Four a.m. Rain stops. Conditions to hold for next two hours. Oppie and Groves agree to go ahead at 5.30, the last possible moment. A stream of headlights in the desert — the arming party retreating from the tower at speed.
A bunch of us are on Compania Hill, about twenty miles NW of zero point. Countdown starts at twenty minutes, then warning sirens and people at Base Camp take to trenches.
And then suddenly the sun is shining, and the hills are shimmering in the light. It's a tiny sun on the horizon, too bright to look at until it has grown into a big churning mass of yellow, and then it's floating up from the ground on a long stem of dust. The fireball turns red as it cools and at that point you can see a luminous blue glow around it — ionized air.
This is all in silence. When the bang comes it hurts my ears and then there is a long, long rumble like heavy traffic, and a strong gust of wind.
I can't describe the feeling. It's somehow threatening, as if we had interfered in a part of Nature where we had no business to be. I have goosepimples for hours afterwards.
13
Witch Hunt
Stefi said, 'I have a feeling I can't describe too. We have a piece of living history here. Can't you feel it? Is it not speaking to you?'
Findhorn stood up and stretched. 'Stefi, it's only a photocopy.'
'I'm beginning to learn things about you, Doctor Findhorn. For example, you have all the romance of a cold fried egg.'
'There's nothing in there,' Findhorn complained.
Romella said, 'He keeps coming back to this question of setting the atmosphere alight.'
'I know,' said Findhorn. He was wiggling his strained ankle. 'It preyed on his mind.'
'It's beginning to prey on mine,' Romella said.
'My nuclear physics friend says it has to be a red herring. It couldn't happen unless the bomb was so big it would zap the planet anyway.'
'This religious maniac,' Stefi asked. 'What was it he said in the Gardens?'
'I'll help them turn the key to the bottomless pit.'
'A very useful clue.' Findhorn assumed Stefi was being ironic.
She stood up. 'I'm going to speak to that nice librarian boy.'
'About HMS Daring?
'Inter alia. I'll bring back a Chinese take-away. Byee.'
Romella had been flicking through the A4 sheets. Her face was thoughtful. 'Petrosian seems to have gotten into some sort of trouble after the war.'
Findhorn sat down on the couch again. 'Tell me the story,' he said.
At 8.14 a.m. Japanese Time, Monday, 6 August 1945, powerful shock waves ripped across Hiroshima at the speed of a bullet.
News of the explosion was flashed from the Enola Gay fifteen minutes after the drop, and was announced at Los Alamos through the Tech Area's Tannoy system. Oppenheimer quickly called the whole staff together in an auditorium, acknowledging the cheers and shouts like a prize fighter. Suddenly, the suspicions of the scientists' wives, that their menfolk had been engaged on something extraordinary, was confirmed. Their children learned that their fathers' work was praised by the President, that their overcrowded little Los Alamos school was being named in great newspapers. In sheer exuberance they paraded through every home in the complex, led by a band banging on pots and pans.
Three days later, Fat Man was dropped from the Great Artiste. Nagasaki became an inferno of flames visible for two hundred miles, and another eighty thousand dead were added to the hundred and twenty thousand of Hiroshima.
A couple of days after that, Los Alamos resounded with parties, conga lines, sirens, drunkenness and TNT explosions in the desert. For most, the doubts, the moral questions, would come later; this wasn't the time.
Over the next few weeks, depression settled over Los Alamos. A diaspora took place, as talented young men took up teaching positions in universities around the States. Few of the emigres returned to their homelands. Fermi joined a new institute at Chicago. Oppenheimer took up his old post at CalTech but, after the daily contact with minds of scorching brilliance, and the creation of a sun which had scorched the New Mexico desert, teaching was an anti-climax. He soon accepted directorship of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and continued to advise government on the development of the new weapons until the day came when the witch-hunters finally got to him.
Across the Atlantic the radar men, whose contribution to the victory had been even more vital than that of the atomic scientists, were likewise dispersing, and would likewise enrich scientific life in future years. Lovell, whose airborne radar had finally killed the U-boat threat, went on to create the Jodrell Bank telescope. Hoyle went on from his wartime radar work to become the most influential living astrophysicist. Bondi, an Austrian and former enemy alien, became Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence; and Tommy Gold, a brilliant iconoclast who had likewise fled the Nazis from Austria, would harass a complacent scientific establishment with radical new insights for the remainder of the century.
At the end of 1945 Petrosian gave up his bachelor flat. With the help of a couple of scientists' wives, he loaded cardboard boxes with Indian pottery, cacti and books, and left them in storage to be sent on. He drove his four-door Buick slowly through the weird, wind-sculpted canyons. Occasionally he glimpsed the Sangre de Cristo mountains far to the west, glowing blood-red in the light of the setting sun. The car's progress was soon marked by tracks in a light covering of snow. He reached a small house on a ridge overlooking Santa Fe; and there he stayed overnight with Kitty Cronin. The morning brought a difficult farewell.
He took Route 85 south, running parallel to the Rio Grande, before turning left, skirting the Trinity test site. Somehow Trinity was a psychological boundary. Once past it, he felt he had left one world behind and was entering another. He drove a thousand miles to Arkansas, stopping only occasionally at roadside diners to relieve himself and have an occasional snack.
Others from the Los Alamos days, and from the defeated Germany, were to turn America into a great powerhouse of science and technology; Petrosian, however, took no part in this. In Arkansas, he buried himself in a small-town community college, a position far below what his talents and reputation could have earned him. Almost wilfully, he had returned to the obscurity whence he came.
Petrosian's record as a refugee who'd worked on the Manhattan Project was soon known locally. He had helped build the Bomb and finish the war in Japan; he had saved thousands of American and Japanese lives; he was a local hero.
Lev quickly established himself as a popular and competent teacher, with a talent for explaining difficult ideas in simple ways. He lived quietly, making only a few close friends. A few Southern girls fluttered their eyelashes at him, but he kept to himself. If asked, he would express clear opinions on anything, and soon became known as anti-segregationist, anti-religious and anti-establishment in outlook. Strangely, in this conservative backwater, these outrageous opinions merely enhanced his popularity, establishing his reputation as a slightly mad foreign eccentric. Lev nominally joined an organization for protecting academic freedom; otherwise, he stayed apart from all organized activity, political or social.
And Romella was now ploughing through year after year of diary whose pages were utterly banal. There was no hint of any drama in Petrosian's life, nothing to suggest that he had invented some new theory, found some novel means of creating energy, or thought of some way to make a super-bomb in a garden shed. He had, in effect, switched off and dropped out. Stefi was singing in the kitchen, and Romella's voice was becoming hoarse, when she said, 'And here comes the trouble.' It started one Wednesday morning in the summer of 1953.