The Trinity Paradox by Doug Beason Kevin J Anderson Page A

has an unsurpassable advantage over the others.”
    — Paul Harteck and Wilhelm Groth, initial letter to the German War Office
    R and R: Rest and Recreation. He would go crazy if he didn’t get away from the bloody Project.
    The road out of the bustling, primitive town of Los Alamos plunged down the mesa like something constructed for an amusement park, then wound back up for the thirty-five-mile trek to Santa Fe. Graham Fox watched the landscape unfold as the dusty bus chugged past the small towns of Tesuque and Cuyamungue, then through the Nambe and Rio Grande valleys. As the bus strained up the last hill before Santa Fe, someone pointed out the silhouette of the Sandia mountains jutting up seventy miles to the south, near Albuquerque.
    A few days ago the scenery had looked totally alien to Fox, something that existed only in cowboy movies. If he had seen a painting of the startling contrast between turquoise skies and red and golden clay, he would have considered the painter an impressionist with a garish palette. The air smelled sharp, the wind felt dry. His lips and hands had begun to chap as soon as he disembarked from the train in Santa Fe station.
    This place seemed to belong on a different planet from serene, civilized Cambridge, England. At any moment he half expected a band of wild Indians to ride over the clipped-off mesas. But was a frontier town full of nuclear scientists any less bizarre?
    Fox tried to tear his mind away from the letter in his pocket, concentrating instead on the distant mountains. In England the farthest distance he could see was up to the nearest grove of trees. The hills there had been soft, rolling, lush and green. In contrast, New Mexico had unlimited visibility, with a clean starkness that hurt the eyes.
    But J. Robert Oppenheimer had found no better place to establish a new town whose purpose was to meet the grandest challenge of science. From his security indoctrination, Fox knew that the boys’ school on the site had been purchased in secret by the War Office, the solitary teacher and his small group of students packed off without any explanation, and Los Alamos had been set up virtually overnight. Right in the middle of America’s legendary wide-open spaces.
    Maybe that was the real reason Oppenheimer had decided to set the Project here. Not so much for the solitude—from what Fox had heard, West Virginia or China Lake in California would have served as well—but other locations might place too much pressure on the scientists, box them into traditional ways of thinking. No, the limitless view had the psychological effect of keeping the scientists unbridled, uncontained with enormous ideas that could end up destroying the world. And Fox had been chosen to lend his talents, whether he wanted to or not.
    Fox fingered his letter. The stationery felt thin and simple, but the words were so dangerous. Just bringing the letter out of the fenced compound went against all instructions the G-2, the Army Intelligence people, had been feeding him the past week. “All correspondence is to be submitted to the security detail with envelopes unsealed. Failure to cooperate will result in a direct violation of the Espionage Act.”
    Espionage Act! The whole situation seemed ludicrous. Fox felt caught between paranoia and laughter at the absurdity of it. How could they in all honesty suspect a relationship that had already lasted fifteen years, one that had been cemented long before Chancellor Hitler began his rampage across Europe?
    Fox’s Ph.D. studies at Cambridge had brought him into contact with several international students. After all, his teacher, Rutherford, was a world-renowned physicist; studying under him had marked Graham Fox as a rising star. It was something ordinary students only dreamed about.
    Fox had become fast friends with Abraham Esau, a young German student. They had lived together in the boardinghouse, sharing the single water closet down the hall; they had played typical