The Nuclear Age Read online

  Books by Tim O’Brien

  If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973)

  Northern Lights (1975)

  Going After Cacciato (1978)

  The Nuclear Age (1985)

  Portions of this novel appeared in different form in The Atlantic, Esquire, Ploughshares, and The Pushcart Prize 1985. The author wishes to thank the editors of those publications and to express gratitude for support received from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

  The principal characters and incidents in this book are wholly imagined. By and large, the author has tried to remain faithful to the flow of public events between the years 1945 and 1995, but on occasion it has seemed appropriate to amend history, most conspicuously by addition. What is important, the author believes, is not what happened, but what could have happened, and, in some cases, should have happened.

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1983, 1985 by Tim O’Brien

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Those Were the Days: Words and music by Gene Raskin; TRO © Copyright 1962 and 1968 Essex Music Inc., New York, New York

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  O’Brien, Tim.

  The nuclear age.

  I. Title.

  PS3565.B75N8 1985 813′.54 85-40211

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82968-9

  v3.1

  For my mother and father,

  for Kathy and Greg,

  and for Ann

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Fission

  1: Quantum Jumps

  2: Civil Defense

  3: Chain Reactions

  4: Quantum Jumps

  5: First Strikes

  6: Escalations

  7: Quantum Jumps

  Fusion

  8: The Ends of the Earth

  9: Underground Tests

  10: Quantum Jumps

  11: Fallout

  Critical Mass

  12: The Nuclear Age

  13: Quantum Jumps

  And the dead will be thrown out like dung,

  and there will be no one to offer comfort.

  For the earth will be left empty and its

  cities will be torn down. None will be left

  to till the ground and sow it. The trees

  will bear fruit, but who will gather it?

  The grapes will ripen, but who will tread them?

  There will be vast desolation everywhere.

  For one man will long to see another, or to

  hear his voice. For ten will be left, out of

  a city, and two, out of a field, who have

  hidden in the thick woods or in holes in the rocks.

  The Second Book of Esdras

  16:23–29

  FISSION

  1

  Quantum Jumps

  AM I CRAZY?

  It’s after midnight, and I kiss my wife’s cheek and quietly slide out of bed. No lights, no alarm. Blue jeans and work boots and a flannel shirt, then out to the backyard. I pick a spot near the tool shed. A crackpot? Maybe, maybe not, but listen. The sound of physics. The soft, breathless whir of Now.

  Just listen.

  Close your eyes, pay attention: Murder, wouldn’t you say? A purring electron? Photons, protons? Yes, and the steady hum of a balanced equation.

  I use a garden spade. High over the Sweetheart Mountains, a pale dwarf moon gives light to work by, and the air is chilly, and there is the feel of a dream that may last forever. “So do it,” I murmur, and I begin digging.

  Turn the first spadeful. Then bend down and squeeze the soil and let it sift through the fingers. Already there’s a new sense of security. Crazy? Not likely, not yet.

  If you’re sane, anything goes, everything, there are no more particulars.

  It won’t be easy, but I’ll persevere.

  At the age of forty-nine, after a lifetime of insomnia and midnight peril, the hour has come for seizing control. It isn’t madness. It isn’t a lapse of common sense. Prudence, that’s all it is.

  Balance of power, balance of mind—a tightrope act, but where’s the net? Infinity could split itself at any instant.

  “Doom!” I yell.

  Grab the spade and go to work.

  Signs of sanity: muscle and resolve, arms and legs and spine and willpower. I won’t quit. I’m a man of my age, and it’s an age of extraordinary jeopardy. So who’s crazy? Me? Or is it you? You poor, pitiful sheep. Listen—Kansas is on fire. What choice do I have? Just dig and dig. Find the rhythm. Think about those silos deep in fields of winter wheat. Five, four, slam the door. No metaphor, the bombs are real.

  I keep at it for a solid hour. And later, when the moon goes under, I slip into the tool shed and find a string of outdoor Christmas lights—reds and blues and greens—rigging them up in trees and shrubs, hitting the switch, then returning to the job.

  Silent night, for Christ sake. There’s a failure of faith. When the back door opens, I’m whistling the age-old carol.

  “Daddy!” Melinda calls.

  Now it starts.

  In pajamas and slippers, ponytailed, my daughter trots out to the excavation site. She shivers and hugs herself and whispers, “What’s happening? What the heck’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I tell her.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Nothing, princess. Just digging.”

  “Digging,” she says.

  “Right.”

  “Digging what?”

  I swallow and smile. It’s a sensible question but the answer carries all kinds of complications. “A hole,” I say. “What else?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Just a hole. See? Simple, isn’t it? Come on, baby, back to bed now—school tomorrow.”

  “Hole,” Melinda mutters.

  She folds her arms and looks at me with an expression that is at once stern and forgiving. A strange child. Twelve years old, but very wise and very tough: too wise, too tough. Like her mother, Melinda sometimes gives me the willies.

  “Well, okay,” she says, then pauses and nibbles her lower lip. “Okay, but what kind of hole?”

  “A deep one.”

  “I know, but what—”

  “Now listen,” I say, “I’m serious. Back inside. Pronto.”

  Melinda squints, first at my spade, next at the Christmas lights, then at me. That mature gaze of hers, it makes me squirm.

  “Tell the truth,” she demands, “what’s it for?”

  “A long story.”

  She nods. “A dumb story, I’ll bet.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Daddy!”

  I drop the spade and kneel down and pat her tiny rump, an awkward gesture, almost beggarly, as if to ask for pardon. I make authoritative noises. I tell her it’s not important. Just a hole, I say—for fun, nothing else. But she doesn’t buy it. She’s a skeptic; Santa Claus never meant a thing to her.

  What can I do?

  I look at the moon and tell her the facts. And the facts are these. The world is in danger. Bad things can happen. We need options, a safety valve. “It’s a shelter,” I say gently. “Like with rabbits or gophers, a place to hide.”

  Melinda smiles.

  “You want to live there?” she says. “In a gopher hole?”

  “No, angel, just insurance.”

  “God.”


  “Don’t swear.”

  “Wow,” she says.

  Her nose wiggles. There’s suspicion in that stiff posture, in the way she slowly cocks her head and backs away from me.

  Kansas is on fire.

  How do you explain that to a child?

  “Well,” she sighs, “it’s goofy, all right. One thing for sure, Mommy’ll hit the ceiling, just wait. God, she’ll probably divorce you.”

  “We’ll work it out.”

  “Yeah, but I bet she’ll say it’s ridiculous, I bet she will. Who wants to be a gopher?”

  Melinda sniffs and kicks at the hole.

  “Poop,” she says.

  I try to lift her up, but she turns away, telling me I’m too sweaty, too dirty, so I lead her inside by the hand. The house smells of Windex and wax. My wife is meticulous about such things; she’s a poet, the creative type; she believes in clean metaphors and clean language, tidiness of structure, things neatly in place. Holes aren’t clean. Safety can be very messy.

  Melinda’s right—I’m in for some domestic difficulties—and if this project is to succeed, as it must, it will require the exercise of enormous tact and cunning.

  Begin now.

  I march my daughter to her bedroom. I tuck her between the all-cotton sheets. I brush a smudge of soil from her forehead, offer a kiss, tell her to sleep tight. All this is done tenderly, yet with authority.

  “Daddy?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing.”

  “No,” I say, “go ahead.”

  She shakes her head. “You’ll get mad.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Bet you will.”

  “Won’t. Try me, kiddo.”

  “Nothing,” she mumbles. “Except.”

  “Yes?”

  “Except, God, you’re pretty nutto, aren’t you? Pretty buggo, too.”

  I don’t say a word. I smile and close the door.

  In the kitchen, however, I feel some pain coming on. Buggo? I pour myself a glass of grape Kool-Aid and then stand at the big window that looks out on the backyard. It’s late, and my head hurts, but I make myself think things through rationally, step by step. Mid-April now—I can get it dug by June. Or July. Which leaves three months for finishing touches. A nice deep hole, then I’ll line the walls with concrete, put on a roof of solid steel. No cutting corners. Install a water tank. And a generator. And wall-to-wall carpeting. A family room, a pine-paneled den, two bedrooms, lots of closet space, maybe a greenhouse bathed in artificial sunlight, maybe a Ping-Pong table and a piano, the latest appliances, track lighting and a microwave oven and all the little extras that make for comfort and domestic tranquillity. It’ll be home. I’ll put in a word processor for Bobbi, a game room for Melinda, a giant freezer stocked with shrimp and caviar. Nutto? I’m a father, a husband, I have solemn responsibilities. It isn’t as if I enjoy any of this. I hate it and fear it. I would prefer the glory of God and peace everlasting, world without end, a normal household in an age of abiding normalcy.

  It just isn’t possible.

  I finish the Kool-Aid and rinse the glass and return to the hole. I’m exhausted, yes, and a bit groggy, but I find the spade and resume digging.

  I’m not crazy. Eccentric, maybe. These headaches and cramped bowels. How long since my last decent stool? A full night’s sleep? Clogged up and frazzled, a little dizzy, a little scared. But not crazy. Fully sane, in fact.

  Dig, the hole says.

  Patience and tenacity. An inch here, an inch there, it’s a game of inches. Beat the Clock. Dig and dream.

  A rough life, that’s my only excuse. I’ve been around. I’ve seen the global picture and it’s no fantasy—it’s real. Ask the microorganisms in Nevada. Ask the rattlesnakes and butterflies on that dusty plateau at Los Alamos. Ask the wall shadows at Hiroshima. Ask this question: Am I crazy? And then listen, listen hard, because you’ll get one hell of an answer. If you hold your breath, if you have the courage, you’ll hear the soft drip of a meltdown, the ping-ping-ping of submarine sonar, the half-life of your own heart. What’s to lose? Try it. Take a trip to Bikini. Bring your friends, eat a picnic lunch, a quick swim, a nature hike, and then, when night comes, build a bonfire and sit on the beach and just listen.

  I’ve done it.

  And I’ll be candid, I blinked. I ran for it. Ten years on the lam, hideout to hideout, dodging bombs and drafts and feds and all the atrocities of our machine-tooled age. You bet I’m eccentric. I was a wanted man; I was hounded by Defense Intelligence and the FBI; I was almost shot to death at Sagua la Grande; I watched my friends die on national television; I was a mover in the deep underground; I could’ve been another Rubin or Hoffman; I could’ve been a superstar.

  But it’s finished now, no more crusades.

  The year is 1995. We’re late in the century, and the streets are full of tumbleweed, and it’s every man for himself.

  Times change—take a good hard look. Where’s Mama Cass? What happened to Brezhnev and Lester Maddox? Where’s that old gang of mine, Sarah and Ned and Tina and Ollie? Where’s the passion? Where’s Richard Daley? Where’s Gene McCarthy in this hour of final trial? No heroes, no heavies. And who cares? That’s the stunner: Who among us really cares? A nation of microchips. At dinner parties we eat mushroom salad and blow snow and talk computer lingo.

  And me, I’m rich. I’m on a uranium roll. I’m well established and there’s no going back. My assets include a blond wife and a blond daughter, and expensive Persian rugs, and a lovely redwood ranch house in the Sweetheart Mountains.

  Call it what you want—copping out, dropping out, numbness, the loss of outrage, simple fatigue. I’ve retired. Time to retrench. Time to dig in. Safety first.

  2

  Civil Defense

  WHEN I WAS A KID, about Melinda’s age, I converted my Ping-Pong table into a fallout shelter. Funny? Poignant? A nifty comment on the modern age? Well, let me tell you something. The year was 1958, and I was scared. Who knows how it started? Maybe it was all that CONELRAD stuff on the radio, tests of the Emergency Broadcast System, pictures of H-bombs in Life magazine, strontium 90 in the milk, the times in school when we’d crawl under our desks and cover our heads in practice for the real thing. Or maybe it was rooted deep inside me. In my own inherited fears, in the genes, in a coded conviction that the world wasn’t safe for human life.

  Really, who knows?

  Whatever the sources, I was a frightened child. At night I’d toss around in bed for hours, battling the snagged sheets, and then when sleep finally came, sometimes close to dawn, my dreams would be clotted with sirens and melting ice caps and radioactive gleamings and ICBMs whining in the dark.

  I was a witness. I saw it happen. In dreams, in imagination, I watched the world end.

  Granted, I was always extra sensitive—squeamish, even a little cowardly—but it wasn’t paranoia or mental illness. I wasn’t crazy. Fort Derry, Montana, was a typical small town, with the usual gas stations and parks and public schools, and I grew up in a family that pursued all the ordinary small-town values. My father sold real estate, my mother kept house.

  I was a happy kid.

  I played war games, tried to hit baseballs, started a rock collection, rode my bike to the A&W, fed the goldfish, messed around. Normal, normal. I even ran a lemonade stand out along the sixth fairway at the golf course, ten cents a glass, plenty of ice: a regular entrepreneur.

  Just a regular childhood in a regular town. Each summer, for instance, Fort Derry staged a big weekend celebration called Custer Days, and even now, decades later, I can still see that long parade down Main Street, the trombones and clowns and horses, the merchants dressed up in frontier clothes. I remember the carnival rides. And the rodeo. And my father, I remember him, too. Every summer he played the role of George Armstrong Custer. Every summer he died. It happened at night, out at the fairgrounds—Custer’s Last Stand—a dazzling historical pageant, blood and drama, the culmination of Custer Days. Up in the grandstand,
among neighbors, my mother and I would eat ice cream and cotton candy while my father led the U.S. Seventh Cavalry to its annual reckoning at the Little Bighorn.

  “There!” I’d cry.

  Spotlights.

  The National Anthem, the high call of a bugle, then my father would ride in on his big white stallion. He wore buckskins and a yellow wig. At his side was a silver sword; his face had the leathery gloss of a saddle.

  I remember sabers and battle flags.

  And then a drumroll.

  And then a procession of mounted soldiers in blue uniforms and yellow neckerchiefs. I felt pride, but also panic. Jangling spurs and weaponry, canteens clanking, wagons, my father’s posture in the saddle. Tall and straight, those bright blue eyes.

  I worshipped that man.

  I wanted to warn him, rescue him, but I also wanted slaughter. How do you explain it? Terror mixed with fascination: I craved bloodshed, yet I craved the miracle of a happy ending. When the battle began—tom-toms and howls and gunfire—I’d make tight fists and stare out at the wonders of it all. I was curious. I’d shiver and look away and then quickly look back again. It was the implacable scripting of history; my father didn’t stand a chance. Yet he remained calm. Firing, reloading, firing—he actually smiled. He never ran, he never wept. He was always the last to die and he always died with dignity. Every summer he got scalped. Every summer Crazy Horse galloped away with my father’s yellow wig. The spotlights dimmed, a bugler played Taps, then we’d head out to the A&W for late-night root beers.

  A mountain town.

  Elevation, just under six thousand feet.

  Population, just over a thousand.

  Ranch country. Scrub grass and pine and dust. An old hitching post in front of the Strouch Funeral Home. A courthouse, a cemetery, the Ben Franklin store. What else? The Thompson Hotel. The Sweethearts, of course. A stone-walled library. The air, I remember, had the year-round smell of winter, a brittle snapping smell, and at night, brushing my teeth, I could taste something like sulphur at the back of my tongue.

  A pretty place, I suppose, but boring.