“Do you know what I’d kill for right now?”
He tried not to take her literally.
“A martini,” she said. “With real gin, not pure alcohol from the lab, and a real olive. And a twirly stick to make twirls in it.”
“Okay. How about we take a night out.”
“Santa Fe?”
“I was thinking more of Taos.”
“What’s in Taos?”
“Not much. More Indians, more pottery, more blankets.”
“But a bar, right? They do have a bar?”
“I’m sure they do. It’s just that I don’t want to be hanging around the bar at La Fonda for one more night with our own people.”
“And if Taos can’t make a martini?”
“Then you can show them.”
Months ago the army had decided on a programme of disinformation. What this meant in practice was that the scientists should prop up bars in Santa Fe, and be indiscreet—letting any drunk they could converse with know that after a couple of drinks they were willing to spill the beans, and the beans were that they were all busy making rockets. “Rockets” was understandable as an idea and might quell speculation as to what was really going on. It was a PR disaster. No one had been the slightest bit interested in what was happening out at Los Alamos. Truth or lies. They were happier with their running gag—“they’re making windshield wipers for submarines.”
The conversation he wanted to have with Zette he’d rather have anywhere but in a bar in Santa Fe. So they drove fifty miles on, to the Hotel Martin in Taos.
“With a name like that I’d hope they make a damn good martini.”
They did.
She twirled her twirly stick and took a first sip.
“S’truth . . . Booth’s gin! Wherever did they get that?”
A second sip.
“You know. I think you’ll be doing all the driving on the way home.”
Szabo left his Mexican beer untouched.
She gazed around the bar. It was mostly empty, and looked as though it hadn’t changed much in twenty years or more.
“Does anything put this joint on the map?”
“It attracts painters. And one of your famous English writers lived here. I believe he’s buried somewhere nearby.”
“Well . . . it won’t be Byron or Shelley . . . and as I can’t guess you’d better tell me.”
“Lawrence.”
“Lawrence?”
“D. H. Lawrence.”
“What, the chap who wrote about going down the pit in Nottingham and fucking in the woods?”
“The same, but he lived here . . . one of his novels is even set here. St Mawr.”
“And you’ve read it?”
“They had a copy in one of the camps I was in. It’s all about never being able to beat the desert. You can work the land, till the soil, and still the desert will come back to beat you. A rather large metaphor for life itself I thought. You can love the desert, as Oppy surely does, and still it will defeat you.”
“And this week we roasted it.”
“Turned it to glass. Nothing will grow at that spot in Jornada del Muerto for years.”
“You bugger . . . I knew you got me here just so you could get morbid on me.”
“Not so . . . but there are things to be said.”
She finished her martini and held out the glass for more.
“See if he’s got a slice of lime this time. One more and I’m all ears.”
Over her second martini, he said, “Leo has got up a petition to the president, urging him not to use the bomb we are making.”
“Another one?” she said. “He’s doesn’t give up, does he?”
“No, he doesn’t. But his concerns are our concerns. Everyone at the Chicago lab has signed it.”
“All of them?”
“Sixty-nine, seventy with Leo.”
“But no one here? I mean, Leo didn’t circulate it at Los Alamos? We all had a meeting. Oppy saw off Leo’s last attempt rather easily.”
“I doubt Leo even tried to circulate it—we’re an army base not a college campus—but I received a copy and so did Edward Teller.”
“But you didn’t sign?”
“No. Nor did Teller. We both considered it. Oppy asked us not to, but now I cannot help but wonder how little we might have had to argue to get him to sign, too.”
“He’s said all along that we will have to use it. He said so at the meeting.”
“It was more than two weeks ago that we discussed it, but his attitude has not been the same since we tested the bomb. He knows it works now, he knows the power it has . . . and he feels . . . responsible.”
She swirled her martini, fished out the olive and ate it.
“Tell me, Charlie Parker, did you and Oppy rehearse that line from the Bhagavad Gita?”
“No.”
“There are times I think he rehearses everything he says. Even the one-liners.”
“An academic practice, perhaps, born of standing up in front of rooms full of students.”
“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds . . . I wonder whether he might not have meant it personally. He seems to take everything so damn personally. The weight of the world on those bony shoulders. The power of life and death in those spindly fingers.”
“It is an ungodly amount of power.”
“Au contraire. It’s godly in the extreme. A destroyer of worlds. Sounds pretty godlike to me.”
“I meant—a frightening amount of power to be possessed by a single nation.”
“Single nation? Well, you might be right. A step on from a single individual, I suppose. But . . . I’m English, Tuck and Chadwick are English, you’re Hungarian, Teller and Leo are Hungarian, so’s Wigner, Fermi’s Italian, Kistiakowsky is Russian, Peierls is German, Bethe’s German, Frisch is Austrian, and most of the others are German or Austrian. Oppy’s American. Serber’s American. There are times they seem to be the only ones. Social nights when you’d think we were all in a café in Vienna rather than stuck in a Sheetrock hut in the middle of the desert in New Mexico.”
“You think they’ll share it?”
“With whom?”
“With our allies.”
“Our current allies? Don’t be daft. An ally is simply an enemy you haven’t met yet. We’ll be squaring up to Joe Stalin the minute this war’s over. Of course I don’t think they’ll share it. I don’t care if they share it. I just want one dropped on Berlin.”
“Three months after they surrendered?”
“I don’t give a toss. Call it insurance. Call it a preemptive strike against the next German war. And you know better than me. Do we have another bomb up our sleeve? You know better than anyone on Earth how much plutonium we have.”
“Zette, I can’t tell you that.”
“Of course you bloody can. We’ve earmarked three bombs for the Japs, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“But nothing. Once we’ve nuked the Nips how many more damn bombs can we make?”
He hesitated.
“Come on. Oppy’s first law of the colloquia, there are no secrets. We all know what there is to know. If you don’t tell me, somebody on your team will.”
“Five, possibly six, by the end of the year.”
“Then we’ve got a fucking arsenal haven’t we? And you think we won’t use it? We’ll drop the bomb for one simple reason: because we can. Japan can surrender tonight. We’ll still drop the bomb. The army won’t miss the chance to see what it can do. Even Oppy refutes the idea that we can stage a demonstration. He might fear a dud but he knows damn well that the army wants to see a bomb take out an entire city. The generals must be praying Japan doesn’t surrender. I don’t know the target but I do know it’ll be a city the air force hasn’t touched yet. Pristine. Virgin. Just asking for it. Leo has wasted his breath—we’re going to bomb Japan, and when that’s done, as far as I’m concerned, we can drop the rest on Germany.”
Talking to Zette once she’d lost her temper was close to pointless. He tacked away from Japan, back towards Russia.
“How about some sense of . . . of . . . of a balance of power?”
“When has power ever been balanced? Balanced power. That’s the perfect oxymoron.”