White Sands, Red Menace

“Okay,” his daughter, Suze, yelled back. “Be right down.” She turned to her friend—and roommate, for the last year—Dewey Kerrigan, who was arranging jars of nuts and bolts on the bookcase near the window. “We gotta go.”

Dewey nodded. They’d only been in the house in Alamogordo for three days, and she itched to have all her things out of boxes and organized. But that could wait, and the trip this afternoon couldn’t. She aligned one more jar with the others, then took off her glasses and wiped her face with her bandanna. “What time’s the launch?”

“Two o’clock, I think. Dad says if we get out there early enough, he’ll show us the rocket close up, before they put the gas in it and it gets too dangerous.”

“Dad made sandwiches.” Suze looked down at the box of magazines she’d been unpacking. “I know I saw pictures of V-2s in one of these, from when the Nazis were bombing London. I guess I’ll find them later.” She pushed the box aside with one foot. “Let’s go.”

Dewey followed her down two flights of stairs to the kitchen, the only room in the house, so far, that looked like people lived here: dishes in the sink, the coffeepot on the stove, and Rutherford, their ginger-striped cat, basking in a patch of sunlight by the back door.

Terry Gordon sat at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, a cigarette in one hand and a coffee cup in front of her. She looked like she’d just woken up. She had her reading glasses on and was staring at a pamphlet, one of a large stack.

“I don’t need to see the army blow anything else up, kiddo. We’ve killed too many people as it is.” She held up the pamphlet. “I’ve got to get fifty of these to the post office before it closes this afternoon.”

“Essays by Einstein and some of the fellows from Los Alamos, to help educate the public about the Bomb.” She took a sip of coffee. “We built it. We’re the only ones who can stop it. These are going to schools and libraries all over the country. Take one. It’s an eye-opener.”

“Not if you think about it. It’s either the United Nations and international control—or World War Three.” She lit another cigarette. “Nobody’s going to win that one.”

Dewey climbed into the car and started reading. Suze looked back at the house once, then sank onto the seat and opened the lunch sack. “Bologna and cheese,” she said. “And root beers. Thanks, Dad.”

“Can’t have you starving. Not on my watch.” Dr. Gordon sat up front like a chauffeur in a pith helmet, a pile of notebooks on the seat next to him. Dewey took a deep breath. There hadn’t been any new cars since before the war. The upholstery of the 1946 Plymouth still smelled like fresh carpet. Faint grease pencil marks remained on the back window, and the wood-grain interior gleamed.

Alamogordo, New Mexico, was a small, dusty place an hour from the Mexican border, tucked between the steep wall of the Sacramento Mountains on the east and the railroad on the west. They drove through town, past the depot and the gas stations and the lumberyard on Pennsylvania Avenue, until the street became a highway again. U.S. 70 was a straight line running southwest across the arid desert of the Tularosa Basin—fifty miles of flat sand with spikes of yucca and twists of cholla cactus. Most of it was the White Sands Proving Grounds, owned by the United States government, where the army was going to test a rocket today, and where they’d tested the first atomic bomb ten months ago.

Sixty miles north, at Trinity, the heat of the blast had melted the desert sand into a sea of green glass. Dewey figured that was why, on the radio, newsmen seemed to say the name Alamogordo as if the town itself were evil, the place where the fear had begun.

When the war ended, life in America was supposed to go back to normal. It hadn’t. After Hiroshima, everyone in the world knew about the atom bomb, the secret “gadget” that the Gordons and her papa had worked on at Los Alamos. Now it was the Bomb, with a capital B, as if it were the only one, ever. People were afraid that they might all die in an instant, without any warning.

That had always been true, Dewey thought. Nothing was certain. Nothing was forever. Papa had died with no warning either, just crossing the street.

Dewey felt like she had almost fallen, almost walked off the end of a plank like in a Laurel and Hardy movie. But she had survived, because another plank, the Gordons, had swung by just in the nick of time, and become her family. She looked over at Suze and smiled, but Suze didn’t notice.

“Functional units? None. But we captured three hundred boxcars full of parts. The sand’s playing hell with the electronics, and there was a lot of damage in transit, but we hope to get twenty or thirty put together in the next year.”

Dr. Gordon chuckled. “Fourteen tons’ worth, all in German. That’s why we brought von Braun and his boys over. We’ll be building missiles of our own—bigger and better—before you know it.” He turned his attention back to the road and began tapping his fingers on the steering wheel to the jazzy rhythm of “Atomic Cocktail,” playing on the radio. Dewey rolled her eyes. Stupid song.

Forty-five minutes later, the car slowed as they approached a line of vehicles waiting at the gate to the base. When they reached the head of the line, the guard wrote down their license-plate number in his logbook.

“Better believe it. Navy brass, army brass, press, you name it. There’d better be a show this time.” The guard shook his head. “The guys from the War Department aren’t here to watch another dud.”

The base was small, a cluster of green wood-framed buildings, a few warehouses, and a large curved-roof hangar. It looked a lot like the Hill—Los Alamos. Dr. Gordon turned and headed out into the desert.

“Hmm. Probably not.” He sighed and slowed the car. “No female personnel on this project.” He turned, a wide U, and drove back to a small building with a red cross on it. “First-aid station,” he said as he turned off the ignition. “You can use the one in there.”