Charlie turned off his iron, removed his mask, and placed it over the hot tip.
The professor put down his papers and sidled over, arms crossed like a disappointed parent. “This is dangerous equipment, young man. Reckless of you to—”
Charlie moved aside, revealing the assembly he’d made. The professor tilted the device on one side. “Wicking, sweating, smooth wires. Where’d you learn all this?”
An undergraduate in the back row called out, “Los Alamos.”
“Well, thank you for a job well done.” The professor ambled to the head of the room. “You may know enough to teach this course. Others here may feel the same. But I’m the one with the PhD, so you’ll not be touching equipment except as I direct.” He faced the class. “Do we understand one another?”
Charlie went and found his seat, settling in at the small desk. “Yes.”
“Sir,” the boy in back said. “This man is a hero.”
“He may well have been, and bravo, but he’s a student now.”
The next morning Brenda came into the kitchen and Charlie was writing again.
“The great American novel?” she asked.
“A letter to Giles.” He turned the page over, tucking it into a manila folder.
“How is he doing?”
“I’m writing to him, as you see. He hasn’t received this yet, much less replied.”
Brenda had been on her way to the coffee, but instead she pulled back a chair to sit beside him. “I am not the enemy, Charlie.”
He put down his pen. “Of course you aren’t.”
“What is upsetting you today?”
“You mean besides the Gibraltar of guilt I’m carrying around?”
“Plenty of people consider what you did heroic. That’s why we’re here.”
“I was called a hero yesterday,” Charlie said. “In front of a whole class.”
“Well, isn’t that sw—”
“I could have throttled him.” Charlie shook his head. “What I did was maybe—possibly, theoretically—necessary. No more than that. Some people were excited by the difficulty of the task, but for most of us, we did our part only because it was needed.”
“But, Charlie, you—”
“We faced no enemy. Nobody was shooting at us. I saw not one person die. Hardly heroic. In fact you could argue that making the bomb—my bomb, my damned bomb—was the consummate cowardice. I could not have been safer, sitting by your bed in the Santa Fe hospital, while the people of Hiroshima were getting ready for work or laboring in the fields or on their way to school.”
“You just interrupted me twice.”
“I—” Charlie caught himself. “So I did.”
She took his hand. “You shush now. You had a small part in a giant victory, which is all any soldier does. You helped end the war, which is good for America and Japan.”
“But the carnage.”
“Do you wish we were still fighting today? That men your age were throwing themselves on some beach five thousand miles from here? Or that Japanese men were defending it to the death, however futile that was?”
“Of course not.”
“Can you imagine the rage of every mother and father who lost a child in the invasion, if they found out later that we had the bomb and did not use it?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Enough of this guilt. Those parents love you. They don’t even know your name, but they love you with their whole hearts. Now,” she said, standing, “I am going to make us some breakfast, and you are going to eat it.”
He bowed his head. “All right.”
“And then,” she said, “you are going to go talk to someone, some senior person, about how Stanford University can take better care of this excellent man and famous student.”
Not two hours later, Charlie spotted Richard Zeno in the hall. “Pardon me, sir, could I speak with you for a minute?”
Zeno, his bushy eyebrows lowered, gave Charlie a long look. “Fish, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Come to my office in ten minutes.”
Charlie went outside to march his nervousness around the building. It was a lovely fall day in Palo Alto, sun sparkling through the trees, the air sweetened with a scent another student had told him was eucalyptus. Gradually, his pace slowed. The campus was nearly empty, two students crossing the lawn from one building to another. On the far side of the physics building, a parking lot sprawled, most of its spaces empty.
Zeno’s secretary was out, but the department chairman called from his desk. “Come in, come in.” He waved Charlie to a seat. “Welcome to Stanford. How is it going?”
“Thank you, sir.” Charlie placed his stack of books on the floor. “I’m glad to be here. But I have some concerns.”
“Then I want to hear them. Be as frank as you like.”
“Thank you.” Charlie sat straight, hands on his knees. “My concern is that the work here, all of the priorities, are about atomic bombs.”
“The study of physics has entered a vast new territory.”
“Yes, sir. But I spent the past three years in that territory, and I came here hoping to gain knowledge in other areas.”
Zeno scratched a sideburn. “Acoustics, wasn’t it?”
“And optics, and radar.”
“We’ll likely have funding for radar soon. Peace won’t stop that enterprise.”
“But the work will be for military applications, I imagine.”
“We live in an unstable world.”
Charlie pulled back, taking a deep breath. “I’ve been contemplating withdrawing, sir. Not getting my PhD after all.”
“Nonsense.” Zeno stood. “No no. Fish, this is a preeminent graduate program. You’ll find no better. What do you want? A teaching assistantship? A lab job?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“That makes it hard for me to help.”
“I don’t want to learn how to become a better warrior.”
Zeno ambled to his window. He gazed out on the quad, where Charlie had just been walking. “I’d like you to think about it, Fish. What do you actually need from us, as opposed to what you need to reconcile within yourself?” With his thumb, he brushed his thick eyebrows back. “I want you to stay. I will make any reasonable accommodation.”
“That is incredibly generous, sir.”
“You do your thinking, and let me know.”
“That’s the best answer I could ask for, sir.”
“Excellent.” He came forward, hand outstretched. “Truth is, it raises our stock to have the likes of Charlie Fish in the program.”
Charlie shook his hand. “I’m just a mathematician.”
“Hardly.”
Gathering his books, Charlie said nothing.
“In fact my colleagues will be green with envy,” Zeno continued, sitting again at his desk.
“Why is that, sir?”
“Are you kidding? I got to have a private meeting with Trigger.”
51.