In West Texas the hills begin, and presently there are mountains, always bare and rocky, so different from the forest-clad ranges of the East. Nothing useful grew here, except in irrigated valleys. It was hot in the month of July—Mark Twain had joked about hell and Texas. They stopped in a town and bought a dishpan and a chunk of ice to go in it, and set that on the seat between them and persuaded themselves that it made them cooler. A thermometer would have made them feel hotter, so they did not buy one.
Then it was New Mexico, and the mountains were gray, brown, red, black; sometimes green, but it wasn’t verdure, and sometimes white, but it wasn’t snow. The highway wound here and there, finding its way up through passes and down again. The breeze of the car’s motion dried you out but didn’t cool you; if you put your hand on one of the rocks by the roadside you would take it away in a hurry. The ice melted fast, and they drank large draughts of the cold water.
XIII
So to the new-paved road that led off to the wartown of Budd. Lanny had phoned, and they were expecting him; he and Laurel had been there before. They drove to what is called a mesa, a plateau, and what they saw astonished them; only a year and a half had passed, and what had magically become a town appeared now to be a city. A flying field as big as La Guardia, and along one side a mile or more of one-story office buildings and hangars and sheds, and back of them block after block of dwellings, all in the Spanish style of this region, of adobe brick or tile. The government had built all this and the government owned it; they would offer to sell it to Robbie for ten per cent of its cost, but what would Robbie or anybody else do with it when the war was over? Especially with the UN proposing to prevent any more business opportunities of the sort!
Everybody was working here like all-possessed, knowing that the Germans had been ahead. New types of planes were being assembled, the component parts coming in caravans of trucks. New types of engines were installed in them, and then they were wheeled or towed out to the field. “Jet buggies” they were called, and weirdly accoutered pilots would be fitted into them—the jokers said they had to be fitted in sections on account of the small space in the newest models. The jets were getting well over five hundred miles an hour now; they flew five or six miles high, and the plexiglass covers the pilots fastened over themselves had to withstand heavy outward pressures. When everything was ready there would come a roar and a flash of white flame. Stand a good way off and always at the side; if you stood in the rear you would be burned completely black. The little plane would leap and go roaring down the runway, and then shoot into the air and become a streak in the sky. Faster and faster! There was a saying: “If you can see them, they’re obsolete.”
18
Blood on the Moon
I
Lanny saw his wife comfortably settled in an air-conditioned guest house, and then he set out by himself. He drove faster now because there was nobody but himself to watch the speedometer. The school site called Los Alamos lies about forty miles northwest of Santa Fe, and when he got into that neighborhood he looked for road signs, and there weren’t any. He stopped at a filling station and asked, “How do I get to Los Alamos?” The answer surprised him. “You don’t get there, buddy; there’s no such place.” For a moment he thought the man was joking and answered in kind, “There must be some mistake on my map then.”
“Listen, brother,” said the man. “The Army says there ain’t, and what the Army says goes around here.”
“Oh, I see,” replied the traveler. “It happens that I have important business at Los Alamos.”
“If you think you have business, buddy, just go ahead and try. If you find it, you’ll be the first one.”
Lanny, a mere civilian now, said no more but drove on. There was no law against scouting round in this mountain and desert land, so he drove and kept looking. There were road signs directing him to Santa Fe, and others to the little town of Española, so from the map he was able to figure out pretty well where he was. He came to the deep White Rock Canyon of the Rio Grande. Behind it were tall mountains, and a road went winding up to what might be a plateau. At the entrance were heavy gates and a guardhouse, but no sign of any sort.
There stood a sentry with a tommy gun, and Lanny could guess what that meant. He stopped his car. “Soldier, I’m looking for Los Alamos.” The answer was, “Have you a pass?” When Lanny said, “I have credentials,” the answer to that was, “There’s no such place.” The man was polite, but there was a weary tone to his voice, as if he had said the same thing a hundred times before and might have to say it another hundred. “Very sorry, but you know what orders are. There’s no such place as Los Alamos. You have to write to Box 1663, Santa Fe.”
It was a drive of forty miles, and slow, because it was a shelf road winding up a cliff, and there was a surprising lot of traffic. The cliff was of volcanic material, porous and easy to dig into, and the Indians had known it for centuries. There were whole colonies of cliff dwellings, and anyone might collect arrowheads and bits of pottery by the bushel. So to Santa Fe, the capital city of the state, built in Spanish adobe style; it was a favorite haunt of artists and tourists—but seldom in the month of July. Lanny got a room in an air-conditioned hotel and on its stationery wrote a note to Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer:
“I have come here with cards of introduction from Charles T. Alston and Albert Einstein. I do not want to entrust these to the chances of the mail, but hope that you will give me a chance to present them to you in person. The cards read as follows”—and Lanny quoted the messages, adding, “I have just returned from Europe where I have been doing secret work in connection with the project in which you are especially interested. I have credentials from the OSS.” He signed himself “Respectfully, Lanning Prescott Budd,” addressed the letter to Box 1663, and took it to the post office.
Then he came back and had a bath and a shave and a meal. He didn’t know how long it would take the letter to reach its destination, but he guessed that mail would be carried frequently to the top-secret place, possibly by air. But Oppy might not be there, and his secretary might not have authority to deal with a stranger. In the lobby of the hotel the stranger bought newspapers and magazines and then stretched himself on the bed for a comfortable wait.
II
It was midevening before the call came. A voice, high-pitched and young-sounding, inquired, “Is this Mr. Budd? This is Dr. Fairchild. Could you arrange to come to the confidential place in the morning?”
Lanny said, “I was there this afternoon, but they wouldn’t let me in.”
“If you will go to U.S. Engineering Office Number Three, in Santa Fe, and identify yourself, they will give you a permit. When you get here you will be brought to me.”
Lanny had a well-earned sleep, and in the morning the hotel porter told him where to go; everybody knew that something important was going on at that address but had no idea what. At the office he was escorted into a cubicle, where he presented his Connecticut driver’s license, his calling card, his two cards of introduction, and a bunch of letters which he happened to have with him. He had to fill out a questionnaire, giving his name, his age, his place of birth, the names of his parents, and a lot of other details. They took his fingerprints and then made out a pass which, they told him, would be valid only until six o’clock that day. Hard luck if his car broke down!
He retraced the hot, sandy drive on the cliffside road; downhill most of the way, descending into dry riverbeds and climbing again, with heavy traffic all the way. He came to the gate, and it was a different soldier. Others came and inspected the pass, the passee, and the car; a minute inspection—they lifted the seats, rummaged in the trunk, looked under the hood of the car; Lanny wondered if they were going to open the cylinders. Nobody was going to carry any bombs or weapons, and perhaps not any opium or heroin or marijuana, into the world’s greatest nuclear research laboratory.
They asked him to slide over in the seat and let a soldier drive. They went through the gate and climbed a windin
g road up to the top of the Pajarito Plateau, backed by the high green Jemez Mountains. The soldier said, “Sir, the regulations require that visitors shall look straight ahead.” Lanny promised to comply.
They went through another pair of gates, and he couldn’t help seeing a high industrial fence topped with barbed wire on each side of the street. He did not look at the low buildings. When he got past the fence there were the stores and dwellings of a very ugly, higgledy-piggledy town. Lanny had never seen so many queer types of dwellings, and could guess that it had grown haphazardly and in a hurry. Later he was told that Oppy, who ran this place, had estimated that they would need accommodations for three hundred persons; now, at its maximum, the town had twelve thousand.
The place had been an expensive ranch school three years ago when the government had taken it over. There had been no time to level the ground; the graveled roads went winding up and down and into canyons, and were lined on both sides with more queer kinds of emergency houses than Lanny had ever seen in one place: hutments, a dozen kinds of prefabricated buildings, two-story, four-apartment, board houses painted dark green, and more kinds and sizes and colors of trailers than anyone could imagine. Trucks whirling around corners kicked up dust.
The visitor was taken into one of the dark green apartments. It was cool and pleasant, with an electric fan going. It was a study with a flat-topped desk, comfortable chairs, reading lamps, and many books. Rising to greet him was an almost comically young and bouncing lad with curly golden hair, bright pink cheeks, and horn-rimmed spectacles. Lanny would have taken him for eighteen, and learned that he was twenty-three. “I am Dr. Fairchild,” he said, and Lanny would have liked to answer, “How well you are named!” Instead he inquired with a grin, “Do I have to have shots?” The other replied with a smile, “I am not that sort of doctor. I am one of those the soldiers here call ‘long-hairs,’ meaning a physicist.”
III
Seated, the youngster began ceremoniously, “Mr. Budd, I am one of Dr. Oppenheimer’s assistants. I told him over the phone about your letter, and he told me to see you. Unfortunately the regulations require that you be cleared by the Army Security Forces. Will you come with me to Captain Smith’s office?”
Said the visitor, “By all means. I have been a secret agent for eight years and I know about security.” He noted that the GI who had driven him was staying right there by the door; and when he went out with the young scientist the soldier followed a few steps behind. No doubt everything had been planned in advance.
They walked several blocks through this strange town and came to a substantial building, which had been a part of the boys’ school. Ushered into an office, Lanny was introduced to a severe-faced gentleman who looked like a prize-fighter with his nose broken. The ex-P.A. turned over all his papers: the two cards and the OSS credentials, a driver’s license and such letters as he happened to have with him. The officer studied them and then said, “So far, so good. But you understand that such things can easily be forged; also, I have to consider the possibility that the real Mr. Budd might have been slugged and buried somewhere out in the desert.”
“True,” said the other, smiling. “What you want are psychological tests, which cannot be forged.”
“Would you mind telling me how you came to know Dr. Einstein?”
“It is all one story, and I had better begin at the beginning. My father is Robert Budd, president of Budd-Erling Aircraft. They have a new town called Budd in this state, and I have just come from there; one of the things you can do is to telephone to the superintendent and get a physical description of me. I was born in Europe—”
“In what country, sir?” The stern officer was making notes.
“Switzerland. I was raised in France and traveled all over Europe. After World War I my father brought me back to France, and on the steamer was Professor Alston, on his way to advise President Wilson at the Peace Conference. Alston had been in my father’s class at Yale, and he invited me to become his secretary because I knew the languages so well. I didn’t see Alston again until 1937; meantime he had become a member of Governor Roosevelt’s staff in Albany and had been taken to Washington with him. Alston sent me to Roosevelt, who invited me to become what is called “presidential agent.” I was Number 103, but I doubt if he had that many. Have you heard of them?”
“They are not within the Army’s province, sir. Proceed.”
“It happened that I had a boyhood friend in Germany who knew Hitler. I pretended to become a convert, and brought out information which F.D.R. said was of value. In the summer of 1941 I was trained to go into Germany to find out what they were doing about atomic fission, and that is how I came to know Einstein. I spent the summer in Princeton, and my instructor was Dr. Braunschweig.” Lanny turned to Dr. Fairchild. “Do you know him?”
“I am sorry, Mr. Budd. I’m a country boy and got my education at Cal Tech. I have never been East.”
“I have never been to Cal Tech, but I visited the Huntington Library. I am by profession an art expert, and that was my camouflage in Germany. I never finished my mission because my plane was wrecked on the way to Iceland and I had both legs broken. You know how it is, Dr. Fairchild, when you bone up for an exam you forget a lot of it quickly; but some of it is still in my mind. It began, I remember, with E equals mc squared, and you write the E with a capital, and the m and c in small letters, otherwise they mean other things than mass and the speed of light. The E is energy expressed in ergs, the mass is in grams, and the speed of light in centimeters per second. I could recite a number of formulas, I believe. I have things like this floating through my mind: ‘The separation factor, sometimes known as the enrichment or fractionating factor of a process, is the ratio of the relative concentration of the desired isotope after processing to its relative concentration before processing.’ Does that mean anything to you, Dr. Fairchild?”
“Of course, Mr. Budd.”
“Still more important is the fact that I played some of Mozart’s sonatas With Einstein. If you are musical—”
“Unfortunately I am not.”
“I called on Einstein only five days ago, to get that card. I told him what I had been doing in Germany in recent months, helping the Alsos Mission dig up atomic secrets. I worked with Professor Goudsmit and Colonel Pash, the military head of the mission. Pash and I drove up to a village called Urfeld, in the Bavarian Alps, to get hold of Werner Heisenberg.”
“He was at Cal Tech, and I saw him.”
“So then we have a point of contact! Heisenberg is a medium-sized man, smooth shaven, pleasant mannered but oversure of his own importance. The principal thing I remember is how warm his buttocks were, for I had to hold him on my knees all the way on a drive out of the mountains, and his weight seemed to double. That is perhaps not very convincing—”
“The way you tell it is, sir.” The young scientist was grinning.
“The main point is what we found. The German efforts at atomic fission were judged amateurish. Their apparatus was good, but it was the wrong kind. They appeared to have the idea that a chain-reaction pile might be a bomb, and they were sure we couldn’t have anything better than they had, because they were Germans. However, we got some materials that were useful; at a place called Hechingen, in the Swabian Alps, we got a ton and a half of uranium, a ton and a half of heavy water, and ten tons of carbon. I suppose all of it was shipped to this country.”
“We did not see the Goudsmit reports,” said Fairchild. “I suppose General Groves thought there was nothing in them that we needed.”
“Goudsmit was absolutely sure the Germans had nothing of importance. I captured Phillip Lenard for him, but he didn’t think it was worth while even to talk to the old man. Perhaps you have seen pictures of him, so I will describe him—”
The Security officer had been listening, never taking his eyes off the visitor. Now he broke in, “I think I have heard enough to be sure of your identity, Mr. Budd. I should tell you that last night, when your letter ca
me, I checked at once with Dr. Einstein and Mr. Alston by telephone, and also with OSS Washington, and they gave me various details by which I might identify you. This morning I phoned General Groves, and he authorized me to clear you provided that I was satisfied you were the right person. Nobody ever gets in here without the General’s OK.”
“I am very obliged to you both,” said the visitor politely.
“I might also tell you that you will be the only person present at the Base Camp who is not actually working on the project. It will be better if you don’t say what you are there for or how you got in; that will avoid hurt feelings. There are a number who would have liked to be present but have been sent to a place twenty-seven miles away.”
“Thank you again, Captain. I’m used to keeping my own counsel.”
The captain made out the pass and handed it over. They shook hands, and Lanny went out with Fairchild. The latter remarked, “We are at the very top of our crisis, the thing we have been hoping and praying for and at the same time dreading. I am so nervous myself I can hardly sleep or eat. You are to drive to a place called Alamagordo, in the southern part of the state. I am expecting to go there myself. I have to make certain records.”
“Why don’t you ride with me?” suggested the ex-P.A. “That way I can be sure they’ll let me in.”