Excerpt
Nuclear Sunrise
Jo Carthage © 2023
All Rights Reserved
September 11, 1951
Experimental Breeder Reactor 1 (19.9 miles outside of Arco, ID)
Captain Brian Flynn slung his duffel bag over his shoulder with a grimace as he stepped out of the air force Jeep, boots crunching in the black volcanic gravel. An older white man in a lab coat hustled out of the massive white cinder block building that nearly glowed in the Idaho twilight. Brian settled his feet a little more firmly in front of the building that would be his home for the next two years as his ride peeled away, heading back east toward the saw-toothed mountains.
“Captain Flynn!”
Brian’s attention snapped to the approaching scientist, and he forced a smile; he had to make this posting work. He had to.
The man’s broad grin made him look a half century younger. Brian felt something lift in his chest. The man’s voice was a warm baritone when he said, “Welcome to our little science experiment.”
His hand-stitched name tag identified him as Dr. Zinn, the chief scientist of this project. He turned to face the installation, its anonymously industrial architecture stark against a sunset-gilded sea of scrubby sage and dark stone. “It sure is a shitty-looking building.”
Brian kept his face stony. “I couldn’t say, sir.”
Dr. Zinn’s gray eyes twinkled, but he kept a straight face. “They picked this site for the Experimental Breeder Reactor number 1—EBR-1 to those of us who know and love her—so if we all blow ourselves up tomorrow, it’ll be a thousand years of poisoned water for the local cows rather than a real metropolitan area. The fact that they built it to look like a high school gymnasium speaks more to the air force’s aesthetics than our mission here.”
Brian glanced back across the vast volcanic plain to the mountains, the last of the light shining off their man-eating snowdrifts. “Beautiful mountains though. I’ve never lived near the Rockies, and with all the sage, it smells like New Mexico.” He ground a heel in the gravel beneath his military-issue boots. “The soil here is all volcanic, right? So it’s too impermeable for any uranium spill to touch the aquifers of the Snake River Valley? Since they’re buried under a thousand square miles of pahoehoe and aa and the intrusive basaltic flows that underpin them?”
Dr. Zinn’s eyes widened. “I knew you had a physics background from your commander’s letter of introduction, but I didn’t know you had an interest in geology as well.”
Brian shook his head with a smile. “Only as it relates to atomic energy production. And I had a lot of downtime at my last base and free access to UCLA’s library.”
“Very good, Captain,” Dr. Zinn said. A gust of early fall wind blew around them, and Brian shivered in his thin uniform shirt. Zinn patted his arm, and Brian held back a flinch. “Let’s get you inside.”
He gestured for Brian to follow him across the parking lot toward the lab. A junior airman opened the door and saluted; Brian returned his salute and stepped inside. He yanked off his hat as the airman swept a Geiger counter over Dr. Zinn’s shoes, pants, chest, shoulders, and hands. Brian followed, holding his arms out for his wanding, eyes sweeping from the leaded-glass shielding around a sort of chamber on his left to a thick-walled vault on his right. Above him hung a tangle of tubes covered in a layer of asbestos that would carry liquid metal to the small reactor in the center of the building. Given the pipes’ design, Brian figured it would be a sodium-potassium alloy, rather than the light water or graphite the folks at Oak Ridge were experimenting with. Then Brian stepped through the metal detector, glancing up. A high catwalk swept around the three quarters of the building, presumably leading to a few control rooms and labs. And in the middle of everything stood a steel spiral staircase leading up to the nuclear reactor platform. No windows and only one way in or out; good for avoiding Russki spies, bad in case of a fire.
Dr. Zinn tapped him on the shoulder. “Captain, you can leave your bag with Junior Airman Freeman. He’s on the night shift again, and most of the scientists have headed home already, so he can keep an eye on it while we get acquainted.”
Brian nodded and laid the book-heavy duffel with what remained of his earthly possessions down behind the guard’s single folding chair. He straightened up, hiding a wince.
“I’ve got some paperwork for you in my office,” Dr. Zinn continued, “then I’ll give you the grand tour.”
Brian followed him along polished concrete floors to an office the size of a closet. Brian got the distinct impression Dr. Zinn would rather be out in the lab than in this tiny room, but leadership demanded a price from everybody.
“All right, son,” he started once he was seated behind his paper-engulfed desk. Brian perched on the edge of the chair and avoided leaning back. “We probably only need to have this conversation once. But this is an Argonne Labs project, and your authority as the incoming security director and as an officer in the air force extends exclusively to the uranium we are working with. The plutonium, too, when we figure out how to make it at scale here. It doesn’t mean you can tell my dozen-odd scientists what to do, even if they are pains in the butt. It doesn’t—”
Brian held up his hand. “Let me stop you there.” He tried to think of a diplomatic way to say it, then he just bulled through. “I don’t have a lot of ego tied up in this role. If by the end of two years, no uranium or plutonium has been lost or stolen, I’ll count that as a win. My commanding officer back at Vandenberg will as well.” Brian paused and then asked slowly, “Did he tell you why I requested this role?”
“No, son. He didn’t even tell me you requested it. I figured you’d been volun-told—”
“No, I requested it. Just like I requested Vandenberg right out of West Point.” He saw the doctor straighten at the name of his alma mater.
“Duty, Honor, Country?”
“Duty, Honor, Country,” Brian replied. He looked at the piles of textbooks heaped on the bookcase wedged between two overflowing filing cabinets; several of the spines sported Dr. Zinn’s name. “Cards on the table. I requested this posting because I want to be good enough to work here someday. I had the option of Los Alamos, Travis, or Oak Ridge, but I’m not going back home to New Mexico again if I can help it. Travis was straight security, no science. And Oak Ridge is working on weapons projects.” He leaned forward, eyes intent. “EBR-1 is the only project in the US focused on using atomic energy for peaceful means. That’s the work I want to be a part of.”
Dr. Zinn sat back, eyes beginning to brighten as he gestured for him to go on.
“I graduated with a degree in physics from West Point in ’48, but they didn’t want to send me to grad school right away. So I went to help run security at Vandenberg, to get to know the conventional weapons research side. With support of my commander, I applied and had been accepted to UCLA’s PhD program, was due to start this week, but”—he took a hard breath—“the air force had other plans. So this is me, doing my service so I can separate honorably in two more years and use my GI Bill to get a physics doctorate. And,” he said, lowering his voice with a tiny smile, “I find that when I’m stationed someplace with a lot of physicists, I get to have a lot higher quality coffee break conversations, no matter my actual title. I was hoping it would be the same here.”
“And a recommendation letter from a chief scientist for one of the national labs would go a long way to getting back into UCLA or an even better program when your two years is up?”
“I’m not gunning for that, Dr. Zinn. I’m here to do my job. I’m sure we’ll butt heads at some point, so I don’t want to have that between us. But what I want you to know is that I am here because I believe in your mission—good, reliable energy for millions. Turning a power that killed 210,000 people into a source of life. Helping with that seems worth spending two Idaho winters wanding scientists coming into and out of a cinder block building in the middle of the high desert.”
“You said two years. That’s how long your assignment is for?”
Brian nodded.
“You know we’re a time-bound mission,” Dr. Zinn said, folding his hands across his belly. “As soon as we achieve it—breed the plutonium from the uranium, that is—they’ll bulldoze this place, and no one will ever know that we did the work.”
Brian tilted his head. “But it’s not about credit, is it, sir?”
Dr. Zinn’s eyes caught his, widening a touch. “No, Captain. It never is.” Then he clapped his hands, leaning forward. “All right, it seems we’re on the same page. Here is the briefing packet Captain Jerush put together before he caught the bus out of Idaho Falls yesterday.” He handed over a black folder. “It has current threats, past incidents. Nothing too thrilling; I promise. You have a six person staff—”
Brian nodded. “That was in the briefing I got before leaving Vandenberg. I used the Greyhound ride from Roswell to plan out the new schedule until the reading lights went out. I’m going to put myself in the rotation with ten-hour shifts. So the rest of the team’s shifts will be seven hours of watch duty, which we can extend to eight for training, research, and paperwork if they end up needing it—”
Dr. Zinn gave him a knowing smile. “I do find that as the days get shorter, tempers do, too, so giving those young men a break will probably help everyone’s nerves. Can I ask which shift you’re planning on taking? Not because I have approval power of any kind, mind. I’m just curious if I’ll see you around for some of those ‘coffee break conversations.’”
“I’m that rare beast that enjoys nightshifts, so unless one of those under my command has a major preference, I’ll take those solo.”
Dr. Zinn nodded. “In a few months’ time, there’s going to be little enough sunlight during the day, so you won’t be missing much.” He took a breath. “There’s really only one of our scientists who uses the lab after eight o’clock.” He checked his watch. “We’ll probably see him when I show you the reactor. He’s a night owl. Honestly, I think it’s because he likes talking to the reactor when he’s working, and even he’s realized it scares the nurses. So he’s restricted himself to times no one will eyeball him over it.”
“I’ve worked with scientists before,” Brian said evenly. “Like I said, to me, that’s one of the perks.”
Dr. Zinn shook his head, neatening a stack of papers on the edge of his desk, which only threatened to unbalance the whole edifice. “We’ll see what you say after six months of dealing with his, shall we say, unorthodox approach to nuclear material management. It’s scared airmen off in the past.”
Brian frowned, leaning forward in his chair, barely feeling the fresh scabs on his back stretching under his uniform. “As long as the ‘unorthodox approach’ doesn’t lead to it going missing or irradiating anyone, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
Dr. Zinn rubbed his hand through his sparse hair. “The only person Dr. Aaron Antares has ever put in danger is himself,” he said wryly. “Which he does on a regular basis. When he transferred here from the University of Wyoming’s post-doctoral research facility, his recommendation letter came with an infraction list about as long as his CV. But since he hasn’t fainted or started pissing blood, we’re going to continue to let him get on with it.”
“Are those the key signs of radiation poisoning? The weapons at my last posting were all pre-nuclear, and my briefing was vague on that point.”
Dr. Zinn’s warm face turned grim. He leaned over to his bookcase, chair wobbling under his weight, and snagged a sheaf of hand-typed pages, spine bound with duct tape. He slapped it on the desk. The title said, “A layman’s guide to nuclear material and security protocols.”
“I put it together last year for the other airmen,” Dr. Zinn said. “Since evaluating the scientists and staff coming in and out is going to be part of your job, it is going to be important for you to know what the signs and symptoms are.”
“Got it.” Brian picked up the sheaf and tucked it into his briefing folder.
“Are you ready for the full tour?” Dr. Zinn said, pulling himself to standing. The older man spoke in a professional tone, but there was a vibrating excitement in him.
Brian nodded, a real smile beginning to surface as he followed him out of the office. “Dr. Zinn, I don’t know if you’re the right person to ask, but where am I sleeping?”
“The airmen assigned to this installation have been staying in the housing units by the two-mile perimeter fence you passed on the way in. I understand there’s heat, space-heaters, hot water, hot plates. It’s not homey. Most people go to Arco if they want food or company. I assume you brought a vehicle?”
Brian remembered a crowbar going through the window of his Ford truck, tires slashed and seats immolated. A crumpled Greyhound ticket shoved into his shaking hands.
He shook his head, shoulders tense.
“I see,” Dr. Zinn said. “Well, we’re a tight-knit community here. I’m sure you’ll find someone to get a ride with.”
Zinn started walking at what for a smaller man would have been a jogging pace; Brian kept up easily, long legs eating up the hard-polished concrete. Zinn started with the vault Brian had seen next to the entrance. “This is where we store the U-235 pellets. We plan to get the plutonium we need for power generation by enriching uranium. We’ll take uranium-235, get some fission going, bombard it with neutrons, and it’ll produce uranium-238 and plutonium.”
Zinn slipped into a lecturing tone appropriate for his tenure at Berkeley. “All the uranium comes in pellets only so big.” He measured about an inch with his fingers. “We get them in quarterly shipments from the mines out in Wyoming in these.” He pointed to racks of thin steel pipes hung vertically behind the bars, shining and deadly in the dark interior.
Brian ran his hands over the thick bank vault door. Good quality with a hard-to-pick lock; it would be a pain to force this with explosives.
Dr. Zinn took him across the way to the leaded-glass-enclosed chamber with a thick metal plating in front of it painted a bright, warning yellow. Brian was careful not to step onto it. “This is where we do some of the initial prep work, to get the material ready for the reactor. The scientists get their experiments in and out with the tongs.” Zinn gestured to leg-length welder’s tongs, then waved at the metal plating. “Don’t step on that or, if you have to, use the lead dinner plate over there. The whole in-floor storage unit is radioactive—we had to paint the entire thing a few months ago to try to remind certain scientists of that.”
Brian took note.
As they walked around labs in the back of the building, he saw a row of oversized unlit light bulbs. “What are these?” Brian strode over to where they dangled on a thin wire stapled to the low ceiling, seeming to emerge from one of the labs. “They remind me of the ones on the stage at the Chinese Theatre in downtown LA.” He paused for a moment, wondering if he should clarify. “I got to go a few times on my weekends off at Vandenberg.”
Dr. Zinn reached out to touch the exaggerated curve of one of them and said, low, “These are my nemeses. These little bastards—excuse my language—have got to light up. Then we’ll know we’ve done it. We’ve bred plutonium. Son, there’ll be a day you’ll come in here, and these will be as bright as anything, powered by steam from water heated by fresh-made plutonium.”
“And then?”
Zinn tapped a knuckle on the light, letting it swing wildly in the quiet dark. “Then we’ll light up this building, then light up Arco, then light up the whole southwest of Idaho. Once we get it to work once, we’ll be able to start producing as much plutonium and as much power as we can possibly need. Mark my words, we’ll get it done.”
Dr. Zinn sped through the rest of the tour: the turbines and a medical office staffed by a rotating crew of seven nurses. They were the only women in the building. Next, a lightless decontamination shower squatted against the wall. Brian figured it was about the size of four regulation shower stalls welded together; on closer inspection, he was pretty sure that was exactly what it was. Dr. Zinn then led him to the basement with more leaded-glass-lined chambers, punctured only by long-armed equipment to manipulate the material and secured by large, heavy lead-lined doors.
He turned to Brian, nearly bouncing on his heels. “Ready to see the reactor?”
Brian nodded and followed Dr. Zinn back to the center of the building.
Zinn shooed him up the spiral staircase. “You go first—I’ve seen it all before.”
Brian started up the stairs, and as soon as he was eye-level with the platform, he froze, staring. There was a man. Half in the reactor. Brian looked through the safety railing as the man squirmed deeper inside, legs on the platform, thighs straining. For a brief second, Brian thought, That is a fantastic ass, and then came a feeling like a boot to the chest and a belt on his back. Brian clenched his jaw and forced himself to look away, watching his boots as he finished the climb up to the platform with Dr. Zinn following behind.
The man in the reactor dropped what sounded like a heavy wrench and started shouting, echoing out of the chamber. “Cock sucking, goddamned, mother fucking—”
“Dr. Antares!” Zinn said sharply, but the smile he turned to Brian was a little fond. Brian put his hands behind his back as the scientist wiggled his way out of the reactor.
“Dr. Zinn,” the man drawled a little breathlessly, his face red. He swiped the mass of out-of-regulation curly hair out of his glinting amber eyes. “How can I help you?”
“You can stop taking the Lord’s name in vain, for one,” Zinn said evenly, with the sound of a long-stalemated argument. He waved to Brian. “Then you can greet our new Security Director, Captain Brian Flynn.”
Brian moved to shake his hand, but Dr. Antares held up his arms, covered in thick, elbow-length, heavy-looking gloves. Maybe lead-lined?
“Sorry, I’m a bit irradiated at the moment,” Dr. Antares said with a smirk. “Where’d you come to us from?”
“Vandenberg Air Force Base, outside of LA,” Brian said. “I handled security around some of the weapons research divisions. A quick trip home, then here.”
“Where’s home?”
Brian dreaded this question. Growing up, Roswell had been a nowhere town nobody had ever heard of, except for his mother’s people who had lived nearby since time immemorial; since June 14, 1947, it was still a nowhere town nobody sane had ever heard of. But, for a few alien conspiracy theory nut jobs, it was now a place with special significance.
Still, a direct question deserved a direct answer: “Roswell, New Mexico.”
Dr. Antares’s eyes lit up, and he leaned in conspiratorially as Brian backed up a step and pressed himself against the hip-high railing. “You see any aliens down there?”
Brian tried to sound neutral, but he was certain it came out hostile. “No. That was a stupid air force press officer making a stupid mistake. He issued a correction the next day, but it wasn’t good enough for anybody. But I can promise you, there are no more aliens in Roswell than there are aliens at EBR-1.”
Dr. Antares looked as if he was ginning himself up to respond when Zinn intervened, stepping between them.
“Dr. Antares has family in New Mexico; he knows there’s no aliens.” He turned to the scientist, continuing severely, “And he knows better than to antagonize the hardworking security staff, just like he knows he’s not supposed to be inside the reactor.”
Dr. Antares held up his gloves in surrender, stepping back. In a more normal tone of voice, he said, “You get up much to the labs at Livermore while you were in the Golden State? Get into any of that H-bomb stuff?” Brian froze, barely letting his eyes glance to Dr. Zinn.
Zinn made a frustrated sound. “Dr. Antares, you’re going to give the poor captain a heart attack.” He turned to Brian. “He knows better than to talk like that anywhere other than this building—”
“What am I going to do, tell our national nuclear secrets to the cows—”
Dr. Zinn spoke over him calmly as if this was a normal method of communication. “Dr. Antares has spent the last two years working on research protected by the highest level of secrecy, and he is absolutely trustworthy. Just—”
“A bit of a mouthy shit?” Antares grinned and didn’t wait for a reply before dropping to his knees—as Brian’s breathing hitched—and hunching over to look into the reactor chamber. “I really need to get that lug wrench out of there before I get lunch—dinner? I’ll see you around, Airman.”
Brian was about to correct him on his rank, but Dr. Zinn was already herding him down the stairs and back to the entrance. He left him with Junior Airman Freeman, waving as he headed back to his office.
Brian turned to Freeman. “I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself earlier. I’m Captain Brian Flynn.” They shook hands, and Brian asked, “Do you happen to like the night shift? I won’t hold it against you if you don’t.”
Freeman grimaced. “It’s hell on my sleep schedule, if you’ll pardon the phrase, sir.”
Brian smiled a little brighter. “I was thinking of making a new shift schedule. All the airmen would get seven-hour shifts, and I’d take ten-hour overnights.”
The airman raised his eyebrows. “That—that would be night and day, for me, for all of us.”
“Not starting tonight though,” Brian said. “I just got off a fifty-one-hour Greyhound ride from New Mexico, and I need to sleep, preferably horizontally, for at least ten hours before I can be a good human, much less a good commanding officer.” He reached down and then heaved his duffel onto his back. “Could you point me in the direction of the barracks?”
*
Brian made the two-mile hike with his duffel over his shoulder, his back and shoulders one unified ache, eyes on the dim lights of the scientist housing and airmen’s barracks squatting on either side of the perimeter gate. The sun had set while he’d been inside, the stars now out to keep him company. They were almost as clear here as from his grandmother’s backyard on the reservation in New Mexico. Brian hadn’t gotten to see the stars much at Vandenberg where they hid behind light pollution from the base or smoke from the summer wildfires or the LA smog. The pure, uncut horizon and the stars that shone above it were the only thing he missed about New Mexico.
The accommodations were as spare as Dr. Zinn had promised. But what his studio apartment lacked in hominess, the barracks gym made up for in thoroughness. A full set of weights and two incline benches filled the room, with a long mirror on the shorter wall. A window gave a view of the winding road back to the installation, and the same beige, found everywhere else in the ten-studio building, covered the cinder block walls.
Brian knew he should be a sensible adult and just go the fuck to sleep. The last bed he’d slept in, he’d been belt-whipped right back out of in the middle of the night two days and three states ago. But he knew from long experience that if he didn’t start exercising now, the old scars and new scabs would stiffen, and it would hurt like a son of a bitch to get flexible again.
So Brian went to his studio apartment, unpacked his astronomy and physics textbooks, his back issues of Astounding and New Worlds and Comet, and his small collection of poetry. He shoved his underwear, socks, and workout clothes in the half drawer they took up; he hung his everyday and dress uniforms in the shower after running it hot enough to fill the bathroom with steam to ease out some of the travel wrinkles. Then he changed into his workout clothes. All of his shirts were dark with long sleeves, a necessity if he wanted to avoid staring eyes.
He took a breath and settled his shoulders, then stepped into the hallway and strode toward the gym at the back. A young airman was working out, and Brian introduced himself. The young man’s last name was Durbin. He’d been here for a year. They exercised in comfortable silence, Brian feeling the scrapes on his back break open, but he just leaned forward to keep from getting blood on the bench. Durbin went to his unit, and Brian, for the first time in what felt like years, was alone.
He’d grabbed a pair of dumbbells and begun wrist curls when the shape of Dr. Antares’s smile flashed across his mind. Brian closed his eyes, twisting his mouth; he wasn’t going to do this on this base. He was going to be as sexless as the snow on the mountaintops, as the rocks, as the plutonium they would be breeding with the reactor; he was not going to do this again.
Brian headed back up to his studio, took a long hot shower, tended to what he could reach of his back using the first aid kit he found under the kitchen sink, and ate some of the canned soup some kind soul had left in the cupboard. Then he fell onto the stiff, thin mattress. There wasn’t really a part of him that wasn’t bruised, so he just hoped the long Greyhound ride and the workout would grant him sleep. He’d spend the morning briefing his team, then work through the night and start his upside-down schedule the next day. He’d done it before, and though it ached more than it had a decade ago at eighteen, he could do it again. I can do this.
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