Climbout seemed simple, and Mitchell instructed a level off when the altimeter reached 5,000 feet.
"Straight and level is the first lesson," he said. "Remember, pull back on the stick, the houses get smaller. Push forward, the houses get bigger." He cackled while Braun concentrated intently. "The instruments are secondary for now. You want to fly as much as possible by looking outside. Pick a bug spot on the windshield and keep it on the horizon."
Braun did and the aircraft stayed remarkably level.
"If you change power to go faster or slower, you'll have to change the aim point just a bit."
Braun experimented, first with the wings level, then adding a few mild turns. The next lesson involved something called stalls, a discomforting term that had nothing to do with the engine, but rather aerodynamics. If you got too slow, in the Luscombe's case below forty-five miles an hour, the aircraft no longer flew. Fortunately, the recovery was tame — the nose dropped, power was added, and the airspeed quickly recovered.
For the next two hours they went through maneuvers and procedures. All the time the Luscombe kept roughly on a westerly heading, making distance as the learning took place. With the fuel gauge getting low, Mitchell turned to navigation. He pointed out the window. "See the road down there? That's Route Six. I've been watching it this whole flight. It's the easiest way to navigate — follow the roads."
He handed over a map that showed the highway in red. Braun studied it, but thought the picture outside was less clear. Intersecting side roads and small cities swallowed the highway at unpredictable intervals.
"I see the road, but how far along it have we traveled?" Braun asked.
"Well, there's a few ways to tell. Dead reckoning with time and speed, checking the layout of the towns and roads against the map. But I have my own personal favorite."
"What's that?"
The old man grinned. He took control of the aircraft and rolled it until they were nearly upside down. Braun gripped the door as the nose dropped. When the wings righted again the Luscombe was diving toward the ground. Mitchell leveled out no more than a hundred feet off the deck, straight above Route 6. The airspeed approached the red line on the gauge—145 miles an hour — and the Luscombe shot past a truck and two cars like they were standing still.
Mitchell pointed ahead and shouted over the rushing noise of the wind stream, "There you go!"
Ahead, a billboard stood at the side of the road. It read:
WELCOME TO SOUTH BEND INDIANA
HOME OF THE FIGHTING IRISH
Chapter 24
The name was Spanish for "The Poplars," referring to the cotton-wood trees that grew in thick clusters at the bottoms of the canyons. Los Alamos, New Mexico, sat high on the eastern slope of the Jemez Mountains, a desert mesa that provided breathtaking scenery and isolation in equal measure. In 1917 it had become home to the Los Alamos Ranch School, a curiously popular and expensive boarding school that provided a "hardening experience" for those privileged young men of good society whose parents saw the need.
Twenty-five years later, in December 1942, the school was presented with its notice of eviction. The directive came from none other than Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, who announced that the school was to be "acquired for military purposes." The owners and staff were asked, in grave tones, to maintain a patriotic silence on the reasons for the schools closure.
The Army's logic was straightforward. The closest city of note was Santa Fe, and that reachable only by an hour's car ride on an unpaved road that suffered seasonally — syrupy plots of mud in the summer and slick sheets of ice in the winter. Unfortunately, it also lacked both straightness and guardrails, leaving little to keep one from launching into the picturesque canyons below. Few of Los Alamos' new inhabitants — all either government employees or dependents — made the harrowing voyage regularly.
The reciprocal result, by strong design, was that virtually no one from the outside world found reason to make the trip up to the isolated canyon community, known by its residents as "The Hill." Those who tried were asked to leave by surly Army sentries at checkpoints along the road. Anyone attempting to circumvent this would have to deal with barbed wire fences, and the soldiers on horseback who patrolled them continuously.
Because of this isolation, the new residents of Los Alamos were allocated a miniature city to themselves. There was a school for children and a store for groceries. The church doubled as a movie theater, and so each Sunday morning the prefects were forced to arrive early at the house of holy worship to sweep popcorn off the floor. This was Los Alamos, a city with a singular purpose — to be the olive drab birthing room for the most deadly weapon ever conceived by man.
If there was a heart to the organism that was Los Alamos, it was the community center. At two o'clock in the morning, music blared to a scratchy crescendo from a worn phonograph, the sound from the highest notes and most egregious vinyl imperfections stabbing out across an otherwise quiet compound. The crowd, twenty-odd scientists and a handful of support staff, all cheered drunkenly. Dr. Karl Heinrich was a silly sight.
At five foot two, two hundred and five pounds, he had never been one to cut a dashing figure on the dance floor. Now, however, with a Navajo blanket draped around his shoulders and a huge sombrero atop his nearly bald head, he resembled a child's top — thick, brightly colored, and spinning to a wobble before inevitably falling to the floor. It was a controlled collapse though, the physicist dissipating his kinetic energy without losing a drop of tequila from the bottle in his hand. Sitting in a heap, Heinrich snorted, took a swig, and yelled in a thick German accent.
"To the conservation of momentum!"
"To gravity!" someone countered.
There was a modest cheer, something less than what would have come an hour ago. Half the crowd had already left, and the remaining hardcores were rightly toasted.
Heinrich pushed himself to his feet as another song began. It had a catchy beat. "Now there is something to dance to!" he sang out. Heinrich scurried over and latched onto Marge, the sixty-year-old widow who ran the cafeteria by day, and dragged her to the center of the floor. She allowed herself to be taken and tried to keep up, but after five minutes she was out of breath. Marge edged aside to watch as Karl Heinrich twirled and shuffled his feet.
"I must have a partner!" Heinrich yelled. He grabbed Arne Pederson, an engineer, and the only man fatter than Heinrich himself. The crowd applauded as the two big men tried to keep time with the beat. Pederson only lasted a minute. Heinrich kept going. Sweat covered his face and neck, and his jowls jiggled. Once again the tireless little Bavarian, whose good-natured smile seemed permanently etched into place, was the center of attention. The crowd began clapping in rhythm to the music, and Heinrich again raised his bottle. "To Ernst Schrodinger!"
The name of the legendary physicist brought a mix of cheers and catcalls. Aside from a smattering of chemists, mathematicians, and the odd metallurgist, the scientists of Los Alamos fell into two overriding groups — engineers and physicists. Each faction was naturally convinced of the superiority of its own discipline. The physicists, aided by Albert Einstein himself, had given birth to the project. In their minds everything relied on the basic theories and mathematical models they contributed. The engineers, on the other hand, insisted that theories were meaningless until applied. Anyone could imagine a bridge over a river, but to build one that wouldn't collapse — that was something else.