Summer 1944
In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, they built a city for the atom bomb. The locals called it “Dogpatch.” They built another pile, factories the size of apartment blocks, cyclotrons to enrich docile uranium to fissile uranium-235, and they built an outdoor dance floor.
Szabo was a physicist in the hands of engineers, in the hands of the United States Army. It was the Chinese box, every layer revealed another. Except that the peeling away of layers revealed nothing beyond the fact that they existed. No one in any layer was supposed to know what anyone in any other layer was doing. No one was supposed to know the ultimate purpose of the experiment. How many knew they were building a bomb? If they knew, did they comprehend that this was a bomb like no other?
He designed the pile, observed the metamorphosis of the elements, and on occasion, on warm summer nights when the girls who pulled the levers and pushed the buttons that made the thingamajig in a process they none of them understood, turned up to work with flowery cotton dresses tucked under their overalls and baskets of fruit and bread and beer, he would look long into the deep, deep, darkening blue Tennessee sky, awed by nature even as he twisted it, shattered it, and rewrote it, and take to the dance floor.
He had never met a physicist who did not have two left feet. He wasn’t bad by that standard, but he had neither the coordination nor the nerve to jitterbug. He waited till the evening mellowed, until the young men had retreated to the edge to drink and laugh, tired and sweaty after lifting women off the floor and over their heads for fifteen minutes of un-European frenzy.
He found himself embraced by a pretty young blonde, strawberry patterns on her dress, bright red lipstick offering permanent temptation, a hint of moisture on her forehead, nut-brown eyes that looked once into his and then buried themselves in his shoulder as the two of them performed a slow shuffle on the boards, the mute smooch of the trumpet competing with the pressure of her hips to tell him it had been far too long since he had had a woman.
It was, not that he had noticed, a ladies’ excuse-me.
At the tap on her shoulder, the strawberry-girl looked up, over his shoulder, into the face of the competition, smiled at Szabo and said, “Some other time, prof. Looks like you’re in demand tonight.” He turned to accept the embrace of Zette Borg.
It had been months. Perhaps more than a year.
The soft cotton of the working girl’s dress replaced by the slippery sheen of a silk blouse—the girl’s natural, erotic scent suddenly drenched by something French and expensive and oh-so-prewar that masked Zette Borg.
The band was playing “Night and Day,” they were under the stars, there was something resembling yearning burning inside of him, and she said, “Leo sent me. Is there somewhere we can talk?”
Szabo had a single man’s accommodation. Tarpaper roof and walls as thin as tissue paper, so they drove out onto the highway, passed two motels, and checked into the third as Mr. and Mrs. Parker.
“There was something wrong with Smith?” he asked as she kicked off her shoes and fell back on the bed.
“No. Parker is who you are now. Brown envelope in my handbag.”
He fished it out.
An Arizona driving license with a number but no name, and a British passport in the name of Charles Parker.
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“The army is a great place for paranoia. Anyone at our level who works at Los Alamos has to have an alias. Even any visitor at the scientific level. Would you believe Niels Bohr is known as Nick Baker? That accent and they give him the name of a cheap American gumshoe.”
“And I, with my accent, I am Charles Parker?”
“I don’t suppose you can play the saxophone, can you?”
“I don’t understand that, either.”
“No matter. You’re Charlie Parker and, alas, I am Betty Bourke from the moment we leave here. Could be worse. I could be Ella Fitzgerald and then no one would believe either of us. Try checking into a motel under those names.”
“Leo is sending me to Los Alamos?”
“Leo is sending both of us. He won’t or can’t go himself. He’s fallen out with the army. You know Leo, you can imagine how he reacts to the military mind. So Leo is sending, Robert Oppenheimer is summoning. Ideally, Oppy would like Leo in person but that’s not going to happen.”
“So, I follow the trail.”
“Eh?”
“I sent the first shipment of plutonium nitrate to Los Alamos only ten days ago.”
“Well, as long as we don’t have to carry the stuff with us.”
Afterwards, each avoiding the damp patch on the sheets, half-asleep, half-awake, half-thinking, half-dreaming, he half-thought half-dreamt not of Zette, the English, Jewish, Cambridge-and-Sorbonne educated, cynical sophisticate but of the girl in the strawberry dress with the down-home Dogpatch accent of whom he knew nothing.
“In what concentration?”
So she wasn’t asleep after all. And she was no more thinking of him than he was of her.
“I’m sorry?”
“Plutonium nitrate. In what concentration?”
“I couldn’t say without notes, but low.”
“Have you considered that you might achieve a higher concentration at lower temperatures?”
“How low?”
“Minus 80. Minus 100. Whatever it takes.”
Ah, they were back on her territory now. The pursuit of absolute zero.
“I can’t create temperatures that low. I don’t have the apparatus.”
“When we get to Los Alamos, I’ll build it for you.”
“Will it work?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”