Los Alamos

by Joseph Kanon

  “But what—what should I do?” Connolly said, his voice still urgent and unsteady.

  “Do? There’s nothing to do.” Eisler looked at him, then moved over to the table. “We must go to the infirmary. But first, you will permit me? One note.”

  Connolly watched, hypnotized, as Eisler wrote on a sheet of paper. So fast, a simple flash. What if he died? Radiation poisoning was a grisly, painful death. Everyone knew that. But nobody knew anything. Minutes ago he had been hurrying through the rain. Just a flash, like a bullet in combat. Here, as far away from the war as anyone could get.

  “May I ask,” Eisler said, “why you came here?”

  “Weber sent me. To remind you. The Beethoven.”

  “Ah, the Beethoven,” he said wistfully. “He will have to wait, I’m afraid. We must get you to a doctor. Right now.” As he moved forward, Connolly involuntarily stepped back. “No, don’t worry, it’s not contagious. I am not myself radioactive. It doesn’t work that way.”

  Connolly flushed. “Sorry.” And then, embarrassed that it had not occurred to him before, “But what about you? Are you all right?”

  Eisler shook his head gravely, but his voice had the tone of a wry smile. “No, Mr. Connolly, for me it’s fatal. It’s in the numbers, you see,” he said, pointing to the board. “The numbers don’t lie.”

  They lay side by side on the small infirmary examination tables as nurses drew blood samples and the doctor ran tests that, incongruously, reminded him of an annual physical.

  “Is there anything wrong with me?” Connolly said. “I don’t feel anything.”

  “We’ll just keep you overnight to be sure,” the doctor said. Then, to Eisler, “How long did you say he was exposed?”

  “A second. Two. Three. It was not significant. There have been worse cases,” Eisler replied, but he was looking at Connolly, reassuring him. “They don’t know, you see,” he said gently. “They put you under observation, but what can they observe? So now we are to be roommates.”

  “Just for the night,” the doctor said. “Just to be sure.” But he meant Connolly. The questions, the light reassurances, were directed to him. Eisler, lying quietly in his hospital smock, would not be expected to leave. He was dying.

  Connolly knew it when Oppenheimer arrived. Eisler had busied himself sending apologies to Weber, politely teasing the doctor, making small jokes to Connolly about the makeshift hospital, so that it all seemed no more unpleasant than an interrupted seminar. Then Oppenheimer came into the room, his porkpie hat dripping with rain, and Connolly saw his pale face, the bright, quick eyes for once still and afraid.

  “Robert,” Eisler said softly.

  Oppenheimer looked at him, a silent exchange, then took off his hat.

  “I came as soon as I heard,” he said, his eyes never leaving Eisler.

  “I’m sorry, Robert.”

  “Friedrich.” He came over and took Eisler’s hand. The gesture surprised Connolly. It was something new in Oppenheimer. He had seen frustration, even a kind of haunted wisdom. He’d never seen simple affection. “We’ll have you moved to Albuquerque,” Oppenheimer said, falling back on authority.

  Eisler smiled. “Albuquerque? And leave the project? What could they do in Albuquerque? Here is fine. I’ll have it all to myself. Mr. Connolly here will be leaving tomorrow—he’s quite all right.”

  Oppenheimer took him in for the first time. “What the devil were you doing there?” he said quickly, and it occurred to Connolly that it might have been his fault, the interruption.

  “Robert, Robert,” Eisler said soothingly. “You blame the messenger. It was nothing to do with him. An accident. Stupid. My own stupidity.”

  “Are you all right?” Oppenheimer said to Connolly, an apology.

  Connolly nodded. “I guess so.”

  “How did it happen?” He turned back to Eisler.

  “The dragon. It went critical. You can see the notes.”

  “I told you—”

  “Yes, yes, a thousand times.”

  “How long was the exposure?”

  “Long enough.”

  “My God, Friedrich.” Oppenheimer took his hand again, disconcerted, and Connolly felt the impulse to turn away, his face to the wall.

  “It’s a risk, Robert, that’s all. You don’t take risks? Every day? How else can we go forward?”

  “It was foolish.”

  “Perhaps. But now there’s much to be done. We have the moment now. We need to calculate—”

  But Oppenheimer had got up and was nervously lighting a cigarette, glancing toward the open door.

  “Robert, a hospital—”

  “It’s my hospital,” Oppenheimer snapped, drawing some smoke. He turned back. “It’s over, Friedrich,” he said quietly. “I can’t allow it.”

  “Allow? I’m not dead. The effects aren’t immediate, you know. There will be a week. Maybe two. I can still—”

  “I’m asking you to stay here. Or Albuquerque.”

  Eisler looked up at him to protest, then, seeing his face, settled back on his pillow. “Under observation.”

  “Yes,” Oppenheimer said reluctantly, “under observation.”

  Eisler was quiet for a minute. “So I am to be the guinea pig.”

  “Friedrich—”

  “No. Of course you are right. I myself should have thought of this. Each day we observe and then, in the end, we go a little forward. But you will allow me to help organize it, the experiment?”

  “Friedrich.”

  “No, no, please. We are not sentimentalists. It’s important to know. We can observe the elements break down—how the body reacts.”

  Oppenheimer walked over to the sink and doused his cigarette under the faucet. “I’m not asking you to—”

  “No, not you. I volunteer. It’s my idea. My wish. For the project.” Eisler’s voice was clear, eager. “It seems fair it should be me.”

  Connolly looked over at him, puzzled, but there seemed no irony in his voice. He was back at the blackboard, going about his business, getting ready to keep the chart on his own death.

  Oppenheimer turned away from the sink, and Connolly saw that his eyes were moist. “Is there anything I can get for you?”

  Eisler thought for a minute. “You have morphine? For later? I’ll need that, I think. I’m a coward when it comes to that. And there’s nothing to learn then. Just the pain.”

  “Of course,” Oppenheimer said, almost a whisper.

  “Nothing to learn,” Eisler repeated.

  The nurse drew a screen between them at night, white cotton stretched on a wheeled frame, but Connolly couldn’t sleep. He had never been in a hospital before and it unnerved him—the constant light in the hall, the discreet sound of rubber soles in the corridor, even, once, the faint smell of night-shift coffee. But Eisler was quiet behind his screen, so Connolly was forced to lie still as well, listening to occasional bursts of rain on the asphalt shingles of the roof. He would drift into a kind of half-sleep, then find himself peering at the shadows on the ceiling, his mind moving from one to the other, making pictures, until he no longer knew when he was awake.

  He saw Eisler bending over the lab table, then Emma biting her bottom lip, then, oddly, his friend Lenny Keazer, who had been killed in New Guinea. Shot down. Connolly wondered whether he’d seen anything more than a flash before the plane tipped. He had never imagined dying before. Now he saw that it was being nothing. And everything else just went on. Lenny didn’t know whether they’d won or—But what was the point? It wouldn’t matter if you weren’t there. Karl found his secret and then it didn’t matter. And Eisler, who’d said his war was over. Then Connolly was back on his street in Washington, home that afternoon, with the bay window of the little room open to the spring air. Magnolia trees. And he leaned out to see the brown army car move slowly down the street, looking for house numbers. Was anyone else looking out, holding a crack open in the curtains? A soldier got out across the street, carrying an envelope, and walked up th
e steps to the house, and the next thing Connolly heard was a scream, a long wail that tore the air. A sound from the ancients, a lamentation. He watched the soldier get back in the car and drive away. Then a truck drove down the street, the paper boy on his rounds, another car, and everything went on. That had been the afternoon he thought he had seen the war, the brown car going down one street after another. It would be worth anything to end that. A quick flash and it would stop, the Japanese, finally, startled out of their mad reverie. A hundred to save a thousand. A new kind of mathematics. Did Oppenheimer think of it that way?

  The rain woke him, a little spurt of gunfire, and he heard Eisler breathing. The fancies of the night. The ceiling was dark, like the blackboard, and he filled it with chalk marks. So many minutes, so many meters. Eisler had saved his life, then calmly gone about his business. Connolly had been the surprise. He closed his eyes, looking at the lab again, the steady hand on the cube, the cool dispassion of science. He watched Eisler bend over, carefully inching the metal down, and suddenly he knew what was bothering him, all this fitful dreaming. There hadn’t been any accident. He had been the accident, quickly corrected. The cube had been deliberate. It had done just what Eisler had wanted it to do. Not an accident. He heard him tell Oppenheimer, an easy lie. He wanted to be nothing.

  Connolly turned toward the screen, his whole body awake now, and listened. The breathing was light, barely audible, not the heavy patterned rhythm of sleep.

  “Professor Eisler,” he said quietly.

  “Mr. Connolly?” Eisler’s voice was alert, politely surprised.

  “When you said before that it was fair it was you, what did you mean?”

  Eisler did not answer right away. When he did, his tone was interested, as if the phrase intrigued him. “Did I say that? I don’t remember. You must have—what is the sound equivalent of a photographic memory?” The question, disembodied, seemed to rise in the dark. Connolly stared at the ceiling, waiting for it to float over the screen. He said nothing. “I suppose I meant that one of us should feel—what? The effect of what we’re doing here. Yes, you might put it that way.”

  “Won’t people be killed outright? Like an ordinary bomb?”

  “Most, yes. But there will be others. We just don’t know.”

  “But why you?”

  Eisler was quiet for a minute. “I can’t say, Mr. Connolly. Some things even I can’t answer.” He paused. Then, more lightly, “Maybe you will tell me. You must use your Oppenheimer Principle—your leap in the dark. On the map. How is your other problem coming along?”

  Connolly felt he was being diverted. His ear searched for nuance in an idle phrase. But clearly Eisler wished to be left alone with his demons. “Not very well,” he said, playing along.

  “Ah,” Eisler said. “But you will get there, I’m sure. The elegant solution. Yes, I think so. But now—you don’t mind?—a little sleep.”

  Connolly said nothing, and after a while the breathing deepened and he fell in with it, so that he wondered whether they’d talked at all or whether he’d been having a conversation with the dark.

  * * *

  The next morning brought a flood of visitors. Weber was there early, fluttering, then a graver Fermi, then Bethe and what seemed to be all of Bathtub Row. They nodded politely to Connolly or ignored him, drawn to Eisler with an embarrassed mix of concern and prurient curiosity, like people at a highway accident. No one stayed long, and no one talked about the radiation. Once in the room, good instincts and duty satisfied, they were at a loss, talking around the incident until they could excuse themselves to work. Only Teller asked for details, precise and brisk, a consulting resident brought in for a second opinion. By the time Emma arrived, Connolly was dressed, waiting to be released. She looked at him in surprise, expecting to find him in bed, and her eyes filled with relief. She smiled at him, a broad, involuntary grin, then caught herself and turned to Eisler, the ostensible point of the visit.

  “You too, Mrs. Pawlowski,” Eisler said. “Has everyone heard?”

  “News travels fast,” she said.

  “Bad news.”

  “Well, I don’t think Johanna Weber makes the distinction.”

  Eisler laughed out loud. Connolly realized it was the first time he’d ever heard Eisler laugh, and for a second he was filled with an odd embarrassed pride that it was Emma who could make the joke. It flustered her, however, and she said apologetically, “How are you feeling?”

  “No, don’t be somber,” Eisler said gently. “Everyone here plays the nurse. Tell me the gossip. What else does Frau Weber say?”

  “She’s baking you a cake.”

  “Excellent,” Eisler said, smiling, and Connolly thought again how little he knew anyone. Last night he had spoken to a dead man, and now he saw the eyes were alive and playful, taking delight in a young woman. Had he been like this at Göttingen with Oppenheimer, a world ago?

  They talked, making an awkward joke about angel food, but it was Connolly she had come to see and her eyes kept moving away, sliding over to where he sat on his bed, the night screen now gone. Eisler, courtly in his smock, seemed not to notice, but Mills caught it immediately. He stood in the doorway, looking at them like three points of a triangle, and Connolly could see him putting it together, a theorem proof. He raised an eyebrow at Connolly as he walked in.

  “Lieutenant Mills,” Eisler said. “At last, a visitor for Mr. Connolly. Or have you come to arrest me?”

  “Arrest?” Mills said.

  Eisler leaned forward conspiratorially to Emma. “My parking tickets. We have to give them to him and then he scolds us. What do you do with them?” he said to Mills. “Do you make the apologies?” Then, again to Emma, “But I can’t help it. If the space is straight, I can do it, but to back up for those little slots? It’s too difficult. My driving—” He waved his hand.

  Mills smiled, a little surprised by the party atmosphere. “Parking’s the least of it,” he said to Emma, joining in. “He’s a menace behind the wheel.”

  “Not only there, it seems,” Eisler said smoothly, indicating his presence in the bed.

  No one knew what to say. Connolly felt the air go out of the room. In the awkward silence, Mills turned to him. “You look all right,” he said.

  “I’m just waiting for my walking papers.”

  Eisler, aware that the atmosphere had changed, now looked moodily down at the bed.

  “I’d better be going,” Emma said, getting up. She went over to Eisler and put her hand on his arm. “You’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

  He patted her hand. “No, nothing. Mr. Connolly here will get my few things,” he said, a question to Connolly, who nodded. “It’s absurd. I’m still all right, but now I’m a prisoner here. My jail,” he said, with a nod to the room.

  “Just walk out,” Emma said, sympathetic. “They can’t make you stay.”

  “But where will I go? No, this suits me.”

  “C’mon, Mike,” Mills said, fidgeting, “let’s go fix you up with the doc.”

  “Mr. Connolly,” Eisler said as Emma and Mills headed for the door. “You don’t mind? A few things?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Some clothes. I don’t want to be in bed. I’m not an invalid. Not so soon.”

  “Do you have the key?”

  “The key?” Eisler smiled. “It’s not locked. We never lock things at the project. There’s nothing to steal.”

  “Anything else? Books?”

  “You pick. Do you know German? No. Well, pick anything. And—” He looked up to see if the others had gone.

  “Yes?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind, a Bible, please.” He smiled. “No, not for the angels. I’m a scientist, you know. But I like the stories. So simple. An eye for an eye. Wonderful stories.”

  “I’ll get one.”

  “Of course, the angels,” Eisler said wryly. “Nothing is proven, you know. Not yet.”

  * * *

  Outsi
de, the three of them walked together for a while. Then Mills, with a pointed glance at Connolly, spun off to head for the office.

  “I’m just going to get cleaned up,” Connolly said. “I’ll be over in a bit.”

  “Take your time. I’ll cover,” he said, almost winking. “I’m good at that.” He tipped his head, a little bow, to Emma.

  “He knows,” Connolly said, watching him walk off.

  “I don’t care. I had to come.”

  Connolly smiled. “The reports of my death were greatly exaggerated.”

  “It’s not funny. I was out of my mind with worry. What if—”

  “It didn’t. I’m all right.” He put his hand on her arm, facing her.

  “No, not here.”

  “I thought you didn’t care.”

  “But not like this, not in the open. Oh, I don’t know what I want anymore. More time, I guess. Until I know what to do,” she said, almost to herself. “But you’re all right, that’s the main thing. Now I feel silly. What must Eisler have thought? Charging over there. I hardly know him well enough for that.”

  “I don’t think he noticed. He has other things on his mind.”

  “Poor man,” she said. “He’s the nicest of the lot, too. It’s not fair. All your life and then one slip—”

  “It wasn’t an accident.”

  “What?” she said, stopping.

  “It wasn’t an accident.”

  She stared at him for a minute. “You mean he tried to kill himself?”

  “He did kill himself. He’s just waiting it out.”

  She shivered. “That’s an awful thing to say. How do you know?”

  “I was there.”

  “But why?”

  He shrugged and continued walking. “I don’t know. I don’t know if he knows. It’s all mixed up in his mind. Something about the gadget. He feels guilty about that. I think he sees this as a kind of penance. I don’t know—is there ever a good reason? Can there be?”

  “That’s insane.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, it’s his life. I doubt we’ll ever know.”

  “Funny your saying that. You always want to know everything,” she said, not looking at him.