****, Spring 1986, PAGES 6-7 Copyright (c) 1986 Infocom, Inc. How I Spent My Summer Vacation By Brian Moriarty "You want to go _where_?" "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.