Lanny had his private thoughts for this crucial occasion. He couldn’t say to these scientists, “I have a million dollars with which to prevent an atomic war”; but he could feel them out and judge which men would be most useful for his purposes; he could make friends with them, so that later, if he wrote to them or went to see them, they would know who he was. Whether nuclear fission was to be used in war or only for the purposes of industry, these were the experts whose say-so the world would have to heed. He found them in a grave mood, ready to speak.
IX
On Sunday evening General Groves arrived; a heavy-set West Pointer just turning fifty, with a small mustache and thick black hair beginning to show gray. His face wore a rather grim expression, and Lanny could guess that he didn’t welcome meeting strangers at this busy moment. He brought with him President Conant of Harvard and Dr. Bush of the OSRD.
Lanny talked with his well-informed young tent companion. What would happen if lightning struck that steel tower? Fairchild couldn’t be sure, but he said it was just as well that nobody should be near. Rain, he was positive, wouldn’t hurt it, for this was not the kind of fire that water would have any effect upon; when a chain reaction got going, water would disappear as steam or perhaps be changed into atoms of hydrogen and oxygen.
One of the uncomfortable ideas these long-hairs had discussed was that a large-scale chain reaction might not stop with the isotopes of uranium. Suppose it were to start off some other heavy metal, iron, for example, and there should be a vein of it under this desert floor! Or suppose—just supposing!—that it should set off a chain reaction of the lighter elements? In that case a medium-sized planet of the solar system would disappear in one bright flash—though not bright enough to be observed by inhabitants of other planetary systems, if such inhabitants might be in the vasty deeps. In that case Lanny would never get to carry out Emily Chattersworth’s mission; in that case, where would Lanny be, and where would Emily be? He tried his best to persuade himself that somewhere, or out of all wheres, might be still existing the millions of millions of souls that had lived upon the earth during its last million or so of years, and that he had been hearing the voices of a few of these through the lips of Laurel and of Madame Zyzynski. The best he could do was to say that he would believe it when he woke up in that new state of being.
From the tent opening he saw the lean figure of Oppy and the burly figure of GG, alias 99, wandering about in the diminishing rain. He knew they couldn’t sleep, and he could imagine their discussion. They wanted aerial observation, photographs, and instrument recordings of the great event; but pilots couldn’t see anything in this weather. More important yet, if the explosion came off, and the enormous radioactive cloud were brought down to the earth by rain, what would be the effect upon towns and ranches and growing crops? These were new questions, and new fears for the authors of unprecedented destruction. Oppy lighted more cigarettes, and wandered about, peering up at the clouds and looking in vain for a star. The test was postponed from four o’clock to five-thirty. Later than that would spoil the chance for photographs in darkness.
One star appeared, then two, and they were enough; the storm was passing. Oppenheimer and Groves consulted their meteorologist and decided that five-thirty would be H-hour. The lieutenant of the Military Police Detachment guarding the tower reported by telephone that all was well. The control station from which the bomb was to be detonated was ten thousand yards, about six miles, from the tower, and here a shelter of heavy logs and earth had been built, with a sloping side toward the explosion. The place assigned to the observers was a slight rise of ground, seventeen thousand yards from the tower, and their orders were to lie flat on the ground, face downward, and heads away from the blast. All were provided with dark glasses, but did not trust to these; they buried their eyes in the sleeves of their forearms crooked in front of them.
X
A tension such as Lanny had never seen before in any group of men. The control room and various observation points were all tied in by radio, and twenty minutes before H-hour one of the scientists took control and began calling—minus twenty minutes, minus fifteen minutes, and so on until the last five minutes, which were called minute by minute from a loudspeaker. Not a sound from any of those prostrate forms; some, no doubt, were praying, others shuddering, all finding them the longest minutes in their lives. At minus forty-five seconds an automatic mechanism took over, and from then on all the complicated procedure was out of the hands of human beings. There was a reserve switch with a soldier-scientist sitting before it; he could have stopped everything if he had been told to—but he wasn’t.
At the precise second there came a flash of light, the like of which had never been seen on this earth, many times the brightness of the sun at its brightest. A blind girl a hundred miles away perceived it somehow, and before the sound reached her she asked, “What was that?” The scientists leaped to their feet and looked through their dark glasses at an enormous half-bubble of light that had been shot up into the sky. They braced themselves for the blast, the mass of air pushed from the explosion, with the greatest force ever created by human beings. At ten miles distance it was not serious, but it knocked flat two men who had stood outside the control room. A few seconds more and there came the sound, a thunderous all-pervading roar like nothing anyone could imagine.
A huge cloud of many bright colors had surged up into the sky. Explosions seemed to be going on inside it, and the shock waves and sounds continued. It billowed and boiled and became an immense mushroom, emitting light like the sun and growling and roaring like the monsters of primeval time. The watchers were stunned at first; then exultation possessed them, and they shook one another’s hands, they hugged the nearest man, and cried out with wonder and delight. They had done it! Their formulas were right!
A sight never to be forgotten by anyone who was there. The light turned the whole landscape to day; the mountain range near by stood out as if in a dawn of many suns. The light shifted and changed, from golden to red to blue to violet, then to gray; nobody dared look at it without the dark glasses. The cloud continued to rise and boil until it became a tower some eight miles tall; then slowly the light faded out of it, the grumbling ceased, and the wind began to shift it, fortunately away from the Base Camp and with no rain to bring it quickly to earth.
The learned scientists stood chattering like a group of schoolchildren. Their satisfaction was beyond bounds. One and all, they had staked their time, their thought, their health, their reputations, upon this, the most costly of all scientific experiments. Up to the last second they had had no surety of success, and now, all of a sudden, they had it in overwhelming quantity and quality. Nobody could have asked more, nobody could have imagined more. There was a story about a pilot who had been sent up to make observations from a long distance and report by radio. When he saw the flash and felt the blast he shouted, “The damn long-hairs have let the thing get away from them!” But it wasn’t so; it was “Operation according to plan.” One of the scientists confided to Lanny the astounding fact that the bomb which had wrought this colossal effect was slightly larger than a baseball and weighed no more than twenty or thirty pounds.
Specially equipped tanks, with thick lead covering, were wheeled to the scene in course of the day. One of them carried the quiet Professor Fermi; he came back and reported that the steel tower, with all its instruments, had completely disappeared; the steel had been vaporized and must have gone up in the cloud. At the base of the tower was an immense crater with sloping sides. The sand of the desert floor had been fused and was now a sheet of green glass, upon which nobody would dare to set foot for many a day, perhaps a year.
“If we drop this over Japan it will end the war,” said 99; and Oppy added, “I hope it won’t end civilization.”
BOOK SEVEN
Thy Friends Are Exaltations
19
Powers That Will Work for Thee
I
Lanny drove back to the town of Budd
and reported to his wife that he had seen something important which he was not permitted to disclose; he thought it wouldn’t be long before the story was released, and then she would have an eyewitness account to write up. In return, she told him that she had taken up the idea of writing a story about Robbie’s number-one test pilot, a daring fellow who flew everything that was made and was still alive in spite of having been doing it for twenty years. When he had flown a plane for an hour he knew more about it than its makers. His job was to get what he called “the numbers”: how fast the plane flew at level flight and how fast when rising; how fast at sea level and at twenty thousand feet; its engine temperatures, its gallons of fuel consumed per hour, and many other details. After he had got them, the Army came and made the tests all over again before accepting the plane. No wonder Budd was a busy field!
It amused Lanny to hear his wife telling him things which he had been hearing from Robbie for a couple of decades. Did Lanny know what it meant for a plane to “snake”? Yes, he had heard the expression. This pilot had a new model that snaked so that it almost yawed, and he had decided it was the fuel sloshing in the tank; they were putting in baffles, which they hoped would stop the trouble. Laurel went on to describe the man’s pathetic little wife, who had never become reconciled to his dangerous job, not even at fifty dollars a day. Laurel said, “I wanted to tell her how sorry I was for her, but I thought I’d better not.” Lanny answered with a smile, “Robbie wouldn’t have liked it.”
He teased her for inconsistency; she, a hater of war, and preparing to start out on a crusade against it, was a Budd-Erling stockholder; she was making blood money out of these engines of destruction. She had inherited the stock from her uncle, so it wasn’t of her own choice; and if she sold the stock, somebody else would get the profits, but it wouldn’t stop the making of the engines. “Thou shalt not kill,” said the Commandment; the Episcopalians had softened it to read “Thou shalt do no murder.” This illustrates the fact that moral problems are complicated, and not even God has been able to make them plain and simple.
II
President Truman had gone to Germany, to sit down with Churchill and Stalin and try to solve those problems which had been troubling Franklin Roosevelt on the night before his death. Lanny had been free to tell his wife about this interview, and now, driving their little aluminum house back to New York, they listened to broadcasts speculating as to what might be going on at the Potsdam Conference. The fate of the world for many years to come might be decided over there in the large quadrangular palace full of relics of Frederick the Great. Certainly it would have a great deal to do with what the Budd couple would be thinking and doing in course of the next five years.
The conference lasted two weeks and two days, and that gave the newspapers and radio commentators plenty of time to speculate, and gave the couple time to get their affairs in order. They took the trailer back to Newcastle, duly thanked its owner, and reported what they had seen at his town. They talked about the trip and about jets, but not a word about bombs. A dutiful son did feel free to say this much to his father, “Don’t quote me, but I think you can make your plans on the basis of the Japs giving up very soon.” The wise father looked at this man of mystery whom he knew so very well and saw a steady look in his eyes and a grave expression on his face. “You really mean that, Lanny?”
“I mean it positively. I can’t say more.”
They found Frances in a state of excitement because her mother and stepfather were coming to pay a visit and take her on a trip across the continent. Ceddy had bought a big ranch in Western Canada—with Irma’s money, of course. It was raising wheat for England, a worthy purpose, and now harvest time was at hand, a great sight. They were going to make a grand tour, through the Canadian Rockies, and returning by way of California and Budd, in which Irma too was a stockholder.
In the course of that trip the girl would make up her mind whether she preferred going back to England to school or staying in Newcastle. Lanny didn’t want to influence her decision. He was aware that the elder Budds were extremely sensitive on the subject of divorces and would consider it a theme for gossip if Irma and Laurel were to be in the same town or if Lanny were to meet his former wife there; he needed no hint, but remarked that he and Laurel had to go back to New York in the next day or two. He knew without being told that the arrival of a genuine English earl and countess would constitute a colossal social event, adding to the prestige of the Budd tribe. He looked with distaste upon such snobbery and had no desire for a close-up view of it.
He took his eager young daughter for a sail on the river and listened to the outpouring of her small adventures and her hopes. He told her that she was to make up her own mind about her future. There was an agreement between her mother and himself that neither would ever do anything to influence her against the other, and this meant that Lanny couldn’t tell Frances his opinion about titles of nobility or about the false glories of inherited fortune. She would have to live in Irma’s world. She would see all the excitement over the almost-royal pilgrimage, be kowtowed to and admired and photographed, and must make what she could of it. He did feel free to tell her that he hated war and was going to do what he could to end it. She, of course, could have no idea that hereditary privilege such as her own was among the causes of social and national strife.
They left the baby in the care of Agnes, the skilled trained nurse who had been a second mother to him from his birth. It was summer, and cool breezes blew off the Sound; also Laurel wanted to write an article about test pilots of jet planes—of which she disapproved. Lanny said she would have to leave her disapproval out of the story, for jet planes might have given the victory to Germany if Britain hadn’t been able to build them faster and better. Jet planes were now knocking the Japs out of the skies, and so the American reading public thought them very excellent indeed.
III
Back in the great city, Lanny went on a hunt for an apartment for Nina and Rick, and thereby extended his distrust of the profit system into a new field. Owing to the housing shortage, Congress had passed a law fixing rents of houses, apartments, and even hotel rooms at the prices which prevailed before the war. The effect of this had been to direct the mental energies of landlords and agents to originating devices to get money from would-be tenants for something that couldn’t be classified as rent. The landlord had just installed a fine piano in the apartment, and would Lanny’s friends be willing to pay fifty dollars a month extra for the use of this piano? In another case, would they be willing to pay the agent a hundred dollars a month extra for his services in finding them a competent cleaning woman—this above what they would pay to the woman?
Lanny didn’t mind paying a high price so much as he minded being forced to connive at breaking the law. After answering several ads and running into various forms of trickery, he decided that he would make use of that snobbery which he had discovered to be so powerful in Newcastle. He inserted in the most highly regarded newspapers an advertisement with a box number, reading: “English baronet (genuine), a well-known playwright visiting city with his wife, desires to rent comfortably furnished, centrally located apartment two months. Middle-aged couple, no children, no pets.”
Two days later there was a reply, offering him just what he wanted, not far from his own apartment. A telephone number was given, and he called it; a pleasant woman’s voice answered and asked for the name of the prospective English tenants. Lanny replied that he didn’t care to give the name of the tenants until he had seen the apartment and been told the price. They sparred for a while over this, and he was asked for his own name and gave a part of it, Mr. Lanning.
The lady consented to meet him and take him to the apartment, and he met her in the lobby of a near-by hotel. She was young, well dressed, and smart, and devoted her smartness to trying to get him to name the baronet; he in turn devoted his to an effort to persuade her to show the apartment, which could be had for only three hundred dollars a month, a price he was willi
ng to pay. The effort was of no avail, and in the end she laughed and told him she didn’t think he had any baronet, and she didn’t have any apartment. She was a newspaperwoman who had smelled a good story in the coming of a titled Englishman who was a well-known playwright!
The problem was solved by accident when Lanny mentioned his trouble to Zoltan Kertezsi. The art expert said, “They can have my apartment. I am going to be away.” Zoltan had been invited to study and prepare a descriptive catalogue of the art collection of a wealthy retired banker in Princeton—none other than that Mr. Curtice who had given Lanny a hiding place while he was boning up on atomic fission. Mr. Curtice was going to the Adirondacks, and Zoltan would have his lovely old mansion with the smooth green lawns and white peacocks on them—all to himself except for some of the servants. “Come and see me,” Zoltan said. “Mr. Curtice will agree that our two heads are better than my one.”
IV
In the midst of these small affairs came an event of electrifying import to the two rich friends of the poor: polling day in Britain, and the Potsdam Conference adjourned for three days to enable Winston Churchill and his large staff to fly back home to vote. Winston went—and he didn’t come back. The most amazing thing, a parliamentary upset the like of which had never been known in British history. The common people of that land of hope and glory adored their war leader, but they didn’t want him as a peace leader—a distinction that was clear to them but must have been confusing to Winnie. The Labour party obtained a majority of almost two to one; they got it upon the basis of a definite program calling for the nationalization of the five most important of the nation’s industries: coal, steel, transportation, communications, and finance.