“He said we would be murderers merely to satisfy our curiosity. He told two division directors their morals were ‘lower than pig shit.’” Giles reached for the bottle, raising it in salutation. “Tonight’s drunk is in his honor.”
“Someone will make one of these weapons first. Our success might scare the others off.”
“That justification and ten more are rattling around in my head. But we’re probably wrong.”
“Should we join Monroe, then? Next bus to Santa Fe?”
“Not all of us have Brenda waiting at the bus stop,” Giles teased. “But no, Charlie. We’re destined to complete this job. We’ll end the war, and perhaps all wars. Or we’ll bring on the ruin of humanity. There is only one way to find out.”
“What about Oppie’s idea of a demonstration?”
“I pray for that every day, and I am not a religious man. Ultimately, if your part of the business is finished, there’s no turning back.”
“None?”
“I have a suspicion that the exact point at which a scientist is satisfied is the exact same point at which a general becomes acutely interested.”
“You think the army will take the Gadget and run.”
“Five Gadgets,” Giles corrected. He tossed a stone into the darkness. “Five.”
After a long pause they heard the rock strike down below, one place and another, or perhaps the echo. Charlie imagined all the critters that would scatter at the sound. “Hey, what do you think became of Midnight? I haven’t seen her in weeks.”
“The same thing that will become of all of us,” Giles replied with a bitter laugh.
“You are in a dark place, aren’t you?”
“All clears,” Giles said, as he tipped the whiskey over his head, pouring it into his open mouth and all across his face.
“Come on.” Charlie yanked the bottle down. “That’s enough.”
They sat in a long silence. Eventually Giles pointed out at the landscape. “Do you know why I came here tonight?”
“No idea.”
“You can only tell where the canyon is by what’s not there. Where you see darkness, that’s the end of The Hill. The roads have stopped, fences and guards and lights. You know what is left, out there? Do you?”
“Giles, maybe we should head back to the barracks now.”
“An abyss, Charlie.” He held his arms wide. “Everything past here is an abyss.”
When Horn came for Charlie’s detonators, he brought four men. They carried steamer trunks, into which they packed the assemblies like crown jewels. One of them did nothing but crumple papers to cushion the devices. Charlie sat at his desk, pretending to calculate arcs, unable to look away.
Horn stood by the door, observing. At one point he interrupted the packers. He reached into the trunk and rearranged one piece.
“Show more care,” he said. When they had loaded everything, he nodded to Charlie and followed the others down the hall.
Charlie exhaled. He had not known he was holding his breath.
The next resistance came in the form of an official dissent. The Franck Report—written by senior scientists, Nobel Prize winners in chemistry and physics who had held secret meetings—issued a letter to President Truman opposing a bombing of Japan. The outcome, this document predicted, would be widespread international destabilization. Other nations would eventually develop their own atomic weapons, spawning a global arms race. The committee urged Truman to approve no more than a demonstration, on a deserted island and with the whole world witnessing, after which regulation of atomic weapons would be given to the brand-new United Nations, with a worldwide prohibition on the use of these bombs.
Charlie had great hopes. Franck was actually his uncle’s boss. He watched in frustration, however, as the report had no impact. Preparations continued. Starting July Fourth, he began making trips to Alamogordo—a giant plain beside the mountains that the original inhabitants had called Jornado del Muerto, the Trail of Death. It was a six-hour drive, down The Hill through flatlands, then out into open desert.
Hundreds of workers had preceded him. Project Y had purchased the land from a cattle rancher, and they turned the house into a command post, erected a tent city for scientists and technicians, and dispatched guards over the surrounding country. The original plan had been to patrol on horseback, but the land was too vast and water too scarce, so soldiers did the job in jeeps.
As far as Charlie could tell, his role was to observe, and try not to get too severe a sunburn. Each day at dusk he had a headache, from squinting in the desert sun all day. Metalworkers erected a steel tower one hundred feet tall, carpenters built observation shelters nine thousand yards from the tower. Long spools of wire tendrilled across the sand, linking the various facilities, and a construction crew bulldozed dirt over the wires. Charlie paced and watched and twiddled his thumbs.
He could not send letters to Brenda. That far into the desert, postal service was not among the amenities. Occasionally he would join other boys in the back of a power wagon and ride all those hours back to The Hill. But the trip left him dulled and he did not write then either. Giles worked nearly around the clock now, and with Monroe gone Charlie realized how few other friends he’d made. Although the work environment had always been intense, in the desert it ratcheted several notches higher.
There was a day when the atmosphere changed in Alamogordo too. It began one morning when a trailer-truck rolled out of the desert, a giant shape under tarps on its platform. With armed jeeps ahead and behind, it came to a stop near the operations center. A crane rumbled over, while men wrapped the covered object in chains. Lowering a hook, the crane hoisted the object and set it on the ground. Immediately a crew built a tent, shading the object from the sun.
Soon after, a car arrived with its own military escort, and a man stepped out with a suitcase handcuffed to his wrist. Armed guards stood by, as he ducked into the ranch house and shut the door behind him.
“Half of world’s plutonium,” Bronsky remarked. Charlie was startled. He had not known his boss was there.
“Is that right?” Charlie said.
The division director nodded. “Cost half billion of dollars to make. Imagine if we have try twenty-four detonators, and fail, and all this money is waste. Good work, you.” He patted Charlie’s shoulder and ambled away.
That night in a nearby tent, Charlie slept among strangers. In the morning, Bronsky pulled him aside. “You must see.” Passing between guards, they ducked into the hidden object’s chilly tent.
There it was: the Gadget, revealed. A dull metal orb, eight feet around, its casing secured by thick steel bolts, with holes all around for wires. The external detonators looked like cloves on a Christmas orange. Charlie marveled to see the actual thing, this device to which he had given so much thought, but always in the abstract. Now it was as real as the ground underfoot.
A team of scientists entered, chatting amiably. Bronsky leaned over to murmur, “They are arm Gadget now. Plutonium plug are slide direct into position, very snug.”
Sure enough, two men removed the Gadget’s cap. Two more carried a wooden box up a ladder. One opened the box while the other removed the plug, held it up for all to see, like a magician preparing his trick, then slid it down the opening.