Two Dooms

  IT WAS MAY, not yet summer by five weeks, but the afternoon heat under the corrugated roofs of Manhattan Engineer District’s Los Alamos Laboratory was daily less bearable. Young Dr. Edward Royland had lost fifteen pounds from an already meager frame during his nine-month hitch in the desert. He wondered every day while the thermometer crawled up to its 5:45 peak whether he had made a mistake he would regret the rest of his life in accepting work with the Laboratory rather than letting the local draft board have his carcass and do what they pleased with it. His University of Chicago classmates were glamorously collecting ribbons and wounds from Saipan to Brussels; one of them, a first-rate mathematician named Hatfield, would do no more first-rate mathematics. He had gone down, burning, in an Eighth Air Force Mitchell bomber ambushed over Lille.

  “And what, Daddy, did you do in the war?”

  “Well, kids, it’s a little hard to explain. They had this stupid atomic bomb project that never came to anything, and they tied up a lot of us in a Godforsaken place in New Mexico. We figured and we calculated and we fooled with uranium and some of us got radiation burns and then the war was over and they sent us home.”

  Royland was not amused by this prospect. He had heat rash under his arms and he was waiting, not patiently, for the Computer Section to send him his figures on Phase 56c, which was the (god-damn childish) code designation for Element Assembly Time. Phase 56c was Royland’s own particular baby. He was under Rotschmidt, supervisor of WEAPON DESIGN TRACK III, and Rotschmidt was under Oppenheimer, who bossed the works. Sometimes a General Groves came through, a fine figure of a man, and once from a window Royland had seen the venerable Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War, walking slowly down their dusty street, leaning on a cane and surrounded by young staff officers. That’s what Royland was seeing of the war.

  Laboratory! It had sounded inviting, cool, bustling but quiet. So every morning these days he was blasted out of his cot in a barracks cubicle at seven by “Oppie’s whistle,” fought for a shower and shave with thirty-seven other bachelor scientists in eight languages, bolted a bad cafeteria breakfast, and went through the barbed-wire Restricted Line to his “office”—another matchboard-walled cubicle, smaller and hotter and noisier, with talking and typing and clack of adding machines all around him.

  Under the circumstances he was doing good work, he supposed. He wasn’t happy about being restricted to his one tiny problem, Phase 56c, but no doubt he was happier than Hatfield had been when his Mitchell got it.

  Under the circumstances … they included a weird haywire arrangement for computing. Instead of a decent differential analyzer machine they had a human sea of office girls with Burroughs’ desk calculators; the girls screamed “Banzai!” and charged on differential equations and swamped them by sheer volume; they clicked them to death with their little adding machines. Royland thought hungrily of Conant’s huge, beautiful analog differentiator up at M.I.T.; it was probably tied up by whatever the mysterious “Radiation Laboratory” there was doing. Royland suspected that the “Radiation Laboratory” had as much to do with radiation as his own “Manhattan Engineer District” had to do with Manhattan engineering. And the world was supposed to be trembling on the edge these days of a New Dispensation of Computing that would obsolete even the M.I.T. machine—

  tubes, relays, and binary arithmetic at blinding speed instead of the suavely turning cams and the smoothly extruding rods and the elegant scribed curves of Conant’s masterpiece. He decided that he wouldn’t like that; he would like it even less than he liked the little office girls clacking away, pushing lank hair from their dewed brows with undistracted hands.

  He wiped his own brow with a sodden handkerchief and permitted himself a glance at his watch and the thermometer. Five-fifteen and 103 Fahrenheit.

  He thought vaguely of getting out, of fouling up just enough to be released from the project and drafted. No; there was the post-war career to think of. But one of the big shots, Teller, had been irrepressible; he had rambled outside of his assigned mission again and again until Oppenheimer let him go; now Teller was working with Lawrence at Berkeley on something that had reputedly gone sour at a reputed quarter of a billion dollars—

  A girl in khaki knocked and entered. “Your material from the Computer Section, Dr. Royland. Qheck them and sign here, please.” He counted the dozen sheets, signed the clipboarded form she held out, and plunged into the material for thirty minutes.

  When he sat back in his chair, the sweat dripped into his eyes unnoticed. His hands were shaking a little, though he did not know that either. Phase 56c of WEAPON DESIGN TRACK III was finished, over, done, successfully accomplished. The answer to the question “Can U23B slugs be assembled into a critical mass within a physically feasible time?” was in. The answer was “Yes.”

  Royland was a theory man, not a Wheatstone or a Kelvin; he liked the numbers for themselves and had no special passion to grab for wires, mica, and bits of graphite so that what the numbers said might immediately be given flesh in a wonderful new gadget. Nevertheless he could visualize at once a workable atomic bomb assembly within the framework of Phase 56c. You have so many microseconds to assemble your critical mass without it boiling away in vapor; you use them by blowing the subassemblies together with shaped charges; lots of microseconds to spare by that method; practically foolproof. Then comes the Big Bang.

  Oppie’s whistle blew; it was quitting time. Royland sat still in his cubicle. He should go, of course, to Rotschmidt and tell him; Rotschmidt would probably clap him on the back and pour him a jigger

  of Bols Geneva from the tall clay bottle he kept in his safe. Then Rotschmidt would go to Oppenheimer. Before sunset the project would be redesigned! TRACK I, TRACK II, TRACK IV, and TRACK V would be shut down and their people crammed into TRACK III, the one with the paydirt! New excitement would boil through the project; it had been torpid and souring for three months. Phase 56c was the first good news in at least that long; it had been one damned blind alley after another. General Groves had looked sour and dubious last time around.

  Desk drawers were slamming throughout the corrugated, sunbaked building; doors were slamming shut on cubicles; down the corridor, somebody roared with laughter, strained laughter. Passing Royland’s door somebody cried impatiently: “—aber was kan Man tun?”

  Royland whispered to himself: “You damned fool, what are you thinking of?”

  But he knew—he was thinking of the Big Bang, the Big Dirty Bang, and of torture. The judicial torture of the old days, incredibly cruel by today’s lights, stretched the whole body, or crushed it, or burned it, or shattered the fingers and legs. But even that old judicial torture carefully avoided the most sensitive parts of the body, the generative organs, though damage to these, or a real threat of damage to these, would have produced quick and copious confessions. You have to be more or less crazy to torture somebody that way; the sane man does not think of it as a possibility.

  An M.P. corporal tried Royland’s door and looked in. “Quitting time, professor,” he said.

  “Okay,” Royland said. Mechanically he locked his desk drawers and his files, turned his window lock, and set out his waste-paper basket in the corridor. Click the door; another day, another dollar.

  Maybe the project was breaking up. They did now and then. The huge boner at Berkeley proved that. And Royland’s barracks was light two physicists now; their cubicles stood empty since they had been drafted to M.I.T. for some anti-submarine thing. Groves had not looked happy last time around; how did a general make up his mind anyway? Give them three months, then the ax? Maybe Stimson would run out of patience and cut the loss, close the District down. Maybe F.D.R. would say at a Cabinet meeting, “By the way, Henry, what ever became of-?” and that would be the end if old Henry

  could say only that the scientists appear to be optimistic of eventual success, Mr. President, but that as yet there seems to be nothing concrete-He, passed through the barbed wire of the Line under scrutiny of an M.P. lieutenant and walked down the barracks-edged company street of the maintenance troops to their motor pool. He wanted a jeep and a trip ticket; he wanted a long desert drive in the twilight; he wanted a dinner of frijoles and eggplant with his old friend Charles Miller Nahataspe, the medicine man of the adjoining Hopi reservation. Royland’s hobby was anthropology; he wanted to get a little drunk on it—he hoped it would clear his mind.

  Nahataspe welcomed him cheerfully to his hut; his million wrinkles all smiled. ““You want me to play informant for a while?” he grinned. He had been to Carlisle in the 1880’s and had been laughing at the white man ever since; he admitted that physics was funny, but for a real joke give him cultural anthropology every time. “You want some nice unsavory stuff about our institutionalized homosexuality? Should I cook us a dog for dinner? Have a seat on the blanket, Edward.”

  “What happened to your chairs? And the funny picture of McKin-ley? And—and everything?” The hut was bare except for cooking pots that simmered on the stone-curbed central hearth.

  “I gave the stuff away,” Nahataspe said carelessly. “You get tired of things.”

  Royland thought he knew what that meant. Nahataspe believed he would die quite soon; these particular Indians did not believe in dying encumbered by possessions. Manners, of course, forbade discussing death.

  The Indian watched his face and finally said: “Oh, it’s all right for you to talk about it. Don’t be embarrassed.”

  Royland asked nervously: “Don’t you feel well?”

  “I feel terrible. There’s a

snake eating my liver. Pitch in and eat. You feel pretty awful yourself, don’t you?”

  The hard-learned habit of security caused Royland to evade the question. “You don’t mean that literally about the snake, do you Charles?”

  “Of course I do,” Miller insisted. He scooped a steaming gourd full of stew from the pot and blew on it. “What would an untutored

  child of nature know about bacteria, viruses, toxins, and neoplasms? What would I know about break-the-sky medicine?”

  Royland looked up sharply; the Indian was blandly eating. “Do you hear any talk about break-the-sky medicine?” Royland asked.

  “No talk, Edward. I’ve had a few dreams about it.” He pointed with his chin toward the Laboratory. “You fellows over there shouldn’t dream so hard; it leaks out.”

  Royland helped himself to stew without answering. The stew was good, far better than the cafeteria stuff, and he did not have to guess the source of the meat in it.

  Miller said consolingly: “It’s only kid stuff, Edward. Don’t get so worked up about it. We have a long dull story about a horned toad who ate some loco-weed and thought he was the Sky God. He got angry and he tried to break the sky but he couldn’t so he slunk into his hole ashamed to face all the other animals and died. But they never knew he tried to break the sky at all.”

  In spite of himself Royland demanded: “Do you have any stories about anybody who did break the sky?” His hands were shaking again and his voice almost hysterical. Oppie and the rest of them were going to break the sky, kick humanity right in the crotch, and unleash a prowling monster that would go up and down by night and day peering in all the windows of all the houses in the world, leaving no sane man ever unterrified for his life and the lives of his kin. Phase 56c, God-damn it to blackest hell, made sure of that! Well done, Royland; you earned your dollar today!

  Decisively the old Indian set his gourd aside. He said: “We have a saying that the only good paleface is a dead paleface, but I’ll make an exception for you, Edward. I’ve got some strong stuff from Mexico that will make you feel better. I don’t like to see my friends hurting.”

  “Peyote? I’ve tried it. Seeing a few colored lights won’t make me feel better, but thanks.”

  “Not peyote, this stuff. It’s God Food. I wouldn’t take it myself without a month of preparation; otherwise the Gods would scoop me up in a net. That’s because my people see clearly, and your eyes are clouded.” He was busily rummaging through a clay-chinked wicker box as he spoke; he came up with a covered dish. “You people have your sight cleared just a little by the God Food, so it’s safe for you.”

  Royland thought he knew what the old man was talking about. It was one of Nahataspe’s biggest jokes that Hopi children understood

  Einstein’s relativity as soon as they could talk—and there was some truth to it. The Hopi language—and thought—had no tenses and therefore no concept of time-as-anentity; it had nothing like the Indo-European speech’s subjects and predicates, and therefore no built-in metaphysics of cause and effect. In the Hopi language and mind all things were frozen together forever into one great relationship, a crystalline structure of space-time events that simply were because they were. So much for Nahataspe’s people “seeing clearly.” But Royland gave himself and any other physicist credit for seeing as clearly when they were working a four-dimensional problem in the X Y Z space variables and the T time variable.

  He could have spoiled the old man’s joke by pointing that out, but of course he did not. No, no; he’d get a jag and maybe a bellyache from Nahataspe’s herb medicine and then go home to his cubicle with his problem unresolved: to kick or not to kick?

  The old man began to mumble in Hopi, and drew a tattered cloth across the door frame of his hut; it shut out the last rays of the setting sun, long and slanting on the desert, pink-red against the adobe cubes of the Indian settlement. It took a minute for Royland’s eyes to accommodate to the flickering light from the hearth and the indigo square of the ceiling smoke hole. Now Nahataspe was “dancing,” doing a crouched shuffle around the hut holding the covered dish before him. Out of the corner of his mouth, without interrupting the rhythm, he said to Royland: “Drink some hot water now.” Royland sipped from one of the pots on the hearth; so far it was much like peyote ritual, but he felt calmer.

  Nahataspe uttered a loud scream, added apologetically: “Sorry, Edward,” and crouched before him whipping the cover off the dish like a headwaiter. So God Food was dried black mushrooms, miserable, wrinkled little things. “You swallow them all and chase them with hot water,” Nahataspe said.

  Obediently Royland choked them down and gulped from the jug; the old man resumed his dance and chanting.

  A little old self-hypnosis, Royland thought bitterly. Grab some imitation sleep and forget about old 56c, as if you could. He could see the big dirty one now, a hell of a fireball, maybe over Munich, or Cologne, or Tokyo, or Nara. Cooked people, fused cathedral stone, the bronze of the big Buddha running like water, perhaps lapping around the ankles of a priest and burning his feet off so he fell prone into the

  stuff. He couldn’t see the gamma radiation, but it would be there, invisible sleet doing the dirty unthinkable thing, coldly burning away the sex of men and women, cutting short so many fans of life at their points of origin. Phase 56c could snuff out a family of Bachs, or five generations of Bernoullis, or see to it that the great Huxley-Darwin cross did not occur.

  The fireball loomed, purple and red and fringed with green— ,,, The mushrooms were reaching him, he thought fuzzily. He could really see it. Nahataspe, crouched and treading, moved through the fireball just as he had the last time, and the time before that. Deja vu, extraordinarily strong, stronger than ever before, gripped him. Royland knew all this had happened to him before, and remembered perfectly what would come next; it was on the very tip of his tongue, as they say-The fireballs began to dance around him and he felt his strength drain suddenly out; he was lighter than a feather; the breeze would carry him away; he would be blown like a dust mote into the circle that the circling fireballs made. And he knew it was wrong. He croaked with the last of his energy, feeling himself slip out of the world: “Charlie! Help!”

  Out of the corner of his mind as he slipped away he sensed that

  the old man was pulling him now under the arms, trying to tug him

  out of the hut, crying dimly into his ear: “You should have told me

  you did not see through smoke! You see clear; I never knew; I nev—”

  And then he slipped through into blackness and silence.

  Royland awoke sick and fuzzy; it was morning in the hut; there was no sign of Nahataspe. Well. Unless the old man had gotten to a phone and reported to the Laboratory, there were now jeeps scouring the desert in search of him and all hell was breaking loose in Security and Personnel. He would catch some of that hell on his return, and avert it with his news about assembly time.

  Then he noticed that the hut had been cleaned of Nahataspe’s few remaining possessions, even to the door cloth. A pang went through him; had the old man died in the night? He limped from the hut and looked around for a funeral pyre, a crowd of mourners. They were not there; the adobe cubes stood untenanted in the sunlight, and more weeds grew in the single street than he remembered. And his jeep, parked last night against the hut, was missing.

  There were no wheeltracks, and uncrushed weeds grew tall where the jeep had stood.

  Nahataspe’s God Food had been powerful stuff. Royland’s hand crept uncertainly to his face. No; no beard.

  He looked about him, looked hard. He made the effort necessary to see details. He did not glance at the hut and because it was approximately the same as it had always been, concluded that it was unchanged, eternal. He looked and saw changes everywhere. Once-sharp adobe corners were rounded; protruding roof beams were bleached bone-white by how many years of desert sun? The wooden framing of the deep fortress-like windows had crumbled; the third building from him had wavering soot stains above its window boles and its beams were charred.

  He went to it, numbly thinking: Phase 56c at least is settled. Not old Rip’s baby now. They’ll know me from fingerprints, I guess. One year? Ten? I feel the same.

 

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