Rodney laid the film on the stage of an enlarger—a downward-pointing rig labeled BESELER that looked like a cross between an industrial lamp and an old-fashioned bellows-type camera—and slipped the film between the lamp and the lens. Then he took a sheet of 8-by-10 photo paper from a metal box and clipped it to an easel at the enlarger’s base. “I’m guessing at this,” he said, “but we need as little light going through this as I can get, so I’ve stopped the lens down all the way. Oh, and I’ve got a number-five contrast filter in there to pump up any trace of contrast we’re lucky enough to have.” He flipped a switch, and light streamed downward out of the lens and through the film, illuminating the white, empty rectangle of paper. Let there be light, I thought, Novak’s funeral hymn echoing in my head.
The light clicked off after only a few seconds, leaving me blind for a moment—and leaving a reverse image on my retinas, a black 8-by-10-inch rectangle floating on a white background—until my eyes readjusted to the red safelight.
“Damn,” I said. The paper was blank.
“Hang on,” said Rodney. “You’ll probably want to say that again in a minute, but we’re not done yet. The image doesn’t show up until we put the paper in the developer.” He pointed to a shallow metal tray that contained an inch or so of clear liquid. “Faint as that image was, this’ll probably develop pretty quickly, if there’s anything there. Then I’ll need to hustle it into the stop bath, to fix it.”
Funny, I thought: a week ago—a moment before events in the morgue took their dramatic turn—Miranda had been preparing to fix Leonard’s brain. Now Rodney was talking of fixing this ghostly image Novak had left behind.
Removing the paper from the base of the enlarger, he laid it gently in the tray.
I leaned close. I knew I wasn’t supposed to hope for anything, but I did.
Ten seconds passed, and the paper remained blank. After another ten, an image began to materialize, like something slowly emerging from a dense fog.
By the time thirty seconds had elapsed, I could tell what that something was. A young man—a young soldier—emerged from the mists of time onto the page. He lay in a shallow, fresh depression in the earth. His head was turned slightly, and I saw a dark circle at his right temple. I had a guess what the dark circle was, although I couldn’t be sure.
One thing was unmistakable, though. The open, staring eyes were those of a dead man.
PART TWO
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
—Robert Oppenheimer,
quoting Hindu scripture after the Trinity atomic test, July 16, 1945
Now we’re all sons of bitches.
—Ken Bainbridge, Trinity test director
CHAPTER 16
CROSSING THE SOLWAY BRIDGE OVER THE CLINCH River, I left behind the Solway community’s half-mile strip of convenience marts and auto-repair shops and barren produce stands. The bridge marked a border, a boundary: once my wheels were on the other side, I had crossed over, into the land General Leslie Groves had claimed for the Manhattan Project—59,000 acres, bounded on three sides by the Clinch, on the fourth side by Black Oak Ridge, and in every direction by the peculiar sensation that World War II still lived on, somehow, in this East Tennessee wrinkle in the space-time continuum. Although the security checkpoints at Solway and the handful of other entry points to Oak Ridge had long since been dismantled, much of the site looked just as it had during the war, and it was perhaps only natural that the city and its people tended to dwell in the black-and-white importance of the past.
On a whim, I varied my route into Oak Ridge this time, taking the exit ramp marked BETHEL VALLEY ROAD, which led to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 Plant. Bearing right at a fork in the road, I bore right onto Scarboro Road. I crossed a low ridge, dropped down into Union Valley, and saw the vast Y-12 complex sprawling to my left behind a high chain-link fence. My eye was caught by a cluster of large, brooding buildings. Their stout concrete frames were filled in with red brick, and strips of windows had been set near the roofline to allow daylight into the cavernous interiors. From the archival photos at the library, I recognized these as the buildings where Beatrice and the other calutron girls had sifted uranium-235 from U-238 for the Hiroshima bomb.
A quarter mile later, the road cut through a gap in a low, wooded ridge, and the Y-12 Plant disappeared from view. Just beyond the gap, a blocky concrete guardhouse, its windows and gunports long since boarded up, marked what had once been one of the Secret City’s gates. Passing the guardhouse, I was leaving the federal reservation and entering the town; leaving the past and rejoining the present. Yet pulling into the police department’s parking lot behind the municipal building, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had one foot in the twenty-first century and one foot in World War II. And sometimes it was tough to tell which foot was on firmer ground.