Stallion Gate (28 page)

“The fact is, I’m scared of heights.” Eberly had climbed back onto the platform.

“Heights are about the last thing you need to be afraid of around here,” Joe said.

As the bomb eased up through the platform Eberly removed a trapdoor from the shed roof. When the bomb was halted at the pinnacle of the hoist, Joe and Eberly gently swung the hoist 180 degrees, so that the sphere hung over the open roof. Then Eberly lowered the bomb and Joe bolted the cradle to its new home on the shed’s floor of solid oak planks.

Oppy, Jaworski and Foote arrived on the platform as Eberly and Joe swung the hoist again to bring up the heavy detonator gear. The Explosive Assembly team carried up electrical leads and coaxial cable. Harvey climbed up to the shed to open the bomb’s polar cap and withdraw the manganese wire to recheck the neutron count.

“Forty hours,” Foote muttered to Joe.

“You’ll make it.”

“Oh, I know the bomb will. I mean him.”

Oppy leaned against the shed wall, eyes intent on the bomb. Fatigue had worn away his cheeks. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and showed wrists like straws. His entire body seemed to maintain a faint existence
whose only purpose was to carry the painfully brooding skull.

Joe ran at night, and on the road met someone he first thought was Einstein. It was Santa, his white hair thinned and drooping, mouth gnawing distractedly on his mustache, and wearing a jacket and long scarf as he stumbled along the shoulder of the blacktop.

“How is the skin?” Joe asked.

“The hives? Much better. Really under control. Up to my chin. A walking bandage of salve.”

“I thought you weren’t going to volunteer for Trinity.”

“I wasn’t in the La Fonda,” he told Joe, “so someone else volunteered me, naturally. They gave me a hut down at the Base Camp. Already getting some interesting cases—GIs who hear the scientists talking, and as a result focus their anxieties on the end of the world.”

“That’s what you predicted.”

“Thank you. So, in fact, it’s worked out. It’s really an opportunity to be here if you think about our psychological history being built on anxieties. Of a sexual nature or a religious nature or a combination of the two. We may be on the ground floor of the primary anxiety of the rest of history.”

Joe ran on to Shapiro’s station at the North-10,000 bunker. On his return leg he met no one. The valley floor lay empty in the semidark cast by a half-moon.
Beyond the mountains on either side were storms, lightning muffled in clouds so far off that they were silent. In his mind he saw Anna step again out of the Rio, water and light flowing from her. In memory, the river was black and filled with coral, shell and turquoise.

After nondenominational services at the Base Camp picnic tables, with the bomb in place at the top of the tower and only awaiting the arrival of General Groves, some men spent the hours before Trinity hunting antelope or searching the area for arrowheads or silver mines. Oppy searched for Fermi and Joe drove.

“We left dummy rigs of the detonators and the firing rig back on the Hill.” Oppy spoke more to himself than to Joe. “Yesterday morning, the detonator dummy failed. Yesterday afternoon, the firing-unit dummy failed. Truman is in Berlin expecting news of our great success and I already know that we will fail. If Fermi thinks we’ll fail, I’ll call it off.”

“Fermi is checking blast measurements. He could be anywhere on the test range,” Joe said.

“Then we’ll cover the test range. Everyone here seems to think they’re at summer camp. It would be good to speak to one serious person.”

At the lean- to that constituted the North-10,000 MP station, Sergeant Shapiro said he hadn’t seen Fermi.
“We did have some intruders last night, though. Could be locals, maybe Indians.”

“Maybe rabbits, maybe deer, maybe cactus in the moonlight?” Oppy asked.

Shapiro backed off. “Could be.”

Oppy pointed into the brush and Joe swung the jeep off the road, maneuvering to drive a course generally on the tower’s six-mile periphery, where many of the last-minute adjustments to instruments were taking place. It occurred to Joe that searching for Fermi might be Oppy’s excuse to get away from the tower and the Base Camp. The bomb wasn’t the only thing on the point of collapse. “What time is General Groves coming?” he asked.

“Our general is arriving with presidential advisers this evening. Our failure will be well attended. We’ll even have a reporter from the
New York Times
watching from a hill twenty miles away.” Oppy glanced at Joe. “Do you have any idea what intruders that MP was babbling about?”

“Mescaleros.”

He braked and stopped to avoid running over a sunburned figure lying on the ground. The man was threading coaxial cable into a garden hose. His back and legs were covered with Vaseline and dirt, and pinned to his shorts was a badge that showed he, too, was an elite scientist of Trinity.

As he stuffed the hose he said up to them, “In a circle of Hell, men are doing precisely this right now. We can thank Foote and those other fucking Brits for this, because
all the cable they insisted on importing and using here has melted under the New Mexico sun and has to be insulated again with thirty thousand feet of hose. Have you ever run a catheter up the ass of a thirty-thousand-foot-long snake?”

Farther on, they found more physicists digging up the cables they had buried the day before, because they had buried the cables taut and, under the weight of the earth they’d thrown back on, the cables had snapped. Two other physicists stood mournfully at a silver barrage balloon. The helium balloon was designed to carry neutron counters aloft, but Trinity’s elevation was so high and the air so thin that the balloon clung to the desert floor. On a gentle rise stippled with piñons a radiologist had strung wires on the branches and was hanging white mice from the wires by their tails in order to determine the effect of the blast on living organisms. The first mice had already perished from the heat.

“He’s been out in the sun too long himself,” Joe said after Oppy had sent man and mice back to the Base Camp.

“It all looks so sane on paper. Do you have a drink, Joe?”

“Sorry.”

“Since when don’t you have a flask? You’re looking fit all of a sudden, unlike me. Two days ago I touched the plutonium. I told Harvey it was shaking. He said I was shaking.” Oppy took a deep breath. “So, Mescal-eros?”

“Just what Groves was afraid of, I guess. They still
think this is Stallion Gate. They still chase horses out of the mountains and round them up here.”

“I recall the mustangs we saw.”

“The trackers come in around dusk and stay until dawn. They’re bound to see the shot unless I cut them off.”

“That means you wouldn’t be getting back until morning. You may miss Trinity entirely.”

“You don’t want any roast Apaches, do you?”

At the West-10,000 bunker, Oppy left the jeep to talk to meteorologists releasing weather balloons. The balloons bounced as they rose, as if they were rolling up an invisible hill.

Behind the bunker, Ray Stingo was riding on a Sherman tank taking a practice spin, treads flattening cactus. The tank had been painted white. The cannon was removed and the machine guns were replaced with automobile headlights. Air bottles for the crew were clamped to the side armor. Behind the turret was a rack of rockets.

Ray jumped from the tank. “Isn’t it amazing, Chief? Lead-lined, air-filtered, air-conditioned. This baby’s the first thing in after the blast to collect samples. The way they do it, they’re going to ride up to the crater and shoot rockets with scoops on one end and cables on the other. They just pull the rockets back. Now
that
’s a garbage truck!”

“Sounds like the garbage truck of the future.”

Joe studied the seam of black above the mountains. It was the clouds from last night. Patient clouds.

Ray got in the jeep. “Only eight hours to go to the fight. Turns out your old pal Hilario’s insisting on a minimum one-thousand-dollar bet from every spectator just to hold down the traffic. It’s a Texas crowd, Chief.”

“That’s good. It helps the odds. What are they now?”

“Holding at two to one. There’s a lot of confidence in the boy. I don’t like the crowd, Chief.”

“We’ll cover the bets. Don’t worry about the crowd, we have the MPs.”

Ray watched Oppy coming back through the brush. “I’m so nervous I could piss a marble.”

“That tent over the picnic tables where they had church this morning,” Joe said. “You think you can appropriate it for the fight?”

“Sure. Why?”

“It’s going to rain.”

As Oppy went by the tank it made a 90-degree turn, rolled over an ironwood tree and headed for him. Ray was gawking up at the sky. Joe was caught on the other side of the jeep. Oppy turned and watched in a defenseless stupor as the tank clattered, dipped, rose. Joe was prepared to save Oppy from nuclear mishap, not from a defanged albino Sherman tank. As it loomed over Oppy, it stopped. A hatch popped open and a head wearing a white cotton cap and goggles peered out.

“ ‘From this crude lab that spawned a dud,’ ” the tanker declaimed with a heavy Italian accent, “ ‘their necks to Truman’s axe uncurled. Lo, the embattled savants stood and fired the flop heard round the world.’ ”

The gloomy ditty was popular on the Hill. The tanker pulled off his goggles and cap to reveal cheerful eyes and dark receding hair. It was Fermi.

“Actually, I would estimate the chances of igniting the entire atmosphere at one in three thousand. Acceptable. The chances of incinerating New Mexico at thirty to one. The bomb will work.” He tapped his bald spot. “The problem is suntan lotion. Teller bought the last bottles so he wouldn’t burn from watching the blast. Edward really thinks the bomb will work.” Fermi pulled his goggles and cap down. “Now I play with my new toy.”

The hatch closed. As the tank rolled into reverse, Ray ran to catch up.

At four in the afternoon, four hours before the fight and ten hours before Trinity was scheduled, Oppy and Joe climbed the tower. The detonators were attached and the leads coiled around the gray sphere of the bomb to two detonator boxes. Extra wires, crates and pulley ropes crowded the shed. Joe slipped out to the platform. A pair of artillery spotter’s binoculars hung on the hoist, and he used them to scan the test site.

Oppy followed Joe out. “I feel as if we’re two men mounting the gallows together,” he said. “Everyone else is so confident. Did you see the standing orders for today? ‘Look for four-leaf clovers.’ ”

Joe could see woolly patches of buffalo grass, rabbit brush and yucca spears. Also, man-made burrows where crusher gauges had been buried, standing pipes with crystal gauges and threaded stakes of electrical wire
running from South-10,000 to the tower base. No clover.

Down at the ranch house where the core had been assembled, a man was swimming in the cistern. It was a concrete cistern with double tanks for the cattle that used to run on the ranch. The man swam back and forth tirelessly for several minutes, then climbed out, dried himself and dressed in white coveralls, cap, booties and gloves. Harvey got into a Dodge coupe, drove to the blacktop and turned to South-10,000.

Everywhere Joe looked, vehicles and men on foot were quitting the six-mile radius around the tower. On the West blacktop a jeep with four flats carried a full load of GIs. Farther in that direction, darkening clouds rose over volcanic peaks. Against them and the mist of the Oscuras, Trinity was a last-lit golden strand. But dust devils were moving in, spinning around abandoned instruments, and thunder was becoming more regular.

“There’s an invisible world out there. A new map, a cartography of Geiger counters, seismographs and gauges. Joe, I’ve been thinking about those Mescaleros. If you start chasing them, you might not come back for a day or two. You and I have been through so much, it would be tragic if we didn’t share this climactic moment.”

Joe wished the tower were higher, the glasses stronger, so that he could see Hilario rolling down from Santa Fe. The lieutenant governor probably had a state trooper driving. The crowd would be coming from the Texas
line, cowmen with fist-sized wads of money. Pollack would just be sliding into his Cadillac now.

“I’ll make sure I’m back in time.”

Oppy leaned on the rail. “The future is here, tonight. The world will revolve around us. You don’t think the MPs will be able to watch for Apaches?”

“MPs don’t know where to look.”

Joe imagined Roberto and Ben hiding in a Model T. Maybe a pickup truck poking along the highway, with Felix at the wheel, a couple of cows in back. Anna must be in Chicago, among the concrete towers rising by the lake.

“That’s their problem. I want you with me,” Oppy said. “Until the test is over. Forget the Indians; you’re staying with me.”

Joe scanned the range. “I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean?” Oppy asked, as if he’d heard Joe wrong.

“I’ll tell you what I see here. I see dirt, brush, rats, snakes. In the real world, in New York, the future is already happening. A warm blue evening. Someone nodding on the keyboard, scratching on sheet music. The horn section is spitting. Ever hear a horn section spit? Mezzo forte. The bass man is tightening his pegs. Same in Philly, Kansas City. Even Albuquerque. Everywhere but here.… I see Groves.”

Through the binoculars he had found Harvey’s Dodge again. Coming the other way was a convoy of jeeps. The lead vehicle had a flag with a single star. General Leslie Groves had arrived at Trinity, and Joe and Oppy
had to climb down immediately to greet him at Ground Zero.

“You think the crackpots have finally pulled it together, Sergeant?” Groves answered Joe’s salute.

“Yes, sir.”

Groves had the familiar leaden voice, the same slow, stoop-shouldered walk, but he had become sleek since winter. There was more silver in his wavy hair and mustache, a more certain angle to his gray eyes. He hadn’t been to the test site since he’d chosen it, and he was too heavy to scale the steps and inspect the bomb in its shed, but he led Oppy and Joe and a dozen colonels and majors around the tower base with the confidence of an engineer whose blueprints had merely been followed.