“Bravo.” Mather made to clap his hands but they never touched.
“A relief, actually. Time to tell the boss.”
Mather continued to study the blueprint. “He’s unavailable just now.”
Charlie wandered over, running his eyes across the sphere’s detailed sketch too. Something bothered him, now that the assembly was complete. What exactly, he could not say. “Why is he unavailable?”
“Because it is five fifteen on a Tuesday morning. I suspect the Detonation Division director is busy dreaming of icy Moscow winters or summer days at Lake Baikal.”
“Five fifteen on Tuesday?” Charlie said, suddenly feeling fatigue in all his bones. “I’ve been here since Sunday afternoon. Forgive me, but I believe I’ll go for a walk.”
He threw a sheet over the fabricator table, then snatched his coat.
“Trigger,” Mather said.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s your nickname. Trigger.”
Charlie stopped. “You must be joking.”
“It’s what everyone says. In Chemistry, Electronics. Even in Theoretical. I’d wager that Oppie, if he is aware of your existence, doesn’t know your real name. Only Trigger.”
Charlie stood near the doorway, fuming. “That is unfair. I am not responsible for how this technology is used. If anyone is the trigger, it’s Oppenheimer. I’m just a math kid, doing what he’s told.”
Mather chuckled. “You keep telling yourself that, Fish. It may help you sleep tonight, not to mention forty years from now. But everyone on The Hill is complicit. We are all building the Gadget. And we will all be guilty of the crimes it commits.”
“I am not making a Gadget,” Charlie said. “I’m making a circuit of detonators. You could use them with dynamite to build a road. You could use them in mining.”
“You could,” Mather said. “Though I prefer Sebring’s description.” He tossed his toothpick in the trash. “‘Weaponry whose force exceeds our imagination.’”
Charlie jammed his arms in his coat sleeves. “I’m going for a walk.”
He was halfway down the hall before Mather yelled after him: “Trigger.”
The barracks had barely begun stirring for the day. A few technicians were lined up at the sinks. Others stood waiting for a shower. One boy put finishing touches on a letter. Another kneeled on the floor beside his bunk, with closed eyes and folded hands.
Charlie staggered past, leaning forward as if gravity were drawing him toward sleep. Instead of untying his shoes, he stepped on their heels and pulled. Unbuttoning his shirt, he saw that there was no envelope on his pillow. Twenty-five days.
He slid a box from under the bed, and opened it. There were her previous letters, arranged by date. He shouldn’t write to her again. He’d put himself at Brenda’s mercy, and her reply had been no reply, for almost a month. Only an idiot would fail to admit what that meant. Only a fool would keep hoping.
Charlie stretched out on the bunk, still dressed. Fifty things happened every day that he wanted to tell Brenda. And no answer was not a real answer. Maybe she was trying to decide. Maybe she needed a nudge. Maybe she wanted one.
“Why not?” He took out pen and paper. But where to start? Should he take back what he wrote in his last letter, and the offer to let him go? Should he tell her what those twenty-five days had been like, not hearing from her? Whichever, of course he should write. Silence never helped anyone.
“Dear Brenda,” he wrote. “Dear, dear Brenda.” Charlie lowered his head to the pillow to think. What should he tell her about first? Three breaths, and he was asleep.
In midafternoon, he had company. Midnight snuck aboard, snuggling against the bend in his knees. Charlie ruffled her head, and she climbed over for easier petting.
Only then did he fully awaken, and see that her normally black fur now had large spots of white—on her front legs and dotting her chest.
“Where have you been, little miss?” His forefinger circled her ear. “What place have you been going where you do not belong?”
By way of answer, Midnight stretched out a white-tipped paw and began to purr.
27.
The train to Lamy felt eternal, but I did not think I was going to die until I boarded the bus to Santa Fe. Despite impressive squealing, the brakes had so little grip, I doubted they could stop a mouse on roller skates. You asked for this, Brenda, I told myself, clutching the seat back ahead of me. You chose this.
When at last I stepped off the bus into a broad plaza, clean August sun poured down on us all. The buildings were small, none more than two stories, and spotless. The air smelled woody and sweet, and lacked the familiar hardness of Chicago. Almost immediately I felt myself warming and relaxing.
Before that trip, I had never been farther from Hyde Park than eastern Wisconsin, at my aunt Claire’s place on Lake Michigan. Now I’d covered twelve hundred miles, to work for people I’d never met, in a place I’d never seen. Before my trip, I spent an afternoon in the library scouring picture books of New Mexico: landscapes, Indians, and the Spanish people. Not one photo of a church organ.
Travel had tested me: a wrenching good-bye from my mother that left us both weepy and weak, the melancholy of leaving a city by train, seeing its back-lot debris as if to say this place was never what you thought, never as pretty or kind. I was suspicious of strangers in nearby seats, anxious about my luggage in a separate car. Away from home, all my confidence turned out to be bravado.
“Here you are, miss.”
I jumped, but the porter only smiled and gestured at my bags on the sidewalk.
“Thank you.” I tipped him a dime, hoping that was right. “Will there be a taxi along any time soon?”
“Not many taxis in this town, miss. Where you heading?”
I told him the address and he nodded. “Five blocks off, up that street there.”
I watched closely where he pointed, saying to myself five five five. Although I felt intrepid, I could not wait to finish the journey, so I could write to my mother and Greta, sweet forgiving Greta, and tell them every little thing.
The only question was my bags. I could manage each one on my own, but carrying two would be a backbreaker. Three was out of the question. I poked my head into a little rug and pottery shop, dim and cool, abandoned by the looks of it. “Hello?”
“Buenos dias,” said a woman I had not noticed, perched on a stool to one side. She had dark skin and the blackest hair, while around her neck hung a pendant of silver and turquoise. It was stunning.
“Yes, hello.” I cleared my throat, and pointed out at the sidewalk. “I need to leave my suitcases here for a few minutes. Would that be all right?”
She replied in a string of Spanish, and the only word I understood was senorita. But her smile I comprehended just fine. I tapped the face of my watch. “Quick as I can.”
I set two suitcases beside her doorway, toting the heaviest one first. Five blocks, and I set off in the direction the man had pointed. After a hundred steps I began to understand what people had meant about the thin air. I flushed warm, felt my heart speeding up, while the suitcase seemed to gain weight with every block. The cross street came along in due time, and I forged on till I reached the right number. It was a wooden frame house, with open stairs hugging one side of the building. On the porch sat a woman in a sleeveless white shirt, drying her hair with a towel.