He acquiesced, made a fool of himself with a thousand missteps—which girl was his cross and which one was his corner?—and laughed more that night than he had in the last five months combined. At evening’s end the woman patted Charlie on the shoulder. “You come back here next week, all right, young man?”
He hadn’t missed a Saturday since, except for those times the site boss gave him an assignment on Saturday to build something by Monday.
The gaiety at Fuller Lodge was so deliberate, so determined, the music did not even stop when the band took a break. The minute they put down their instruments, Willy Meehan—by day an Electronics Division leader—would break out his accordion, an instrument so large people called it his Stomach Steinway, to keep the party bouncing. No time for rest, just boisterous fun till the clock struck midnight.
At that, the room emptied in minutes. People might linger on the terrace, and sometimes romances occurred on the grassy knoll at the foot of Bathtub Row. But quiet came fast, the dance floor swept and everything made ready for religious services in the same room eight hours later. Charlie had joined the choir, prompted less by faith than by the desire to sing, though it meant an early morning after a late night. He would squeeze his whole week’s joy into one twelve-hour burst.
Now he was passing the family apartment buildings, so hastily built they would have been called tenements back home, though they housed some of the world’s preeminent scientific minds. Out of the dark came women’s voices, a peal of laughter.
The power came back on. By then Charlie was facing the tech area, where men working late meant the lights were on in nearly all the windows. From Fuller Lodge, brightness spilled onto the outside patio, and music poured out to echo across the campus. Charlie felt like a swimmer, approaching a cruise ship at anchor.
The caller had a microphone, Charlie could hear him telling people to hustle and rustle, new squares were forming. He quickened his pace.
Fuller Lodge had been the main building of a boys’ school. They’d left behind horse trails, a basketball hoop, and a main lodge made of logs—with antlered deer heads over the doorways and local Indians’ rugs tacked to the wall. Here and there, long strings of crimson chilis hung to dry. There were large fireplaces at each end of the main room, with a piano pushed against the wall to make room for more dancers.
There were far more men on The Hill than women, no surprise given the disciplines that Project Y required. But there were WACS, female technicians and administrators, wives whose husbands didn’t dance, plus a few women scientists with reputations equal to many of the men. After all, Marie Curie had won two Nobel Prizes for discovering radioactivity and more. Still, the lopsided population meant that women had no rest on dance nights. It was likewise considered polite for boys not to monopolize partners.
When breaks came, Charlie liked to wander out on the stone terrace. The tech area’s lights reflected off Ashley Pond, reminding him of Chicago skyscrapers shining on Lake Michigan. What was Brenda doing? A time zone ahead, she was probably asleep.
“May I please to say hello?”
It sounded like hail-lo, and Charlie turned to see the slender man with the brushed-back hair. Charlie couldn’t help checking, and yes, his shoes were still immaculate. “Mister Bronsky.”
He made the slightest bow. “Mister Fishk.”
Charlie waited, but the man said nothing more, and he felt he had to fill the silence. “Are you enjoying the square dancing tonight, sir?”
“I do not dancing.”
“I didn’t use to, myself. I’ve learned how, since I arrived here.”
“I come from Russia, where it is not time for dancing.”
Charlie hardly knew how to respond. “Yes, sir.”
Bronsky stared into the distance. “That assembly you use today. At concrete bowl. How you do arrange three detonations to be simultaneous?”
“I make the connecting wires all the same length. One may have an extra loop, but that’s a small inefficiency for having all three go off at the same time.”
The Russian man nodded. “Make electrons travel same distance. Simple.”
“There would be more integrity if I created a timing device,” Charlie replied.
Bronsky bent and wiped the toe of a shoe with his thumb. “You can build device with more than three triggers?”
“Theoretically, I could make an infinite number.”
Bronsky frowned. “I am not discussing of theoretical.”
Charlie turned from the pond. The man wore an expression of deprivation, as if he were hungry. But there was plenty of food on The Hill. He wanted something else. Charlie felt like he was back at Harvard, taking an important oral exam.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how far soldering wire can carry a clean signal.”
“Is easily determined. Trial and error.”
“Yes, sir, but it would be hard to know what caused the error. Resistance in the material limits its capacity. Also, if you had too many triggers, the device could become unwieldy. For example, if the contacts need to be closer together than the width of the wire, making the device physically impossible to build.”
Bronsky waited while Charlie continued to think the problem through.
“There’s a reliability risk too. If you have one firing control for, let’s say ten or twelve circuits, what if one thing failed? It would affect ten other things. I’d probably want redundancy, too, especially in a combat situation.” He chuckled at the complexity of it all. “Can we go back to theoretical ideas instead?”
Bronsky waited, making sure Charlie had nothing more to add, before he spoke. “Perhaps, Fishk, please you are build for me device that triggers six, and we see what flaws we find.”
Six. He’d never done more than three. It would take days of work—designing, soldering, trouble-shooting—and only if he quit the field team. “I could do that, sir.”
“Good.” Bronsky cleared his throat, began moving away in his cautious, mincing fashion, then paused at the edge of the light. “Perhaps please, by Friday, you are build for me ten of them.”
Charlie threw his head back laughing. “Ten? Do you know how much time that would . . .”
His voice trailed off. The man had already vanished in the dark.
21.
It had to be submarines. I’d considered everything else Charlie could possibly be working on. For a while I speculated that it had something to do with the big new bombers. My girlfriend Greta said they flew so high, no Japanese defense plane or antiaircraft fire could reach them, so they bombed at will. Powerful. I liked imagining Charlie contributing to that strength.
At the movies I saw a newsreel about bomber factories in Wichita, Kansas, and Renton, Washington. Not New Mexico. Next letter, I asked point blank: “What are you doing down there?”
Charlie’s reply dodged it with a joke. “We build the front end of horses. The other half comes from Washington, D.C.”
Which made that letter like many in those days—you did not know how to read it. Was Charlie mocking my curiosity? Or was he forbidden to tell me, and trying to make light of it? A girl had no way of knowing.
I missed Charlie, his kindness, his attentiveness, his patience. But I hated the tedious communication, not knowing when I’d see him again. Life reduced to longing, requiring my mother and me to cope and worry. Families around us experienced such severe losses, sons injured or killed, we could not utter one word of complaint.