Star Harbor Nights

Trinity, New Mexico. July 16th, 1945.

William Wallace Flagg, a rail-thin man with a nervous disposition, was brought before General Graves with shackles on his hands and feet. The two MPs shoved him down in the chair across from the general, who dismissed them with a nod.

"Wallace Flagg," Graves said. "I thought of you as my son, you know."

"I don't understand why I'm here," the thin man said. "Lundquist... Lundquist was the saboteur."

"We know all about your friend Lundquist," the general said. "And we know all about you... we know what you really are, Wallace."

"I... don't know what you're talking about," Flagg said.

"Oh, maybe some pictures would jog your memory," the general said, holding up a manila envelope. He pulled out several sheets of photographs and spread them across the table, touching them only with the tips of his fingers. It was as if he were afraid to get them dirty... or that touching them would somehow dirty him.

Flagg leaned forward, afraid to look but needing to see. The table was wide, though, and the pictures were somewhat fuzzy.

"You sat there pretending to be a man all this time, while beneath your skin lurks something dark and dangerous, a twisted abomination," Graves said. He pushed the pictures across the table. "Tell me, Flagg, do you think a man could have done all of this?"

"That... that isn't me," Flagg said, looking at the pictures and not looking at them. The black outs, the dizziness, the white fog that had enveloped his world... had he done the things in the photographs during one of those spells? Could he have? "Someone else... something else..."

Denial wrapped around him like a tight-fitting glove. He felt his throat constricting.

"For the love of God, General Graves, you know me!" Flagg cried, pleadingly. "You can't think I have any... I'm engaged to your daughter!"

"Not any more," Graves said.

"Look, just let me talk to Bainbridge or the other scientists," Flagg said. "Whatever you think I am, there's more at stake."

"I'm not letting you near anything to do with the project again," Graves said.

"You don't understand!" the scientist said. "We... there were two main working designs we came up with, a fission device and a super fusion device..."

"Bullshit, we were told a fusion bomb was impossible or decades off," the general said.

"A controlled fusion bomb is... the one the project devised would burn nearly as hot as the sun. If it went off anywhere on the planet, it would ignite the atmosphere and reduce the earth to a burnt cinder," Flagg said, his voice raising in both pitch and volume. "We agreed... all of us, all the head researchers, to keep that design a secret and tell you that fusion was impossible, but Lundquist somehow found the designs..."

"'Somehow'," Graves said. "I suppose you have no idea how that came about."

"That's not important, you fool! The thing is, he's not a scientist, so he didn't understand them, except to the point that one was far more powerful than the other."

"So instead of stealing our atomic bomb design, he's got the plans for a doomsday weapon," Graves said. "If his masters hadn't already surrendered, you would have just won them the war. Now he'll just sell it to the highest bidder... probably to our 'friends' in Russia."

"But don't you see, he didn't just steal the plans for the bomb... he had it built."

"The devil you say!"

"It's true! He switched the plans," Flagg said. "The bastard switched them on us! The manufacture of the device... it was so heavily compartmentalized that nobody realized... none of the technicians knew what they were really working on. He covered it up with a stream of duplicated paperwork and phony progress reports... everybody's so used to working in the dark here that he was able to pull it off. His idea was to test the super weapon, and wipe out everybody else who knew how to recreate it, in one blow."

"And if you weren't his willing accomplice, how do you know all this?" Graves demanded. "I don't suppose he simply told you."

"He... he poisoned me first," Flagg said. "Radioactive materials stolen from the labs, to make it look like I was the spy. He gave me a massive dose and told me all this while I... I... I was dying. And... then..." Flagg screwed up his face in concentration, trying to remember exactly what had happened after that.

"The test proceeds," Graves said. "You and Lundquist did your best to destroy the project, and you failed. This cockamamie story is clearly your last ditch attempt to derail it. But you see, you're too late. He gestured to the clock on the wall, which showed it to be a quarter past five morning. "The weather report came in just before you got here... final count down just started five minutes ago."

"No!"

"By rights I should be there to see it, instead of being cooped up here with a sick bastard like you who'd betray his country," Graves said. "I fought in the last war, you know. I saw a lot of things in the trenches that I never thought I'd see, but I've never seen anything like what you did."

"I didn't..."

"Shut up!" Graves roared, jumping to his feet and pounding on the desk. "I don't want to hear one more word out of you. I'll see you before a firing squad, boy, and after that's done I'll cut off your head and ram a stake through the black pit where your heart should be, just to be sure!"

He stomped over to the door and opened it.

"Lock this... this... thing up tight," he said to the MPs on his way out. "I'll deal with him after the test."

"I'm not... I'm not..." Flagg repeated over and over, unable to bring his thought to completion. Something was growing within him, or the world around him was shrinking. He felt hot and cold all over. He got clumsily to his feet, struggling against his bonds, which stretched and snapped like taffy as the two guards came at him.

His world went white-hot...

Inside the concrete bunker at the camp ten miles from the test site, Beth Anne Graves, the general's daughter and chief aide, pursed her lips. "Wallace should be here," she said. "He did as much for this project as anybody else. He should be here to see it. Does anybody know where he is? Or where my father is, for that matter?"

"Your father got a phone call a few hours ago," Director Bainbridge said. "He said he needed to see Dr. Flagg immediately."

"Did he say what for?" Beth asked.

Around the room, several of the men exchanged covert glances. Bainbridge shook his head.

"No," he said slowly. "He didn't say."

"It was probably something to do with his brother," Beth said. "His brother's been sick, and Wallace has been taking care of him... keeps him coming and going at all hours, but it's family, you know? And when we're married, he'll be my family, too."

At the front of the bunker, the great man coughed.

"Ten minutes and counting," Samuel Allison said.

"One way or another," Bainbridge said to the great man, "now we're all sons of bitches. You know that?"

The great man nodded mutely, lighting the fourth cigarette since the countdown had begun ten minutes before. He wasn't smoking... just lighting them and letting them go out. There was very little meaningful conversation from that point on; most of what there was consisted of the 'what do you suppose will happen?' variety. Some of the men present were placing bets. Quite a few were of the opinion that the whole thing would turn out to be a dud. They sounded oddly hopeful, considering that they'd given over their lives to this project... but Bainbridge understood what they were feeling, even as he had confidence that the device would work.

When the device went off--not if, but when--they would have given the world atomic power... a weapon capable of obliterating a hundred thousand lives in the blink of an eye, and it was just the start. He had meant what he said: they were all sons of bitches now.

Just after Allison reported two minutes til doomsday, a phone rang in the bunker. Several of the technicians jumped out of their skin. One of the uniformed men answered it, speaking in hushed, clipped tones. A look of alarm crossed his face.

"What is it?" Bainbridge asked him when he'd hung the receiver back on the hook.

"There's been an incident at the base," the man, a lieutenant, said. "Some kind of a break out."

"Break out? Who were they holding?" Bainbridge asked.

The phone rang again. The lieutenant picked it up immediately, turning his body away from Bainbridge and the rest of the room as he spoke. He was pale when he turned back around to address them.

"We have been advised that there's...an object... been sited moving towards the test site," he announced. "Coming in low and moving fast."

"A missile?" someone asked.

"They don't know," the lieutenant said. "We have been advised to maintain our position."

"I wasn't planning on moving," Bainbridge said. There was scattered chuckling around the room. Of course any warhead that might be carried by a missile would have little chance of harming them in their fortified viewing chamber, ten miles from the most likely target of any strike.

"If it's a missile, the device will be destroyed and the plutonium scattered," the great man whispered to Bainbridge, who was thinking the same thing. "I'm not sure that would be such a bad thing."

"Unless someone else has beat us to the punch, and managed to fit the whole thing inside one of Von Braun's rockets," Bainbridge said. "Wouldn't that be a hell of a joke?"

"Indeed," the great man said.

"I think I see it!" one of the men shouted excitedly. Everybody... everybody whose eyes weren't already glued to the specter  of the tower visible in the distance out the front view port... rushed forward to look. Those who had field glasses, Bainbridge and the great man included, used them.

"It's a man!" Bainbridge said, even as his mind registered there was something badly wrong. The figure was man-shaped, but his head came up much too high measured against the framework of the tower they'd constructed to hold the device which had been codenamed "The Gadget."

"A man nearly four meters in height," the great man estimated. He sounded remarkably calm.

"What's it doing?" one of the technicians asked, then immediately answered himself. "It's... it's destroying the tower!"

Indeed, the immense figure was doing just that, crumpling girders as if they were tissue paper and ripping struts out effortlessly.

"Where's the military?" somebody asked. "Where are the troops?"

"Ten miles back behind us," somebody else reminded the speaker.

"Is... is that thing... glowing?" Bainbridge asked. The giant danced around the base of the tower, moving with phenomenal speed in the gray pre-drawn light. It did indeed seem to be giving off an eerie white glow.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, looked on the destruction wreaked by the immense figure in awe. Ever the poet, he felt a line from the Bhagavad Gita pass through his soul, and muttered it aloud:

"...I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."

Bainbridge felt a chill run down his spine.

The damaged tower, sagging under the weight of its burden, came down with a crash. It fell in the direction of the behemoth, which raised its arms and swatted it aside. It set upon the Gadget, ripping apart its casing.

 The crash of the door slamming inward made everybody start, as if the bunker was under attack by a raging giant of its own. The truth was not far off: the general had stormed in.

"Daddy!" Beth cried. It was the first word she'd said since the phone calls had come in. "Is Wallace with you?"

"Wallace was broken out of a secure holding cell at Los Alamos... by whatever's out there tearing up the test site," General Graves said.

"A holding cell!" Beth repeated. "Why was he in a holding cell?"

"Because he's a traitor, and worse," Graves said. "Lundquist was a Nazi spy... and Wallace Flagg was in it with him, in it up to his neck."

"Wallace would never..." Beth said.

"As soon as we're sure the bomb's been destroyed, my men are moving in to take that thing down," Graves said. "Leftover Nazi übermensch or whatever it is. After it, Flagg's next."

"Daddy... Father, how can you say that about my Wallace?" Beth demanded. "I'm sure there must be some explanation..."

Graves cut her off with a look. It wasn't his normal look, but one of sadness and frustration. There were actually tears in his eyes.

"He's... he's a homosexual, Bethy!" he sputtered. "A God-damned queer. He was... in bed with Lundquist. The Nazi bastard took pictures, probably to keep Flagg loyal."

"Something is happening," Oppenheimer said quietly. Almost impossibly, everybody else in the bunker had found themselves watching the immediate human drama to the exclusion of the superhuman one ten miles away.

The giant stood above the ruins of the world's first atomic bomb. The glow around him was far more pronounced now, and growing in intensity with each passing moment until the figure was obscured completely by the intense white light.

"Death," Oppenheimer repeated. "The Destroyer of Worlds."

The nimbus of light exploded outwards, lighting up the desert and the mountains as bright as noon. Forty seconds later, a deafening shock wave struck the observation post along with a rush of blazing hot air. The explosion would be heard more than one hundred miles away.

The blast was initially reported as the detonation of an ammunition dump... the cover story that had already been arranged for the test. After the successful deployment of the atom bomb over Nagaski, Japan, it was explained away as having been a successful test of the prototype.

Lundquist's plane was destroyed at the airstrip not long after the blast at Trinity. The bodies of he and three accomplices were found ripped to pieces at the scene, with no signs of the bomb plans. William Wallace Flagg was found alive, shaken but unhurt, in the mountains, with no memory of anything that had happened after Graves had left the room.

Kenneth Bainbridge, the man who had overseen the test of the world's first atomic bomb, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who had been chiefly responsible for its creation, would dedicate the remainder of their lives to undoing what they had wrought.

A later inquest determined that, the suspicions of General Graves notwithstanding, Lundquist had already had all the access he would have needed to carry out his scheme and that Flagg had not been a willing participant in anything. As a confirmed homosexual, his security clearance was revoked.

He would never again work for the United States Government.

He would never work as a nuclear scientist again.

The creature dubbed the Destroyer would be seen again, but that is an altogether different story.