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deeply blue. The wild celery was just as green on the bank of the small stream which wandered over the rocks on its way to Havasupi Falls. The green backs of the frogs leaping in and out of the stream glistened as always with crystals of brook water. Everything was the same. But nothing would be the same again. There would never again be a piñon tree under which was eternal peace and everlasting happiness.
    When war was declared on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dorothy’s first reaction was that at least she and Kevin “would be safe,” tucked away in a sleepy backwater such as Santa Fe. She had lost family in the Great War and felt no good had come from that or any other war. She had seen enough misery and death to last her a lifetime and had come out west in part to escape all that. Despite a strong sense of duty that tugged at her conscience, she turned her back on the drumbeat of patriotism and the colorful propaganda banners that filled the Plaza. But the war soon came home to Santa Fe in ways she could not ignore. The small city fell into an economic slump as all the able-bodied men enlisted and one business after another was liquidated. Not far from town, in Casa Solana, a large internment camp was built, and surrounded by barbed wire. Rumor had it that the prison held Japanese Americans and Japanese from Latin America who were deemed “dangerous persons,” and the U.S. government was holding them as bargaining chips for potential prisoner exchanges with Japan. By the beginning of 1943, Dorothy, whose travels had given her a lasting interest in foreign affairs, found it impossible not to feel “quite worked up about the world situation.” She followed the reports of fierce fighting in the Pacific, where America had mobilized almost half a million troops to prepare for General Douglas MacArthur’s offensive. In North Africa, Rommel’s panzer army had routed Allied forces at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, leaving nearly 1,000 dead. The war was not going well, and Dorothy kept her small kitchen radio tuned to the news.
    By the time she met Robert Oppenheimer, Dorothy had been a widow for twelve years. At his request, she plunged herself into the clandestine wartime project. She did not have the slightest idea what he was doing in the high country, or what would be asked of her. She did not care, she wrote, “if he was digging trenches to put in a new road.” He was the most compelling man she had ever met, and she would have done anything to be associated with him and his work. Perhaps the desert had worked its cure on her a second time, and she was strong again. Her heart, like her scarred lungs, had healed. Maybe after so many years the town had become a bit too small, and she felt the stirrings of an old restlessness. It may also have been that her father’s spirit of adventure ran deeper in her than she knew, and she was ready to see what else life held in store for her. Oppenheimer asked her to start right away, and she agreed.
    To people in town, she remained the same sweet widow, working at a nondescript office around the corner from her old job and spending all her free time with her boy. She was told to attract as little attention to herself and her new position as possible, and she did as she was asked, sticking carefully to the daily rhythms of her previous life. No one, not even her son, was aware of what she was really doing. To people inside the project, however, she became known as Oppenheimer’s loyal recruit, his most inspired hire, and the indispensable head of the Santa Fe office. For the next twenty-seven months, she would lead a double life, serving as their confidante, conduit, and only reliable link to the outside. She would come to know everyone involved in the project and virtually everything about it, except exactly what they were making, and even that she would guess in time. One of the few civilians with security clearance, she was on call night