“I agree completely, sir.”
“Do you really? Because it seems like you are standing in the way. The pawn has become an obstacle. Not only to ending this war, but ending all war. All war, Charlie.”
“I’m not sure I follow you, Uncle John.”
The professor leaned over the table, opened an assembly, and began flipping its switch on and off. Charlie raised a hand toward him, but the switching continued.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said at last, “but that piece took ten hours to build.”
“What’s that?”
Charlie pointed. “It has to be ready for testing in two days. The whole assembly.”
Simmons closed the switch without apology, and began to pace at the end of the table. “What does it mean to be at war, Charlie?”
“A friend of mine here says war is when someone is shooting at you.”
“By that measure, you are not at war, are you?”
Charlie shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Well, I am.” He was not smiling anymore. “My definition of war is when a government slaughters law-abiding citizens, when it invades peaceful neighboring nations.” His voice rose, and he paced faster. “When it preaches a gospel of the state crushing individuals and their freedoms, when it attacks my country, when it kills our boys. Then, Charlie, then I am at war sure as hell. And I will be at war until that government and its leaders and its entire goddamn idea is wiped from the earth.”
By the end, Simmons was shouting. Charlie stood perfectly still. His uncle was not trying to persuade him. This was something else, and Charlie waited to see what it would be.
Meanwhile, the professor had stopped pacing. “Look at what’s happened to me. A mathematician, calling for blood.” He shook his head. “I’m not ashamed though. That is how important this project has become.”
Simmons arrived at a chair Charlie had stood on, the day before, to add a piece to the middle of the assembly. Simmons turned the chair around and straddled the seat, forearms resting on the chair back.
“Imagine a day that brings an end to armed conflict. No longer will madmen be tolerated when they choose to make war. Would the next Hitler dare smash the ghettos of Poland, murder those innocent people, start years of terror and waste, if he knew we possess a weapon to obliterate not only him, but his entire capital city?”
“I hadn’t considered—”
“Would the emperor of Japan attack Pearl Harbor, if he knew the extinction of his family’s bloodline, and those of a million other residents of Tokyo, is only a few hours of air travel away? No, those men would never attempt such terrible things again.”
“Do you really think so, Uncle?”
“The Gadget will do much more than deliver victory today, Charlie. Our power to annihilate will bring an end to war.”
Charlie wandered to his desk, the array of papers, calculations, and designs. He thumbed the bar of a slide rule out and back.
“Everyone here is depending on you,” Simmons persisted. “But that’s not the real story. The future of mankind is depending on you too.”
“I am the wrong guy to wager the future of mankind on.”
“Then look at it this way. You are in debt. You owe a working detonator to your nation, after all the opportunities it’s given you. Hell, son. You owe me.”
Charlie pushed a sheet of paper aside. “What if I told you that I have not been stuck at twenty-three detonators on purpose? What if it really is that difficult to build?”
“You forget, Charlie. We’re family. The same blood in our veins.” Simmons stood, turning the chair right side around. “If you say you can’t build it, I don’t believe you.”
And with one last flash of a smile, he marched out of the room.
The test the next day did not show twenty-three detonators working. Instead it was twenty-two. Charlie suspected the component his uncle had touched was the one that misfired, but he had no proof. Bronsky came by his desk after the test to say that David Horn would begin work the following day, in his own lab.
“One way or other, Fishk,” he seethed, “we are have twenty-four soon.”
Charlie worked nearly every waking hour, leaving the lab only for meals, or refills of coffee till his stomach burned. He stopped going to the barracks, sleeping instead under his desk like the senior scientists.
The exception was Saturdays. Then he caught the early bus to Santa Fe. A sign outside the last gate read: “Are you continuing to protect information?” and Charlie tried to stay awake till the bus passed it. Usually he failed, and slept the whole way down. Those days with Brenda flew past, whether they had plans to visit an adobe village, or simply take a stroll. She was kinder then, softer. Once she took him to her church so he could hear the organ, which had fine tone but many mechanical problems.
Nonetheless Brenda played the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor with high proficiency, though after the fugue part he lost his fight with exhaustion. At the end, instead of applause Brenda was surprised by silence. When she found Charlie stretched out on a pew, sound asleep, she did not snap at him, or say he had insulted her playing. Instead she lifted his head to rest it in her lap, and sat with him there till the bells tolled seven, which meant it was time to catch the bus up to The Hill.
Back inside the fence, he skipped dinner and went straight to his desk.
That month showed a world in convulsions. Each new development stirred Charlie’s hopes—and fervent discussions in the barracks—over whether the Gadget would be needed. Not two weeks into Truman’s presidency, Mussolini and his mistress were executed, their corpses hung upside down in public in Milan. The next day, American forces liberated the camp at Dachau. Everyone saw the photos of skeletal men, women, and children. Also that day, Hitler married Eva Braun—their love like a dark flower, blooming from all the spilled blood. What did it portend?
The answer came in the papers of May 1: Hitler and his bride had committed suicide. A day later, after murdering their six children, Chancellor Goebbels and his wife also killed themselves. Then a thousand Germans committed mass suicide in Demmin.
“By their own hands,” Giles declared at the bonfire that night. “By their own hands they set us free. There’s no need for the Gadget. Surrender is imminent.”
“It don’t say much good about my morals,” Monroe said, pausing to swig from a bottle. “But damn those boys make me happy, doing our job for us.”
Sparks rose in the spring twilight, climbing, lost in the stars overhead.
“I don’t care if our work amounts to nothing,” Charlie said. “If we don’t have to finish, and all those innocent people—”
“Mister Charlie?” Monroe said. “You’re half a mile ahead of yourself. Stop talking and start drinking.”
Charlie shook the length of his body, like a dog fresh out of a pond. He reached for the bottle. “I believe I will.”
35.
For the first time, when Charlie stepped off the bus I was not there to greet him.
I can still imagine it: the other passengers filing off, a few heading into the government offices, others meandering one way or another. He’d be standing alone.