“You’ve defaced yourself. It’s graffiti on your body.”
“Easy does it,” Charlie said. “Too late to lecture him now.”
But Giles shook his head. “As if this life did not already give a person enough things to regret.”
“Jealousy talking,” Monroe slurred. “Some people can’t handle a man so pretty.”
“Exactly,” Mather said. He leaned against a locker, sliding his hands into his pockets. “I’m breathless with envy.”
Charlie remembered his constant interruptions in Chicago, the picture of his pretty sister who he swore none of them would ever touch. Were they supposed to be friends now, on this island of science? “Which division are you in?”
“Theoretical. Under Bethe.”
“That’s the genius crew,” Giles observed.
Mather blinked blandly at him. “If the shoe fits . . .”
Giles snickered. “Humble too.”
“Fellas.” Monroe shook himself as if he had just awakened. “I’m dancing on over to Fuller Lodge for a bit. Aim to make a god-awful fool of myself, do things I’ll regret for weeks, and I’d be right honored to have your company.”
“Not me,” Charlie said, waving the letter. “I have reading to do. Then I need to march myself over to the tech area, and figure out what went wrong today.”
“That’s you all over, Fish,” Mather said. “Not that bright, but as persistent as a salmon headed upstream.”
Giles’s eyes went back and forth between the two, waiting for Charlie’s riposte. When nothing emerged, he patted his friend on the back. “Don’t underestimate our Charlie. This guy has already rewritten the world’s rules for detonator switching.”
Mather bent at the waist, looking downward, before rising with a smirk. “Just checking to see if I’d wet myself with excitement.”
Giles bristled. “Well, aren’t you a perfect pain in the—”
“Don’t mind Mather,” Charlie interrupted. “Unfortunately, he is every bit as smart as he considers himself to be.”
“Also?” Monroe held one hand high. “He knows where to get whiskey. Them sick of rum can respect such a man.”
Mather stood straight again. “You’ve all bored me. Good-bye.”
He swept away down the barracks aisle, his manner entirely regal, Monroe wobbling along behind, his boozy scent following like a tail. Giles watched them, shaking his head, then turned to Charlie. “Sonder,” he said, “you know what I mean?”
“Rarely do I know what you mean.”
“Sonder is the realization that every other person has a life as vivid and complex as your own.”
“So saith the walking dictionary.”
“Shower night for me, so I’ll leave you to your epistle,” Giles said. “Are you planning to attend tomorrow’s lecture?”
“I’ll be choiring at the church service, if that’s what you mean.”
“No, the physicist Robert Sebring is speaking in the afternoon. Allegedly, he’s going to explain what’s actually happening here, and what we might accomplish.”
“The end of compartmentalization?”
“Possibly. But my hope is for liberosis. Know what I mean?”
Charlie shook his head. “Not a bit.”
“The desire to care less about things. It might do us all some good.”
“Where do you find these ten-cent words?”
“Lying on the ground, Charlie, waiting for someone to scoop them up.” He headed down the row of bunks. “Have a good night.”
“I hope when you wash all the dirt off, there’s still a person left inside.”
Giles snapped his fingers. “Damn close to making your second joke of the day.”
“I apologize.”
Charlie shoved his pillow against the bed frame, settling against it, when who should jump onto his lap but Midnight. She squeezed her ebony body along his leg and began to purr. He rubbed under her chin before lifting the letter again.
Dear Charlie, I took your advice, or followed your example anyhow, and at the urging of my girlfriends, last Saturday I went to a dance.
The guard returned Charlie’s pass, waving him through the fence. Party music from Fuller Lodge echoed at his back. He climbed the creaking stairs and was chagrined to see a light on down the hall in his workroom. The bigger surprise was finding Bronsky there, perched on a high stool.
Usually at ten on a Saturday night, senior staff gathered in one of the directors’ cabins on Bathtub Row, martinis and cigarettes, a mélange of accents arguing or laughing. Yet here was the Detonation Division chief with a magnifying glass, hovering like a vulture over the assemblies that had not fired that afternoon. Or their remains, because he had already taken them apart, pieces and wires scattered across the table.
“Hello, sir,” Charlie said.
“Fishk.” Bronsky remained bent forward. “Perhaps I am not only one wondering about today’s result.”
“I thought you wanted this stuff in the trash.”
He kept the magnifying glass to his face. “I am angry then. Not so much now. Do you know why they fail?”
“That’s why I came. To find the error.”
“I do this already and learn nothing. You have a theory?”
Charlie scanned the table. Three weeks of fastidious design and careful soldering lay there, dismantled recklessly. A ballpeen hammer would have done as good a job. Any diagnostics would be pointless now. The error was therefore likely to repeat, and he would be blamed. “Maybe it’s because we used ten detonators, instead of twenty-four.”
“Ah.” Bronsky straightened on the stool. “Someone has been indiscreet.”
“Or honest.”
“Now I see it is your turn for anger.”
“Four, twenty-four, one hundred and four, I’ll do my best. But I thought we were on the same side. Is it wrong for me to know what you actually need? Are you concerned that I might try to talk you out of a method that invites malfunction?”
Bronsky set the magnifying glass on the table with care. “Fishk, how much you are knowing about arcs?”
“Thanks to Chicago,” Charlie answered, “more than I ever cared to know.”
“Good.” He took a sheet of paper and drew a large circle. “Imagine in three dimensions though.”
“A ball.”
“Yes, a sphere, this large.” Bronsky held his arms about four feet apart. Then he drew bumps at various places around the circle. “Detonators in arcs around ball, all identical distance from one another. Calculating this is hard arithmetic, many arcs. But to make ball implode, each detonator must burst uniformly, identical force.”
“Implode. I don’t know that term.”
“Opposite of explode. Pushes everything inward.” He put the pencil down. “Ball we are create here on Hill requires twenty-four detonators. All must fire simultaneously for Gadget to work.”
Charlie pondered this information. “Two questions. First, do you understand that twenty-four things cannot happen at exactly the same time? It has never been done.”