The journey was a subterfuge. Ezra Prentice traveled with an assumed name, his papers under a middle-grade engineer's name with the War Department. He took a series of army transport planes, from one dusty airfield to another, till he landed finally on a lone airstrip amid the high desert country of New Mexico. He was transported miles into the backwoods by a dusty army jeep, up a winding road to a high mesa.
He visited a place that did not technically exist. "Site Y." Los Alamos.
The scene that greeted his eyes was a harsh, practically savage opposite to Kykuit's Gilded Age excess. This was a city founded in mud and necessity. Rough, functional buildings and pre-fab barracks spotted the landscape, connected by mud roads that stagnated into thick muck during the afternoon storms. The entire mesa was surrounded by high barbed-wire fences, guarded by armed military police. It was a frontier city, a prison camp, a monastery, and it was populated by the greatest concentration of scientific genius that the world had so far known.
His appointment was with the man who by then indisputably reigned as king of this secret domain: Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The past year had transformed the theoretical physicist. The casual arrogance Ezra had firstnoticed in New York had blossomed into an attitude of lordly, almost royal, self-confidence. In his porkpie hat, pipe gripped between his teeth, Oppenheimer moved with lordly ease through the bustling construction center as if he were a prince surveying his territories. Brilliant, dynamic, and he was well aware of it. He resented, personally, Washington's "civilian oversight," and from Ezra Prentice, man he sneeringly, but privately, referred to as the "hotel-suite physicist."
"Mr. Prentice," Oppenheimer said, his tone a gentle, professional warmth that did little to mask his condescension. "Welcome to the frontier. Rougher than your usual accommodations, I imagine."
He led Ezra into the central technical section, speaking in deliberately plain terms, as one might lecture on thorny points to a rich but dim-witted patron. "This, my boy, is our cyclotron, a present from Harvard. We use it to bombard... ah, to study the characteristics of certain materials. And here, within what has come to be nicknamed 'The Ice House,' we are dealing with some very curious thermodynamic conundrums involving... ah, a burst of energy release."
Ezra listened intently, his face a mask of polite interest, until they were within Oppenheimer's own office—a room surprisingly large with an enormous blackboard adorned with a galaxy of intimidating equations. A few aides and military attachés lurked discreetly.
Ezra turned to them. "Gentlemen, might I ask that you afford the Doctor and me just a moment's privacy? We have certain... financial matters to attend to." He said it quietly, but his voice was laced with a certain authority. The men glanced to Oppenheimer, who gave a very small, impatient nod. They withdrew promptly, closing the door behind them.
The instant the door closed, Ezra's whole demeanor changed. The kind benefactor was gone, to be replaced by the detached, analytical mind.
"It's taking too long, Robert, to generate the implosion lens calculation," he remarked, his reference to Oppenheimer by first name a casual, deliberate assertion of power.
Oppenheimer's pallid smile froze on his lips. He stood immobilized, aghast.
Ezra continued, walking to the blackboard as if he owned it. "It's wrong to have so much reliance upon your man's use of Dr. Neddermeyer's original data from his tests of cylinders. The convergence is unstable. You are wasting time and valuable material. You are going to need a new, dedicated unit working with nothing but the hydrodynamics of spherically explosive lenses. And a practical chemistry and explosive master to direct it. I think General Groves should relieve George Kistiakowsky from his present work with him at Harvard."
Then he nodded to another set of equations scribbled on the blackboard. "And this. Your proposed scheme to remove the plutonium from the reactors at Hanford. The use of the bismuth phosphate technique is clever, but your yields will be poor and your operation slow. You ought to be studying liquid-liquid extraction with a special emphasis on organophosphate complexing reagents. Have your chemists research it."
Oppenheimer stared at him, his pipe suspended, forgotten, from his lips. His mind, one of the fastest on planet Earth, could hardly cope. Prentice wasn't reciting from reports with which he had been supplied. He was displaying a full, internal understanding of the project's highest classified, most difficult, and most pressing scientific and engineering challenges. He was aware of the implosion problem, a fact possessed by no more than a few dozen men on the entire planet. He understood its ins and outs, but he correctly evaluated its root flaw and even knew the name of a certain outside scientist better qualified to fix it.
Their relationship did not just shift; it disappeared and reformed in a moment. The confident prince turned into a bewildered subject. The beneficiary was none other than the true king.
"How?" he finally managed to get out, his voice a strangled whisper. "In God's name, how could you possibly know these things? This is information that doesn't exist except in this room."
Ezra wheeled away from the blackboard and across to his window, where he gazed into the bleak beauty of the desert world outside, with the mountains of Sangre de Cristo a purple smudge across a hazy sky.
"Come, Doctor," he said, his tone gentle and contemplative, "you and I are vastly similar. You are assembling parts to build a machine that will change the world irrevocably. I am assembling parts to build the world that will be after your machine has transformed it. We are both constructing a new world."
He turned round to challenge a wide-eyed scientist, his eyes as cold and hard as steel.
"You are building the bomb to finish this war, Robert. A defensible and noble endeavor. I am building it to finish the peace that follows—a peace to be dictated by whoever holds power over this." His gaze did not change. "Never, ever mix my role within this project again. You are a genius, the scientific brain behind this project. But I am its will. You are my greatest asset. See to it that you deliver as intended."
The line had been drawn, not with chalk on a blackboard, but between two titanic egos. Two men, both convinced that they were the indispensable man of their time, had finally gauged each other. And Oppenheimer, who was destined to be the destroyer of worlds, had just come to see that he, too, owed obeisance to a higher, and infinitely more evasive, power.