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“Guys, guys,” I said, trying to de-escalate the conflict, but the chain reaction had gotten out of hand.
“No,” shot back Thornton. “Fermi was betting the bomb would ignite the atmosphere. He was taking side bets, too: Would it incinerate the whole world, or just New Mexico?”
“Jesus,” said Miranda. “That is sickening.”
“You. Weren’t. There.” Thornton’s voice was quiet but hard as steel. “How dare you judge them? How dare you? You and I are part of the most sheltered, pampered generation ever to walk the face of this earth. These scientists, a lot of them, were refugees, Jewish refugees, from Europe — the land of Hitler, the land of the Holocaust, remember? Six million Jews murdered, just for being Jews. Tens of millions of other civilians killed just for living in the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong politics. If those scientists felt the need for a little gallows humor, who can blame them? The gallows was casting a shadow over the whole damn world at the time. How dare you sit there in your privileged, liberal smugness and pass moral judgment on them?”
Miranda drew back as if he’d slapped her. “Excuse me,” she whispered. She stood up, and before I knew what was happening, she was gone, the steel door of the bone lab banging shut behind her.
Thornton and I sat staring at each other. “Well, shit,” he finally said. “I just scorched the earth, didn’t I?”
“I should’ve stopped you somehow,” I said. “Kicked you under the table. Clobbered you with a femur.”
He rubbed his face with his hands. “The hell of it is, I really like her,” he said. “I thought maybe she liked me, too.”
“She did,” I said. “And she’s notoriously picky.”
“Crap.”
“Oh well,” I said. “You’ll always have Paris. Or Verona. Or Venona. Was there anything else about Venona or Novak or — I don’t know, about anything—you’d planned to tell us, before you went stomping across the minefield of Miranda’s opinions?”
He sighed. “A little,” he said. “Nothing concrete yet; just some tantalizing possibilities. There are lots of code names in the Venona transcripts that have never been deciphered — hundreds of Soviet spies in the United States back in the forties that have never been identified. We’re hoping, if we sift back through the transcripts again, maybe we’ll get lucky; maybe find something that ties to Novak.”
“Not to be too negative,” I said, “but if they threw thousands of people and millions of dollars at this back when it really mattered, isn’t it likely to be a dead end by now?”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “New things still bubble up. Just a couple years ago, we got some new insight on one of the few spies who infiltrated Oak Ridge. A health physicist, guy named Koval, who worked at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos and Hanford during the war. His job was checking radiation levels, so he got a look at all the crucial process equipment for creating weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, and nobody suspected him at the time, even though he’d lived and studied in Russia.”
“I thought you said security in Oak Ridge was tight. They turned a Russian loose with a Geiger counter?”
“His parents were Russian immigrants, but Koval was an American, actually — born in Iowa, and christened George. Millions of European and Russian immigrants came to the U.S. in the early part of the twentieth century — the ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’ remember? Koval’s parents were among them.”
One of the notations on Leonard Novak’s yellow notepad popped into my head. “George Koval?” Thornton nodded. “Novak wrote the initials ‘GK’ shortly before he died, and he was reading books about Venona at the time. Maybe he knew about Koval. Maybe they collaborated. Can you guys interrogate George, see if our guy Novak was one of his comrades?”
“George is outside our jurisdiction,” Thornton said dryly. “Moved to Moscow in 1948, died in 2006. After he died, Vladimir Putin awarded him Russia’s highest medal.”
“Damn,” I said. “Well, between the Acme Credit Corporation and the Venona transcripts, maybe something will turn up.”
He gave a rueful smile. “Unlike Kistiakowsky, I wouldn’t bet a month’s pay on it,” he said. “Hell, I wouldn’t bet ten bucks. But we’ll keep digging.” He thought of something. “You still in the good graces of the woman in Oak Ridge?”
I blushed. “The librarian? Isabella?”
He shook his head. “No, the old lady. Beatrice. The one that married Novak without having done due diligence about his sexual orientation.”
“Ah. No, I haven’t talked to Beatrice since she outed Novak as gay, but it’s not like she and I have had a spat.”
“Lucky you,” he said. “Listen, since you seem to bring out the gift of gab in Madame Beatrice, how about chatting her up some more, see if she thinks Novak was giving secrets to the Soviets?”
“If she snitches on him, should I send a note to the Acme Credit Corporation?”
“Sure,” he said. “We check the P.O. box twice a day.” He pushed back from the table. “I reckon I’ll slink back to my office now,” he said. “I’ve done enough damage here for one day.”
“You mean Miranda?” He nodded. “Surely you’re not throwing in the towel so soon,” I said. “I thought you G-men never gave up. ‘We always get our man’—wasn’t that an early FBI slogan?”
“Nah, that was the Canadian Mounties,” he said. “They had a better sloganeer than we did. Besides, this thing with Miranda, it’s outside my field of expertise. The bad guys, they’re pretty easy to figure out, Doc. It’s the great women that are truly mysterious.”
“I know, Chip,” I said. I walked him to the door of the lab. “That’s what makes them great.”
CHAPTER 21
Four hours after the blowup in the bone lab, as I was about to head to Oak Ridge for another stroll through the past with Beatrice, I heard a light tap on my door. Looking up, I was surprised to see Miranda; normally she just barged right in, her arrival accompanied by a wisecrack — usually one at my expense. Her eyes were red and she looked off-balance. I pointed to an empty chair that was shoved against the radiator under the window.
“No offense,” I said, “but you don’t look so hot.”
“I look a lot better than I feel,” she said. I was alarmed — was she developing symptoms of radiation sicknesss? — but she read my expression and swiftly waved a hand to let me know her problem wasn’t medical.
“You want to talk about it?” It seemed a safe question, since she’d shown up at my door, but as fragile as she seemed, I wanted to go easy.
“Some of it,” she said. “The ideas part. Not the boy-girl part.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant. “The ideas?”
“The ideas. The ideals. The people. Patriots and traitors. Hard choices and hellish compromises.”
“Maybe we should send out for pizza,” I said. “And a six-pack of philosophers.”
She plunked down into the chair with a sigh. “In a way, the problem all boils down to the difference between Groves and Oppenheimer,” she said. “And it’s all written in their eyes.” I furrowed my brow at her. “Groves was like the ultimate can-do guy,” she said. “The steamroller of the Manhattan Project. Get it done, get it done, get it done. No matter what. He and his secret project had so much power. Groves had the authority to take whatever he wanted, build whatever was necessary. Not enough copper to make the Y-12 calutrons? No problem; we’ll just take fifteen thousand tons of silver from the U.S. Treasury. Not sure the calutrons can make enough uranium? We’ll build a gaseous-diffusion plant, too, the biggest factory in the world. Not sure uranium’s the ticket? Let’s make plutonium, too. He hedged all his bets, but in the end, all his bets paid off.” I nodded; to lessen the risk of failure, Groves had indeed pursued multiple paths to the bomb, and all of them succeeded. “But look at him, Dr. B.”
She pulled a photo of General Groves from a folder she’d brought with her and laid it on the desk. It was a famous photo, one I’d seen countless times since cu
