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 cutting Novak from the ice. The picture showed Groves studying a map of Japan. No, not studying it, exactly; more like burning a hole in it with his eyes. The general’s belly was doughy and his jowls were flabby, but his eyes were like lasers locked on a target. “That man’s horizon didn’t extend one inch beyond Japan,” she said. “Build the bomb; drop the bomb.”
“He was a good fit for the job,” I said.
“Now look at Oppenheimer,” she said, slipping another photo from the folder. The physicist was wearing the porkpie hat that had been his trademark, much like the battered fedora of Indiana Jones. A cigarette hung from Oppenheimer’s lips, and a wisp of smoke wafted up the left side of his face. A skinny tie was cinched around a scrawny neck—no flabby jowls on Oppenheimer—and the nubby collar of a tweed jacket gapped open above bony shoulders. At the center of the image was a pair of haunted, haunting eyes. They were staring straight into the lens, but they seemed to be focused on something far beyond it. “Do you see? Those are the eyes of a man who’s been chained to a rock; a man staring at eternity,” she said. “Where’s the border between America and Japan, or America and Russia, when you’re staring at eternity?”
“Are you sure he can see that far, Miranda? And are you sure you can see into his soul?”
“Come on, Dr. B. When the Trinity test worked, this guy didn’t say ‘yee haw’ or ‘hot damn’ or even ‘oh shit.’ This guy said, ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ He agonized. He tried to rein in nuclear weapons after the war, and he was painted as a traitor for that.”
“He did try,” I said. “But not until after the war.”
She frowned. “I know,” she said, “and that’s part of what’s tragic about him. He built the bomb, and then he hated what it did, and hated the arms race it triggered. And then he was destroyed for opposing the arms race. Meanwhile, look at Werner von Braun. Von Braun was the brains behind the V-2 rockets that rained down on London during the war, but he became an American hero because he started building rockets for us instead of Hitler. Which brings me back to Klaus Fuchs, sort of. Was he a patriot or a traitor?”
“Traitor,” I said. “No question. He sold atomic secrets to our enemies.”