Oppenheimer meets Hidden Figures in this sweeping historical debut where two Jewish physicists form an inseverable bond amidst fear and uncertainty.
Sure to captivate readers of Kate Quinn and Bonnie Garmus, The Sound of a Thousand Stars eerily mirrors modern-day questions of wartime ethics and explores what it means to survive—at any cost.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Sound of a Thousand Stars by Rachel Robbins, which is out October 8th 2024.
Alice Katz is a young Jewish physicist, one of the only female doctoral students at her university, studying with the famed Dr. Oppenheimer. Her well-to-do family wants her to marry a man of her class and settle down. Instead, Alice answers her country’s call to come to an unnamed city in the desert to work on a government project shrouded in secrecy.
At Los Alamos, Alice meets Caleb Blum, a poor Orthodox Jew who has been assigned to the explosives division. Around them are other young scientists and engineers who have quietly left their university posts to come live in the desert.
No one seems to know exactly what they are working on–what they do know is that it is a race and that they must beat the Nazis in developing an unspeakable weapon. In this atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, and despite their many differences, Alice and Caleb find themselves drawn to one another.
Inspired by the author’s grandparents and sure to appeal to fans of Good Night, Irene, The Sound of a Thousand Stars is a propulsive novel about love in desperate times, the consequences of our decisions, and the roles we play in history.
Chapter One
June 1944
Alice
As she drove through the security checkpoint at the main gate, Alice tried to ignore the warning signs. Peligroso! read bold letters in red and black, dappling the barbed wire perimeter. Prohibida La Entrada and No Trespassing. US Government Property. It felt like the beginning of a horror story.
From so high up on the mesa, she could make out the desert floor combed smooth by the wind. In her rearview mirror, the peaks of the Ildefonso Mountains were drawn like crude animal teeth. The desert sand was redder than she’d thought possible, and the rust-colored silt was everywhere: kicked up in the road and tingeing her windshield. Ahead of her, the red dust whirling in the wind seemed alive.
The gate clinked closed definitively behind her.
Her car jostled and bumped over potholes, and she gripped the steering wheel, terrified of a flat. Laid out before her was a maze of lopsided houses and stairways to nowhere. Everything was painted monotone army green, and the buildings were mirror images of each other. The whole mesa seemed like a mirage, wriggling in waves of heat.
Many of the homes seemed to be facing the wrong direction, their backs to the street, as though they were hiding. Children’s toys emerged out of the muddy, red earth like weeds. Crimson dirt lined the side of an abandoned baby stroller fading in the sun. A clothesline sagged near some picnic tables, and colorful laundry flapped like butterflies in the breeze. The trash cans were overflowing, and several were overturned. Parked cars were sinking into the muck, and the license plates were so filthy the numbers were illegible— only a few were discernible with the state motto shimmering through: “New Mexico: Land of Enchantment.”
A few young men staggered by like zombies in the heat. Alice was startled to see that even the people of the town were coated with a film of red dust, their dirt-caked faces glistening with sweat.
This wasn’t what she had expected after her clandestine recruitment—a mysterious phone call around midterms from someone who’d claimed to represent the Office of Scientific Research and Development, seeking under Vannevar Bush to recruit scientists for the Manhattan Engineering District. At first, she had wrongly supposed that meant the research would be located in Manhattan. Now, looking around at the jagged mountain peaks and winding roads to nowhere, Alice keenly felt how far from New York she really was.
She knew she was only there on Dr. Oppenheimer’s recommendation as one of his preferred understudies. They were so desperate for help that they were willing to look the other way and hire a woman scientist. Despite her numerous questions, all she had gleaned from her phone call was that she was being sent “somewhere in New Mexico.” But she was reassured by the rumors around the Berkeley physics building: whispers of Nobel laureates and the opportunity to test the limits of the known universe. Surely, those legacies were here, too, somewhere, but now, sinking into the sludge, men were dressed in cowboy jeans, their belt buckles flashing in the sunlight.
She hesitated over which of the crisscrossing gravel roads to follow. They all seemed to lead to the same place, Ashley Pond, which was flanked by army barracks and the additional barbed wire perimeter of the laboratory complex. The pond had been named for the town founder, Ashley Pond II, who had built a school for boys on this land—though he was by no means the original inhabitant of this place.
In preparing for her move to the mysterious city, Alice had scoured the Berkeley library. The checkout card on a book about New Mexico had read like a Rolodex of strange, vanished physicists. Alice had read about the indigenous communities Pond had displaced when he constructed school buildings out of horizontally stacked ponderosa pine logs and modeled his curriculum after the Boy Scouts of America: an outdoorsman education complete with uniforms and neckerchiefs. Paying no mind to the history of the site, he encouraged his schoolboys to rearrange remaining pueblo structures to their liking and dismantle holy sites. Alice knew that the homesteaders, mostly of Hispano descent, had been allowed to stay so long as they served food in the mess hall and swept the dormitory floors. But in recent years, they, too, had been removed from their homes to make way for Oppenheimer and his community of scientists. Pond had at least been paid for the land, and it retained much of the ethos of his school for boys who wore shorts year-round to toughen them up, regardless of the plunging temperatures.
It made sense that Oppenheimer had chosen this place. Pond had been a sickly child with bronchial infections and typhoid, and consequently had been prescribed a warmer climate, much like Oppenheimer himself. In this isolated wilderness, Pond had taught boys to ride horses, hunt, and walk with a purpose. Alice wondered fleetingly whether she was one of the first females to cross this threshold.
She braked and stared at the ramshackle laboratory buildings across the pond, the main tech area flanked by a perimeter of barbed wire. Alice had never before stepped foot in a real lab. Most of her research in theoretical physics had taken place in sterile campus buildings, in the company of undergrads vying for a passing grade. As a woman, she’d been barred from innovations like the increasingly larger cyclotrons, or any of the hushed elements housed in the Rad Lab. Now, the slapdash army construction before her on the opposite shore seemed eons beyond her grasp. She couldn’t believe she was there at all, and she tried to repress the uncertainty knocking around in the back of her mind that she was only there on Oppenheimer’s good word.
She squinted to see through her mud-splattered windshield. She ran the wipers, but they only rubbed the red grime in. The tired station wagon had strained up switchbacks and the steering wheel was still warm, the heat rising up through the dash. She killed the engine.
“Stay here, Pavlov,” she said, giving her golden retriever a quick head rub and stepping outside into the glare. Alice had named the furry, yellow dog Pavlov after the scientist of canine reflex fame, but ironically, it was more often Alice who exhibited conditioned responses to the dog’s behaviors. She gauged the world through his alarm and joy. She hadn’t dared embark on this journey without him. Now, she tried not to feel too unmoored by the worried expression in his storybook eyes as she exited the vehicle.
In keeping with the cowboy aesthetic, Ashley Pond II had constructed a wooden water tower, which rose over the western-style buildings like a second sun. Alice shielded her eyes and admired the structure. It felt like she had driven backward in time. This town built for boys had, until now, seemed mythical, having only existed in her mind as its code name: Site Y.
She watched the reflections of the army buildings sparkle and ripple in the pond.
“Mrs. Katz?” said a voice behind her. She turned to see a young military guard blinking at her. Inside the car, Pavlov exploded into a thunderous growl, rocking the vehicle.
“I told them I had a dog,” she offered in explanation. “When I signed the contract.” If she was going to agree to sixteen months isolated from the world, bringing Pavlov was nonnegotiable.
“Pets are fine,” said the guard, surrendering his hands like she had pointed a gun at him. “Pets don’t talk.”
The man stepped closer. She could smell the metallic stench of his sweat. His uniform was sticking to him in the heat. His hair was freshly cut and the buckles and badges on his uniform looked very important, but he couldn’t have been a day older than seventeen. His face full of freckles and acne gave him away. She relaxed.
“Lieutenant Abrams,” he said, saluting her. “Call me Saul.” The more he spoke, the more his New York Bronx accent clogged his words. “Welcome to Quantum Land, Mrs. Katz.”
She elected not to correct him about her marital status. While she was quite correctly a Katz by birth, she was not yet a Mrs. It would be too hard to explain that she was not married to Warren VanHuff, only engaged while he drifted on a tanker into the port of Le Havre, standing stick straight and saluting in his military fatigues with his chin in the air. Besides, she had only ever agreed to the match to appease her mother. She hated that the pear-shaped diamond she wore on her ring finger was a conversation starter. It rested atop an elaborate art deco setting, engraved with her grandmother’s de Young family crest.
As an heiress to the San Francisco de Youngs, Alice bore the elite lineage of both the famous art museum and the most reputable newspaper in the city. While she fingered her ring and Saul hoisted her luggage, it occurred to her that she had not insisted on her correct designation as Doctor.
In coming here, she had agreed to trade her penthouse apartment overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge for utter invisibility. Going unnoticed had seemed a welcome change after the high-profile and public drowning of her then fifteen-year-old sister, Abigail, had filled her childhood with the flashbulbs of tabloids and news vans double-parked in their drive. She’d been only eleven years old when it happened, and the tragedy had followed her family in the decade and a half that followed. In the aftermath, her father became a recluse and her mother took to sherry. While her parents secluded themselves in dark rooms and friends delivered casseroles, Alice had watched ferries drift east through her bay window, so slowly they seemed not to be moving at all. She had often dreamed herself onboard, or up onto the blinking airplanes overhead.
Rather than mourn her sister, Alice had vowed to continue where they had left off. Like Alice, Abigail had had a mind for science, and an insatiable drive for professional success. Most nights, they had stayed up late whispering in the dark about Marie Curie. Alice, in particular, was engrossed by Madame Curie’s work with uranium salts, even if she had been overlooked, assumed to be merely an assistant to her scientist husband. It broke Alice’s heart to think that her name had nearly been forgotten, that she had come so close to being snubbed for the Nobel Prize. But despite the odds, Curie had found invisible rays of energy, an inexplicable additional substance coexisting in the mineral that was more radioactive than anything anyone had ever seen before.
In the wake of Abigail’s death, conducting experiments in Alice’s high school laboratory had freed her mind from the lonely existence within her penthouse walls. One teacher after another had singled her out, recommended her for scholarships and fellowships, admired her endless curiosity. By day, she exuded academic excellence. But questions of science had kept her up at night.
Alice had accepted this role with no idea how her research would be used, placing all her trust in Dr. Oppenheimer—the same man who held the physics department hostage with his Chesterfields and mood swings. Only last quarter, he had disappeared from class for several weeks and administrators had had to drag him back from the Sanskrit department. But the more he berated his students, the more they imitated him, and Alice was no exception. She had to figure, of course, that her work here was related to national defense and the war effort. Perhaps they were building heat-seeking missiles or lasers. Regardless, she felt certain that Oppenheimer would never be on the wrong side of history. Abigail would have longed for this kind of adventure, this proximity to greatness and scientific discovery. Alice had ached for it all her life. And here she was: she had landed in a faraway land.
Saul dragged her suitcases through the muck, and she slid around behind him in her peep-toe heels, snapping her feet from the goo. Despite the leather ration, she had wedges and espadrilles for every occasion. Usually so proud of her footwear, she was suddenly embarrassed by her extravagance in this dusty, casual town.
Saul jangled a janitor’s ring of keys, swinging the door to a small house open and flooding the dark home with light. It was so bright outside Alice had to wait a minute for her eyes to adjust to make out the military-issued chairs and couch. In the bedroom, there was a small cot with a blanket stamped in white letters against that same militant green reading US Armed Forces.
“It’s no Taj Mahal, but it’ll do,” Saul said, following a few steps behind her as she opened doors and cabinets and Pavlov ran from room to room sniffing around.
“I’ve been tasked with reminding you of the operating rules,” he said, looking sheepish. He launched into a recitation: “Refrain from calling any of the scientists by their professional titles for any reason,” he began. “If you go to town, don’t talk to strangers except for in an emergency.” He rattled through an exhaustive list he had clearly recited a hundred times over. “If you see an acquaintance,” he instructed, “you are allowed a half smile and a partial nod, but nothing more.”
While he spoke, Alice watched the layers of her identity blow away like the strands of a cobweb in the wind. It must have shown on her face because he repeated sternly, “A partial nod and nothing more.”
He paused, waiting for affirmation. “Right,” she agreed.
“And I’ve been instructed to kindly remind you about the drought,” he said. Alice felt her eyebrows react but tried to smooth her expression.
“What does that mean?”
“Showers will be a luxury,” he began, nodding in the direction of the claustrophobic shower stall. Seeing her face, he rushed to explain: “Only about five houses are equipped with bathtubs, and those are for the ‘special’ residents. Dr. Oppenheimer himself is lucky to occupy one of the homes on what the boys are calling Bathtub Row.”
Most of the dwellings in Site Y were constructed of plywood or thin wallboard, isolated and sinewy as though they might fly away in a strong gust of wind, their surrounding landscapes barren. Bathtub Row homes, Alice would come to learn, were made from more permanent materials, like logs and stones, and boasted vegetable gardens and trees.
“Cap your showers at thirty seconds,” Saul instructed, “like we do in the army.” He paused, waiting for a response, but she gave none, so he pressed on. “You need to distinguish between potable and nonpotable water.”
“What?” she asked, her voice sounding crosser than she’d intended.
“You’ll need to recycle bath water for use in the toilet,” he clarified, showing her a bucket tucked under the sink for this purpose.
Just then, a whistle hissed outside the window, followed by an enormous boom that made them both jump.
The floor rattled beneath their feet. The army glasses jiggled in the cupboard, clanking against each other. A salad plate toppled from its position on the shelf and crashed to the floor, shattering. Alice covered her head and cowered.
“What in the heavens?” she asked after it stopped, straightening and dusting herself off. “Was that an earthquake?”
Saul grinned. “Dynamite. Keeps ya on your toes. Home sweet home.” He saluted, then turned on his heels and left, kicking up red dust on the gravel road until he was out of sight.
This was the most alone she had ever been. Even in the hours after Abigail had been swept away by the undercurrent, Alice had been surrounded by people. She had waited in the pristine Cliff House restaurant with its wall of windows overlooking Ocean Beach while helicopters flashed searchlight beams and boats dragged for the body. Someone had draped Alice’s wet hair in a towel. Another had cloaked her in fur. She had still been in her swimsuit. She had been shivering. They had offered her tea, but the cup kept rattling when she raised it to her lips, the tea sloshing around.
In the months and years that followed, her parents developed a habit of turning on the radio to fill the house with conversation. And of course there’d been the noises of the city: the fog horns on the bay, the honking traffic on Geary Street, the exhale of the city buses as they settled at each stop. Now, there were no man-made noises. Alice could only hear the crickets chirping and the cicadas ringing. She fanned herself. The still heat was suffocating, her curls sticking to the nape of her neck.
It was strange that she hadn’t told her parents where she was going. She hadn’t even told Warren. He had promised her a wedding fit for a queen before being deployed. He was a good man, a brave man, and her parents adored him. He faced rifles, flamethrowers, and grenades in the trenches, and still sent love letters flapping across the ocean, reminding her that to him she was the only girl in the world. Perhaps he said it a little too much, insisted a little too desperately, considering that he had barely taken notice of her change of postal address.
Planning their nuptials had brought her parents joy for the first time she could remember, and her parents deserved a wedding. Since Abigail hadn’t lived long enough to do it, she would give them the grandchildren they deserved. Someday, holding their grandchildren’s tiny hands, they’d wade into the water without fear.
But first, she would do her part to help end this war. Her children would live in a world free of Nazis and firing squads, shooting prisoners stripped naked into open graves. She had been sick hearing on the evening news about the gas chambers where instead of water, prisoners showered in carbon monoxide. She wasn’t sure what, but something had to be done. This was her chance.
She steeled herself and turned the shower tap cautiously. The pipes coughed and spat out chunks of mud before running clear. As soon as the water pooled, two beady-eyed black scorpions darted out of the drain and marched around the tub in a frenzy. Alice shrieked. Sheltering most of her body behind the shower curtain, she strained to turn off the faucet. The insects darted back into the drain and disappeared into the wormhole universe of the pipes beneath her. How many of them lived in there? She had to flush them out.
There were a few basics pre-stocked in the kitchen. She sprinkled the tub with baking soda, the powdery substance snowing out of the cardboard box gently, just like it had when she and her mother baked gingerbread, or she and Abigail instigated a chemical reaction resulting in foam that could fill a balloon. When she dumped the vinegar into the tub, the solution frothed and bubbled, producing carbon dioxide. She had only been there five minutes and already she was using science to kill.
After a few moments, she stepped into the slow trickle of the shower, summoning the courage to wash her face. The chlorine stung. She knew it was a good burn—that the chlorine had been added to disinfect harmful illnesses otherwise prevalent in that slap-shod sewage system of interlocking pipes and tessellations. She pressed her fingers into her eyelids until she saw red, dancing shapes.
Abigail would have wanted this, she reminded herself. Alice had chosen this. She had spent so much of her life faking her way through pleasantries at her mother’s dinner parties, and treading softly when the guests departed and there was no one left to put on a brave face for. While their childhood friends had scribbled in Little Housekeeper coloring books, Abigail and Alice had stared out their window of stars from their bunk bed and wondered how many light years the helium and hydrogen had traveled to make it to their small corner of the world.
“What’s there?” they had asked the night sky. “How does it work? How did it come to be this way?” In Abigail’s absence, Alice lay awake at night wondering.
When the news first broke about the mass executions in Germany, Alice was no longer a child. The rumors about soap and candles made from Jewish corpses had launched her into emotional adulthood early, but now she had the lanky body to match her serious affect. A teenager with a “Growing Girl” brassiere and a head of curls swept back in bobby pins and a headband, she had hidden the newspaper from her father. Their family wasn’t religious, but they were still Jewish. In light of his grieving over his elder daughter, there was no telling what the news would do to him.
Listening to the radio in the coat closet, Alice learned how the Nazis armed many executioners so that no one man would know for sure whom his bullet had murdered. Even with the anonymity, guards still required psychological counseling as women’s and children’s arms and legs were dislodged and strategically stashed between torsos to fit in the killing pit. That was why the gas vans, the radio explained, had come along. It was like Schrödinger’s cat, she had thought. Sometimes it was difficult to differentiate between science and violence.
The shower water continued to spurt out in uneven bursts, with long pauses when no water came from the faucet at all. When the water did come, it wasn’t enough to wash the shampoo from her hair.
She counted to thirty seconds as instructed, limiting herself to an army-style shower, thinking of all the things that came with the number thirty: the atomic number for zinc. The atomic weight of phosphorous: 30.9738. Thirty was the number of eggs in the carton, and the number of upright stones at Stonehenge. The number thirty had everything to do with how humans measured time, she thought, drying herself with an army-issued towel and tying a bandanna around her head to hide her greasy hair. The number of seconds in a minute was divisible by thirty. The average number of days in a month was thirty. Even when Jews sat shiva, mourning their dead for seven days, they abided by the law of thirty where hygiene was concerned. Her own father, Ishmael, had not cut his hair, shaved, or clipped his nails for thirty days after the funeral. At least that was the reason he gave.
***
Inside the commissary, Alice was underwhelmed by the narrow aisles and the fruit flies buzzing around the spoiling produce. She picked up a basket and strolled the aisles, thumbing the tomato paste and refried beans absentmindedly, scanning the backs of people’s heads and observing their purchases. A woman in a purple sundress and large glamour sunglasses was flipping through the glossy pages of a magazine she clearly did not intend to buy. A man was reading the nutrition facts on the back label of a box of Grape Nuts.
She couldn’t help but wonder who each of these people were—she was thrilled by the prospect of standing in line behind the same men who had discovered the basic rules of the universe. There’d been rumors in the Berkeley physics department, before her classmates had vanished one by one until the lecture halls were empty, that this place would be chock-full of the world-famous physicists who had written her college textbooks. She knew their words and ideas, but she didn’t know their faces. She wondered whether they would look the way their research sounded.
A man with an athletic build and long, wavy hair was lecturing a few young Special Engineer Detachment recruits between the weather-beaten artichokes and the shriveled bell peppers. She recognized their brown uniforms as the same Saul had worn. Saul had mentioned something about being plucked right out of his undergraduate physics class, selected from the other rank and file GIs for his basic knowledge as a machinist. She hoped the SEDs were skilled mechanics and electronics technicians, and they certainly looked important in their gleaming uniforms and military haircuts, but seeing their doe-eyed expressions filled her with doubt. These were boys, not men. They were looking for a hero.
The physicist before them had a long melon face, like a crescent moon. He seemed to have abandoned whatever task had brought him to the commissary in the first place in favor of saying something lofty about nature. He spoke in such a quiet voice that they all leaned toward him. His words strung together, making him nearly impossible to understand. Because of this, all eyes were trained on him, watching his lips intently. “Nobody thought that one could get the basis of biology from the coloring of the wing of a butterfly,” he said.
The woman in purple had stopped reading her magazine and lifted her dark glasses for a better look. She nodded at Alice. “Baker’s up to it again,” she said.
“Who?” she asked.
“Oh, Bohr. He traded his famous name for an American pseudonym. It’s all code names these days. Everyone just calls him Uncle Nick.” She rolled her eyes and returned to her magazine.
Alice had been taught Niels Bohr’s model of the atom all the way back in high school physics. Last she had heard of him, he was fleeing the Nazis in a fishing boat on his way to Sweden. And here he was, in the flesh, shopping for cabbage.
“The trouble is the netting of language,” he was saying. “There must be an infinite progression of selves, an entire sequence of I’s who must consequently consider each other.” He was gazing at the watermelons but didn’t seem to see them. “It’s like looking down into a bottomless abyss,” he said with finality. By now, more scientists and military personnel had stopped to listen. He was drawing a crowd.
“Are you saying we need to divorce science from language?” asked a young military man with a freshly shaved head, framed by a precarious mountain of limes. Behind him, a woman with frizzy hair was pretending to squeeze an eggplant, pausing to listen.
“I try not to speak more clearly than I think,” Bohr responded. “But I do think we need to distinguish between physics that seeks to understand what nature is, and physics that concerns what we can say about nature.”
Alice stared. She remembered hearing how Bohr had worked with a chemist to dissolve the golden Nobel Prizes preserved in his institute to save them from the Nazis. The Wehrmacht had goose-stepped right by the liquid gold in a beaker. It was something out of a spy novel. Alice was convinced through and through that whatever side of history Bohr was on had to be the right one.
The bell on the door chimed announcing the entrance of a new customer, and Bohr seemed to snap out of his theoretical reverie and realize where he was. “Oh heavens, Margrethe will be wondering where I’ve run off to with her tomatoes,” he said and sauntered off, leaving the produce aisle mesmerized.
Alice watched him hop effortlessly down the stairs, taking them two at a time, and out of her line of vision. Niels Bohr eats tomatoes, she thought.
The basis of biology from the wings of a butterfly. She traced her fingers along the cantaloupe and honeydew, feeling the porous rinds and estimating the radius and linear velocity were she to set them loose, rolling down the aisle like bowling balls. What if the undulating lines on the watermelon had mathematical explanations? Perhaps the meaning of life was hidden in an apple seed. What if humanity was looking in all the wrong places?
Standing there, by the wilting leafy greens, Alice felt closer to Abigail than she had in years. She had done it. She was here.
©2024 Rachel Robbins
