Chapter 2
Los Alamos
June 1943
“History again and again shows that we have no monopoly on ideas, but we do better with them than other countries.”
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
“At present we can see no practicable technical method of producing an atom-bomb during the war with the resources available in Germany. But the subject, nevertheless, must be thoroughly investigated to make sure that the Americans will not be able to develop atom-bombs either.”
—Dr. Werner Heisenberg
Daylight again. It had to be—nothing could be that bright with her eyes still closed. But why did the light seem to come from inside her head?
A splitting headache ran from the back to the front of Elizabeth’s skull. Her side ached, and she had trouble breathing. She felt giddy, as if she were spinning on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Her eyes wouldn’t work. What frightened her most was that her body wouldn’t stop twitching, as if every fiber had been stretched on a rack, and the nerves kept misfiring.
At least the ground was soft. She must have been thrown clear of the concrete pad when the MCG … exploded. Magnetocumulative Generator …
Everything fell into place. The explosion, the lightning, Jeff standing with his sledgehammer held high like Conan the Peace Activist.
She had to get up. She had to move. Someone must have seen the explosion. She and Jeff had to climb back out of the canyon, hide from the security guards. They had to run, to get out of the storm.
She couldn’t even manage to open her eyes. But it felt like sunshine warming her skin.
As Elizabeth drifted back to unconsciousness, she still couldn’t tell what exactly had happened …
O O O
Elizabeth woke with a start. Try it again. She had no idea how much time had passed.
She forced her eyes open and saw that she lay on a slope, her feet pointing uphill. She wondered if Jeff had dragged her away from the MCG site, into hiding. One arm flopped behind her head, numb with the ice prickles of impaired circulation. She tried to move, but her muscles felt so tired they hurt.
The ground smelled damp. The storm had passed by, but clouds still covered the sky. Whatever had happened must have knocked them both senseless. She couldn’t hear Jeff beside her.
The implications hit her at once: the Los Alamos scientists would be returning with the guards. They would find their test apparatus ruined. Security should have been here already.
“Jeff—” She coughed from the dust in her throat. Where was he? She tried to turn her head, but black fuzz obscured her vision. As she lifted her left arm she yelped in pain. She flexed her wrist—the arm didn’t seem to be broken. She pushed up on the opposite elbow. Her eyes wouldn’t focus properly.
“Jeff!” Elizabeth sucked in a breath, and at last her vision cleared. Her heart skipped a beat at what she saw.
Jeff lay crumpled on the ground thirty feet away. Not moving.
Elizabeth struggled onto her hands and knees. It took a second for the dizziness to pass, but she focused on Jeff and crawled over to him on all fours. “Jeff?” She slowed as she approached, then stopped a yard away, ready to retch.
His legs beneath the knees were … missing; but no blood flowed from the wound. His legs looked as if they had been fused together. He lay at the lip of a shallow crater ten feet across, as if he had been caught at the edge of an explosion, too close to the fury that had knocked her senseless. His red-rimmed glasses lay undamaged beside him in the crater.
“Oh, God. Jeff.” Elizabeth ignored her pain and knelt beside him. She fought to keep her consciousness. Tears stung her eyes and she trembled, just looking at him. Reaching out with one hand, she ran a hand over his chest, then knelt and put an ear to his mouth. Nothing. Touching the artery in his neck gave the same result. He felt cold to the touch.
She checked again, then pounded on his chest, more in despair and frustration than in any attempt to revive him.
Elizabeth dug her fingers into Jeff’s curly hair, her face close to his. Tears gathered, and a paralyzing flow of memories overwhelmed her. Living with him in a small flat near the Berkeley campus. Arguing about political issues. Working on her MBA while he studied history, or poetry, or whatever he fancied that semester. They both played guitar on the doorstep, watching bicyclists or joggers go by.
She had not seen him for several years after their breakup, not until she had called him to come down to Santa Fe. To come help her with this, and maybe rebuild their relationship. Now weapons research had claimed another victim …
Elizabeth looked around, her shoulders trembling. She tried to swallow, and her throat ached from the dryness. But she began to think clearly. Jeff always admired her for that; even when she got emotional about the issues, she could somehow step back and take matters in hand. No matter how badly she was hurting.
But not now. She couldn’t move. She stared at Jeff’s lifeless body for a long time. No one came—no security forces, no scientists, nothing. She forced her eyes from his legs. The sight was all wrong; it just did not belong. Something very strange had happened.
Elizabeth didn’t know how much time passed before she snapped out of her daze and felt engulfed in panic. She had to do something, get him out of here. They couldn’t be caught now, not like this. She didn’t want the security forces to find either of them. It was a felony simply to trespass on federal grounds.
“Jeff …” She leaned over to kiss his forehead. Dust stuck to his open eyes, and she brushed the lids closed.
Jeff would have been disappointed with her if he knew she’d risked getting herself caught because of sentimentality over him. She had to smother the grief for now. Let it come back a little at a time, when she could afford it.
With an effort, she visualized herself shifting into high gear, shutting down the unnecessary thoughts like extraneous subsystems. Survival of the fittest. She could do nothing to help Jeff now. She had to start thinking about herself.
That was what he would have said to her. She would mourn later, Elizabeth told herself again, when it was safe.
She looked around.
Something else seemed wrong.
From the location of the sun, it had to be early morning. She might have time to drag Jeff’s body out of the way, maybe hide it and come back later after the scientists had left. No, the security crew would get here and comb the area once they found the wrecked apparatus. Someone should have been here long before to check if the storm itself had caused any damage.
She could never carry Jeff far. There were thousands of places to hide, little cave notches in the cliffside, if she could only get the body far enough from the experimental site—
And then it hit her: the experimental site.
Even if the MCG explosion had sent them flying a hundred yards, she still should have been able to see the concrete pad, the dirt berm covering the explosive facility, even the road that ran down the canyon to the chain-link gate.
Elizabeth got to her feet, swaying with dizziness as she surveyed the canyon. She spotted the ledge at the top of the cliff where she and Jeff had waited, the stream winding down the canyon floor, piñon and scrub brush. Everything looked unchanged.
Except that every trace of human influence had vanished. It was as if someone had come along and completely cleaned up the MCG apparatus, the pad, the road, everything.
As if the site had never been here at all.
Elizabeth had never done drugs back at Berkeley, so this wasn’t some sort of flashback. Maybe she had hit her head in the explosion, she thought. Maybe none of this was really happening.
Maybe it was.
She took care to hide Jeff’s body in one of the natural caves that dotted the cliff wall, shallow impressions weathered into the soft tuff. The rock was too hard to dig. She couldn’t find any way to bury him, no way to keep the animals away. It made her sick to think of leaving him there, unprotected, unmarked. Not unremembered. She tried not to look at his fused legs or the blood splotches on his tan shirt as she piled rocks beside him. It took an hour to cover up the shallow depression in the rock, a cairn for him.
When Elizabeth was done, she stared tight-lipped at his makeshift grave. She stood for several moments, then whispered, “Good-bye, Jeff,” and turned away while she still could.
She had heard no sound, no sign of any traffic, though hours had passed. She decided to climb to the top of the mesa, away from the canyon floor, so as not to run into one of the Los Alamos scientists. When and if things got back to normal, she wanted the situation to be in her favor. And on her own terms.
Exhaustion sapped at Elizabeth as she climbed back up the canyon wall, but still she made considerably better time in the daylight than she had last night. Even the chain-link fence was gone. She made her way down the canyon rim toward the Park Service road that would lead to the Bandelier Monument headquarters and visitor’s center where they had parked the Bronco.
The second shock came when she couldn’t find the road.
New Mexico State Road 4 should have been at the bottom of the canyon, winding its way to the national monument, looping around to the cluster of homes called White Rock, then back to the city of Los Alamos. She found only a faint horse trail disappearing into the distance. The New Mexican foothills showed no other sign of civilization.
Elizabeth shrugged off her pack. Panting and sweating, she dug out the topographical map she and Jeff had used to plot their course to the back fence of the MCG site. Squatting in the dirt on the canyon rim, she oriented the green map toward the Jemez caldera. Mount Baldy lay to the right, sixty miles away, towering over Santa Fe. Behind her rose the Sandias and Albuquerque; half a million people within a hundred-mile circle.
It just didn’t make sense. She stood and pushed back her reddish hair, then retied the leather thong. The central part of Bandelier National Monument, with its hiking trails and ancient Indian cliff dwellings, lay over the next two ridges. She was sure she had her bearings right. She would straighten this out sooner or later.
But Jeff would never be coming back.
Elizabeth shoved all those thoughts aside. Not now! She set off at a rapid, steady hiking pace. She had never felt so tired, or so overwhelmed.
The sun was not quite overhead by the time she scaled the last ridge, looking over Frijoles Canyon, where the Bandelier parking lot, gift shop, and snack bar should have been. Even in the mountains the cool early summer air seemed heavy, making her perspire more than she should have.
Elizabeth confirmed her location once again by lining up features on the detailed topo map before looking over the canyon rim. She scrambled up to the top and surveyed Bandelier. Caves dotted the far cliff walls. A partially excavated circle of boulders delineated the ancient Anasazi Indian settlement off to her right. And below her sprawled a wooden ranch house and stables, with dirt paths stretching from the buildings. She recognized the adobe visitor’s center buildings, but they looked different somehow, newer.
Mouth set, she stared at the site. Nothing existed of the ranger station she had visited just a day earlier. She could not see any cars; even the Bronco she and Jeff had left by the cottonwood tree was missing. The Anasazi ruins looked the same, but everything else had changed.
What is going on? she asked herself. Am I still dreaming?
Jeff’s death had been no dream.
Elizabeth didn’t spend time debating what to do. Explanations could be filled in later. She had to decide her next course of action. A jaunt down to the ranch house would prove nothing right now, only raise questions she didn’t want to answer. But a trip into Los Alamos would clear the air. She could figure out what was going on without causing too much of a stir. From the location of the sun, it didn’t seem to be more than eleven or so in the morning.
Confusion and panic gripped her again. Her body still felt displaced and inside-out after the explosion. She remembered Jeff … then slowly regained control of herself.
Clouds covered the top of Santa Fe Baldy fifty miles away, but it looked as if the good weather would hold. She should be able to reach Los Alamos by nightfall if it didn’t start raining again. She could get a newspaper. She could have a hot meal. Right now even Los Alamos’s limited selection of restaurants sounded appealing to her.
She could go back and sleep alone, without Jeff. She could think of how she would explain his absence. Somehow, Elizabeth could not conceive of the need to report his death to the police. A dim part of her mind recognized that she was still in shock.
But what in the hell was going on? It kept coming back to her as she walked. The simplest answer was that her mind was screwed up; the answer most difficult to swallow was that what she saw was real. But what had happened to everything?
O O O
No fences surrounded the mesa or any of the designated Technical Areas. In her Bronco, she had driven around the restricted zones many times before, pretending to be a tourist. But now she saw no warning signs, no barbed wire. As she made her way through the foothills, Elizabeth kept careful track of her location. On the map a dotted red line clearly marked the laboratory limits: u.s. department of energy restricted area. Though she must have crossed the line, she came across nothing that even resembled a boundary.
A spring rain spread light mist, but Elizabeth kept on, wet and miserable now. Droplets glistened on her bare arms, and her jeans and hiking boots were nearly soaked through. She ate her last package of trail mix on the go; she could see no use conserving food. Her highest priority was to find out what was going on—and to keep from thinking too much about Jeff.
Seeing the town of Los Alamos intact might jolt the imbalance from her. She wanted to think clearly again. By the time she reached the top of the mesa where the city lay, the clouds had darkened, sending down torrents of rain. Her feet squished with every step.
She approached from the southwest, following the ridge line up to where the main lab complex should be. She quickened her pace when she spotted a barbed-wire fence running through the trees, extending into the dense undergrowth. She had never thought she’d be glad to see a security fence!
Maybe the hike had cleared her mind. Maybe she had been too intense, had dwelled on the Los Alamos project too long. The explosion had sent her reeling. Perhaps her anger at the MCG experiment, and the lightning storm, and Jeff’s horrible death, had snapped her mind like a rubber band. Maybe she had imagined a Los Alamos without the lab, without the experiments.
The rain made it difficult to see far. As she sloshed through the pines and cottonwoods, her hope continued to rise. Lights—she spotted a flickering source, then a glaring array between the trees. It was if the bulbs had been hung on a wire and strung over a clearing. Noise drifted through the downpour, diffusing into the rain.
The first thing she’d do was get to a phone—call one of her friends back in Santa Fe. It would take a couple of hours, but Marcia would probably drive up, meet her at the coffee shop at the Los Alamos Inn. The news of the sabotaged MCG experiment must be all over the headlines by now.
The United Conscience Group would treat her as a hero.
As she reached the clearing she slowed her pace, not wanting to reveal herself. It sounded like a construction crew hard at work even in the bad weather. Saws buzzed, hammers pounded nails …
As Elizabeth crept to the edge of the woods, her lips clamped. Her delusions crashed around her again.
Mud covered everything. Aluminum-sided Quonset huts dotted the clearing in a haphazard order. Poles carrying electrical wires ran between the buildings. The few wooden buildings looked more like thrown-together shacks.
This should have been downtown Los Alamos.
Men wearing khaki uniforms and steel helmets directed traffic around the sloppy construction site. None of the roads looked paved, just mud and some gravel, with brown puddles in ruts, no sidewalks or gutters. Spattered jeeps drove up to the Quonset huts. And the other cars looked like they had been taken from old Untouchables reruns on TV.
Elizabeth took an unsteady step backward. Her breath came in short, labored spasms. Mind games, she thought. I’ve gone completely bonkers.
But yet … the impossibility of it all … the noises, the smells, the sights … if she didn’t know better, she could just as well be back in World War II. She couldn’t make up details like this—she didn’t know anything about history. But the activity surrounding the isolated mesa seemed more appropriate for wartime Los Alamos—
She stopped. Fifty years ago this place had been wartime Los Alamos. And the height of the Manhattan Project. The birth of the atomic bomb.
O O O
Elizabeth stepped back into the woods and sat on a boulder of crumbling tuff. Not a speck of graffiti marked the boulder surface, though it lay close to the main road.
She couldn’t have been tossed back in time! That MCG explosion had somehow sent her back into the past? What about all those lectures in her undergraduate days as a physics major, talking about how time travel violated every principle of modern physics from entropy increase to causality?
Yet she couldn’t deny what she saw. Something big was going on, right where Los Alamos should be, and the city itself had vanished. How many times had she driven past the sprawling administration building, pointing out the headquarters of the bomb factory to her activist friends? What if she had suffered some sort of concussion and was simply hallucinating? A simpler answer to accept, perhaps. For all she knew, she was still lying back at the explosive site, bleeding to death, while her mind refused to accept the inevitability of dying.
Elizabeth chewed on her lip. The hunger in her stomach was real enough, as were the blisters on her feet. Maybe she needed to play this out, see what her subconscious had in store for her. Maybe it was trying to get her to accept Jeff’s death.
Had he even died?
She slapped her hand against the rough surface of the boulder. It stung. The rock seemed solid enough.
She knew she couldn’t just sit there. Night was coming fast, and she needed to get into a shelter, find some food. Even if the whole thing was in her mind.
Taking a deep breath, she set out in the rain, straight for the center of activity.
O O O
“Over here, hon! Quick now—get yourself out of the rain!”
Elizabeth could not make out any features through the downpour, but she spotted a tall woman motioning to her. “Can’t you hear me? You’ll catch your death of cold.”
Elizabeth lowered her head and trudged through the mud to the woman, who fluttered around her like a clucking hen. “Put this blanket around you. Did you just get here on the bus? What were you doing out in the trees? Not a good day to take a walk, and you shouldn’t be out there alone.”
“I can take care of myself.” Elizabeth pulled the green Army blanket around her and let the woman lead her into the building. “Thanks, though.” Thin and willowy, the old woman reminded Elizabeth of a sorority mother employed to keep watch on college coeds. She looked to be in her late fifties.
“Look how you’re dressed! Dungarees? Now you get out of those clothes and hop right into the bath. We’ve still got some warm water left. Take advantage of it while you can.” The woman put a finger to her cheek. “Didn’t they drop off your luggage with you?”
“Uh, no.”
“My word, you’re the third person they’ve done that to this week. What in the world are they thinking down there in Santa Fe? Bring up the young ladies and treat them like soldiers. What’s going to happen next? I just hope the Army didn’t ship your belongings back home.”
Elizabeth remained quiet and let the elderly woman go on. She would figure this out sooner or later.
Just inside the veranda a row of metal beds lined a long room. The low ceiling rafters revealed a dormitory-like construction. Only about a quarter of the beds looked as if they were being used.
On a flimsy table Elizabeth saw a ragged newspaper, shuffled and folded as if it had been read by a dozen people. The headlines spoke about Himmler ordering the liquidation of all Polish ghettos, someplace called Pantellaria had been captured, and the USAAF had attacked Wilhelmshaven—wherever that was.
The date on the masthead read June 12, 1943. And the paper was new and white, not yellowed with age.
Before Elizabeth could say anything, the old woman steered her to the back. “I’ll get you a spare bathrobe after you’re through with your shower, dear. I’ll notify the guard to send a runner for your luggage in the morning.”
“But what is—” She caught herself. “I mean, thank you, Ms …?”
“Mrs. Canapelli. My Ronald died five years ago. He was a handyman at the university, and we used to be friends with Dr. Oppenheimer and Kitty back in Berkeley. Oppie asked me to chaperone the ladies’ dormitory. I’m glad he remembered me, bless poor Ronald’s soul.” They stopped in front of the bathroom.
Oppie? thought Elizabeth. Yes, that Oppie. She felt dizzy. So this lady was friends with Oppenheimer, the man responsible for the Bomb. “Thank you, Mrs. Canapelli. Uh, can I get these clothes dried? Do you have a laundromat?”
“A what? Why don’t I just hang them up for you. The humidity here is very low, and once the rain stops, your clothes will have a chance to dry out. We can get you an iron to use if you’d like.”
“No thanks, they’re permanent press.” Elizabeth never bothered with clothes she had to iron.
“Permanent press?” Mrs. Canapelli inspected Elizabeth’s jeans and plaid shirt. “You really took the Project at their word, dressing for the country, didn’t you? Where did you say you came from? And I didn’t catch your name.”
“Elizabeth Devane, and, uh, I’m from … Montana. I always dress like this.” She closed her mouth, not wanting to get caught up too much in her lie. Montana was about as far removed from anything else she could imagine, and it might explain some of her unusual behavior.
Elizabeth backed into the small bathroom and started taking off her clothes. Mrs. Canapelli continued to chatter. Elizabeth normally would have resented the company, but since Mrs. Canapelli mentioned everything from in-processing to Project rules, she ended up filling in Elizabeth with the details she would need for getting around. Elizabeth listened and stored the information.
It might be useful until she woke up and ended this hallucination.
O O O
Elizabeth never thought an Army cot could feel so good. She rolled over and felt only the sharp edge of the cot, not Jeff’s warm shoulders. The realization jarred her awake.
It had been at least twenty-four hours since she and Jeff had climbed down into the MCG test site. Twenty-four hours, some twenty miles of hiking. And maybe fifty years of … time travel.
Elizabeth snorted. Time travel. The human mind is far more complex than most people give it credit for. If she woke up tomorrow still in the Los Alamos women’s dormitory, then she had to make a concentrated effort not to keep thinking about the impossibility of it all. Obviously her mind wanted her to experience something in this era—best to go along with the flow and live it out. That way, at least her body could heal while her mind put things in order.
It made sense to her. Putting the blame on her psyche and leaving it time to heal. But if it was only a hallucination, she wished she could imagine Jeff back into it somehow.
O O O
The officer squinted at Elizabeth. He wore military insignia on his collar—two parallel silver bars. She didn’t know anything about ranks, but Elizabeth thought she had heard someone call him a captain.
The rain had disappeared, leaving a sunny spring morning, but the mud remained. Brown muck spattered everything; even the soldier’s khaki uniforms seemed a part of the mess.
Elizabeth tried to keep the notion that she was hallucinating out of her mind as she explained her situation. She silently thanked Mrs. Canapelli for droning on the night before, feeding her tidbits of information.
“No, sir. My papers were with my luggage. I was told to board the bus in Santa Fe. And until the Army can locate my things, I don’t have any other documents or even items to wear. Mrs. Canapelli says I should be able to arrange for some clothes through the PX …”
Trucks rumbled past; a dozen soldiers leaned out the back and whistled at her. The three people in line behind her tapped their feet in the dirt.
The captain held up his hands and rolled his eyes in good-humored exasperation. “Okay, okay, I understand! It’s just that you’re the third person in four days with the same problem. I’m trying to prevent it from happening again. Look Miss Depine—”
“Devane,” said Elizabeth. “And it’s Ms. Devane.”
He looked up sharply. “Yes. Miz Devane.” He muttered to himself, “Must be from the South.” He opened his hand and ticked off the rationale on his fingers.
“Okay, your papers must have been in proper order or they never would have let you board the bus in the first place. Otherwise, you never could have gotten up here, since there’s only one road. Therefore, something must have happened to your paperwork after you got on that bus. Maybe someone else picked up your suitcase and it’ll turn up before long? Did you have your name in it?”
“Of course.”
“Guess you’ll just have to wait and keep your fingers crossed, then. I’m sorry, Miz Devane, but until your paperwork comes through, the only thing I can do right now is assign you to the in-processing center as a clerk.”
“Doing what?”
“Clerical work, of course. What else would you want to do?” The captain looked astonished.
“How long will I be there?”
“If your paperwork is just misplaced, it may be only a couple of days. If it’s really lost, we have to go all the way back to Washington. And that may take until the end of the summer.”
End of the summer? Is that the timescale I have here, going crazy for three months? I thought I’d wake up tomorrow.
“So until then, there’s nothing more I can do.” The captain raised a finger. “Except I have to restrict you to the Project. Can’t allow you to leave the grounds until we’ve got something back on you.”
Elizabeth set her mouth, unwilling to make a commotion. What difference did it make? Where would she go anyway?
“Thank you, Captain. I appreciate your help.” She turned and left the wooden administration building. On her way out, she noticed that the Assignments and In-Processing rooms were across from each other.
She experienced a sinking feeling in her stomach. After all her efforts protesting nuclear weapons research, now she found herself in the middle of the Manhattan Project itself. And they expected her to work for them.
O O O
Two o’clock in the morning, and sleep would not come. A single white light blazed outside the women’s dormitory, throwing deep shadows across the row of beds. Outside, moths and insects whipped around in the light. Snoring came from the cot next to hers. A guard’s footsteps crunched between the buildings on the other side of the window. Elizabeth turned over and tried to make herself comfortable. The sheets smelled like bleach and felt too hot, even in the cool mountain air.
Growing up in Albuquerque, Elizabeth had dreamed of leaving New Mexico, getting out of the sleepy nowhere city and tackling the real world. Berkeley had afforded her the chance. On a scholarship, she thrived in the intellectual community by the San Francisco Bay. The Northern California lifestyle opened her eyes, though she still spent much of her time with her nose in the books.
After graduating in physics, securing a job with United Atomics in Los Angeles came naturally—it allowed her to use her knowledge and at the same time take advantage of everything L.A. had to offer. She enjoyed her life alone, from hiking in the San Bernardino mountains to body surfing off Manhattan Beach.
One day she realized that she needed an MBA to get ahead, to move out of the population of “techies” and into the higher-paying levels of management. That decision ushered in the end of her innocence. Ted Walblaken’s death shortly thereafter, and United Atomics callous attempt at a cover-up, was the last weight that tipped the scales for her.
Her move back to Berkeley and subsequent enrollment in the Management School left her jaded. She had more time to experience the Berkeley environment, get involved in the really big issues: biogenetics, the end of the Cold War, and the disarmament of America.
The 1983 Livermore protest had nailed it down—she could never return and work for big industry after allowing herself to be arrested for her principles. And then there was Jeff … but the backward allure of New Mexico had become enchanting to her again, a simpler way of life where she would not have to support the bottom-line-only businesses she abhorred. Elizabeth’s only regret was that Jeff didn’t want to come with her.
Santa Fe, only seventy miles north of where she had grown up, beckoned as an ideal place to settle. With her completed MBA and her experience in finance, she had no problem getting a job keeping the books for a Santa Fe art gallery—Nambe on Canvas. Elizabeth loved the chic gallery, the circle of friends who were also concerned about important issues. Her private accounting business grew, and she settled in the comfortable life as a professional.
But now she seemed anything but comfortable. To top it all off, with her years of specialized education, she had been assigned as a file clerk! If she weren’t in such a screwed-up situation, the whole thing would be funny.
Elizabeth pushed back the sheets and sat up on her cot. She stared at the bed next to her. The girl slept without a worry, confident that the “powers that be” would find a way to defeat the evil Japanese, the terrible Nazis, and then steer the world toward an endless supply of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. All because of the Manhattan Project.
Elizabeth swung her feet over the side of the cot, trying not to wake the others. How many times had she heard the expression “If I only knew then what I know now”? How many people would really be content to go on with the atomic bomb project if they really knew what was to come. The Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam. The Arms Race. Star Wars. The Gulf War. The capacitor accident at Los Alamos. The homeless, and the people dying of AIDS, because too much money had been spent on defense.
But how could they know? And what was better—for her to stay and do nothing, to ride out the tides of time, or try to actively change things? As a clerk in the in-processing center? Get real.
She wasn’t sure exactly how she would do it, but if she could get transferred into something more important—somewhere that made a strategic difference—then she might be able to see where things had gone wrong.
The wooden dormitory floors didn’t creak as she crept to the bathroom. Quickly changing into her own clothes, Elizabeth debated if she should wear some kind of camouflage, something to help disguise her in case she was caught. She thought better of it. Anything unnatural would only draw attention if she were spotted.
She had heard that other women sometimes left during the night and returned clandestinely, slipping past Mrs. Canapelli—midnight liaisons had not been invented in Elizabeth’s generation, after all. Too many single young men were housed at the Project, and the women of 1943 had been fed propaganda that they were supposed to adore brave soldiers in uniform. Leaving the dormitory would be tolerated, if she could stay discreet.
O O O
Elizabeth jiggled the door to the administration building. The door opened with a squeak. Surprised to find it unlocked, she held her breath. It seemed that the sound had echoed across the muddy encampment. But no one came running down the street brandishing weapons. So far, so good.
The sound of a jeep came from across the compound. Pools of yellow-white headlights turned down another un-paved road and continued up the bill. Elizabeth crept inside the Admin building and closed the door, hoping the jeep engine would mask any noise she might make. She debated whether she should lock the door in case one of the guards came to check. She decided against it; besides, she saw no key on the inside.
This left her momentarily wondering why security should be so lax—but she didn’t dwell on it, concluding that the administration areas must not rate as high in the hierarchy as the scientific part of the Project.
Elizabeth made her way down the hallway, relying on touch to get her past the large foyer. Only a few well-placed lights from the outside managed to cast their glare into the building. The site’s blackout regulations dictated only minimum lighting, not visible from the air.
Once she had negotiated the foyer, she managed to keep from knocking over a trash can by first feeling it with her shoe. The hallway led to a set of double doors. In-processing should be two doors down, across from the Assignments section. If she were going to do this right, she needed to do more than forge her papers and add them to the file—she also had to make sure that her physics background was documented.
Even at the B.S. level, with a physics degree granted thirty-five years in the future, her knowledge ought to count for something. But that opened up another set of problems entirely. How many women were on the Project now, serving in a true professional sense? There must be some, but probably fewer than she could count on her fingers. It would only draw more attention to herself, raise too many questions.
And what if she let something slip, some bit of knowledge that hadn’t been discovered yet? Her own physics studies had ignored historical perspective altogether; none of her professors bothered to add any kind of context to their explanations of important theories. According to her schooling, there was Newton, then Einstein and Dirac, and a whole bunch of equations with people’s names on them magically appearing in the interim.
How could she explain that two or three of the scientists working on the Project now would be her guest lecturers at Berkeley three decades from now? No, she had to keep this simple, mark it down in her records that she had some business experience, some mathematics. Maybe that would let her work on the sidelines, where she could watch, observe.
Elizabeth moved toward the Records section. She pushed the door open, half expecting someone to be waiting for her with gun drawn. A row of Army-gray file cabinets lined one wall like a battalion of metal soldiers. The Project personnel had made no attempt to safeguard the personnel information. And this place was one of the most secret places in the nation? The Army must have been working on the principle that the threat was entirely on the outside and not from within.
How could people be so naive?
She found a blank form, personnel qualifications. Bending over a patch of light on a cluttered metal table, Elizabeth penciled in a mathematics degree along with her business experience. That should satisfy any routine checking once she switched jobs. Filing her records, Elizabeth made her way to the Assignments section. Time to get herself a new job.
She crept through eerie hall shadows. The air felt stale. She had heard no other sounds since the jeep went by. She thought about the guards—would they really not patrol the buildings at night? She drew in a breath and looked around. Why was it so quiet? When she reached the door to Assignments, she slid inside the opening and pulled the door partway closed.
Elizabeth glanced around. The room showed even more paperwork chaos than Records. Piles of paper three feet high sat on each desk. Yellow pencils covered the windowsills, and red or black ink pads littered the floor.
Her heart sank. How in the world am I going to even find the right form in this mess? She didn’t know where to start.
She picked up a paper from the nearest desk and squinted in the dimness. It looked like an alphabetical list of people in one of the divisions. Her frustration grew. Trapped, years in the past, and knowing the outcome of a no-win situation, didn’t help her spirits any. She rummaged through another pile, sheet after sheet after sheet—nothing.
She couldn’t go back to her own time. She had no idea how. She would have to watch the Manhattan Project without being a player. Did she even want to be a player? What else could she do? The paperwork and bureaucracy here seemed just as screwed-up now as what the government had to offer in the future. The rosy picture of “all for one and one for all” painted of this war effort didn’t include the times like this.
She stopped. Something just outside in the hall. A footstep, a scratch at the door.
Elizabeth held her breath. She started to duck down, out of sight behind the desk and its column of paper. The security guards—what would they do if they found her there? Did they shoot on sight? The thought chilled her. The nation was at war, when people accepted even the atrocities of penning up American-born Japanese. Being executed for breaking into the Manhattan Project records, no matter how innocuous, no longer seemed unlikely.
Someone stepped through the door. Elizabeth ducked lower.
“Excuse me.” The words came out in a whisper. She looked up. A man stepped behind the stacks of paper and looked down at her, as if he had known her hiding place all along. “Ah, do you need any help?”
Elizabeth caught a hint of a chuckle. She strained to see the man’s face, but the light coming from the window shone behind him. She saw only his silhouette.
Elizabeth slowly stood. Her arms and legs trembled as cold sweat broke out on her skin. Her stomach knotted, but she didn’t understand. “I … I …” She couldn’t make the words come out.
“It’s okay. Really,” he said.
Elizabeth sucked in a breath. “Oh, damn.” She glanced around, pulled up a metal chair and sat down. “So what are you going to do with me?”
“Eh?” The man moved around so that the light shone on his face. He appeared young, not more than twenty-five or so. His hair was cropped short, curly. “Do with you? My, that opens up all sorts of implications, doesn’t it? I just thought you needed help getting around in here.”
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. She sat straighter in the chair. “Help?”
“Sure. Going through those paper piles.” He jerked his head at a particularly large heap in the corner. “Can you believe all this? This is a scientist’s nightmare and a bureaucrat’s dream. Paperwork heaven. One of those Admin clowns could die in here and it would take them a month to find out he was even missing.”
Elizabeth stifled an uncertain laugh. This man didn’t seem bothered that she was here in the dark; he didn’t appear to be a threat. “You’re probably right.”
“About you needing help?”
“No. I mean yes, I need help. But about this being a paperwork nightmare, or heaven, or whatever.” She stopped, tongue-tied. She felt angry at herself, but forced it down. She couldn’t believe any of this.
“Good.” The man cracked a smile. “Then what are you looking for?”
“Something to get me transferred. Whatever paperwork I need.”
“You want to move to another job.”
“That’s right.”
“Gosh, I can’t imagine anything being misplaced around here.” He snorted with derision. “Don’t you like what you’re doing now?”
“Typing and shuffling paperwork isn’t my strong point. I mean, that isn’t the reason I was brought here. I’ve got a good background in mathematics. It’s a terrible misuse of talent.” Elizabeth held her breath and hoped that the man wouldn’t press for details—or that she wouldn’t tie herself up in a lie she couldn’t get out of.
“Makes sense. Maria Goeppert had the same problem. One of the best minds in the country, and people would rather shove her off making coffee than using her talents.”
Elizabeth kept quiet and allowed the man to continue. She kept taking peeks out the window, afraid that their whispered conversation would draw attention. The man, whoever he was, seemed content just to sit and chat away.
“Actually, if you knew where the forms were …”
The man stood. “I don’t, but I bet if I thought as a bureaucrat would …” He looked around the room. Elizabeth’s eyes had become accustomed enough to the dark to see where he was looking. “Umm. Let’s see. This is the Assignments section, so you’d think that assignments would be on the top of their priority list. Now all we have to do is figure out where they would think of putting their important stuff. Which means …”
He strode around to the front of the office, lifted up a small pile and revealed an in basket. He fished around and pulled out a dark, half-page form. “Aha!” He looked as if he had just cracked a mystery. “The only people who really bother these folks are the ones they try to transfer. Which means that if the transfer form is located near the door, then they can get rid of the people faster. Lessen the amount of hassle they get.”
Elizabeth pushed up from her chair and moved to the front. “I don’t know how to thank you—”
“Well, if you insist … no, I mean, nonsense! I know it’s impossible to get things done during regular hours around here. You have to do things yourself sometimes. Where are you trying to get transferred to?”
“Uh, I’m not really sure. Somewhere that could use my abilities. My math background, I mean. I used to teach high school math before I joined the civil service.” Oh boy, she was going to have to remember that one.
“Ah, so that explains why you’re here. Johnny von Neumann is getting together a group to grind through some intensive calculations.” He cocked an eye at her. “You aren’t familiar with hydrodynamics are you?” He shook his head before she could answer. “Never mind—it doesn’t really matter. But if you’re a math whiz, we could sure use some talent in von Neumann’s group. Here.” Elizabeth took the sheet of paper as if it were a nugget of gold.
“Thanks!” Von Neumann … the name sounded familiar to her. Hadn’t he invented the first computer or something?
“Just put down T-Division as your reassignment. That’ll get you there.”
They deposited the official transfer form in the front office. Elizabeth crept along beside him, fearful that his cavalier attitude would get them caught, but they negotiated the building without bringing attention to themselves.
She wanted to ask the man who he was, but since he had kept his nose out of her identity, she decided to do likewise. Whoever he was, he was one strange duck—getting his kicks out of playing jokes on the paper pushers.
The man steered her to the side door. “Go ahead on out—I’ll lock up behind you.”
Elizabeth started for the door. “But it was unlocked when I got here.”
“I know.” The man grinned and pulled a long wire from his pants pocket. “I broke in and left the door open in case I had to make a quick escape. It’s great, isn’t it? Drives the brass bananas when they find out I’ve been drooling over their paperwork. Not that it’s important or anything. What really drives them crazy is when I break into the safes and leave them little notes.” He creaked open the door and peered outside. “Go ahead, it’s clear.”
“Uh, thanks again—”
“Just get going.”
“Yeah.” Elizabeth slipped outside. She moved around the mud puddles that dotted the streets and kept to the building shadows. When she finally reached the women’s barracks, the long row of cots looked inviting. She had had enough excitement for one night, and just hoped her transfer would go through without anyone questioning it.
Breaking and entering wasn’t her style. Maybe she was better off with the United Conscience Group, passing out leaflets and doing nothing significant. The MCG debacle had shown her the worst of what could happen. Jeff had paid with his life.
Once was enough, no matter how high the stakes.
***