Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  Which didn’t clear things up much for Sean. Police cordons in Oxford were suddenly looking very appealing.

  “Los Alamos, New Mexico,” Sullivan said. “July 17th 1945”

  “The nuclear testing site?” Sean enquired.

  “No,” Sullivan said with a rueful smile, “but a very common mistake. Los Alamos was the home of the research team. The test was carried out south of Socorrow on July 16th.”

  “You said the 17th,” Sean pointed out.

  “The test was on the 16th, south of Socorrow,” Sullivan said, a little irritably. “I showed up at Los Alamos on the 17th, the day after the test. Understand?”

  “Yes,” Sean confirmed, hiding his own irritation.

  “This will go a lot faster if you let me do the talking and don’t interrupt so much.”

  “All right,” Sean agreed, stifling the desire to point out that it would also go a lot quicker if the man didn’t waffle around so much and got to the point.

  “All right,” Sullivan repeated, mollified. “It was an odd time to be there. I mean, they’d just tested the most destructive bomb ever made and it had worked. There was a lot of excitement, you know, real satisfaction that they’d actually achieved something that was going to help the war effort, that they had contributed. But there were some, just a few, who got it. You could tell them from their eyes. They were troubled, troubled people. I think they were the smart ones. They saw what was coming and knew that they weren’t ever going to be able to forget that they had a part in it.”

  “You were part of the Manhattan Project?” Sean was amazed at the prospect of speaking to someone who had worked on such a historically important project.

  “Me? No,” Sullivan denied immediately. “I just said that I arrived in Los Alamos the day after the Trinity test. No, I was a wet-behind-the-ears private straight out of basic training. My folks, my uncle really, were rich people with some pull in Washington and I found myself assigned as an assistant to one Major-General Clanton Weatherby. I’m not proud of that, I admit, but I was young and naïve and thought that I was serving my country. Whilst my draft buddies were shipped off to the Pacific, I was shipped off to New Mexico. I sometimes wonder which of us got it worse.”

  “Now Weatherby was every bit as formidable as his name suggests. It might even have been his real name, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter because you won’t find any record of the man, but he was real enough and just about the most powerful man in the world.”

  “What?” Sean couldn’t stop himself from asking.

  “We’ll come to it,” the old man gestured for him to be patient. “We’ll get there.”

  “I met the man in Los Alamos the day after the Trinity test. I was marched right up to him by the Colonel in charge of the Laboratory’s military presence. And there were a lot of soldiers there, I can tell you. Anyway, this Colonel marches me right up to Weatherby, who’s not even in uniform, and salutes. What am I gonna do? If a Colonel’s saluting this guy, then I’m going to do the same thing.”

  “‘Here’s your boy, Clanton,’ says the Colonel. Weatherby, well he looks me up and down for all of about three seconds and says, ‘You’re hired’. That was the entire interview process. Well that and the fact that virtually every person I ever spoke to in my entire life had been thoroughly vetted in secret. I found out later that there were three replacements standing by in case he didn’t take to me. I don’t know that he did take to me, really. He wasn’t big on sharing his feelings, that one. About the only instructions he gave me were ‘From this moment on, everything that you hear me say, everything that you hear someone say to me and everything you hear anyone say in my presence you will forget immediately. Understand?’”

  “Well, I did understand and I haven’t spoken a word of this until now.”

  “Why now?” Sean asked, understandably curious.

  “Because I’m dying,” Sullivan told him.

  There was something about the undramatic way in which he said that convinced Sean he was telling the truth, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m old,” Sullivan said with a shrug that was not quite as nonchalant as he would have liked it to be. “When you’re old, things just stop working.”

  “How long?”

  “They’re measuring it in weeks now. That’s why I’m here. It’s time to give this up and spend what time I have left in Utah, spoiling the great grandkids beyond their parents’ wildest fears.”

  “But why here?” Sean queried. “If your family are in Utah...”

  “This would never get out in the US. Here, well maybe not even here, but then one chance in a million is better than no chance at all,” Sullivan suggested. “Now, where was I?”

  “Not getting any instructions,” Sean reminded him.

  “That’s right,” Sullivan said with a sly glint in his eye.

  “Were you just testing me, to see if I was paying attention?” Sean demanded.

  “No point in going on if you’re not,” Sullivan said, “but you were, so what’s the problem?”

  “I’m not at school and you’re not my personal tutor,” Sean told him firmly.

  “Well good for you, son,” Sullivan congratulated in a manner that made him feel just like a kid at school who had answered a tough maths question. Maybe Sullivan could have been his tutor. “Do you want to hear the rest of it?”

  “Be a bit of a waste of time if I didn’t now, wouldn’t it?” Sean replied and hated how petulant it sounded.

  “July 30th 1945,” Sullivan continued, giving no outward sign of what he thought of Sean’s reply. “Washington DC. The White House, in fact.”

  “You were in the Oval Office with the President?” Sean was impressed, even if he was entirely sure he believed his guest.

  “Not the Oval Office, no,” Sullivan denied. “There was a war on and have you any idea how many windows that room has? Let me see. At a rough estimate, too damned many, that’s how many. Just seeing who was in the room with the President might have been enough to give the enemy clues as to what was being discussed. The serious business of planning the fighting was done down in the War Room. ‘The Situation Room’ is the euphemism I think they use now.

  “I was only there once, but the President was there, yes. All of the highest of high-ranking brass were there. The subject was that important. We had a working atomic bomb now and the decision was how to use it.”

  “We know how that conversation went,” Sean said.

  “No you don’t,” Sullivan disagreed. “You know the outcome, but not how they got to it. The conversation went back and forth and back and forth and it got pretty heated at times, I can tell you. There were moments when I thought the MPs were gonna have to step in and separate some of those officers. It was the first time I’d seen the High Command in action and I was pretty terrified. I’d been in the job for only a couple of weeks, remember, and I’d always assumed that the men at the top knew what they were doing. That was how they got the stars they wore, after all. It turns out they did all know what they were doing, but what they were doing wasn’t always the same thing.”

  “Weatherby sat in a chair in the corner of the room and said nothing. I believe that some of the others genuinely forgot he was there. I was standing right behind him, doing my damnedest to merge into the wall and not be noticed by all these great and powerful men.”

  “The President wanted to carry out a demonstration bombing on an island somewhere…”

  “What?” Sean interrupted immediately. This was not something he had ever heard before. It was true that he was not an expert on the subject, in fact he knew very little about it at all, but what little he did know did not fit with what he had just heard.

  “Harry S Truman was a good man,” Sullivan took the diversion in his storytelling stride, almost as though he had been expecting it. “He could be a sonofabitch for sure, but then you don’t get to be President by being a fluffy bunny. No, he was essentially a decent man. He didn’t want to drop the biggest bomb
ever known onto a bunch of civilians. He had some sympathy for dropping it on the Emperor’s headquarters and wiping out the whole Japanese command structure in one blow, but we’ve seen what happens when you leave an occupied country without its own internal leaders, haven’t we?”

  “We’d been moving on Japan for some time by this point, and we’d been firebombing their cities regularly. Those bombings had been preceded by leaflet drops urging them to get the hell out of Dodge and urge their government to surrender. Seeing an island suddenly vaporised off the coast could have been a hell of a lot more persuasive than dropping a plane load of leaflets. It was about shock and awe. It was about creating the greatest fear whilst killing the fewest innocents. That’s what civilised countries do and back then we were still civilised. Why would we suddenly change from doing all that and drop all hell on a city without a single warning? Why such a hell of a shift of tactics all at once? Does that make any sense to you?”

  Sean felt like saying that nothing about dropping a nuclear weapon made sense to him, but instead asked, “So, why did they?”

  “They didn’t,” Sullivan revealed. “Weatherby did. He’d let the debate go on for about an hour and nobody was getting anywhere. They weren’t going to be making a decision in a week, let alone that evening. Eventually, he just stood up and walked into the middle of the room. He still didn’t say anything, but everyone else just fell silent and looked at him. He had their entire attention and he didn’t waste it. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘the bomb will be dropped as soon as the 393rd are ready and the target is Hiroshima.’”

  “And that was the end of the discussion. It was the single most effective display of naked power that I have ever seen and it bothered the hell out of me. Weatherby saw that it bothered me. Maybe it was because I was so quiet on the ride back to the barracks we were bunking in whilst in DC, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, he saw that was I concerned and he called me on it; wanted to know what the problem was.”

  “Weatherby wasn’t the kind of man who took kindly to diplomacy. If he asked a question, he wanted an answer, and he wanted the truthful answer, not someone telling him what they thought he wanted to hear. I saw a few people busted down to private for trying to tell him what they thought he wanted to hear. I may have only been in the job for two weeks, but I’d learned enough not to make that mistake, so I told him straight, ‘That was the President of the United States of America and you just told him what to do.’”

  “He just nodded his head and agreed with me. ‘I did’. He said it like it was nothing at all. ‘I did’. Just like that. I admit that the way he said it made me more than a little angry or I would never have said what I said to him.”

  “What was that?” Sean asked, fascinated.

  “I said, ‘You just gave the President an order. My President. This is a democracy and that isn’t how democracy works. The people vote for the President and the President leads the people. I don’t recall anyone voting for you. That’s not how democracy works.’. And you know what he answered back?”

  “No, I don’t,” Sean admitted.

  “He said, in that same damned unconcerned tone, ‘No, it’s not’.”

  Sullivan paused, lost in the memory for a few seconds before he carried on with his story. “I only ever saw Weatherby lose his cool once and that was on August 7th 1945, the day after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The effects of the bomb were being analysed and those who were not appalled by them were impressed. Weatherby was neither. I recall him nearly screaming down the phone at someone at the Los Alamos Laboratory. It might have been Oppenheimer himself. Whoever it was, they got a tongue-lashing the likes of which I would never want to see again, let alone be on the receiving end of.

  “‘It fizzled?’ he was shouting. I guess that whoever was on the other end of that phone call had chosen his words poorly. ‘It fizzled? I was promised destruction on a much larger scale. I was promised the total annihilation of the target area and you’re telling me that it fizzled? Don’t give me fires. You know I’m not interested in that. Fires aren’t enough. If I could deal with them with fires do you think I would have had this program bankrolled in the first place? I needed them gone and this was supposed to do it. I don’t care how good the second one’s going to be; the first one should have done it. We shouldn’t be needing to use a second one. And now I have to find them all over again. They’ll be running now, and who knows where they’ll have gone.’”

  “Of course, the real conversation went on for a lot longer than that, but I’ve taken out all the cussing and there was a lot of that.”

  “Wait, wait,” Sean said, trying to process what he had just heard. “You’re telling me that the bombing of Hiroshima, the whole Manhattan Project, was carried out to target someone specific?”

  “Several someones specific,” Sullivan corrected.

  “The world’s biggest sledgehammer to crack a nut.”

  “Depends how tough the nut is,” Sullivan commented. “The next few days were the busiest that I have ever seen in my life. I don’t think I ate or slept for 48 hours straight and I don’t recall going to the can either, though I guess I must have found five minutes somewhere for that. Weatherby had the phone permanently fixed to his ear and the teletype almost wore itself out with messages coming and going. Surveillance photographs came into the office by the box load and the Weatherby looked at them all, rejecting most of them but sending handfuls over the lab to be blown up.”

  “And then the breakthrough came in through a news photograph.”

  Sullivan reached inside his jacket and extracted a folded piece of paper, which he handed to Sean. The reporter unfolded it. It was a high-quality photograph of a newspaper. The paper was foreign and the writing was Asian, though Sean had no idea whether it was Chinese, Japanese, Korean or what. The words weren’t the important feature of the photocopy, apparently, because there was a circle made with a red marker pen around a section of the photograph that made up most of the photocopy. The circle was drawn around a group of faces in a crowd of other people.

  “In case you can’t read the caption, that’s a photograph of refugees from Hiroshima arriving by train in Nagasaki,” Sullivan explained.

  “These are the people Weatherby was hunting?” Sean asked, examining the copied photograph more closely. They resembled a family group of father, mother, two older sons and one young daughter.

  “Not people,” Sullivan denied. He took another piece of paper out of his jacket. “Weatherby kept this photograph with him wherever he went. It was taken in Dresden on February 14th 1945.”

  The photograph was of the same family group, escaping from a building that was on fire. They were on fire. Their clothes were aflame and their hair was smoking and yet they were walking out of the building as though the inferno around them was a matter of the utmost indifference. Their faces had the same neutral expressions that they wore in the newspaper image.

  “This isn’t real,” Sean said tapping the Dresden photograph. “This isn’t possible.”

  “Oh, it’s both,” Sullivan confirmed and there was no doubting that he believed what he was saying.

  “Nobody could do that,” Sean insisted. “Nobody could do that and not care.”

  “Nobody human,” Sullivan agreed.

  “So what are they?” Sean asked, somewhat dazed by what he was being asked to believe. “I mean are they aliens, mutants, escaped experiments, what?”

  “Now there you have me,” Sullivan apologised. “My security clearance was high enough to work for Weatherby, but it wasn’t high enough for that. All I know is that they survived the bombing of Dresden and were considered enough of a threat by Weatherby to order the bombing of Hiroshima and, when that didn’t work, the bombing of Nagasaki.”

  He reached over and slid the pad from under Sean’s unresisting fingers and scribbled something on it with a pen of his own. Then he stood up. “Well that’s my story. It’s told now. I have great-grandkids waiting. You might want to look
at this though,” he tapped the pad. “Good luck.”

  Sean didn’t register Sullivan’s departure. He was staring at the two copied photographs. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. It was some sort of hoax, some sick and twisted joke. And yet… and yet... The question was why. Why would someone set him up like this? Who would go to all the trouble of coming up with this elaborate story, create fake photographs like this and hire an old man to come in and scam him in such an overly-complicated manner? Gary might harbour the desire to do something like this, but he certainly didn’t have the imagination for it and there wasn’t anyone else. It made no sense at all, but did the story that had just been laid out for him make any more sense? A practical joke might be highly unlikely, but it was at least possible. What lay behind these photographs surely was not.

  Sean dragged the pad reluctantly towards him and looked at what the man calling himself Sullivan had written. It was a web address and a five-word sentence.

  Reluctantly, Sean got up from the seat and went back into the main office. Nobody jumped out at him, shouting ‘Gotcha!’. Everything was just as it ought to have been. Sean switched on the computer and logged in. He typed in the web address from his pad into the search engine and hit the return key.

  It was a news story from the BBC website. It featured an embattled British Prime Minister facing hard questions about her inability to get a decent deal for the country’s exit from the European Union. There was a picture of her departing hurriedly from the Brussels building where negotiations were taking place. It was all very unremarkable except…

  Sean suddenly felt very cold.

  In the background, watching the scene with expressionless faces, was a small family group of father, mother, two elder sons and a younger daughter.

  Sean looked from the photograph to the message on the pad below the web address

  There is no Weatherby anymore.

  Which Witch is Which?