will be a month, maybe two. The general needs to spend time at Hanford and at Oak Ridge. You have to take a train everywhere, or a private car. None of us is allowed to fly anymore; airplanes are considered too dangerous, and we’re too valuable to the country to risk it.”

“Elizabeth.” Feynman spoke from behind her; his voice softened. “We don’t really have a choice. I didn’t want to ask you to do this—heck, I’d rather have you here keeping me straight—but you’re really the best person we have.”

Elizabeth blinked, stunned at the rapid change of events. And all because of an offhand comment to Feynman. Or was it? Would this have happened anyway? Groves was out here because of the Nazi bombing—but would he have decided to go on this little trip if her implosion scheme had not surfaced? She did not want to be thrust into such a pivotal role. She had already done far more than she had intended.

Elizabeth breathed deeply. All she saw in front of her was the film of the P-51 racing close to the ground, and the deserted streets of New York, overlaying remembered photographs of burned and mutilated corpses from the Japanese atomic bomb blasts. What was that saying? A person could not serve two masters, lest she despise one and hate the other. Telling Feynman about implosion was one thing—she didn’t take an active role in the weapon development—but giving direct technical advice was an entirely different matter. Now she could see why Fox felt betrayed. But there was no other way.

“Let’s get started,” she whispered.

18 Hartford Engineering Works, Washington August 1944

“Get your own damned pot of coffee,” Elizabeth said.

General Groves had grated on her nerves from the beginning. After ten hours beside him on the train, Elizabeth had all she could do to keep her temper in check. She didn’t turn away from the night-blackened window of the streamliner as it sped with muffled clacking along the tracks.

She saw the reflection of Groves’s astonished expression, then she watched it change to one of outrage. “I— Are you questioning my orders?”

Now Elizabeth turned to him. The situation struck her as so funny she had to control a giggle inside of her. “I’m not in the Army, General, and I’m not a waitress. You can’t just order me. Slavery was abolished in the 1800s, you know.”

Groves snapped shut the manila folder of papers on his lap. His jowls trembled as he tried to find words. The smoldering cigar in his hand spewed out stinging smoke. His eyes looked bloodshot, and his chestnut-and-gray hair was disheveled. “I brought you along, Missy, in order to—”

“To be your technical advisor about some parts of the Project. That’s what Feynman and Oppenheimer crammed me with all night. And my name is not Missy. You can call me either Ms. Devane or Elizabeth.”

Groves sat speechless. Elizabeth enjoyed it very much, but decided she had made her point. “However, I think I’ll go get us a pot of coffee. I could use some myself.”

She got up and went looking for the conductor. Returning from the dining car, Elizabeth carried a tray with a silver coffeepot and two china cups. She set it on the small courtesy table and fixed herself a cup. “You can pour your own, General.”

Groves thrust a manila folder at her. “If you’re going to act like my technical advisor, then you’d damn well better get your facts straight. Read this. Memorize it. It’s all about Hanford and the plutonium plant.”

He reached for the coffeepot, and she sat back in her seat. In the folder she found black-and-white aerial photographs of the central Washington desert, an enormous sprawling complex of long brown barracks flanked by occasional Quonset huts. Another photo showed gigantic buildings, water towers, smokestacks, power lines, all erected in the middle of a barren wasteland.

“Did you get any cream and sugar?” Groves asked.

“No. I take mine black.” She didn’t look up, but she heard him mutter to himself.

The pages of text had been typewritten on an old manual machine with a faded ribbon. She could see marks from erasures and scribbled-in corrections.

Six hundred square miles of land in the middle of the flat Richland valley had been deemed by the Department of Justice as “necessary to the public interest,” and appropriated en masse. Fifteen hundred residents had received eviction notices from the government—most of the people had been farmers, or veterans who had settled there after World War I; many were offered jobs in the burgeoning Hanford Engineering Works, where construction began on a scale that would have made Egyptian pharaohs proud.

The construction numbers staggered Elizabeth. 45,000 workers, 11,000 pieces of heavy machinery, 158 miles of railroad tracks, 386 miles of roads, 1177 buildings. She shook her head. The bigger numbers were difficult to comprehend—40,000 tons of structural steel, 780,000 cubic yards of concrete, 160 million board feet of lumber. All for an installation that had magically appeared out of nothing in the middle of sagebrush and emptiness!

She read accounts of difficulties the Hanford management, run by Du Pont as a contractor, had had with rowdy workers, the brawls, the drunkenness. The quantity of beer consumed in the construction camp was greater than in the entire city of Seattle. The camp bars had special windows that allowed security forces to lob in containers of tear gas whenever the workers got out of hand; paddy wagons hauled unconscious drunks off to a holding area until they sobered up enough to go back to work.

She read documented complaints from labor unions about the working conditions, about the lack of amenities, about the poor transportation services. Apparently everyone had to ride in dilapidated buses out to the reactor construction sites, which were no closer than six miles and often as far as fifteen miles from the main camp. To encourage productivity, the Du Pont management had chosen the buses in worst condition and used them for the last runs in the morning and the first runs in the evening; that way, the last to arrive at work and the first to leave were forced to suffer the worst ride.

The whole place sounded like a Wild West mining town. “A charming vacation spot,” Elizabeth muttered to herself. She watched a feathering of ripples on the surface of her coffee as the train shuttled along.

Groves had fallen asleep with papers in his lap, his black coffee untouched. It surprised her that he didn’t snore.

The dry air smelled dusty when they disembarked from the train at Richland, Washington. The sunlight bore a yellowish tinge, reflected up from the barren land.

Elizabeth looked around, blinking sleep from her eyes. She felt stiff and uncomfortable from the hours on the train, but Groves stepped down, clasping his briefcase to his side. His khaki dress uniform had wrinkled, but the general himself looked supercharged.

“General!” a man called. “General Groves, over here!”

Groves turned and walked over to a younger, thin man, also in military uniform, standing on the platform. The man smiled behind a pair of dark sunglasses while snapping a salute. Elizabeth followed Groves, carrying her overnight satchel.

“Fritz! I didn’t expect you to come out here yourself.” Groves tightened his voice and returned the salute. “Don’t you have anything better to do? I didn’t leave you in charge of all this just to be a chauffeur.”

“Please don’t call me Fritz, sir.”

“If you didn’t get so annoyed about it, nobody would bother.”

The two men amazed Elizabeth by not slowing for a moment. They talked as they met, then moved along at a half run. The younger man turned and held out his hand to her, still walking away from the train. “New secretary, General? I’m Lieutenant Colonel J. T. Matthias, ma’am.”

“Not much of a secretary,” Groves snapped.

“Technical advisor, at the moment,” she answered, taking his hand in a curt grip. “Elizabeth Devane. The general is upset because I wouldn’t read him a bedtime story.” Matthias seemed to have trouble hiding his shock.

The colonel took Elizabeth’s satchel and packed it in the back of a dusty jeep parked alongside the Richland station. Groves kept hold of his own briefcase. Matthias wiped a finger along the grime on the windshield. “Just had the damn thing washed this morning.”

“You picked this place, Fritz. Put up with it.”

They drove out, bouncing as Colonel Matthias turned sharply over the embankment to the main street. They left the outskirts of the city of Richland and struck north along a straight road that the horizon swallowed in the flat distance.

The Hanford Engineering Works lay twenty miles away from Richland. All signs of civilization fell away, plunging them into a wasteland of sagebrush and sand that seemed to stretch forever. The sky looked like an inverted blue china plate, with a thin crepe of high clouds. The aquamarine path of the Columbia River curled across the desert; untended orchards and farmland broke the monotony. Far, far in the distance, she could see a green-gray haze of mountains.

Groves raised his voice above the breeze whipping over the windshield. “I plan to stay a week or so and get everything knocked into shape. What’s going on? You didn’t tell me why you came to meet me yourself.”

“Well, General, we got the reactors completed ahead of schedule—and you know how tight the schedule was in the first place. I think what the Nazis did to New York got everybody quaking in their socks. These workers don’t have the tiniest idea what we’re doing at the plant, of course, but they think this must be some pretty big project.”

“When are we going to start getting usable amounts of plutonium? My boys at Los Alamos are waiting. They’ve got a hot new idea of how the plutonium Gadget might work”—Groves looked at Elizabeth grudgingly—“thanks to Miss Devane here.”

Matthias grinned. “Well, we had to make sure all the safety systems were installed in the reactors, but they’ve been cooking for more than a month now. The plutonium-separation plants are up and running. All remote-controlled.”

“Any other troubles? Out with it! I can see you waffling.”

Matthias stared ahead at the road. “Nothing out of the ordinary, sir. Just handling some of the men. Yesterday afternoon all 750 of our plumbers went on strike. I was up salmon fishing at the mouth of the Columbia—my only day off in a month—but I got called back. It’s a mess. They’ve been whining to their union.”

Groves’s face turned a deep red. “Strike! This is wartime, dammit! They can’t strike.”

Matthias seemed haggard, but Elizabeth saw the hint of a smile behind his eyes. He looked at his wristwatch. “They’ve brought part of the construction work to a standstill. I’ve called a meeting with the strikers at, um, nine o’clock this morning. Half an hour from now. I was hoping you might speak to them, General.”

Groves seethed on the seat of the jeep. “Just drive, Fritz!”

Elizabeth and Lieutenant Colonel Matthias stayed out of Groves’s way as he charged into the Hanford theater. All 750 strikers had gathered there, grumbling and looking ugly. Many had been drinking, and Elizabeth saw a brawl about to happen, or perhaps murder. On the door and walls, people had put campaign posters for presidential candidate Dewey, looking sincere with his short dark hair parted in the middle, his black eyes, his bushy brown moustache. Someone else had drawn a large caricature of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“Sieg heil, you Nazis!” Groves shouted as he walked onto the stage. “Yes, I mean you! Every one of you! What the hell do you think is going on here?”

He paused for the barest second, just enough for the first instant of an outcry, but then he raised his voice, using the microphone this time so that his words drowned out all other noise. “You are interrupting a project that could save the lives of a great many of our servicemen. I’m sure that most of you are patriotic Americans, but I wish I could find the dozen men responsible for this outbreak, and send them packing to Germany where they belong!”

The auditorium echoed with a storm of protests, but the general weathered it without flinching. “You have complaints? You don’t like working conditions here? My heart aches for you—it really does—and I’m sure all our soldiers getting shot in the Pacific would sure hate to be in your shoes.” He found a podium and pounded it.

“In case you haven’t been watching the newsreels, there is a war going on! You’re part of it here! Men are dying by the thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—and you have a chance to end it all if this project works out!”

He lowered his voice as the striking plumbers became quieter. “Now you just think about your complaints and write them down. You think about all our men lying at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. You think about all the good soldiers who died alongside the road on the Philippines during the death march of Bataan. Then you write down your complaints and get them to me. I’ll see that everything’s taken care of.

“Oh, I forgot to introduce myself. I’m General Leslie Groves. I’m in charge of this whole mess. Everything. I can cut wages by half. I can cut off all alcohol supply. I can make things better, or I can make it worse. It just depends on whether you cooperate. Now get back to work!”

Groves stalked off the stage to where Elizabeth and Lieutenant Colonel Matthias stood waiting. Elizabeth could hear an uncertain, not-so-outraged tone in the grumbling of the striking plumbers, and she didn’t want to stay around in case their mood changed.

“Thank you, General,” Matthias said.

“Let’s get out of here. Show me those damned separation buildings you’re so proud of.”

Ugly. Elizabeth could think of no better word. The Queen Mary separation plant stood like a long, stretched shoe box made of blotched concrete. Windowless, the narrow building sat in a great basin of scrubbed dirt, barren of anything but a few weeds. The jeep’s tires kicked up dust on the worn dirt road as the vehicle bounced along.

Control shacks, power lines, and a single tall smokestack ran toward the prisonlike complex. A thin humming hung in the air. Matthias held open the door of the control bunker for Elizabeth.

“I’ve asked Raymond Genereaux to meet us here,” he said. “He designed the separation plants for Du Pont. He’s in charge of everything here, and he could probably give you a better overview of the process.”

Inside, the air became hot and stifling, smelling of grease and cigarette smoke. Naked yellow light bulbs made the interior of the control bunker look like the belly of a submarine. “Ray, you’ve got visitors!” Matthias called.

They went to a bustling control room with a dozen operators working the panel for big machinery. A tall engineer stepped toward them, extending a hand to the general. The yellow light made Genereaux’s hair look paler, his blue eyes appear greenish. His expression was serious. “General Groves, I hope you will find everything satisfactory here.”

He led them toward the crowded control works. The brusque-looking men there remained silent, concentrating on their work with a dedication that convinced Elizabeth they had been instructed how to act around the general.

“Because everything must be remote-controlled,” Genereaux said, towering over one man who looked very nervous at his station, “we must watch all activities through a special monitoring system we developed. It uses television cameras—we find it very effective.”

The grainy TV pictures looked dim and distorted, but Elizabeth could make out the general images of the tomblike interior. On the grainy image she saw long lines of processing cells with a metal pier standing beside each one. Garish lights shone down on everything, showing open corridors where no human being could ever walk again. She imagined what it must have been like for the last person to close the door and seal the newly constructed building, knowing the place was about to be filled with radioactive poison.

“Using mechanical lifts, we take the irradiated uranium slugs and put them underwater. The slugs are still glowing because of the radioactivity. We need to take them to a depth of thirty feet. We operate remotely from here, every step of the separation process.”

He tapped one of the smeared monitor screens. “This is one of the first practical uses ever made of television. We had to redesign the optics so we could use a microscope through the water. Our original glass lenses all turned black from the radiation, and we had to come up with plastic replacements. So far we have overcome all obstacles, General.”

Elizabeth pondered the irony of men designing an atomic bomb with a technological background that could barely make a television work.

“Good,” Groves said, “so when do we get the plutonium?”

Genereaux looked to Matthias. The lieutenant colonel opened his mouth to answer, but suddenly the windowless control bunker plunged into blackness. All power stopped, the television screens winked out, the yellow bulbs faded-just for an instant as Elizabeth saw colors dancing in front of her eyes—then everything switched back on.

An alarm sounded. The control workers scrambled over their panels, looking at blinking lights, old analog gauges and monitors. The television picture skirled with a horizontal band of interference, then straightened out.

“What was that?” Groves demanded.

“One moment, General,” Genereaux said, checking his monitor panel. Matthias didn’t even answer, but grabbed a clunky black telephone. Groves scowled.

“It was less than a second,” Elizabeth said. “A blip in the power.”

“Makes all the difference in the world,” Matthias said around the telephone mouthpiece, then shifted his concentration as someone answered the other end. “It’s Matthias,” he said, “tell me. Quick!” He paused to listen. “Oh, damn! Well, I mean it’s good, I suppose, but dammit anyway!” He scowled. “Everybody okay? All right, get moving. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

He slammed the phone back down. Groves stood waiting. Matthias didn’t hesitate, didn’t try to make excuses. “Something cut the main power line between Bonneville and Grand Coulee. Backup power came on in about a fifth of a second, but that was still too long. It triggered the emergency systems, and all the reactors shut down. Shut down!”

“Well, get them running again!” Groves said.

“We will, but it’ll take days.”

Groves closed his eyes and pounded on the control console hard enough to make parts rattle. Elizabeth looked at the TV monitors and thought of the deadly forces kept so precariously contained throughout the entire Hanford site. “Aren’t you at least glad all the safety systems kicked in as they were supposed to? You probably didn’t test them out, with the slapped-together way you’re doing everything on the entire project. If the reactors had gone out of control, you could have had a major disaster here.”

Groves narrowed his eyes at her. “There are times when I really don’t like your attitude, Miss Devane,” he said. “This is one of them.”

“I’m just giving you technical advice.” She knew Groves couldn’t conceive of a disaster like Chernobyl, and she felt sorry for him.

The general looked as if he wanted to order her to drop to the floor and do push-ups. Instead he redirected his anger toward Matthias. “Find out what caused the power outage. I want to see it myself. And make sure it doesn’t happen again.” He strode toward the door, a mass of clenched muscles. Then, remembering what he was expected to say, he turned toward the control room workers. “Keep up the good work, men.”

Two days later the jeep bounced along the rough desert surface, following the web of power lines strung from pole to pole across the endless flat. Sandstorms had long since obliterated any trace of a road alongside the power poles and had covered all potholes, but Lieutenant Colonel Matthias managed to find every single one of them.

Elizabeth swayed, feeling seasick. Her back and buttocks throbbed. She wanted to snap at something, yell at someone, but she kept her silence. Beside her in the back of the jeep, General Groves looked even angrier than she felt.

They had been driving for an hour and a half. The dust and heat of the central Washington desert made even a few minutes in the open jeep miserable. Elizabeth had seen no markers, but Matthias seemed to know exactly where they were. He turned around from the steering wheel and raised his voice over the grind of the engine. “Should be right up here, General. You’ll find it interesting.”

Groves wiped a ham like hand across his mouth, smearing dust away from his lips. “It better be. I’m starting to wonder whatever caused you to pick this place, Fritz. Didn’t you have any better alternatives?”

“Please don’t call me Fritz, sir.”

Elizabeth turned and shouted toward the general, “What did you mean about him picking this place?”

“Fritz went out on a site-selection tour for the plutonium works. We gave him a handful of likely choices for the installation. He chose Hanford. He had worked with me on building the Pentagon, and he offered some advice on the gaseous-diffusion plant in Oak Ridge. I trust his judgment.”

Matthias brought the jeep to a stop so suddenly that the back wheels slewed to the left. “Almost passed it. Between these two poles up here.”

“What can you see of the explosion?” Groves asked.

“You’ll find out in a minute.” Matthias climbed over the side of the jeep and turned to offer his hand to Elizabeth.

“Not necessary,” she said, and scrambled after him. Groves, with his girth, needed the help more.

Matthias took off his sunglasses, swiped them across the front of his khaki shirt to brush away the dust, then planted them back on his face. Sweat caused the fine sand to stick to his forehead and cheeks. “Follow me.”

He trudged toward the nearest wooden power pole, avoiding mounds of scrub grass. Groves and Elizabeth came after. She could already see the blackened blasted mark on the ground, the gashes in the wood, and the shine of new electrical connections above. Small chunks of shrapnel lay scattered over the ground.

“We got the primary wiring rigged again in half a day,” Matthias said as he strode around the burned area. “This is the power line between Bonneville and the Grand Coulee dams. The Hanford Engineering Works installed special safeguards just so we wouldn’t lose power completely. I guess somebody must have thought a fifth of a second switching time was acceptable.”

“Make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Groves said. “Find out who made that assumption and chew his ass. How long is everything going to be out of commission?”

“Three days, sir. Everything shut down, all safety systems kicked in just like they were supposed to. Sorry, sir.”

“Three days! For a fifth of a second blip?” Groves kicked a melted piece of metal from the sand. “Tell me what happened here.”

Matthias cleared his throat and straightened his sunglasses again. “The shrapnel is what’s left from a small thermite bomb. We also found some mechanism and tattered pieces of rice paper nearby in the desert.”

“A Fugo balloon?” Groves rolled his eyes. “Good God, what luck the Japs have!”

Elizabeth bent down to look at the scraps of slagged metal. “What’s a Fugo balloon? What are you talking about?”

“Fire balloons, a present from Japan,” Groves said.

“The Japs launched what must have been thousands of them,” Matthias explained. “Rice-paper balloons carrying fire bombs. They go up on the winds at about forty thousand feet, drift along the air currents, over to the United States. We’ve found a few intact over the past month or so—they seem to have a system of weights and altimeters that keeps them in the jet stream. When they’re over the U.S., the balloons explode their bombs, like this one did.”

“How come we never heard about this?” she asked. “Why weren’t people warned?”

“The first couple hit in remote parts of Montana and North Dakota,” Matthias said. “Nobody noticed except for a few local small-town newspapers—but the Jap press made a big deal of the stories, so we know their spies are reading even our dinkiest hometown rags. We stopped publishing any word about it.”

“The Japs don’t understand just how big this country is,” Groves said. “They can’t beat us by lobbing a few balloons at random across the entire western half of the United States. They just got lucky here, damned lucky.” He picked up a chunk of melted shrapnel, swaying as he bent his large body over. He inspected the lump, then hurled it out into the desert. “I’ve seen enough.”

He strode back to the jeep, moving with swift determination that looked awkward on him. “If that’s the best damned secret weapon they can come up with, we don’t have to worry about the Japanese. Come on, Fritz! I’ve only got another few days here before I catch a train to Oak Ridge.”

19 Oak Ridge, Tennessee September 1944

Despite all the priority General Groves commanded, despite the Manhattan Project’s AAA war status to get every supply at the soonest possible moment, the streamliner train still took forever to get from one side of the country to the other.

Elizabeth had visited other parts of the U.S. before, but had mostly divided her time between California and New Mexico. She had flown in a plane wherever she vacationed—but as the passenger train moved across endless miles of desert, mountains, plains, she began to get a conception of the vastness of the United States. Seeing this, she thought how ludicrous the Japanese plot had been to drop untargeted balloon bombs on random sites, thinking to cause important damage.

Now that she had established her working relationship with General Groves, Elizabeth decided to slacken her hardline approach and be more cooperative. She had made her point, and Groves seemed uneasy enough around her that he watched his step more than he normally would.

So she helped arrange connections for the trains, working to avoid long delays and to determine the best route to get him to Tennessee. The two of them sat and talked sometimes; Groves ignored her often; he dictated letters; he smoked his cigar. She stared out the window at the 1944 landscape.

The two of them could have flown to Oak Ridge in a day, but Groves refused to risk himself or any of the Los Alamos scientists to the less-safe airplanes. “Listen, Miss Devane, every one of those scientists—and myself too— are vital national assets right now. We are needed for the war effort. You may not comprehend this yourself yet, but we will change the history of the world by what we do.”

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. She knew that more than he did himself.

“I won’t even let the scientists drive themselves around,” the general continued. “One day when I rode with Dr. Lawrence up in the Berkeley hills, he was gesturing with both hands and wrapped up in his thoughts, talking to me and paying no attention to the road. The car was weaving back and forth—a few more feet and we would have gone over the hillside. For some of these eggheads, just letting them drive is dangerous. And I can’t let them do anything dangerous. I obtained a chauffeur for him that afternoon, and all the top scientists got one too.”

Groves puffed on his cigar. “For us, taking a plane is dangerous. We sit here on the train, and we take as long as it needs to take. Besides, we’re getting work done right here.”

Elizabeth thought of how she would rather be back in Los Alamos. But then she recalled her last fight with Graham Fox, and how much she had changed in the fifteen months she had been trapped here in the past. Her former life seemed unreal to her. She tried not to ponder it often.

Groves settled back in his train seat, sucked on his cigar, and dictated a letter. Elizabeth scribbled as fast as she could; she had never learned shorthand.

“I’ve done a lot of things,” the general said later in conversation as the sun set across the hilly farmland of Indiana, “but this is going to be my crowning achievement. I’ve seen duty in Hawaii, Europe, and Central America. I built the Pentagon, for God’s sake, but nothing compares to this… this dream. Two billion dollars’ worth, and we’ve only got a lot of construction and exhaustion and receipts to show for it. No Gadget yet.”

Elizabeth worried for a moment that he might ask about her own background, and she would have to make up a story again. But Groves had never shown any interest before, and he didn’t now. He seemed preoccupied only with himself and his project. He had no real conception of what he was starting—and Elizabeth no longer had any idea how it would all turn out. Too much had changed.

Groves stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray beside his seat in the coach. Elizabeth tried to open the train window to let in some fresh air, but the catch would not work.

The general opened his briefcase and stared at its contents. He spoke as if finally deciding to break news to her. “The real reason we have to get to Oak Ridge when we do is to be on hand for a very special inspection. It seems one of the congressional ninnies, Albert Engel from Michigan, is making a stink about all the money we’re spending and the funny way we’re covering up our expenses. He thinks I’m committing a major-league fraud on American taxpayers, and he’s making public noises about it.”

Groves sighed. “Just what we need—some congressman calling all sorts of attention to a billion-dollar secret war project we’ve been working on for years. Why not just send a typed notice to the krauts?”

Elizabeth looked at him. She had not considered the funding before. “You mean all this work, all that money, and nobody in Congress knows about it. Nobody authorized the expenses?”

“Roosevelt authorized them. He’s commander-in-chief, it’s wartime, and he considered it his own prerogative. Oh, Secretary of War Stimson and a couple others have met with the House Speaker, the Majority Leader, and the Minority Leader about it, explaining the Project’s urgency and all that. They accepted the explanation and they agreed not to worry about it until after the war. But you can’t tell everybody. And trying to convince Congressman Engel to keep his mouth shut just makes him yap more. Especially now with the election only a couple months away, with Dewey ahead in the polls, anybody’s looking for a way to shoot down the people in office.” Groves ground his cigar stub into the ashtray once more.

“So what is this inspection at Oak Ridge?” Elizabeth asked.

“Secretary Stimson is traveling down with Engel. I’m supposed to be there as head of the whole Project to show them around, tell Engel as little as possible, but impress the hell out of him.”

“I thought we were going to check on uranium production?”

“Well, that’s the main reason anyway. Stimson shouldn’t be traveling anywhere. His health is so bad he can hardly walk. He’s got to use a cane. We had new ramps installed all over the place at Oak Ridge, then polished all the doorknobs, cleaned all the windows, swept all the sidewalks. Of course, none of the Oak Ridge folks know Stimson is coming. Half of them think it’s FDR and that the ramps are for his wheelchair.”

Groves looked at her with his pale eyes. He puffed out his cheeks and spoke in an almost human tone. “So please cooperate and help me out here with whatever I need. This is important.”

Elizabeth frowned and realized that Groves actually seemed intimidated by her. “Okay, I will,” she said. “But don’t get used to it.”

Late summer left the Tennessee hills verdant and filled with insects, most of which bit or stung. The air was rich with humidity that made Elizabeth sweat just from the effort of breathing. Her gingham dress clung to her and itched. She had rolled down the passenger-side window of the limousine, but even the stirred breeze didn’t help as the motorcade climbed the hill.

In the back of the limousine rode General Groves, dressed in a clean and freshly pressed uniform, taking up more than his share of the seat. Next to the general sat the gray-haired Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. Stimson’s skin looked ashen, and his pale moustache emphasized the sharpness of his hawkish nose. Stimson laid his cane across his bony knees and rode with an expression of discomfort on his face. Directly behind Elizabeth, Michigan congressman Albert Engel sat making nervous small talk with his two companions. The balding, red-faced representative looked as if he had somehow gotten in over his head by questioning the Manhattan Project.

In the backseat General Groves attempted to explain some of the physics behind isotope separation. Elizabeth listened with a bemused smile on her face as he simplified the concept to the point of ridiculousness, but neither Stimson nor Engel appeared to be grasping the science, nor did they seem to care. When Groves described the atomic nucleus, comparing hydrogen and helium, Stimson perked up and interrupted. “Helium? That word comes from Helios, the Greek sun god, doesn’t it?”

Groves stumbled on his words for a moment, then agreed, though he plainly couldn’t see the relevance of the comment. “Yes, I believe helium was first discovered in the sun.”

Stimson formed his thin lips into a smile and nodded as if pleased with himself. He had apparently not understood anything else. But then, Elizabeth realized, Stimson probably didn’t need to understand. He had given Groves the responsibility of bringing the whole Project together, and he trusted his choice.

Meanwhile, the Oak Ridge driver tried to make small talk with Elizabeth, working too hard to catch her eye and then drawl some inane comment about the weather or about his local baseball team. The man’s words came out so slowly in his Southern accent that Elizabeth wanted to shake his cheeks and knock the rest of the sentence out long before he ever got to the verb.

She looked out the front windshield instead, at the bug specks all across the glass. Butterflies flew about in the pine, oak, and poplar trees; fluffy seeds gusted in the breeze. The driver had pointed out the dogwoods that would be bursting with pink or white flowers in the spring. To the west she could see the bluish hazy line of the Cumberland Mountains, to the east were the Great Smoky Mountains. Below the road the meandering Clinch River wound around the base of the ridge.

Nineteen miles from Knoxville, Black Oak Ridge had been selected by Groves himself as the first major site for the atomic program because of its isolation, its pleasant climate, and abundant water and electrical supply, thanks to the Tennessee Valley Authority dams. Few locals lived in the area, yet the site was easily accessible by train and road. The enormous construction project here had revitalized the flagging rural economy.

When the driver topped the ridge and drove out across the sprawling complex, Congressman Engel leaned forward and spoke to no one in particular; his words rang in Elizabeth’s ears. “Good Lord!”

Stimson cackled and slapped his cane on the back of the limousine seat. “Now do you see what all the money’s being spent for, Albert?”

Groves spoke in a smug voice. “Actually, this is only the K-25 plant, just one of the major facilities we have here. The entire complex is on 54,000 acres.”

“But it’s… huge!” Engel said.

The sight astonished Elizabeth as well. The building sprawled in front of them, shaped like a squared-off U half a mile on a side, four hundred feet wide. It appeared as ugly as the buildings at Hanford, sinister and gray, like a fortress with tiny windows along only the top floor.

Groves smiled. “We believe it’s the largest single building in the entire world. Shall we step outside the car? You can comprehend the size better.”

Groves opened the car door himself and stood. He extended his large hand to help Stimson climb out, slow and careful. Congressman Engel got out the other side and stood, gripping the edge of the car. The driver waited, pleased to have a chance to talk alone with Elizabeth, but she got out of the car as well, staring down at the gargantuan building.

As she smelled the medley of forest odors, she could hear a whining hum that throbbed in the air, pitched just at the edge of hearing. The plant was operating at its full capacity.

“We use K-25 for our gaseous diffusion work with uranium,” Groves said. “Like I described it in the car, we take a uranium hexafluoride gas and pump it through three thousand separate filter stages, all in a row inside that one building. The filter material is so fine that it can preferentially allow uranium-235 atoms, the lighter isotope, to pass through a little bit easier than the heavier isotope uranium-238.

“But the uranium hexafluoride is extremely corrosive. None of the piping or valves in that entire building are made of steel or conventional alloys because they’d get eaten away within hours. Most everything’s glass, specially crafted. The filtration material had the same constraints. And this is only a single facility.”

Groves put his thumbs into his protruding waistline as if he had just impressed himself. “After we pump the gas through the three thousand stages, what comes out the other end is a little bit enriched in the uranium isotope we want. Only about one percent, but that’s better than anything we’ve achieved before.”

“And that’s why you need such a large complex,” Engel said.

“Yes, sir.”

“But what do you need it/or?”

Groves scowled. “I’m afraid we can’t tell you that, Mr. Congressman.”

Stimson turned and looked over the car at Engel. “We need it to win the war, Albert. We need it to get back at the Nazis for what they did to New York.”

“But-”

“Oh Albert, can’t you see this isn’t all just a fraud?” -

Engel shuffled his feet on the opposite side of the limousine. “Of course I can see the money hasn’t been embezzled away somewhere. But I still can’t understand what it’s about.”

General Groves took a step toward the front of the car, then waved at a pair of mosquitoes in his face. “Congressman, we have an army of workers inside those buildings. Every man or woman stands at their own station. They have been given very careful instructions about what the needles on their gauges should read and which knobs to turn if they need to adjust anything. We have thousands of stations, every one monitoring just a single part of this gigantic process.

“But not one of those workers knows how his piece fits in with anything else. Not one of them has the vaguest idea of what the whole thing is for. They don’t need to. They only need to know that they’re doing war work and their country depends on them. And pardon me for saying this, sir, but you don’t need to know either.”

“The general means no offense, Albert,” Stimson interrupted.

Groves nodded down at the K-25 building, then turned his conversation down a different track. He pointed to a distant set of buildings on another flattened hilltop. “The Y-12 plant over there is where we use a different process, the electromagnetic method, to separate the isotopes further. We have giant magnets wound with silver wires all arranged in an enormous loop called a racetrack, and the gas gets passed through the magnetic fields. We’ve also got a third plant, S-50, using yet another process called thermal diffusion.”

“Why so many different methods, General?” Engel asked, still defensive. His eyes looked glazed from the technical jargon, though. “Why not just pick the best one and go with it? We don’t have infinite financial resources, you know. That’s what my constituents would be most distressed about. It’s typical of the way Roosevelt has been handling things throughout his administration. That’s why Dewey is doing so well in the polls.”

Groves drew in a deep breath, apparently to quell an outburst in front of the congressman. “Mr. Engel, we must find the process that works. We are at war, and the attack on New York has shown us that German secret research is following the same lines as ours. We don’t have the luxury to try one idea, then another, then another. We must try them all at once and proceed immediately with whatever solves our problem. We must have this working now.” He pulled a cigar out of his breast pocket but did not light it. “And it is. We have been successful. Now we must put it to use. The Germans aren’t going to know what hit them.”

Congressman Engel looked down at the K-25 building and shook his head. Elizabeth could tell he was astonished, but she still didn’t know if he was convinced.

“We’ve come all the way out here, Mr. Secretary,” Groves said. “I know you’re probably tired already, but I would like to show you the Y-12 and the S-50 plants as well.”

“Just have that driver mix me an old-fashioned and I can last a few hours more,” Stimson said.

“I would like to see the other plants,” Engel said. “But I wish we could get rid of some of these bugs!” He slapped at something on his hand, then climbed back into the car.

“General Groves,” Stimson said, lowering his voice with a glance at Engel slipping into his seat and out of earshot. “I would suggest that you hurry up with your Project. You know I have always supported you with the full resources of the War Office, but I’m not sure how much longer I can continue to serve. This atomic bomb idea is about the only thing that keeps me in office.

“But that’s not even the worst of it. Too many people have blamed FDR for what happened to New York. This war has been going on for too long, and his popularity is plummeting. All of us in the White House know that there’s practically no chance in hell that Roosevelt could ever win against Dewey now.”

Groves stopped moving in shock—the first time Elizabeth had ever seen him stand still. “And Dewey knows nothing about the Project. There’s no telling whether he’ll even support it.”

Stimson nodded. “That’s right, General. I would say it behooves you to get something ready before November.”

Groves stared down at the K-25 plant. “That’s impossible, Mr. Secretary.”

“Impossible?” Elizabeth interrupted. “General Groves, I thought you said yourself that you never wanted to hear that word spoken aloud by anyone connected with this project.”

The general turned red and glared at Elizabeth. She ducked inside the car before he could lash out at her. Congressman Engel fidgeted in the backseat of the limousine. “Are we going to get moving?” he asked. “It’s awfully hot in this car.”

As Stimson clambered into the back, making every move as if his joints had been fashioned out of fine china, Groves stuck his head in and spoke to the driver. “We’re skipping the rest of the tour. Back at the office we can find someone to show Congressman Engel and Secretary Stimson around. Miss Devane and I must get to Knoxville and catch the next train back to New Mexico.”

“General, I would still like to see—” Engel began.

“I’m trying to think right now.” Groves rubbed his forehead. “Miss Devane, if you have any more brilliant ideas as my technical advisor, you had better come up with them between now and the time we board the train.”

20 Dachau Concentration Camp November 1944

They hauled another dead one outside the big doors that morning.

Daniel Waldstein—rather, the skeletal man who had once been Waldstein—and one of the other prisoners picked up the shrunken, disintegrating man they had known only as Eli. Eli did not moan or move as they carried him from the concrete floor of the reactor building; that didn’t mean he was dead, but once a man reached this state of collapse, Daniel knew he was doomed.

When they opened the door to set out Eli’s body on the cold muddy ground, the breath of frigid wintry air felt like the snap of a wet towel in his face. The odors of the concentration camp struck him, as did the briskness of the air. New snow had melted around the reactor building, dotting the ground with puddles trying to freeze.

Daniel and Saul, his helper, set the body down where other prisoners would come to retrieve him. The Nazi guards refused to go near the reactor building. Saul turned and shuffled back inside to the humid warmth. Daniel caught one last breath of the fresh air, then pulled the enormous doors shut behind him with a clatter on their metal tracks.

Inside, the cavernous reactor building felt unbearably hot and stifling. Steam filled every breath. The other prisoners remained silent, and the reactor itself made only humming and hissing noises from the coolant water being pumped through its pipes into the core. No mechanical sounds could be heard—the reactor worked by magic, it seemed. None of them knew what the thing did or what it was for.

They knew only that if they worked inside there for a week, they would earn their freedom. They had seen others walk out, carrying a few possessions and a new coat. Most of them did not survive their term of labor—but it was worth the risk. Any of them would have said so.

No one could understand what kind of sickness struck them down, why their bodies fell apart simply from being in the same room with the reactor. Occasionally, the Dachau doctors would remove one of the workers for inspection and analysis, and those workers never came back.

Daniel Waldstein kept ignorant of science. He had been a jeweler, a fine jeweler with his own shop in Berlin. He had not harmed anyone; he had simply made his jewelry, rings, pendants. Some of the finer pieces he wore himself—or had worn. Everything had been stripped from him on the day he arrived at Dachau.

He thought of those days sitting in the dimness of his shop, with light shining through the windows that he cleaned regularly. He could smell the precious metal as he worked on it; he could feel the smooth craftwork on his strong but delicate fingers—fingers that had long since been smashed and dulled by hard work here in the camp. Daniel remembered talking to his customers, Germans and Jews alike. He thought about going home at the end of the day and relaxing in his apartment, perhaps lighting the candle for a dinner with his wife Emmi.

They had shot Emmi within the first month here.

Now Daniel felt only a tiny candle of life burning in him, focusing existence on merely carrying his soul from one second to the next. He could not give up. He could not surrender. He had endured this, and it could not possibly get worse.

Already gaunt and nearly starved, half dead from exposure to the cold autumn and approaching winter, Daniel had grown much worse in the few days he had worked in the reactor building. In another day or two it would be his turn with the four others to disassemble the reactor, wearing scarred and burnt leather gloves to pull away the hot blocks of graphite, moving them aside to withdraw the glowing warm tubes of uranium, preparing them for shipment somewhere else. It was the day after disassembly that workers most often succumbed.

Daniel remembered his rush of excitement when the camp officials had picked his name for the duty. Tears had streaked his cheeks; he had fallen to his knees with gratitude toward the guard who had told him of his opportunity.

Now he knew he could not survive the length of his term of service, though only a few days remained. He could not keep his meals down. Sores covered his skin. Diarrhea had exhausted him, torn him apart. Retching, trembling, sweating, he could not last much longer. He would never leave Dachau alive.

Daniel had always feared he would die here. Somehow he had known it in the back of his mind. But the desperate need to survive refused to let him believe, though now it had become even worse: not only was he going to die, but he was going to die without knowing the reason, without knowing what this infernal device was for, how the Nazis would use it… to win the war? To destroy the world?

Saul looked at him before returning to his work, as if knowing what Daniel was thinking. Saul kept his voice low and bleak. “We are all dead men here. How many more days before they carry us out? Before you carry me, or I carry you?”

Daniel saw a flash of anger behind Saul’s eyes. The anger startled him, and he realized that his own anger had slept for too long. While he remained passive, had his own dignity been trampled beyond the hope of recovery? Why had he let them do everything to him? Was it just to survive? If survival cost that much, was it worth living?

Daniel looked at his hands, blackened from the carbon bricks and the ever-present graphite dust. These were the hands that had just carried a man, a human being, out into the mud, where he would be thrown into a trench and buried with the others.

Daniel took a step closer to Saul. He kept his voice low, as if afraid someone might hear him, though none of the Nazis would dare enter such a dangerous place. “You see what they are doing to us. Why are we helping them?” Saul’s face hung slack, as if the brief flash of anger had been all the emotion remaining within him. “We don’t even know what this does.”

Daniel remained silent, and then stared into Saul’s eyes. They were bloodshot, with dark pupils that looked blasted and shrunken from everything the other prisoner had seen and done.

“But I bet we could break it.”

Saul blinked and took a step backward. He looked down at his own hands, at the tattooed number on the inside of his forearm. “We don’t know how it works. It has no mechanical parts. I used to build and fix machines. This is not a machine.” It seemed an empty objection. “We could knock down the pile?”

Daniel shook his head. “No, they would shoot us and have someone else rebuild it in a day. We must cause more damage than that.”

He jerked a bony shoulder to indicate the cooling pipes where water rushed through the reactor, bursting into steam and pouring out the smokestacks above. Day after day, when not assigned to other work details, Daniel had watched the smokestacks, looked at the white steam, wondering what it was like inside the reactor building. He hoped and prayed that his name would be picked because that would give him a slim but definite possibility that he could escape this place and go back to his old world, to his jeweler’s shop, back to an imaginary life with Emmi.

He knew that would never happen. Emmi was gone. His shop was smashed, the windows broken out during the one frenzied night called Kristallnacht. He could not go back, but he could get out of here. Or so Daniel had thought. Now he knew otherwise.

“Saul, we cannot let it continue. Who knows what they are going to use this for? If we smash the cooling pipes, that is the only thing that could perhaps cause enough damage to stall them a little while. They will kill us for it, but we are dead anyway.”

Saul now looked as if he had second thoughts. “I do not want to die to serve no purpose. What if we do no good?”

“Does it not serve a purpose just to do something, just to strike a blow against them?”

Saul pondered this a moment. The other prisoners continued their aimless jobs, but some had stopped to listen.

“Yes,” Saul said. “It does.”

Daniel and Saul spoke to the other workers in the reactor detail. All agreed, except one man who hung so close to death he could barely keep himself moving.

“I heard that other Dachau prisoners sabotaged the construction work on showers that were to be used to gas Jews,” Daniel said. “We will do the same to this project, whatever it is. The Nazis will have no success from our labors.”

Saul found a small wrench used to adjust some of the apparatus and handed it to Daniel. “You should be the one to do this first,” he said.

Daniel took the wrench and looked at it. The tool was too small to be used as a weapon against any of the guards, not that the guards would fear them anyway, strutting around with their rifles and machine guns. The Jewish prisoners outnumbered the guards hundreds to one, but still none of them did anything. The guards enjoyed taunting them, knowing the prisoners would not resist; they had all been too cowed.

The lack of guards inside the reactor building was another reason why working there was such an attractive assignment. Regardless of the chance for freedom, even if they knew they were likely going to succumb at the end of a week, a few days without the taunting, without the nightmare of having a rifle barrel pointed at your back every moment, was perhaps worth dying for.

Daniel took the small wrench over to the red-painted valves protruding from the main cooling pipes. He slipped the wrench through the padlock and twisted, although he had not the strength to break it. Black spots danced in front of his eyes and he felt dizzy from the effort, but still he pushed and twisted.

One of the other prisoners, wearing a pair of the burned gloves, came back with a brick of the soft graphite and pounded on the wrench with it.’ The graphite crumbled into splinters of glossy black powder, but it added enough force to snap the hasp of the padlock.

Daniel took the lock off and dropped it. The rushing sounds of water pulsed next to his ear just on the other side of the pipe. He didn’t hear the padlock as it struck the concrete floor. He yanked out the chain holding the valve in place and, with a burst of strength, tossed the chain toward the towering, silent reactor.

Saul and Daniel turned the valve together, cranking it on resisting threads until they had shut all the water off. The other prisoners used the wrench to break smaller, secondary padlocks off, turning valves.

Saul opened up a large shunt valve, which sent a jet of water blasting into the echoing reactor bay. The water looked clean and cool as it splashed up on the concrete. Daniel stared at it. One of the prisoners held his hands out and stood in the stream, but the force knocked him backward. Daniel let the water run over his own hands and feet, feeling it soak into his clothes.

The river water felt icy, and his whole body numbed in an instant. Daniel didn’t mind. He wanted to feel numb. The weakness and nausea welled up in him again, and he fell retching onto the floor. He spat blood into the swirling water.

Through eyes blurred with tears of pain, he gaped at the blocky, dark leviathan of the reactor. Already he could feel waves of heat pulsing, growing hotter. The water felt cool, but Daniel could not concentrate. The dizziness roared in his head. As the water swirled and the reactor continued to eat itself alive from within, he slumped cross-legged in the churning pool.

They had done something. They had made a point. This wasn’t useless. In response to his thoughts, his lips made their own small smile.

Saul hunkered down beside him. The gushing water continued to echo in the empty building. All the prisoners remained silent as the heat rose. They had no strength to scream, or cheer.

“Are you all right?” Saul asked. “How do you feel?”

Daniel hung his head and felt water dripping down his back, down his chest. He looked up. “I feel fine.”

Dr. Kurt Diebner sat in his austere, tiny office in the administrative barracks near the camp processing center. All day long he heard the movements, the banging, the wailing, the complaints of prisoners being taken into Dachau. He had his own small window covered with a splintered set of wooden blinds he had insisted upon installing. He did not want to look upon the wasteland of the camp all the time.

Diebner doodled on a piece of paper, ostensibly working on plans to improve the efficiency of his graphite-moderated pile, but he had nothing else to work on, nothing he could do except sit and resent what had been done to him and his career.

The radioactive dust dumped on New York had bought them time. Hitler had been so pleased, he had allowed them the freedom to go back to their original work. They would produce a bomb to write their names larger in history than any other incident in the war. But not Diebner. He was stuck here, in this place.

He rubbed his hands to slick back his thinning hair and pressed his black glasses against his face. He had worked for the Ministry of Armaments to develop new munitions, though he had no interest or skill in such activities. He had served a short assignment at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, leading all the Virus House researchers, before he had been reassigned to a different team. He had not felt comfortable until he worked with his own group at Göttingen, with Paul Harteck and Walther Bothe and the others. Together, they had used the information taken from the Joliot-Curies in Paris to further German nuclear research.

But then Abraham Esau, with his Cambridge education and his arrogance, had snatched it back from him, pushed him down like a naughty child. Now Diebner had been thrown here in this hellish pit of Dachau. He had welcomed the responsibility at first, to run a project by himself, no matter where it was located—until he realized what it meant. Now his digestion was bad, his attitude bad, his health declining. He found he could no longer care about the reactor project or the plutonium they had begun to produce. He had seen the deaths caused in New York by the radioactive by-products from this reactor, but the Jews here seemed to be dying in numbers as great.

Before long, they might have enough material to make Hitler’s super bomb.

A draft whistled through the chinks in Diebner’s window. It had been a breezy day, a cold November morning. He snapped open his wooden blinds and stared out at the bleak camp, at the muddy barrenness surrounding the reactor building.

He noticed that the smokestacks had stopped giving up steam. For a moment he felt only puzzlement, knowing it should have been days yet before they disassembled the pile and removed the irradiated uranium rods. Then, when he saw the gathering black smoke coming from the walls and roofline, he panicked.

He had just turned around when one of the guards pounded on his door. Bursting into the small office, the guard shouted over the normal chaos of the processing center. “Dr. Diebner! You must come to the reactor building immediately!”

“I can see already. What happened?”

“There is a fire! We can hear it through the walls, but the prisoners have blockaded the door. We don’t know what they have done.”

A fire in the reactor, Diebner thought. A blaze hot enough to burn the graphite. It would be an inferno inside the building already. He could see black smoke gushing out the stacks, through cracks around the ceiling, through the lips of the large doors.

The reactor was melting down, the core burning. He felt an ice lump inside himself. He alone knew what that meant.

“Dr. Diebner, you must come and see! Tell us how to fix it.”

But Diebner didn’t move. His knuckles grew white as he gripped the corners of his desk. “There’s no way to fix it. This is a disaster!”

Inside the blaze, uranium rods would be melting. All the graphite slumping together into a mass, all contaminated, everything radioactive. They had constructed the reactor building so rapidly that they added no containment, nothing to trap all the deadly by-products and keep them from spraying through the air if such a catastrophe happened. The smoke gushing into the sky would be poison, dumping death just as the small rockets had spread radioactive dust on New York City.

“Get my car. Immediately! I must leave within the next two minutes! All of your men must evacuate. Everyone must flee.”

“Evacuate? But what about the prisoners?”

“Go! Now!” Diebner slapped his hand on the desktop. “Do not worry about the prisoners.” He lowered his voice. “They’re already dead.”

The guard finally ran out. Diebner himself left. He looked around to see if he should take anything with him. He had only a moment—if it wasn’t too late already. But then he realized that there was nothing here he wanted to keep.

He hurried outside. Prisoners gathered near the reactor building, staring at the spectacle. Flames came out from the roofline, through chinks in the side. Guards scurried about, some directing firefighting efforts, others trying to escape.

Diebner waited for his car, and kept waiting. He looked around to find some other way he could flee. He wanted to get moving, put distance between himself and the invisible death. He didn’t know if he should hold his breath, duck his head and cover his mouth. He could never hide from the radiation.

Black smoke rolled out from the fire, swirling in the mild autumn breezes, some of it settling like a blanket on the camp.

Diebner’s hands were trembling. This, he thought, is a true holocaust.

He wondered why his car was taking so long.