Stallion Gate (27 page)

Working at the table, and dressed in a white surgical coat, rubber gloves on his hands, Harvey already had joined the two silver-plated plutonium hemispheres into one croquet-ball-sized, eleven-pound sphere, and was stuffing holes on the sphere’s shining surface with tiny wads of Kleenex, the fill-all of Trinity. Geiger counters conversed on the floor. Six silent men in lab coats monitored the counters and gave Harvey one tool, then
another. The only one without a task was Oppy. Six feet tall, Oppy now weighed a hundred pounds. His head seemed gaunt and swollen at the same time, too large for the neck that stuck out of the lab coat. His hands wrung a cold briar. Somebody had hammered a nail in the wall so he could hang up his porkpie hat, the same as in his office on the Hill. The hat was there, but Oppy seemed oddly out of place and miserable, not triumphant at all.

“Remember the Dragon,” Harvey said, although he hadn’t looked up from the core when Joe came in.

Joe stayed back by the wall, which was a foot thick, making the room relatively cool, maybe 90 degrees. The plastic-covered window faced the idling cars, poised for flight in case of a slip of Harvey’s hands. Joe’s mission orders at Trinity were to stay with Oppy at all times and make sure the project director survived any accident.

Harvey gave the core a final polish with an emery cloth. “I gave away my clarinet.”

“Too bad, you had great potential,” Joe said.

Harvey’s Critical Assembly team followed his every move with the intensity of chicks watching their mother turn an egg. One of them put long brass tweezers and a small shockproof case studded with plugs on the table, then unlocked the case and raised the lid. On a bed of foam rubber lay a large pearl, a one-inch ball of platinum-coated polonium. This was the core within the core, an “initiator” that would emit a burst of neutrons in the first millionth of a second of detonation.

“I think I’ll stick to what I’m good at,” Harvey said.

He reopened the larger core, propping the top hemisphere with his finger. With his free hand he picked up the tweezers and with the two brass tines lifted the tiny ball. He had to place the initiator in its nest in the center of the core, and the insertion had to be done in slow motion while the building radiation was monitored. He blinked through his sweat, but his hands didn’t falter. His finger prodded the core a little more open as the ball and tweezer advanced. The ticking of the Geiger counters rose like the pulse of excited hearts. Oppy looked as if he was going to sway and drop.

“Those icy atoms up and down my spine,” Harvey sang softly. “The blue of ions when your eyes meet mine. A strange new tingle that I feel inside, and then that radiation starts its ride.”

Oppy’s pipe hit the floor and spun across the boards. Harvey froze, fingers in the maw of the two hemispheres. “Joe, will you please take Oppy for a walk?”

Outside in the hot, dry air, Joe found his shirt had soaked through with sweat. Oppy sat on the low stone wall, hat on his knee.

“I suspect that before his flight, Icarus was throwing up. I wish we could just go into the mountains again, Joe, go riding again like we used to. I’ve ridden that horse of mine just once this year. I know they don’t need me in there, but it’s my test.” He looked up at Joe. The rest of Oppy had been worn down to bones and clothes while the blue eyes had the intensity of a man enduring pain. “I asked Groves for another week
or just another four days. When this is over, we’ll go riding.”

“Sure.”

Harvey called Joe inside. The core was closed and complete and sat in a lead-lined wooden box.

“He’s been like this ever since he got here. Maybe he should go back to the Hill.”

“It’s his test,” Joe said.

They carried the box on a litter out to Harvey’s car and put it on the backseat. Joe took Oppy in the jeep and led the way back to the tower. The breeze of late afternoon was picking up; dust devils whipped around the tower base.

Within the tent, Foote and Jaworski had removed the polar cap at the top of the bomb and taken out a brass plug so that the plutonium core could be inserted. Harvey opened his box and attached the core to a vacuum cup. Nobody wanted to damage the precious core with screws or bolts, and being scientists they trusted the reliability of a vacuum. Harvey tested the cup’s seal, then hooked the chain of a manual hoist onto the cup’s eyes. He pulled off his lab coat and kicked it away, then tested the seal again. Harvey looked like a plump and innocent boy, the sweat coursing off his belly, his fine blond hair standing as if magnetized. Foote cranked the core up from its box. From a corner of the tent, Oppy and Joe watched Jaworski steady the core with a pencil as Foote swung it over the waiting bomb.

Wind beat on the canvas. “One proper dust devil and
a few grains of sand and we can put our symmetrical implosion into a pisspot,” Foote said.

He lowered the core. One moment it hovered over the bomb like a moon above a larger body; the next it was descending by its chain into the bomb’s interior.

And stuck.

Jaworski waved his hand up. His mustache had started to sag. Foote cranked up the core and lowered it into the bomb again. It stuck.

Foote cranked the core halfway out of the bomb, slipped the hoist’s ratchet and painstakingly let out the chain again. The core made its slow downward passage, nudging lenses of high explosive as it dropped.

And stuck. By a millimeter or so, the plutonium core was simply too big or the hollow inside the bomb was too small.

“I don’t believe this,” Oppy said and stared first at the bomb and then at Foote. “It isn’t possible. You measured wrong?”

The tent walls shook. Measured wrong? Wouldn’t fit? Joe pictured someone telling this to General Groves, and he suspected that every man was imagining the same scene.

Harvey laughed. “It’s the desert heat. The plutonium’s hot, expanded. Grade-school physics. Leave the core where it is; it will cool.”

It took five minutes, but the temperature of the plutonium and high explosive finally equalized and the core slipped meekly into place. Jaworski unsealed the vacuum cup, and as Foote raised the chain Harvey inserted
a three-foot-long manganese wire down to the resting core to check its neutron count. Connected to a Geiger counter, the wire detected a cascade of ions, a noise like a hive.

“I’m done.” Harvey withdrew the needle. He paused at the hole as if he couldn’t trust the moment, then slipped quickly out of the tent.

At once Foote and Jaworski began replacing high explosive. Lenses that appeared loose they made snug with Scotch tape. As the work went on into the evening, lamps were brought in. Thunder could be heard walking across the valley.

“Italy has just declared war on Japan.” Harvey had returned to the tent.

“Hell, this war
is
almost over,” Joe said.

Joe ran in the early morning; he did roadwork whenever he had the chance now. Punching the air, ducking, slipping punches right, left. Cool sweat ran down his chest.

As he ran he played music in his head. He worked on a “Fugue for Night.” He thought it could be bebop, but it became a double waltz for minor chords, constantly changing, rising and falling because there were so many kinds of night. Mountain night. Desert night. Even the deep, fungal night of the Philippines had variations. Then there was the interior void without moon or heart that was life without Anna. Sometimes the physical reaction came before the thought itself: a burning in the throat, a hollowness in the chest, then memory. If she was drivings to Chicago, she was still on the road. It was as if his body were actively betraying him. Sometimes his eyes told him they actually saw her in the dark, as if hope could gather shadows and take on human form. Then the shadows would fade and he’d be alone again in a flat void.

Sometimes, with sweat and concentration, he didn’t think of her at all.

He brought down the moon on flatted fifths. The sweat poured.

At eight in the morning, Foote struck the tent at the base of the tower and Joe hooked a pulley cable to the rim of the bomb. Since it ran a hundred feet down from the trapdoor in the tower platform—a long way to lift five thousand pounds of steel and explosive and eleven pounds of plutonium—the cable was stabilized by side ropes to skates on two tower legs. The sky was a paralyzing blue, blue as a burst of water, not a ragtail hawk up yet, only the dots of weather balloons basking in the sun.

As Foote waved up to the platform the two-cycle engine of the pulley motor started overhead. As the cable went taut and the sphere and its cradle cleared the ground enough to stir, a truck backed up to the tower and Foote’s team began throwing GI mattresses down from the truck bed. The bomb rose cautiously an inch at a time while Joe and Foote slipped mattresses under the ascending sphere.

“This is the greatest scientific program in the history of mankind?” Joe asked.

“Absolutely,” Foote said.

“If the cable snaps, you’re going to catch a two-and-a half-ton bomb with mattresses?”

“I concede we may have reached a certain point of intellectual exhaustion.” Foote blithely watched the bomb
rise. “Reminds me of the late Queen Victoria being lifted on board a ship. A feeling somewhere between the religious and the ridiculous.”

Much of the exhaustion was located next to the tower, in the jeep where Oppy was talking to Jaworski. Oppy’s face was ashen and his eyes were reddened from the alkali dust.

The bomb rose smoothly as a plumb, the side ropes stretched to skates that jerked up the rails within two opposite tower legs. Joe and Foote could stack mattresses up to ten feet, but no higher. The bomb, rocking gently in the air, rose to twenty feet, to fifty feet. After all the security back at the Hill, it occurred to Joe that he was looking at the easiest potshot of the war; if a saboteur wanted a chance, this was it.

“Where is Augustino?” he asked as Oppy approached the pile of mattresses.

“The people back on the Hill tested a dummy of the detonators last night.” Oppy ignored Joe and told Foote, “There was no symmetrical shock. I am informed as of five minutes ago that we have a dud.”

“It will work.” Foote tipped the brim of his sombrero the better to keep his eyes on the bomb.

“Two billion dollars.” Oppy laughed. The laugh became a cough that sounded as if his lungs were ripping. While he bent over he lit a cigarette. “No, Joe, to answer a question of immaculate irrelevance, I haven’t seen Captain Augustino. Please get it through your skull that I don’t care about Captain Augustino. Captain Augustino does not concern me.”

“I suppose he concerns Joe.” Foote craned his neck. “From rumors I’ve heard, I suppose he’d like to nail Joe’s cock to the ground and shoot him through the head.”

“The captain is after bigger game than that,” Joe said.

The bomb shook. A skate rattled down a track, its rope whipping the air until the skate dug itself into the dirt at the tower base. Fifty feet overhead, the bomb slowly yawed from side to side, still attached to the other skate and twisting with a new inertia.

“Fucking Mother of God,” someone said.

“Dear me,” said Foote.

The bones in Oppy’s face seemed to sag.

“The cable’s stuck!” the man on the platform shouted. “Coming off the wheel. I’ll have to free the other skate.”

It was Private Eberly. An ungainly soldier in shorts, but he came down the tower’s steel rungs like a hero, taking each flight of steps Navy style. The second landing put him on a level with the skewed bomb, but one tower leg away. He’d have to walk across a narrow, open horizontal brace of the scaffolding fifty feet above the ground. Diagonal braces would support him most of the way, but in the middle where the braces rose out of reach, he had to be a tightrope walker. Why not? After the most powerful weapon in the world left the hands of Oppy and Fermi and Foote, why shouldn’t its fate hang on the nerve of an ordinary soldier? Let him be the man of the day.

Jaworski ran from the jeep. “Don’t try it!”

“Try it,” Oppy whispered.

Eberly clung to the rising brace as long as he could, then spread his arms for balance. The steel was about four inches across, and Eberly moved on anxious splayed feet. Don’t stop, Joe thought. The soldier tilted, regained his equilibrium and stood motionless in the center of the horizontal brace. Don’t look down, Joe thought. Eyes level, Eberly started again toward the far tower leg. He misstepped. He pulled his foot back onto the steel, but he had come to a stop. His arms waggled like duck wings. He looked down and dove.

Eberly turned in the air and landed on his back in the middle of the mattresses. He slid off the stack to the ground and to his knees, winded but unhurt.

“Joe?” Oppy said.

Joe was already going up the ladder. He climbed to the steel steps of the tower leg and climbed those to the second landing, where Eberly had been standing a minute before. Because he was taller, he could hang on to the diagonal strut longer. The breeze was stronger at fifty feet than he’d expected. The steel ball slowly rolled, and although he knew he was being watched from below, he felt oddly alone with the bomb, as if it had been waiting only for him. He spread his arms wide, catching the wind, and walked with a quick, steady pace across the beam to the descending diagonal brace and the other tower leg.

The skate was jammed. He called down for a hammer and caught it as it spun up. When he hit the skate, it freed and the bomb gently swung to the center of the
tower. He tucked the hammer into his belt and walked, arms out, back across the beam.

He was vaguely aware of someone saying “Bravo,” down on the ground. He continued up the tower steps, rising to the second and third landings and on to the platform at the top. Most of the platform was taken up by an eight-by-twelve shed of corrugated sheet iron. Outside was the engine and hoist. He started the engine. As the pulley wheel turned, the cable slipped back into its groove. He could see the bomb inching up the scaffolding again. He kept his heel on the engine switch, ready to stop it in case the skate jammed a second time.

West, he had a distant view of volcanic cones. South was more interesting. A smudge showed on the desert floor where a practice blast, a mere one hundred tons of TNT spiced with isotopes, had been set off on V-E Day. Firebreaks had been plowed around the blast, giving it the look of a bull’s-eye. Farther on was the ranch house where Harvey had assembled the core the day before. There were random scars of tire tracks and a blacktop road that ended in the middle distance at South-10,000, the control bunker six miles away that would fire the bomb. He could just make out the slap-up buildings and the windmill of the Base Camp ten miles off. Behind the camp was a dry sea of brush and dust that lapped against the Oscura Mountains.
Oscuro
meant “dark.” Low and broken, the Oscuras seemed to lie in the shadow of some larger, invisible mountains. It was a region of illusion. On the other side of the
Oscuras were snowy dunes called White Sands. He noticed that blacktop roads also ran west and north from the tower, new roads virtually without traffic, in place purely for disaster.