"Albuquerque." I hoped this would be easy. "Halfway between Los
Alamos and White Sands. The National Atomic Museum is there, and I've
been talking to this professor at UNM who --"
"Great. Go." Marc Blank was never one to mince words.
A month later I was easing a brand new T-Bird out of the Hertz lot at
Albuquerque International Airport, ready to start researching my next
interactive fiction title, _Trinity_. Those long, empty roads I'd
seen from the window of my jet made me insist on something with cruise
control. Air conditioning isn't optional in New Mexico, especially
around mid-July.
I drove north for two hours on 25, New Mexico's central artery. It
winds between the blue mountains and brown arroyos, past quiet Indian
reservations and the shopping malls of Santa Fe, to the foothills of
the Jemez mountains. From there I began to climb west.
How can I describe the landscape? The colorful mesas, rugged hills
and forests are profoundly old and silent; there is nothing in New
England to compare with them. I drove for miles without seeing
another car, house, or any sign of human habitation. Just when I was
certain I'd missed a turn and lost myself in Colorado, a McDonald's
flashed by.
"New in town?" The girl ringing up my postcards sounded like she
really wanted to know. New Mexicans take small talk very seriously.
"Just visiting," I replied, fighting to suppress my Boston accent.
"Isn't there supposed to be a museum around here?"
"There's a big one down at the Lab," she drawled, gesturing through
the window of the drug store. "Just follow the signs."
"The Lab" is Los Alamos National Laboratory, announced by a sign that
stretches like a CinemaScope logo along the fortified entrance. One
of the nation's leading centers of nuclear weapons research. The
birthplace of the atomic bomb.
The Bradbury Museum occupies a tiny corner in the acres of buildings,
parking lots, and barbed wire fences that comprise the Laboratory.
Its collection includes scale models of the very latest in nuclear
warheads and guided missiles. You can watch on a computer as animated
neutrons blast heavy isotopes to smithereens. The walls are adorned
with spectacular color photographs of fireballs and mushroom clouds,
each respectfully mounted and individually titled, like great works of
art.
I watched a teacher explain a neutron bomb exhibit to a group of
schoolchildren. The exhibit consists of a diagram with two circles.
One circle represents the blast radius of a conventional nuclear
weapon; a shaded ring in the middle shows the zone of lethal
radiation. The other circle shows the relative effects of a neutron
bomb. The teacher did her best to point out that the neutron bomb's
"blast" radius is smaller, but its "lethal" radius is proportionately
much larger. The benefit of this innovation was not explained, but
the kids listened politely.
It isn't clear whether visitors are allowed to visit the adjoining
Oppenheimer Library or not. The building stands behind a high fence
with signs hinting an awful fate for unauthorized personnel. But the
gate was open, and the Lab employees eating lunch under the trees were
unarmed. So I stepped inside and roamed the stacks for hours. Nobody
questioned my presence, and I drove away from Los Alamos without being
shot.
* * *
Albuquerque's National Atomic Museum is a different story. It's right
in the middle of Kirtland Air Force Base. You have to stop at a
security shack and persuade a very young man with a crewcut to issue a
visitor's permit. This valuable document gives you the right to
proceed to the Museum by the most direct route possible, but with no
stopping on the way. Cameras are forbidden outside the Museum
grounds, and they can search you or your car if they decide they don't
like you. I didn't bother locking the T-Bird as I went in.
A third of the exhibit space is devoted to "Energy Horizons,"
featuring a solar TV set and other equally arresting wonders. The
rest of the Museum looks a lot like its counterpart at Los Alamos,
except that the missiles are even bigger and more numerous. One of
the four H-bombs they accidentally dropped over Spain in the 1960s is
on display, still wrapped in its silk parachute like a naughty baby.
After the Museum closed I took Ferenc Szasz and his family out to
dinner. Professor Szasz teaches history at the University of New
Mexico, and had just published a book about the testing of the first
atomic bomb. As we shook hands he grinned at me mischievously. "Ever
had real Mexican food?"
We drove to a place in Old Town, Albuquerque's historic district near
the river's edge. I ordered an obscure chicken dish, and the waiter
asked me if I wanted it served Mild, Medium, or Hot. Szasz grinned
again.
"Hot, please."
The waiter looked up from his pad. "Have you eaten here before?"
I cleared my throat, determined to know the worst. "Hot."
It wasn't too bad. I had to eat very slowly, and convince myself that
I was savoring the food instead of tolerating it. But I think the
Professor was impressed. He'd ordered his Medium.
* * *
The alarm in my Albuquerque hotel room went off at 5:00 AM on Tuesday,
the 16th of July. I wanted to go outside and learn what the desert
air felt like at that time of day. The sun was still behind the
mountains to the east; the sky was gray and lightly overcast, much as
it had been on that same morning in 1945. At 5:29:45 I turned my eyes
to the south, across the airport, and wondered what I might have seen
at that precise instant 40 years earlier.
Trinity Site is located in Jornada del Muerto, "the Journey of Death,"
a barren stretch of high desert that lies within the jurisdiction of
White Sands Missile Range. The Site is normally open to the public
only one day each year, the first Saturday in October. But in May I
got a hot tip from a White Sands official, who told me they were
planning to open the Site for five hours on July 16th to commemorate
the 40th anniversary.
The drive from Albuquerque to White Sands takes a couple of hours. At
nine o'clock sharp the Army opened the Stallion Gate on the northern
boundary of the Missile Range. I was near the beginning of the
caravan of cars that began to snake down the paved road, into the
desert. Twenty miles later, I caught my first glimpse of Ground Zero.
There is no crater to speak of. The bomb was fired from the top of a
hundred-foot tower, too high to dig much of a hole. Instead, there's
a shallow depression, a quarter mile across, where the desert floor
caved in under thousands of tons of pressure. Slap your palm hard on
a piece of styrofoam. _Whack!_ That's what it looks like.
The whole area is enclosed by a chain link fence. Yellow signs warn
of radioactivity ten to fifteen times higher than normal. I left the
T-Bird in the dusty parking area and joined a growing retinue of
sightseers for the last, long walk across the sand.
What monument could do justice to that fateful experiment? Events and
people of far less significance are commemorated by mighty pyramids
and heroic statues. Yet the simple stone obelisk at Ground Zero is
effective in its understatement. When you look around at the vast,
timeless desert that stretches away in every direction, it's easy to
imagine the hopes of all generations, past and future, balanced on
that spot. To visit Trinity is to stand at the fulcrum of history.
The reaction of the crowd was mixed. Many felt ripped off; I think
they expected a glowing, smoke-filled canyon, inhabited by mutated
jackrabbits the size of buffalo. Others, myself among them, just
stood looking at the monument, lost in thought. A few actually wept.
All the major networks were running around with TV cameras,
interviewing anyone who looked interesting. Children combed the
ground for bits of "trinitite," a green, glassy substance composed of
sand that was fused in the stellar heat of the blast. A man kept
running a Geiger counter around the base of the obelisk, and turned up
the volume so that everyone could hear the steady tick, tick, tick.
The Army ran shuttle buses from Ground Zero to a small ranch house
about two miles southeast. Once it was a private home, owned by the
McDonald family, until it was appropriated (ahem) by the Manhattan
Project for the final assembly of the bomb. The people who felt
ripped off at Ground Zero got really annoyed at the ranch, as there is
nothing to see except a cluster of small rooms, all alike, and all
completely empty.
* * *
My last morning in New Mexico was spent at the Rio Grande Zoo. Very
tasteful. The shady walkways almost make you forget the heat of the
surrounding city.
I wandered slowly past the monkey houses and prairie dogs, lingering
at the seal pool and the yak pen, until I came at last to a big cage
filled with cacti. A gray bird was perched inside, sleek and
fast-looking, with sharp eyes and a long tail splashed with color.
"I'm gonna make you a star," I whispered.
The roadrunner blinked at me, and pretended not to understand.
