Months bled into a year, marked not by seasons on the mesa, but by the grim milestones of the project. The reactor in Chicago had achieved criticality. The uranium isotope separation plants at Oak Ridge were beginning to produce fissile material. At Los Alamos, the theoretical designs solidified into engineering reality, and Robert's tightrope walk became ever more perilous.
He was now deeply embedded in the implosion group, his reputation that of a brilliant but occasionally erratic engineer. He had moments of sheer genius—solving a maddening issue with radiation containment seals by suggesting a layered approach using available metals, a solution that saved weeks of work. These victories earned him trust, access, and the respect of his peers.
But these were always followed by subtle, calculated setbacks. When asked to review the neutron initiator design—the device that would flood the compressed core with neutrons at the perfect moment—he praised the concept but raised "concerns" about the purity of the polonium-beryllium source, suggesting a lengthy, redundant purification process that historical records showed was unnecessary. The team, erring on the side of caution, spent six weeks on it.
He was a virus in the system, introducing tiny, inefficient lines of code that slowed the processor without crashing it.
The pressure, however, was becoming unbearable. The war in Europe was reaching its climax. The mood on the mesa grew more urgent, more desperate. The moral qualms many scientists had quietly harbored were being shouted down by the brutal logic of the Pacific theater. News of the bloody island-hopping campaigns, of kamikaze attacks, and of the fanatical resistance expected in a invasion of Japan hardened hearts. The "gadget" was no longer a theoretical horror; it was being seen as the only way to end the war and save countless American lives.
Robert found himself in a meeting where a high-ranking Army general stood before them, his voice gravelly and blunt.
"Gentlemen," the General said, his eyes sweeping the room of scientists and engineers, "your work is no longer an experiment. It is a weapon. A invasion of the Japanese home islands is projected to cost over a million Allied casualties. Your device could prevent that. The President has been briefed. A list of potential targets is being drawn up. We will use it, and we will use it as soon as you can deliver it."
The words landed on Robert with the force of a physical blow. A list of targets. He knew the names. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. They were no longer just words from a history book; they were cities, filled with people, being discussed in a room he was sitting in. He was no longer slowing down a science project; he was potentially altering the calculus of which cities lived and which died.
The guilt became a crushing, suffocating weight. His campaign of subtle sabotage now felt monstrous. Was he prolonging a war? Was his desire to preserve the timeline he knew worth the price in blood being paid every day on Iwo Jima and Okinawa? The clear moral certainty he had felt in Oppenheimer's office was now a muddy, bloody swamp.
He sought out the one person he thought might understand, the group's resident philosopher-physicist, a man named Klaus who often voiced his doubts late at night over coffee.
"Does it ever… keep you awake?" Robert asked him quietly in the cafeteria that evening. "The thought of it actually being used?"
Klaus stirred his coffee, his face grim. "Every night, Robert. Every single night. We are building the sword of Damocles. But the question is not whether the sword should exist. The question is who holds the string. If we don't, the Nazis will. Or the Japanese. Is it better for us to wield this terrible power, or for a fascist state to hold the world hostage with it?"
It was the same brutal logic Oppenheimer had used, but it felt different now, more immediate, more visceral. Robert thought of the young soldiers—boys no older than Jimmy Miller—storming fortified beaches. He was safe on this mesa, playing God with time, while they were dying in the surf.
That night, he didn't work on schematics. He sat on his bed, the wooden swallow in his hand. He thought of Arthur and Eleanor, their simple, decent world. He thought of the brave, terrified men flying the P-47s he had helped perfect. He thought of the faces of his colleagues in T-3, their exhaustion, their hope that their work would end the nightmare.
He was trapped in an impossible ethical paradox. To succeed in his secret mission was to betray the men and women around him and potentially prolong a horrific war. To fail was to hand the world a weapon of apocalyptic power years ahead of schedule, with consequences he could not possibly foresee.
He was no longer just a man out of time. He was a man drowning in time, pulled under by the conflicting currents of past, present, and future. The weight of a thousand suns was not in the plutonium core they were building; it was on his shoulders, and it was breaking him. He had to make a choice. Continue his quiet, desperate sabotage, or surrender to the relentless tide of history and help them finish it. Either path led to a kind of damnation. The countdown to Trinity—the first test—was beginning, and Robert Vale was the most unstable element in the entire equation.