The Trinity Paradox

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Elizabeth looked up at her from the paper. “No, I don’t think I need you to explain anything.” But the woman had begun her speech now.

  “I know Americans are excited right now with the atomic bombing of Pyongyang, Mukden, and Fushun. Congress didn’t do much debate when General MacArthur asked to use the weapons, and now he is claiming total victory over North Korea and southern Manchuria. President Lodge has formally petitioned the Republic of North Vietnam to adhere to France’s Indochina Occupation Accords or risk the same penalty. MacArthur is calling it his ‘Pax Americana’ and everybody seems happy about the whole situation.”

  Elizabeth, though, had not been happy. When she read of the use of three bombs in Indochina, she had been absolutely horrified.

  “But those weapons,” the protester was saying, “were exact duplicates of the uranium gun-type weapon that we dropped on Peenemunde and Hiroshima six years ago and Moscow last year. In all that time we haven’t improved them at all. No one’s been able to recreate the plutonium bomb they tested down in the desert.”

  Elizabeth cleared her throat, feeling sweat prickle her arms. “I understand that most of the scientists got killed during the first test.”

  She herself had suffered a concussion and two cracked ribs, second-degree burns—all in all, rather minor compared to the others. Eight people had died, including Oppenheimer and General Groves, crouching side by side and watching for an atomic flash they would never see. The explosion had broken both of Fermi’s legs, tossed and smashed Dick Feynman every which way, leaving him crippled. Only Johnnie von Neumann had somehow emerged unscathed. “Probabilities,” he had said in his thick Hungarian accent, “merely probabilities.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she looked up to the framed black-and-white photograph of Feynman in his augmented wheelchair in front of a chalkboard. He had signed it, “For Elizabeth, what a great bang we had!” He had gone back to teaching at Berkeley, working off-hours on his theoretical studies. He still kept in touch with her, trying to get her to join him in California, where she could be his assistant. He claimed the wheelchair and the partial loss of function in his left arm didn’t slow him down at all. “I’m a theoretician, Elizabeth,” he had told her. “I don’t need to do anything.” The only other effect, he said, was that the women on campus now considered him safer.

  She sighed at the thought. Going to work with Feynman again was indeed a tempting offer, but she wanted nothing more to do with any such work. She had left nuclear research once before, vowing never to support the effort. This time she meant it. She had seen once again what it could do.

  “Those warheads are mass-produced at Oak Ridge. Uh, that’s in Tennessee.”

  “I know. I’ve been there,” she snapped, growing annoyed at being reminded of everything.

  The protester’s eyes widened. “Well, if you’ll read this you’ll see what I’ve been getting at. Some scientists have developed proposals to put atomic bombs to peaceful uses. Beating swords into plowshares, as it were.” She laughed a little.

  “We could use atomic explosions to blast canals, to excavate new harbors, to make reservoirs. Down there at the bottom of the page, you’ll also see a description of something called ‘Thunderwells,’ deep pits filled with water under which we would set off an atomic explosion— our calculations show that the shock wave would be enough to launch something into orbit. Americans would be the first to send an object to space!”

  “Wonderful,” said Elizabeth. “If you leave the paper here, I will read it. I promise.”

  The woman appeared defeated, but she bought a small Nambe pot before leaving. Elizabeth told her she could leave some of her leaflets on the counter. She smiled and thanked her before moving down the mall to find someone else.

  Not too many tourists showed up anymore nowadays. Elizabeth rarely thought of her old timeline, but when she did, she remembered that the tourists would flock to the plaza, catch a midday meal at the Bullring and then stop by the galleries before heading up to Los Alamos or Taos.

  But Los Alamos had been shut down for years. Nothing remained but a deserted old Army town, decaying buildings. The Project had done its work, and it could now rest in peace.

  As one of his last official presidential acts, Franklin Roosevelt had used the uranium bomb. The gun-type design did not need to be tested, once the purified uranium-235 had arrived from the Oak Ridge plants. Even without Oppenheimer and Groves to push for its use, Roosevelt had dropped the Bomb on the German island of Peenemunde, where the Nazis had developed the radioactive-dust missiles that had made New York uninhabitable.

  President-elect Dewey had engaged in an enthusiastic propaganda campaign, dropping millions of leaflets in German cities, showing photographs of the death and devastation of both New York and Peenemunde, with a caption urging the people “Don’t Let This Go On!”

  Dewey had announced a list of German cities to be obliterated if the Nazis did not surrender immediately. His first act as the new U.S. President would be to annihilate Berlin if Hitler did not surrender unconditionally. Frightened more by the unknown actions of a new President, Hitler surrendered on the day Dewey took his oath of office. He had then killed himself with a poison capsule before the Allies could begin carving up his Reich….

  Current events always frightened Elizabeth. She rarely looked at the newspapers at all anymore, because she had lost track of what had already happened, and what might still come. She felt responsible for every disaster she read about.

  Had she done something to trigger all this? What would have happened if she had assassinated Oppenheimer? Was the world better now or worse? Or just different?

  For a while she had dabbled in the stock market, investing in television manufacturers, in John von Neumann’s company that produced “computing machines”—but the world economy had changed enormously, and she had no particular edge over anyone else. It was like what had happened to her eyesight—though she stared straight at something, she still could not see.

  After opening her art gallery, exhibiting the work of local Indian artists, she had decided just to live her life and let the world go on by itself. History had chosen a different path, and it had to proceed where it would go, without any help, or interference, from her.

  She would watch the future happen, while she lived in the past. Do what you have to do. If things got too bad, she would have to step in again and try to change things. And damn the consequences. For someone.

  Afterword

  THE TRINITY PARADOX ORIGINS

  Doug Beason

  I think it was Kevin who came up with the idea of writing an alternate history of the Manhattan project. And it all seemed natural at the time, the thing everyone expected us to do. After all, we’d met back in ’85 at a nuclear weapons laboratory, and we’d both had experience at Los Alamos National Laboratory—birthplace of the atomic bomb—and we’d both been out to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site: Kevin as a technical writer, and myself as a researcher.

  Writing Trinity was not only personally and professionally interesting for us, but it made extensive use of our training and education. In fact this had become somewhat of a trademark for us: we both knew and understood our writing because we were not only active in the field, but we were publishing and making technical advances in it as well. This became an attribute of our collaborations: inserting real life experience and knowledge into our work. Other projects, such as our short story “Reflections in a Magnetic Mirror,” and novels such as Ill Wind, Ignition, Lifeline, the Nebula-nominated Assemblers of Infinity, and the Craig Kreident SF-mystery series (Virtual Destruction, Fallout, and Lethal Exposure), all made use of our scientific backgrounds.

  What made writing Trinity even more exhilarating was that Kevin was a fanatic for historical detail, and as a computational physicist, I was fascinated by the science pioneered at war-time Los Alamos. I had performed my PhD thesis on the Los Alamos supercomputers, and Kevin had orchestrated some complex technical publications at the
lab, as well as spent weekends touring the once highly secretive complex, and hiking throughout Bandelier National Park and the Anasazi ruins.

  Writing Trinity started as a typical brainstorming session for us. We were eating either pizza or grilling steaks—a great way to fuel the creative juices—and whoever wasn’t cooking was taking notes. The concept grew into about five pages when we decided to start chopping it up logically and laying out the different plot lines.

  The idea was that an extremely bright, and blindingly passionate female anti-nuclear protestor would somehow be transported back to the origins of the Manhattan project, in the middle of wartime America. This allowed us to explore the question of whether her foreknowledge of history would change the outcome of inventing the bomb… or WWII? And would her views change when she was suddenly immersed in this frantic, all-out effort to save 1940s America?

  Writing the novel was one of the most fun collaborative experiences I’ve had. For example, one morning we wrote synopsis of major scenes onto sheets of paper. That afternoon (after a hike up the Sandia mountains in Albuquerque) Kevin and I laid the paper all over my living room floor, rearranging them while we mapped out the plot. My wife kept our toddlers out of the way while Kevin and I unscrambled plot lines, added and subtracted chapters, and finally achieved a holistic, visual view of the novel.

  The story naturally divided itself along two lines: the German nuclear effort, and the US/UK Los Alamos secret program to produce the “device” (what the atomic bomb was called at the time).

  Kevin and I divided the writing duties equitably. “You take that character and I’ll take this one.” Or, “I’ll write this chapter if you want to write the next one.” After the first draft was finished, whoever wanted to take the first cut at re-writing the entire novel had carte-blanche to change anything he wanted—words, sentences, scenes, structure, plot, whatever. And that, I think, was the strength of our collaboration. It was like taking our own work (but yet weirdly different because we had not written all of it) and rewriting it as our own. It took awhile to get into this mode of editing, but that gave the novel a single voice, and gave us the freedom to produce something that was much greater than simply slapping two pieces of disparate text together.

  For this collaboration, the process of figuring out “who wrote what” fell naturally along our areas of interest. Kevin may not have literally jumped up and shouted that he wanted to write the German part of the novel, but he did everything but that. And I assume that I did the same for writing the US part. One anecdote I fondly remember was about the innovative way that we fictionally killed off Edward Teller, father of the H-Bomb. I actually truly admired Dr. Teller, and years later, he nodded his head in amusement when I told him I’d committed literary homicide in Kevin and my critically acclaimed book.

  The Trinity Paradox was a culmination of our diverse experiences, a fusion of mutual interests. At the time we wrote the novel, it had been fifty years since the Manhattan project had occurred when we wrote Trinity in 1991, and that monumental event was quickly fading from memory. By contrast today, the Beatles first appeared on the international scene some fifty years ago, and look at how many people are still swept up by that creative explosion… equivalent in cultural change, if not in energetic force, to the impact made by wartime Los Alamos. We just wanted to ensure that perspective was not forgotten.

  Look for these and other digital works by Kevin J. Anderson:

  RESURRECTION, INC.

  In the future, the dead walk the streets—Resurrection, Inc. found a profitable way to do it. A microprocessor brain, synthetic heart, artificial blood, and a fresh corpse can return as a Servant for anyone with the price. Trained to obey any command, Servants have no minds of their own, no memories of their past lives.

  Supposedly.

  Then came Danal. He was murdered, a sacrifice from the ever-growing cult of neo-Satanists who sought heaven in the depths of hell. But as a Servant, Danal began to remember. He learned who had killed him, who he was, and what Resurrection, Inc. had in mind for the human race.

  CLIMBING OLYMPUS

  They were prisoners, exiles, pawns of a corrupt government. Now they are Dr. Rachel Dycek’s adin, surgically transformed beings who can survive new lives on the surface of Mars. But they are still exiles, unable ever again to breathe Earth’s air. And they are still pawns.

  For the adin exist to terraform Mars for human colonists, not for themselves. Creating a new Earth, they will destroy their world, killed by their own success. Desperate, adin leader Boris Tiban launches a suicide campaign to sabotage the Mars Project, knowing his people will perish in a glorious, doomed campaign of mayhem—unless embattled, bitter Rachel Dycek can find a miracle to save both the Mars Project and the race she created.

  “Drumbeats”

  A chilling story cowritten with Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart. A rock drummer bicycling through the African wilderness encounters a village that makes very special drums. This one will make your heart skip a beat.

  BLINDFOLD

  Atlas is a struggling colony on an untamable world, a fragile society held together by the Truthsayers. Parentless, trained from birth as the sole users of Veritas, a telepathy virus that lets them read the souls of the guilty. Truthsayers are Justice—infallible, beyond appeal.

  But sometimes they are wrong.

  Falsely accused of murder, Troy Boren trusts the young Truthsayer Kalliana… until, impossibly, she convicts him. Still shaken from a previous reading, Kalliana doesn’t realize her power is fading. But soon the evidence becomes impossible to ignore. The Truthsayers’ Veritas has been diluted and someone in the colony is selling smuggled telepathy. Justice isn’t blind—it’s been blinded.

  From an immortal’s orbital prison to the buried secrets of a regal fortress, Kalliana and Troy seek the conspiracy that threatens to destroy their world from within. For without truth and justice, Atlas will certainly fall….

  GAMEARTH—Book 1 of the Gamearth Trilogy

  It was supposed to be just another Sunday night fantasy role-playing game for David, Tyrone, Scott, and Melanie. But after years of playing, the game had become so real that all their creations—humans, sorcerers, dragons, ogres, panther-folk, cyclops—now had existences of their own. And when the four outside players decide to end their game, the characters inside the world of Gamearth—warriors, scholars, and the few remaining wielders of magic—band together to keep their land from vanishing. Now they must embark on a desperate quest for their own magic—magic that can twist the Rules enough to save them all from the evil that the players created to destroy their entire world.

  GAMEPLAY—Book 2 of the Gamearth Trilogy

  The Gamearth Trilogy continues. It was written in the Rules—Save the World! Over the past two years, a group of four players had given so much to their role-playing world that it had developed a magic of its own. The creatures, warriors, sorcerers, thieves—all had come alive. And now there is an odd connection between the gamers and their characters, splitting into factions to determine the fate of the Game itself and both the inside and the outside worlds.

  GAME’S END—Book 3 of the Gamearth Trilogy

  The finale to the Gamearth Trilogy. It’s all-out war between the players and characters in a role-playing game that has taken on a life of its own. The fighter Delrael, the sorcerer Bryl, as well as famed scientists Verne and Frankenstein, use every trick in the Book of Rules to keep the world of Gamearth intact while the outside group of players does everything possible to destroy it.

  Digital works by Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason:

  ASSEMBLERS OF INFINITY

  Nebula Award Nominee. The crew of Moonbase Columbus make an amazing discovery on the far side of the Moon—a massive alien structure is erecting itself, built up atom by atom by living machines, microscopically small, intelligent, and unstoppable, consuming everything they touch. The mysterious structure begins to expand and take shape, and its creators begin to multiply.

&nbs
p; Is this the first strike in an alien invasion from the stars? Or has human nanotechnology experimentation gone awry, triggering an unexpected infestation? As riots rage across a panicked Earth, scientists scramble to learn the truth before humanity’s home is engulfed by the voracious machines.

  ILL WIND

  A supertanker crashes into the Golden Gate Bridge, spilling oil. Desperate to avert environmental & PR disaster, the oil company uses an oil-eating microbe to break up the spill. But the microbe, becomes airborne… and mutates to consume petrocarbons: oil, gas, synthetic fabrics, plastics. When all plastic begins to dissolve, it’s too late…

  IGNITION

  NASA—you have a problem. In this high-tech action adventure from Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason, terrorists seize control of the Kennedy Space Center and hold the shuttle Atlantis and its crew hostage on the launchpad. But astronaut “Iceberg” Friese, grounded from the mission because of a broken foot, is determined to slip through the swamps and rocket facilities around Cape Canaveral and pull the plug on the terrorists. With their years of experience in the field, Anderson and Beason have packed Ignition with insider information to create an extremely plausible, action-packed thriller.

  VIRTUAL DESTRUCTION—Craig Kreident #1

  At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California—one of the nation’s premier nuclear-weapons design facilities—high-level physicists operate within heavy security to model and test new warhead designs. But politics can be just as dangerous as the weapons they design, and with gigantic budgets on the line, scientific egos, and personality clashes, research can turn deadly.

  When a prominent and abrasive nuclear-weapons researcher is murdered inside a Top Security zone, FBI investigator Craig Kreident is brought in on the case—but his FBI security clearance isn’t the same as a Department of Energy or Department of Defense clearance, and many of the clues are “sanitized” before he arrives. Kreident finds that dealing with red tape and political in-fighting might be more difficult than solving a murder.