“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
“On the day I learned that I was to direct the project which ultimately produced the atomic bomb, I was probably the angriest officer in the United States Army.”
—General Leslie R. Groves
“We came to recognize that this substance [plutonium], which up to then one had never seen except through its radioactivity, would be fissile. This conclusion was soon to lead to a preposterous dream: by means of a neutron reactor such as never before existed, manufacture kilograms of an element never before seen on earth.”
—John A. Wheeler
“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 answe
red, 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 gl
owing 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.”
The Trinity Paradox Page 24
