The name of the site was one that sounded like a phrase from a requiem: Jornada del Muerto. The Dead Man's Journey. It was a desolate, sun-scorched piece of the New Mexico desert, a landscape of stunted brush and alkali flats that God himself had seemingly left behind. Here, in the midst of this Old Testament desolation, man had come to build his own star.
Ezra drove in General Groves's dust-gray staff car to the Trinity test site, the air being heavy with tension that was nearly a physical presence. The world's largest secret, the end result of three years of frenetic, non-stop effort and billions of dollars, now hung balanced atop a single, hundred-foot steel tower, an eerie, metal orb studded with wires and detonators. The Gadget.
The pre-test hours were an anxiety fever dream of humanity. Below in the control bunker, a five-mile underground dugout of concrete from Ground Zero, the scientists moved around in frantic double- and triple-checks, their faces chalky and lubricated with sweat in the harsh, bare light of bulbs. They were the new high priests, staging the final rites before the unleashing of their terrible new god.
Enrico Fermi was making side bets that the bomb would ignite the atmosphere and kill the entire state. George Kistiakowsky, the explosives expert, was fretting about his difficult lens system. And J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific conscience of the project, was a ghost, a chain-smoking apparition drifting through the tumult. He had appeared to shrink, his already tall, thin frame engulfed by the intolerable, crushing weight of the moment. He stammered poetic quotations and referred to the Bhagavad Gita, his eyes expanded with a fearful, ecstatic terror.
General Groves, the practical man that he was, only worried that the entire endeavor would turn out to be a gigantic bust. A man of return on investment, he had recently sunk two billion dollars in a scientific experiment. His career, and a good portion of the US Treasury, sat perched upon that steel superstructure.
Amid frantic, fearful men, the most composed man in the room was Ezra Prentice. He was an anchor in a spinning world of terror. He sipped his coffee, perused the weather forecast, and spoke in hushed, thoughtful cadences. His composure was vastly unnerving to the other men. It was the calm of a man not predicting the outcome of a given event, but simply predicting a pre-ordained event. He was the only man on the face of the Planet Earth who, with absolute, metaphysical conviction, predicted the bomb would go off.
Within minutes left before the intended blast, Oppenheimer noticed Ezra standing by himself outside the bunker, staring out into the black desert toward the distant, lit tower. The wind was building, and the scientists worried they would need a postponement.
"You're not nervous, are you, Prentice?" asked Oppenheimer, his voice gruff with cigarette smoking.
Ezra didn't turn. "No," he said quietly. "The mathematics are right. The engineering is superb. It will work."
"I know that it will work," Oppenheimer panted, standing up on his side. "That is what scares me." He looked down at his own hands, then out into the darkness. "For months, we've been adrift in the theory, in the complexity of the problem. A glorious puzzle of the intellect. Only now, tonight, have I actually sat back and considered what it is that we've done." He looked at Ezra, his eyes demanding... something. forgiveness? Understanding?
"'Vishnu, in the Gita,'" breathed Oppenheimer, his voice trembling, "attempting to persuade the Prince that he has to do his duty, taking on his multi-armed form and intoning, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'" He breathed heavily. "I feel that we are going to do the same."
Ezra stood up, turning to him, his face illuminated with the cold, isolated glow of the entrance to the bunker. There was no compassion in his eyes, but a hard, unflinching clarity.
"Someone has got to bear the responsibility, Doctor," he said in a tone soft but as hard as stone. "The world is not a Berkeley seminar room. It is a raw, savage world. The energy you unleashed was there all the time, dormant in the nucleus of matter. If we had not done that, the Germans, or subsequently the Russians, would have. It is better that the power is in our hands than in theirs. It is better that we are Death, than that we're killed by that."
The final count began, called out through gruff-sounding loudspeakers all throughout the bunkers. Ten. Nine. Eight...
The scientists put on their welder's goggles. Ezra didn't. He wanted to see it for himself.
Three. Two. One. Zero.
For a moment, there was nothing. An unimaginable, profound silence.
And then the world was reborn in fire.
There was silence. There was light. A quiet, inconceivable flicker that was not like the sun, but as if someone had punched a hole in the fabric of the world and the raw, pure, creative energy of the universe itself was pouring through. It was a light that made the black desert night an overexposed, bleached noon. Each mountain, every boulder, every scrub brush for twenty miles was illuminated in cold, stark, terror-inducing detail.
Ezra felt a wave of warmth engulf his face, the warmth of a sun that rose and set within the same fraction of a moment. He could see the steel tower, the container of the Gadget, disintegrate, transforming from solid to gas but not liquid.
And then the sound came. It was not a boom. It was a roar, a primal, physical force that was felt as much as heard, a deafening, unbroken thunder that seemed to shake the continent's foundations. It was the world's first man-made earthquake's rumble.
Finally, in awful, sublime silence, the cloud began to rise. A tumbling, seething column of dust and fire, it went up, up, through the clouds, till it stretched out at the top in the classical, terrible, beautiful shape. A mushroom. A column of fire that meant a new page in the book of man.
Back in the bunker, there was chaos. Men shouted, cheered, wept. Scientists embraced, soldiers slapping backs. They had done it. They had won. The race was won.
General Groves, his face flushed with relief and triumph, grasped the hand of Ezra and shook it vigorously. "The war's all over now, Prentice," the general announced in grim, definite joy. "Everything's over."
Yet Ezra was not in celebration. He stood looking upwards at the pillar of fire that glowed in the pre-dawn sky. He thought of the web of intrigue that he had spun. He thought of the Soviet agent that he had let see this day's work, a man even now in his mind ticking off what he had been permitted to see. He thought of the German scientists that he was about to import, the products of a war that now in the cold light of the rising sun seemed a small, minor prelude. He thought of the cold, new war that he had already started to plan, a war that would not be fought with armies, but with the cold, inhuman menace of this fire.
He realized that, for every other mortal on the face of the earth, that excruciating light was a terminus. The end of a barbarous war, the beginning of an unpredictable peace.
But for him, that was more of a beginning than the end. The war he had been fighting—against the Germans, against time, against bureaucracy—was ended. The war he had been constructing—a war for domination of the post-atomic world—was to come.
He felt a cold, freezing sense of triumph, coupled with an even colder, blacker sense of terror. He had summoned a new sun into existence. He had, as Oppenheimer feared, become a destroyer of worlds to dust. And he was alone with his terrible creation.