Ezra, back from the high desert of Los Alamos to New York, abandoned a humbled and bitterly disturbed Prince of Physics. He reasserted his command over his scientific front of his war, but to his scientific triumph, he could no longer counter a crisis faced by his home front. Alta's ultimatum still tolled a note within his thoughts, a challenge to be met by neither cold reason nor by might.
He could not help but ignore it. To lose Alta would be to loose his last real anchorage to this world, to be an utterly rootless creature, spectre of future man operating a body of blood and flesh. He needed her, bitterly, by right not just of his creeping, tortuous developing affection for this woman whom he had killed, but by right of practical strength.
It was a calculated choice. He would violate his most significant new rule. He would be honest with her. A version of honesty, at least.
Later in the evening, instead of the sitting room or the bedroom, he took her to his study, his innermost sanctuary, where she never went since he had been changing. He shut the heavy oaken door and nodded to a sitting down place in the leather armchair opposite his desk.
"Alta," he began, his tone no longer possessing its usual authoritative bite, but, rather, a still, grave gravity. "You asked for the truth. You have earned it. But what I'm going to tell you cannot go beyond this room. Not ever. It's neither a commercial nor a national secret; it's our generation's deepest national secret."
He took a long breath, collecting his thoughts. "For the past two years, I have not been just building companies. I have been carrying on a clandestine, frantic competition with Nazi Germany."
He outlined to her his intelligence network, his belief that Germans were working up some new kind of weapon, a bomb so gigantic, so unlike any previously imagined, that it might decide the outcome of war within a single, terrible moment. He outlined his industrial takovers were no money-making projects, but to build those secret plants needed to fulfill his threat. He outlined to her his brilliant refugee physicists his foundation supported were no more working on theory, but were core to America's own development to build just such a weapon first.
"The excursions, the sneakiness, armed men outside our door... it's all to make sure this project stays safe," he said. "It's the world's greatest and deadliest work. I did not trust you with it because bearing that kind of knowledge is a heavy responsibility. I was trying to protect you from it." He veiled his secrecy as no treachery, but a misguided act of chivalry, a shield he had tried to raise up for her.
Alta listened, pale, with her hands clenched together in her lap. She was horrified by the revelation, by the sheer, world-thudding size of the secret that her husband possessed. A super-bomb. A parrying with Hitler to build a weapon capable of unthinkable devastation. It sounded a pulp story from scientific fiction, but he talked with a gentle assurance that made it queerly real.
But, underneath the horror, she experienced a strange sense of relief. He wasn't a monster. He wasn't a rock-hard, incompassionate ghoul who was tired of her. He was a man. A general man, perhaps, but a man. He waged a secret war, a war with huge stakes. The estrangements, the evasions, the hunted look she sometimes saw, below his eyes, beyond his gaze—it all summed up to a terrible, tragic kind of sense.
"This burden which you carry," she spoke softly, a new note of wonder lurking in her voice. "To carry it alone..."
"I'm not alone any longer," he said quietly, reaching across to grasp her hand.
It was a tenuous truce that was reached in that room. The crisis was averted. But their union was forever changed. Gone was easy, old-fashioned intimacy consumed by flames of his revelation. In its stead was something new, something forged by crucible of this terrible secret. She was no longer his wife but his co-conspiratrix, his accomplice to a secret by which the balance of the century would be torn.
Just as Ezra felt that finally his home front was stable, plugging holes in his bulwark, Sullivan showed up with a new and extremely disturbing report. It had come by secure military messenger from Los Alamos. It wasn't a report about science. It was about security.
"There's a problem on the mesa, Mr. Prentice," Sullivan detailed, his face grave. "That G-2 Army intelligence officer out there, a Colonel Pash, has been taking background checks among scientific personnel. He's flagged several of them as potential security risks."
Ezra took the file. "What risks are those?"
"Communist sympathies, sir," Sullivan stated. "Some of the young physicists were active with left-wing organizations during the thirties. Standard political protocol among professors from that era. But one name extends a hand from the page." Sullivan pointed to a sentence within the report. "Klaus Fuchs. A German émigré, who belonged to the British Mission to the project. Brilliant theoretical man, one of Oppie's inner-circle physicists. G-2 has come up with concrete evidence of active membership with the Communist Party."
Ezra's blood went a dash of ice water. Klaus Fuchs. He knew the name to be his own. In his past, Fuchs was the baddest but also most harmful atomic spy, a devoted communist who would pass basically all of the vital details of the implosion bomb, by direct wire, to the Soviet Union, accelerating their own atomic program by several years.
Sullivan continued. "Colonel Pash is a hard-liner. He's advising them be removed from the project immediately. General Groves has a tendency to agree with him. They see it as an unacceptable security threat."
Ezra's mind was reeling. Here was a silver opportunity, being offered to him on a golden platter. He could forestall the Soviet threat even as it was beginning. He could approve the recommendation, get rid of Fuchs quietly, and alter the very course of the world that would come after this war's end. His every breath, every sense prodded him to do so.
But then, cold, impersonal mathematics of the master strategist intervened. He looked to the project schedule. He looked to the fact that Klaus Fuchs was no usual scientist. He was a crucial man on the team working to solve the daunting mathematics of the implosion lens of the plutonium bomb. His was crucial work. To get rid of him now, at so crucial a moment, could entail unwarranted delays. It could slow up by months the implosion project.
Months. Months could be a lifetime to be chasing behind the Nazis. Perhaps they did make a breakthrough. Perhaps they did come up with a solution to their heavy water problem. The threat, no matter how small, was still a threat. The end goal, and one goal alone that trumped all others, was to create the bomb and end the war. The problem with war's aftermath of Russian spying, he contended, could be handled later. It was a future inferno to be fought another day.
He was immobilized by his own premonition. He was crystal clear as to what exactly future danger was, but to do something to remedy it now could ruin the present.
It was a difficult, relentlessly practical decision.
He took the secure telephone that kept him constantly connected with General Groves' Washington office.
"General," said Ezra as Groves boarded. "I've just reviewed Colonel Pash's security report on employees with communist affiliations working at Site Y."
"Blasted reds," Groves said. "I'm having them all sent by air to a weather station way up in Alaska by the end of the week."
"No, I wouldn't advise that, General," replied Ezra calmly. "My proposal is to put these men deeper into increased observation. Double their bodyguards. Monitor their communications. But release them back to work."
"What?" boomed Groves. "Prentice, are you mad? Those are a security hazard!"
"They are a scientific necessity, too," said Ezra, his voice ice-hard. "Their contribution, and that particularly of Dr. Fuchs, is worth too much to be lost at this time. The timetable takes precedence. We can postpone the threat. We cannot do without the time delay. That's my categorical recommendation."
It was a long silence from the other end. Groves, who felt in his debt as a decisive partner, consented reluctantly. "Very well. On your head be it, Prentice."
Ezra hung up. He sat alone in the quietness of his study, a shuddering realization creeping over him. He just voluntarily, intentionally, abandoned a Soviet spy sitting right at the very heart of his deepest, darkest project. He could build secret cities, lord over generals, cheat German intelligence, and with heavy hand direct the very flow of scientific development. But maddening, multifaceted turbulence of human devotion and ideology was a variable even he could never quite come to terms with. In his obsessive focus on winning this war, he knew with a shuddering surety, he might just personally staked his own keystone to the next.