“Maybe someone could show me where you found Babar.”

She was told that it would not be a problem. Everyone helped Maria clean up. A short while later, Karla was in her sleeping bag.

The old building was remarkably tight and warm, and, except for the scurrying of tiny animals, she felt quite comfortable. In her excitement over the baby mammoth, she found it hard to sleep.

She remembered a good-night poem her grandfather used to recite to her when she went to live with him after her parents died.

She hardly got past the first line before she fell fast asleep.

NUMA 6 - Polar Shift

19

THE TROUTS FLEW INTO Albuquerque late in the afternoon and drove to Santa Fe, where they stayed the night. Early the next morning, they got into their rental car and headed toward Los Alamos, which was located on a natural citadel atop the three mesas that extended from the Panaretos Plateau.

Trout noticed a change in his wife during the twenty-five-mile drive. She had been chatting about the scenery, wishing they had time to stop at an Indian pueblo, when she became uncharacteristically silent.

“A penny for your thoughts,” he said. “Adjusted for inflation, of course.”

“I was just looking at this peaceful landscape, thinking about the work here with the Manhattan Project and the terrible forces it unleashed.”

“Someone was bound to do it. Just be glad that we were the first.”

“I know that, but it still depresses me to think that we still haven't learned how to control the genie that we let out of the bottle.”

“Cheer up. Nuclear power may be old hat compared to whirlpools and waves on steroids.”

Gamay gave him a sour look. “Thanks for pointing out the bright side.”

Los Alamos had changed a great deal from the day when Robert Oppenheimer and his team of geniuses figured out how to put the power of the atom into a metal, finned cylinder. It was a bustling southwest town with malls, schools, parks, a symphony orchestra and theater, but it has never been able to—or wanted to—escape its dark past. Although the Los Alamos National Laboratory is engaged these days in a number of peaceful scientific explorations, the ghost of the Manhattan Project lingers still.

Lab buildings where research is conducted into the maintenance of nuclear weapons are still off-limits to the public, hinting that the town is still very much in the business of nuclear war. Tourists who drop into the laboratory's museum can touch replicas of “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” the first A-bombs, view various types of warheads and cozy up to life-size statues of Robert Oppenheimer and General Groves, the binary stars of the ultrasecret alliance of military and science that created the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.