Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  Groves raised his eyebrows, as if the question surprised him. “Does he strike you as the type who would allow himself to be taken alive?”

  “Frankly, no.”

  “Then I don’t expect the problem will ever come up.” The eyebrows sank back down again, and the general moved the point of his thumb absentmindedly back and forth across the surface of the table, as if he were rubbing out a mark. “I expect you’ll run him to ground and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “That’s clear enough, General.”

  “I hope so.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence that went on for several seconds, as if neither of them cared to be the first to speak again.

  “You know, you’re going to have to tell me a little more about this project of yours,” Havens said finally, glad to have found a means of getting to something else. “I can’t go running blind. If I’m to catch him, I’ve got to know what he’s looking for.”

  “I thought you took your degree in English.” The general smiled, just a little condescendingly, but if he expected Havens to be put off he was mistaken.

  “But that doesn’t make me an idiot—just spell it out for me in layman’s terms, how in outline the thing’s supposed to work, what sorts of materials it needs, what the problems are, and where your people have got their laboratories. I think I’d like to know that first.”

  “Do you have any idea what you’re asking?”

  “In broad terms—yes. But don’t worry, General. I don’t talk in my sleep.”

  Groves stared out through the Venetian blinds for a moment and sighed. And then, from one instant to the next, he seemed to grasp the force of Havens’ argument.

  “All right,” he said suddenly, his head snapping around on his thick neck. “I suppose that security clearance was inevitable. After you’ve heard some of it, you won’t thank me.”

  “We’ll see—start with the locations. I want to know where he’s likely to turn up.”

  The general actually laughed—it wasn’t a very cheerful sound.

  “You name it. You try coming at it from that end, son, and you’ll end up in a strait jacket. We’ve got big installations in Washington State and Tennessee and New Mexico; Berkeley is doing work for us, and the University of Chicago, and NYU, and the Ford Motor Company. And there are small contracts out to dozens of companies, and every one of them has got a security force of its own to make sure people lock the doors.”

  “Okay, which ones are you the most worried about? You seem to think all this has something to do with their not having any more heavy water. Where would von Niehauser go for that?”

  “Nowhere. We aren’t using heavy water.”

  Havens watched him for a moment through narrowed eyes, but there wasn’t anything in Groves’ face to suggest that he was trying to sandbag anyone. Havens nodded—okay, so heavy water was out.

  “All right. Next question—if the Germans have the head start you seem to think they do, they must already have done their own spadework. Where do you feel the most naked? Suppose our boy wants to know about how you plan to put the goddamned thing together, where would he go?”

  “New Mexico.”

  “What’s in New Mexico?”

  “A converted boys’ school with a bunch of certifiable lunatics running around loose.” It sounded like a joke, but apparently it wasn’t—the general wasn’t laughing. “The actual bomb development laboratory is on a mesa just north of Santa Fe. The place is called Los Alamos.”

  11

  For what felt like the hundredth time that week, Jenny Springer swept the snow from the two concrete steps that led up to the front door of the three-room bungalow she shared with her husband. There was no garden, since there was almost no water. In the spring, when the ground thawed, it simply turned to mud and then, finally, the summer sun baked it hard as concrete. There were no flowers, so one lavished one’s attentions on the front steps.

  The house was a prefabricated structure, put up with twenty other houses in part of an afternoon, with almost no heat and only the most rudimentary plumbing. Still, to have it at all had to be considered an enormous privilege—more than half of the other enlisted personnel had had to leave their families behind or, what was perhaps worse, to huddle them together in one of the squalid little apartments which had originally been intended as bachelor quarters. But Hal was a sergeant in the Security Section and thus enjoyed more perquisites than some of the officers. The Security Section really ran the installation. And Hal was the sort of person who took advantage of every break that came his way.

  It was too cold to linger outside for more than a few minutes, so Jenny retreated back through the door and went into the bedroom to change her dress. It was Saturday, and on Saturday she and some friends pooled their gasoline coupons and drove into Santa Fe for the afternoon. In theory, it was supposed to be a shopping expedition, a safari in pursuit of make-up cases and lingerie and pretty little tile plaques to hang up in the kitchen, but the prices were really better at the Army commissary and the stores in town were nearly empty of such peacetime luxuries and, besides, nobody had the money to waste. Really, what everybody wanted was just a chance to get away for a few hours from the smothering atmosphere of the base.

  She opened her closet door, looked inside, and sank down on the corner of the bed, stifled with melancholy. Nobody had told her that it snowed in the desert and all of her warm clothes were in mothballs back home in New Jersey. Nothing had prepared her for this. Suddenly, all she wanted to do was to cry.

  But she wouldn’t cry. After all, she wasn’t a child. It was always the same—every time she had one of these days she ended up feeling horribly guilty. Somehow it didn’t seem very patriotic to hate military life quite so much, but she did. Even in the middle of a war, even when she knew everyone else was having to make sacrifices too, she couldn’t help herself. She just hated Los Alamos.

  And it wasn’t even that, really. Everybody hated Los Alamos. She didn’t know a single woman there who didn’t loathe every square inch of it, who didn’t live for the day the war would be over and she could go home. There was a solidarity of misery here, but she doubted if many of her friends collapsed in a panic of depression every time they looked inside their closets. It was the solitude that she felt was crushing her, the necessity of facing every second of it with no resource but herself.

  She hated her husband. At least, sometimes she hated him. And it was worse when she didn’t.

  She couldn’t really judge. Even in her own family, she really didn’t have any clear idea how her mother felt about her father—her mother wasn’t the sort of woman who could have brought herself to talk about something like that. And her friends, well. . .

  But at least, from the way they sounded, from what they seemed to assume about their marriages, at least, if they didn’t think that the man who came home at night and sat down to dinner in his underwear was precisely a hero of romance, they didn’t feel that nothing was possible except silence.

  I told Frank that he should have talked to his brother before he bought that car. I told him. Even his mother told him and, you know, she believes the sun rises and sets on Frank. Frank imagines he knows everything there is to know about cars, but he’s such a fool. That salesman wrapped him around his little finger, and now he’s. . .

  If that wasn’t love, at least it was something. It wasn’t just an emptiness that was like death.

  And with Hal it had been no other way, a desolation, from the first moment. And she had known that it would be. Oh God, why had she married him?

  He had been hanging around her parents’ house for close to a year without managing to generate much interest. He was a nice enough sort of fellow, but with a kind of cold tenacity that wouldn’t listen when she said no. He seemed to think he was irresistible just because he happened to be wearing a policeman’s uniform. And then, about six months after Pearl Harbor, one day he showed up in his fatigues and announced that he was through with basic trainin
g and had just a week’s leave before he was expected to join his unit.

  He begged her, almost with tears in his eyes, saying that he had done it for her, that he would face any kind of death for her. It would be Europe, he said, and he wanted to carry her with him in his heart, to give him something to stay alive for. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do except to marry him.

  It was her own fault, her own stupid mistake. She had let her enthusiasm run away with her, and who wouldn’t tell her that she was a fool to marry a man because she thought that afterward she wasn’t going to have to live with him?

  Except that Hal had known he would never get out of the country—he already had his orders that morning when he showed up with his uniform and his aching eyes and made his last appeal. It had all been a lie, from beginning to end.

  Two weeks after they came back from their three-day honeymoon in Connecticut, when she had heard the truth and was busy telling herself that she had no right to resent Hal because he had been assigned to the MPs, when they had moved to Fort Monmouth and she was busy trying to get everything put away in the two-room apartment they had rented in town, she found the letter from the commandant’s office, saying that his application had been approved and giving his posting. The date on the letter was a month back. There wasn’t anything she could say to him—what could she have said?—so she put the letter back into its envelope and tried to forget she had ever seen it.

  But how could she do that? How could she ever do that? So they had spent that first year of the war at Fort Monmouth, not fifty miles from the place where both of them had lived their whole lives. Hal grew a mustache, but otherwise he might just as well never have left the Newark Police.

  Hal. He was a good-looking man, with a dark complexion and black hair and eyes. He was tall and well-built and had been lifting weights ever since his early teens to make the most of it—he could spend half the morning standing in front of a mirror feeling his biceps. When he put on his uniform, he really looked like a soldier.

  And during the entire eighteen months of their marriage, every night his uniform had been carefully hung up in their closet and he had never even missed dinner. Sometimes, while she lay in bed next to him, listening to his slow, even breathing, she thought it just possible she might actually suffocate out of sheer desperation.

  There was a crack in the bedroom ceiling, just over the closet door—the house hadn’t been up longer than five months and already there was a crack in the ceiling. She sat there now, watching it, expecting it to widen in front of her eyes. Half hoping that it would. The house might split open, like the skin on an apple, and then she could get out. And then she. . .

  But she was only being stupid again. She was always being stupid—it was a trait that seemed destined to decide the whole pattern of her life.

  Marrying Hal was supposed to have been a gesture, you see. It hadn’t been something she had thought through very carefully—that was obvious enough by now, even to her—but she had seen it as in some sense a contribution to the war effort. The idea, on some level or other, had been that she would sacrifice herself, her private reluctance—after all, Hal might have been sacrificing his life. But it hadn’t turned out that way. This wasn’t the war she had signed on for.

  Nobody even seemed to know what they were doing here. Not even Hal. One gathered there was some sort of top-secret research program up on the mesa, but they could be up there making mud pies for all anybody really knew for sure. And a military detachment of some two or three hundred men had been assigned as baby sitters. There was almost no contact between the military base and the others, the ones who were involved in what was called simply “the Project,” but it must have been the same for them too. All those hundreds and hundreds of people, sitting out here in the middle of the New Mexico desert—the battles in Italy and the Pacific were just things you read about in the newspapers.

  Hal would be endlessly mysterious on the subject of the Project. He didn’t have any idea what it was either, but its importance—and therefore, indirectly, his own—was something he accepted as an article of faith.

  “It,” he had on the highest authority (probably no higher than the scuttlebutt in the sergeants’ mess), was going to win the war all by itself. “It” was just something he needed to believe in, so that no one could criticize him for being here rather than at Anzio.

  It was impossible to believe that anything that happened here was going to make any difference in the history of the world. They were both of them just wearing away their lives. Los Alamos was just a pointless suspension, something they had to get through and then try to forget about as quickly as they could. It was just a place they happened to be, where they could allow themselves the luxury of not thinking about what would come next.

  Jenny Springer pressed her hands down against the mattress, forcing herself to remember that her friends would be by to pick her up in less than half an hour, that she was driving into Santa Fe for the afternoon, that she had better step on it or she would hold everybody up and ruin the one day a week that held the promise of escape.

  She got up and took the brush and comb from the top of the dresser and began working on her hair, which fortunately never took very much work. She brushed it straight back over her ears, and it was a color somewhere between brown and blond that didn’t need to be washed every day. Water was scarce at Los Alamos, and even shampoo was something of a luxury item, unavailable at the PX, sometimes for weeks at a time, and not easy to find even in Santa Fe.

  And she had to wear her hair short to make her face seem fuller. All her life she had envied girls with long hair—she had even tried it once, but it only made her look like Wanda the Witch. Even now, as she combed out the ends and studied herself in the mirror, she was conscious that she had started losing weight again. Her brown eyes were getting so large that she looked like a startled child. It happened every time she had something to worry her; she began forgetting about food and thinning away to nothing. You didn’t get to be a beauty queen that way.

  And that was just one more thing to worry about. It was like a merry-go-round you couldn’t get off.

  She would wear her brown wool suit and the tan coat. She always wore her brown wool suit and the tan coat on her Saturdays in Santa Fe, simply because there wasn’t anything else. In another three or four months, when Hal got his furlough and they could get home to New Jersey for a week or two, she would gather up the rest of her winter clothes. But by then, of course, the cold weather would be over, and by April she would be back to fighting the snakes and the Gila monsters for the little patch of shade provided by the canvas awning over her back door. Probably by then it wouldn’t seem worth the effort anymore.

  It was just ten minutes before eleven when she heard the car horn sounding—one short little squeal so as not to wake the neighbors’ children. It was time to go.

  The ride down into town was pleasant enough—five women in a car with the windows rolled up could at least keep themselves warm—and, before they split up and went their separate directions, they all had lunch together at a tiny Mexican restaurant about three blocks from Palace Street. The tablecloths were like horse blankets and the single ceiling fan creaked like a rusted hinge, but it was cheap and the food wasn’t bad. Mindy Applewhite spent the whole meal talking about her husband’s probable promotion to T -5.

  Outside, where the sidewalks had been scraped clean of ice, the sunshine was bright enough to make your eyes tear. Wilma Bragg, who was thirty-seven and the wife of a second lieutenant who had been promoted up through the ranks too slowly ever to have made the social transition from enlisted to commissioned, took Jenny by the elbow and began guiding her toward the center of town. As if by prearrangement, the others had all scattered up and down the various side streets, but Wilma, it seemed, wasn’t averse to a little company.

  “I don’t know why we come down here,” she said brightly, smiling like a milkmaid. “You can see everything there is in Santa Fe inside o
f forty-five minutes. I’ve been looking for a pair of size nine elastic-sided rain shoes for Pauley ever since we got here and I’m not even getting warm. You have anything special on today, dearie?”

  Jenny laughed, perhaps a trifle nervously, and shook her head. She liked Wilma Bragg.

  “No, I’ll probably end up going to the movies. I saw in the paper that they’re playing Springtime in the Rockies, and at least the theater will be warm.”

  “Betty Grable in the middle of the afternoon—oh God, no, not for me! Are you sure you wouldn’t rather come and help me inspect the rubber dish drainers?”

  “I’m sure,” she answered, still smiling. “What time do we meet to drive back?”

  “I should think four would be soon enough. Why? Impatient to get back to the nest?”

  It was only a joke—after all, what did Wilma Bragg know about her domestic troubles? But Jenny thought of the sullen, silent dinner she and Hal would eat at their general-issue composition board kitchen table, and her heart seemed to go cold within her.

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “Well, then, figure on four. That is, if Mindy doesn’t take all night at the hairdresser’s again—imagine such a silly waste of time and money, and in the middle of a war. . .”

  It was after one-thirty before Jenny finally got away by herself, which was all she had wanted from the beginning. And she had never intended to go anywhere near Springtime in the Rockies, but one had to tell Wilma Bragg something. Springtime in the Rockies would keep—movies were the principal staple of entertainment at the base, with screenings two or three times a week, and Hal was a fan. So it was a pretty safe bet that Betty Grable would have her chance.