You gotta do what you gotta do, and damn the consequences. She should stay with Fox, take care of him, see what she could do to help him. What if he was dying? What if she had killed him? She didn’t have time to prevent anything back at the bunker anyway. She couldn’t stop the explosion from killing all the scientists. She had to get her priorities straight.
“I can try,” she said to herself, and left Fox lying there as she let up on the clutch. The jeep jerked as it moved into first gear, but she managed to keep it moving. The stick shift wasn’t too different from what she had learned to drive, but it took most of her remaining energy to jam the clutch to the floor.
The jeep sped off, spewing wet sand from its tires. Fox raised a hand, trying to call her back, but she ignored him. She had made her choice. His wasn’t the only life at stake.
Things had changed from what she thought. These people were not the historical monsters she had imagined them to be years ago when she was with the Livermore Challenge Group or with her Santa Fe activists. Flesh, blood, feelings—and things were different here.
The jeep picked up speed as she ran through the gears. Her body smacked against the side of the vehicle as she hit a depression; she clung to the wheel to keep herself from bouncing out. She could hardly see the road. She fumbled for the headlights, but they helped little in the growing glare of sunrise. Still, she kept the jeep pointed toward the command bunker, a good five miles away from her, from Ground Zero.
She had to punch the vehicle to over sixty miles an hour. Could an old Army jeep even go that fast? It had to. She had less than ten minutes. She pressed the pedal to the floor. Over the bouncing she could make out that the wobbling speedometer read a maximum of fifty miles an hour. The rough desert road made her bones rattle in their sockets. She didn’t have any idea how fast she was really traveling, but she prayed that there would be time to reach the bunker.
She didn’t want to be caught in the open when the blast went off. In her mind she saw a snippet of one of the silly civil defense films from the fifties, with cartoon ducks singing a ditty about how to “duck, and cover!” if you happened to be away from a fallout shelter during a nuclear air raid.
As she came closer to the bunker she blasted the horn and yelled at the top of her lungs. “Come on, somebody let me know you’re hearing me!”
She couldn’t tell how far she had gone, or even how far she had left to go. The bunker seemed to sit fixed on the horizon with the tower standing vigil five miles farther away.
She didn’t even know if they could stop the test.
But that didn’t matter. She had to get the people out of the bunker. Feynman, Oppie, Groves, Fermi, von Neumann, a bunch of other Project scientists, a New York Times reporter, a dozen military men, all waiting for the Gadget to go off, and not even knowing they were sitting on another bomb themselves.
She spotted something—someone standing outside the bunker, as if he had just stood up and noticed the oncoming jeep. She tried to keep her hand on the horn, but kept bouncing up with the potholes. She steered with one hand and tried to swerve to miss a cactus the size of a tire, then ran over a broken mesquite bush instead.
The tire exploded, causing the jeep to lurch and bounce, barely avoiding a rollover. “Dammit!” she screamed, and tried to keep the jeep moving, but it caught in a pothole and spun around in the other direction.
Without a second to waste, Elizabeth leaped away from the steering wheel and ran toward the command bunker. She could see it just over the rise in front of her. She sprinted so quickly, leaning forward, that she sprawled on her face in the wet sand, got up again, then kept going.
“Get out of the bunker! Out!” She screamed until her voice fell hoarse. “Get out of there!”
Back at the bunker another person joined the first one outside, then another. One of them pointed at her, but the other two whirled around to look at the tower, then all three made frantic motions with their hands, urging her to hurry.
“No, you idiots! Not me!” Panting as if each breath were being ripped from her lungs, she grew closer. “Out of the bunker!” She had to make them hear her. She took a deep breath and put all her strength behind shouting one word. “Bomb!”
She scrambled ahead and could hear faint words called back to her. “Fifteen seconds until the bomb! Hurry!”
They were not thinking of the right bomb. With more energy than she knew she possessed, Elizabeth threw herself forward. She didn’t recognize the military men standing outside it, motioning to her. They had all turned to watch the tower. The countdown clicked off its final few seconds.
“Get out of the bunker! Please!” she cried. “Out!”
Several people heard her and came to the doorway. The military men ducked down. “Get them out! There’s a bomb! Sabotage!” Elizabeth said again, but she had little force left behind her voice. “They’re going to die!”
Feynman stepped to the doorway. He wore black sunglasses and had suntan cream smeared on his face. He saw her, frowned, and instantly recognized something was wrong. He turned back to the bunker entrance and shouted. Some of the people inside looked startled and reacted with alarm, moving toward the doorway.
As Elizabeth fell to her knees at the last embankments outside the bunker, she could see Oppenheimer and General Groves sitting side by side, ignoring all the rest of the commotion. Oppie turned to her, blinking at seeing Elizabeth there. “A bomb! Get out!” she said one more time, but Oppenheimer flinched and turned back to the slit window, staring through smoked glass and focusing all his attention on the shot tower. One of the military men reached out to grab the general’s shoulder.
“…one… zero!”
Far across the desert, a flash, bright enough to deaden all her senses, then everything went dark. At the same time, the bunker erupted like a volcano. She heard an instant of sound like the roar of a world breaking apart, then her ears were swallowed in a blanket of shocked silence.
Time seemed to go in slow motion. Elizabeth brought her other hand up to her eyes. Purple splotches filled her vision, like a thousand flashbulbs going off at once. Dirt filled her mouth as she rolled; a smell of gasoline seared her nose.
The ground moved from both explosions. Dirt, chunks of rock, shrapnel thanked to the earth around her. The packed sand gave a lurch, then settled down to a long rolling motion in the shock wave from the atomic blast, the same feeling as the San Francisco earthquake of ‘89, which she had felt back at Berkeley.
She could hear or see no other reaction from any of the gathered observers. Every person had to experience this alone, to deal with it in his or her own way.
And then the wind struck. A hot, smacking pop that grew and grew, and never seemed to quit. The wind howled, pushed her back, away from the tower, away from the bunker. Away from the bomb…
She forced her eyes open and tried to see, but still the purple-yellow splotches obscured her vision. She fought against the wind that tried to shove her away from the people she had been trying to save.
And just as suddenly, the wind reversed itself. It came as a shallow, haunting roar that tried to suck her back in the opposite direction, like an undertow into the sea, into the past, into the future.
But she could never go back. She had to live with what she had helped create.
She struggled to her knees. At her left came a growing heat. She turned, still unable to see. The blindness persisted. But as she faced the heat, she felt as if she could feel the growth of the fireball—it should have already risen thousands of feet by now, boiled into the upper atmosphere and spread out in a yellow-orange mushroom cloud.