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Beside him was Wilhelm Frunze, a young German scientist he had first met in Chicago. "What would have happened, Will, if lightning had struck the bomb?"
Frunze shrugged. "No one knows."
A green Verey rocket shot into the sky, startling Greg.
"Five-minute warning," Frunze said.
Security had been haphazard. Santa Fe, the nearest town to Los Alamos, was crawling with well-dressed FBI agents. Leaning nonchalantly against walls in their tweed jackets and neckties, they were obvious to local residents, who wore blue jeans and cowboy boots.
The bureau was also illegally tapping the phones of hundreds of people involved in the Manhattan Project. This bewildered Greg. How could the nation's premier law enforcement agency systematically commit criminal acts?
Nevertheless, army security and the FBI had identified some spies and quietly removed them from the project, including Barney McHugh. But had they found them all? Greg did not know. Groves had been forced to take risks. If he had fired everyone the FBI asked him to, there would not have been enough scientists left to build the bomb.
Unfortunately, most scientists were radicals, socialists, and liberals. There was hardly a conservative among them. And they believed that the truths discovered by science were for humankind to share, and should never be kept secret in the service of one regime or country. So while the American government was keeping this huge project top secret, the scientists held discussion groups about sharing nuclear technology with all the nations of the world. Oppie himself was suspect: the only reason he was not in the Communist Party was that he never joined clubs.
Right now Oppie was lying on the ground next to his kid brother, Frank, also an outstanding physicist, also a Communist. They both held pieces of welding glass through which to observe the explosion. Greg and Frunze had similar pieces of glass. Some of the scientists were wearing sunglasses.
Another rocket went off. "One minute," said Frunze.
Greg heard Oppie say: "Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart."
He wondered if those would be Oppie's last words.
Greg and Frunze lay on the sandy earth near Oppie and Frank. They all held their visors of welding glass in front of their eyes and gazed toward the test site.
Facing death, Greg thought about his mother, his father, and his sister, Daisy, in London. He wondered how much they would miss him. He thought, with mild regret, of Margaret Cowdry, who had dumped him for a guy who was willing to marry her. But most of all he thought of Jacky Jakes and Georgy, now nine years old. He passionately wanted to watch Georgy grow up. He realized Georgy was the main reason he was hoping to stay alive. Stealthily, the child had crept into his soul and stolen his love. The strength of this feeling surprised Greg.
A gong chimed, a strangely inappropriate sound in the desert.
"Ten seconds."
Greg suffered an impulse to get up and run away. Silly though it was--how far could he get in ten seconds?--he had to force himself to lie still.
The bomb went off at five twenty-nine and forty-five seconds.
First there was an awesome flash, impossibly bright, the fiercest glare Greg had ever seen, stronger than the sun.
Then a weird dome of fire seemed to come out of the ground. With terrifying speed it grew monstrously high. It reached the level of the mountains and continued to rise, rapidly dwarfing the peaks.
Greg whispered: "Jesus . . ."
The dome morphed into a square. The light was still brighter than noonday, and the distant mountains were so vividly illuminated that Greg could see every fold and crevice and rock.
Then the shape changed again. A pillar appeared below, seeming to push miles into the sky, like the fist of God. The cloud of boiling fire above the pillar spread like an umbrella, until the whole thing looked like a mushroom seven miles tall. The colors in the cloud were hellish orange, green, and purple.
Greg was hit by a wave of heat as if the Almighty had opened a giant oven. At the same moment the bang of the explosion reached his ears like the crack of doom. But that was only the beginning. A noise like supernaturally loud thunder rolled over the desert, drowning all other sound.
The blazing cloud began to diminish but the thunder went on and on, impossibly sustained, until Greg wondered if this was the sound of the end of the world.
At last it faded away, and the mushroom cloud began to disperse.
Greg heard Frank Oppenheimer say: "It worked."
Oppie said: "Yes, it worked."
The two brothers shook hands.
And the world is still here, Greg thought.
