25
July 1945
Caleb
In the brightness, Caleb scanned the crowd of whooping and hollering scientists. The bomb had transformed night into day. Everywhere he looked, men were hugging, embracing, and running their hands through their hair. He glanced over at the theoretical team. Bethe’s eyes were sparkling with tears. Beside him, Fred was strutting around, whistling what sounded like bird calls with two fingers in his mouth.
Caleb pinpointed Oppenheimer in the crowd, standing quietly amid the commotion. His face had relaxed from sheer relief. Beside him, Enrico Fermi was running around tossing torn bits of paper into the air to measure the displacement. In the excitement, his companions forgot to call Fermi by his code name, Farmer, as they clapped him on the back and congratulated him.
Beside Caleb, Dick was seeing spots, but he hadn’t gone blind. His eyes looked marbled, like they belonged in a much older face. He was a little off balance at first, like a sailor with sea legs. But he seemed to have been rejuvenated. He was particularly taken by the distance the heat and ignition had traveled. He marveled, working up an estimate. Then he pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the explosives crew. “These duh-ta-duhs are callin’ them lethal coat tails.” Caleb followed Dick’s accusatory thumb toward a group of SEDs who were making felicitous toasts and passing around a flask. Looking at them, Caleb couldn’t repress the looming fear that in the excitement of the success, all the young people had forgotten what the gadget was for.
He did not take part in the celebrations. He had to find Alice. He could picture her clearly, straining for a better look at the end of the world with one palm pressed flat against the windowsill and the other on her belly. Caleb was overcome with guilt. He wanted nothing more than to marry her and run far away from this place, to shed who he was and become what she saw in him. But wherever they went, the specter of the bomb would follow.
He made the trek back to base camp at a clipped pace. His sweat fogged up his specs. He realized with new clarity that he would be in large part responsible for whatever happened once the bomb was in the hands of the military. Whatever that was, it had to happen, he rationalized, to end the war. But still. His work had been meant only to save his house and his family. At least when he’d first come to the desert, he was not a murderer. What was he now? He wondered if a prayer existed for this moment. For the first time he could remember, he longed for his father’s steadfast company. Only now, when it was too late, he understood him.
Back on the hill, fireworks erupted overhead, and people feverishly described the mushroom cloud to neighbors. The barracks exploded with celebration. People were dancing in the streets. Others were arguing with wild hand gestures. An SED who had celebrated too hard was vomiting in the bushes. Someone set off a firecracker by Ashley Pond and it made Caleb jump. The tail of the explosion snickered and burned off like a snake in the middle of the road.
He was trying to figure out a way to locate Alice in all the commotion when someone clapped him on the back. He jumped, recognizing the blunt shape and the coarseness of mangled skin through his shirt.
“I got decked out just for you, sweetheart.” Saul laughed heartily like a schoolboy.
Caleb spun around to find Saul standing by his bunk, stark naked. Given that it was still so early in the morning, it took him a moment to realize his friend was drunk. Saul sloppily dropped a sack at his feet that clunked with the force of a bowling ball and began unwinding his bandage and removing his splints. “Might as well go au naturel,” he said. The stumped nubs of his deformed hand and his coiled remaining fingers were appalling, yet Caleb couldn’t look away. He desperately wanted to see what was concealed beneath the splint. He realized that several of the other SEDs were naked as well, dragging similar heavy backpacks as though they were filled with bricks.
“We’ve been on a treasure hunt.” Saul winked. “It’s harder than it looks with one paw.”
“Where on earth are your clothes?” asked Caleb.
“Green-gold,” Saul said dreamily.
“What?”
By way of response, Saul fished a mystery item from his sack. It was the size of a pebble, but it wasn’t a pebble. He held the strange green gem to the light, inspecting it. It looked like sea glass, but when he moved it, the colors shifted like gasoline on pavement.
“What is it?” Caleb asked, reaching for it, mesmerized. The stone seemed to have its own light trapped inside.
Saul shooed his hand away playfully and turned mischievous eyes on Caleb. “The sand and the explosion fused into a strange new element,” he said. “No one has seen the likes of it before.”
“Is it safe?” Caleb worried, but Saul interrupted him.
“We named it Trinitite,” he cut in proudly. Of course, Caleb thought, they had named it after Trinity. Saul squinted at the stone. His nose was peeling from sunburn, and he had a tan line from his sunglasses, which he had also removed when he undressed. The white, naked appendages of his body looked soft and tender. Caleb tried not to stare at Saul’s mutilated stump of a hand. He thought he would be sick from the stink. A putrid, rancid odor wafted from the sutures. It had to be infected.
Saul gestured for Caleb to take the stone.
“Is it radioactive?” Caleb asked, stepping back and holding his hands up defensively.
Saul let out a defiant laugh as though he wouldn’t care if it was. “We asked ourselves that same question,” he said, “when we collected it off the desert floor.”
“Is it?”
“If it is, it’s too late.” He tossed the hair from his eyes with a youthful headshake. “After we realized it might be, we tore off our infected clothes in a frenzy. I’m not so superstitious,” he boasted, gesturing at the other naked SEDs, “but I’m not taking any chances.” He grinned with pride. “Picture it,” he said. “An army of men walking the desert in their birthday suits.”
“You’re drunk,” Caleb said.
“Here,” said Saul, teetering on legs that would not bend. He tossed him the stone with his good hand. He wasn’t much for aim with his left arm, so it fell short. Caleb flinched and leaped back. “Jesus,” Saul exclaimed. “It’s not gonna bite ya.”
Alice
The redheaded nurse, Petey, looked up with a serene smile when the door chimed signaling her entry. Timoshenko, the large Irish wolfhound who still presided over the barracks hospital, was unaware that the world had changed a few hours before and sleepily wagged his tail against the floor.
“We’ve been booked solid all morning,” Petey said. “People are falling apart. What brings you in, dear?”
“I’m having sharp pains in my abdomen,” Alice said. At the bed and breakfast, she’d managed to sleep for maybe an hour, then jumped up thinking of Caleb waking up on the other side of that second sun. She’d raced to the barracks first thing when she got back to town, but he’d been nowhere to be found. She was still hearing his words over and over. She rubbed her temples. “And my head.”
“Take a seat,” said Petey gently. She gestured toward two folding chairs beneath an inspirational poster with a bald eagle that read, Victory: Now you can invest in it!
Alice was settling into Ladies’ Home Journal, about to flip the page from an article on innovative ways to can fruit, when Saul staggered in.
He was tomato red with sunburn and his shirt was damp. His temples glistened with sweat. “Just lookin’ for your run-of-the mill pain reliever,” he said.
“You’ll have to see the doctor,” Petey instructed, offering him a clipboard. Her eyes lingered on his deformed right hand. It was a cesspool for infection and unlikely to heal properly without the splints. Even Alice knew that.
He nodded weakly in Alice’s direction, embarrassment registering on his face when he recognized her. Still, despite the other empty chairs, he stumbled over and sat right next to her.
“I sincerely hope you two lovebirds worked things out,” he said.
She tried not to show anything on her face. “Thank you,” she said, “for what you told me.”
He nodded with importance and cocked his head back. He stunk of booze. Alice crossed her legs away from him and shifted her weight subtly, careful not to offend. Saul struggled to uncap the pen one-handed. She was about to offer to help when he finally used his teeth, and still chewing the cap, began to scribble.
“What a bender,” he said. “Nausea, headache, shakes, you name it,” he said, checking off boxes.
“How awful,” said Alice, feigning empathy. She wondered whether he had noticed the size of her belly in his stupor. Perhaps Caleb had already told him.
“It’s nothing,” he scoffed. “I’ve had worse.” He indicated his stumped arm and winked at her. He was struggling to hold the pen steady between weak fingers.
“Alice,” Petey called.
She glanced back at him one last time before passing through the swinging door. “Feel better,” she said fleetingly. She didn’t mean it. She didn’t care if he drank himself into oblivion. She just hoped he didn’t understand what he had seen or why she was there. There were no secrets in those tightly knit barracks. She knew she couldn’t hide it much longer, but every day helped.
Petey listened to her breathing, looked down her throat, palpated her abdomen, and measured from her pubic bone to the top of her uterus. She seemed empathetic, but she firmly declined her request for medication. “Since this morning’s events, I’ve had such demands for headache and nausea pills, anxiety, you name it. All our supplies have already been dispensed. We’re waiting on the next shipment.”
Alice did not feel reassured that others shared her symptoms. People were picking fights over rotten milk and provisioned tires. What had begun as a celebration of man’s triumph over nature had devolved quickly as people worried about what was coming. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they were living on borrowed time. Los Alamos was a secret about to get out.