“Thanks.” Horn peered around the orb. “Looks intact.”
“Are you my relief?”
“Yes. Though in my opinion, you shouldn’t have been here at all.”
“Oh, I don’t know—”
“We can’t delay the test, what with Truman meeting Churchill and Stalin tomorrow. The president needs to know if the Gadget will work.” He placed both hands on the doubler, as if he were preparing it for some ceremony. “But it’s my screwup, no question. I never thought to test for a storm.”
At that instant, Charlie realized that he was not going to die that day. His shoulders lowered, his breathing eased.
“Anyway, your ride’s waiting.” Horn sat, pulling a paperback from his back pocket. “Humor essays, to pass the time. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck, David,” he said, then threw back the tent opening, and as quickly as he could, Charlie raced down the steps. As the other side of his shirt became drenched, he realized he’d left his slicker up on the platform. He did not care enough to go back.
The same soldier sat at the wheel of the jeep, but there was a passenger in back.
“There he is,” Giles called out. “The babysitter’s shift is over.”
“Boy, am I glad to see you.”
“Feeling’s mutual,” he replied. “You okay?”
“Better every minute.”
Giles tapped the driver’s shoulder. “Please get us the hell out of here.”
At 2:00 a.m. Giles stood at the tent opening, watching the rain fall, and declared, “Chrysalism.” He turned to Charlie, who was stretched out on his cot but wide awake. “Know what I mean?”
“Not in the least. What does today’s ten-cent word mean?”
“Chrysalism. The womblike comfort of being sheltered during a storm.”
Charlie rolled onto his side to face away. “There is no comfort tonight.”
At 3:30 Giles roused in his folding chair. The storm had passed. “How about petrichor?” he asked Charlie. “Do you know that one?”
Charlie barely shook his head. He lay on his back, staring at the roof of the tent.
“The scent of the ground after a rain.” Giles widened the tent opening with one finger. “I love it.”
At 4:00 a.m., the countdown recommenced, with a detonation target of five thirty. Half an hour later, Horn returned to the command center. Charlie saw him climbing out of a jeep, and hurried over. “Thanks for relieving me out there.”
Horn smiled. “We both feel relief at this point, right?” He bobbed from side to side. “Now I have to play goalie.”
He climbed into another jeep, which took him to the relay tent. Charlie knew from the planning that this was where Horn would sit during the test, manning the only switch that, once the final orders came, could stop a detonation if something went awry.
The remaining boys also went to their assigned observation stations. For Charlie and Giles, that meant the southern end of the firing area, where a concrete bunker sat half buried in the sand, a row of windows facing north to the tower. The ease Charlie had felt after leaving the platform had evaporated. Now he held his stomach as though it pained him.
At 5:09, the twenty-minute countdown began. The announcement came booming over loudspeakers mounted outside the ranch’s house, and radios at the observation bunkers. Charlie recognized the voice: Sam Allison, an affable physicist who sang to himself while walking the project’s hallways. Charlie knew him from the choir, too: a clear, steady tenor. Around the Gadget, meanwhile, Charlie imagined there was an eerie silence.
The top command men occupied a separate shelter. It had a cluster of measuring equipment screwed and bolted onto the roof. One physicist handed out suntan oil, to protect the observers from ultraviolet light.
Outside the southern shelter, Charlie watched Giles poke twigs of different sizes into the sand. “I’m stealing Monroe’s idea,” he explained. “To measure how high the explosion cloud goes.”
Charlie nodded wordlessly, then went off to relieve himself.
An MP at the bunker entry called the boys to find secure places. Charlie was surprised to see Mather there, calmly smoking against the wall. When he waved, Mather responded with a cool, slow nod. More boys sardined into the narrow space, clustering by the windows. A few remained outside. They’d been instructed to lie on their bellies with their feet to the tower, but none of them did it.
“Come all this way, and not see?” one said, chuckling. “Not a chance.”
The MP stood near them. “You’re civilian, so you don’t have to obey orders. But it’s my job to encourage you to comply.”
“Thanks,” the technician said, not moving. “Job well done.”
Soon they were all hushed, smoking or talking quietly. They fidgeted. They ignored one another’s odors. At the ten-minute mark—the milestone when, aside from Horn at his switch, human control ceased and the automated process began—Charlie rose to relieve himself again.
“Fish,” Mather called. “You’re as nervous as a cat.”
“I’m fine,” he insisted. “Too much coffee.” And he headed outside.
“You’d be agitated, too,” Giles told the boys, “if those were your triggers all needing to fire at the same instant.”
“Never been done, can’t be done,” Mather said. “Even with Horn’s help, Fish isn’t smart enough. I’ve argued that for weeks.”
Giles bristled. “We’ll see.”
Observation planes had flown south from Holloman Air Force Base, to monitor from the sky, their noise preventing conversation for a full minute. When Charlie returned from his moment outside the bunker, he stepped carefully over the other boys’ legs to reclaim his place near one of the windows.
“Hey, friend.” Giles shifted to make space. “You afraid that it won’t go off?”
Charlie shook his head. “I’m afraid that it will.”
A flare rose into the night sky: two minutes till detonation.
Mather let out a sigh. “I would not want to be Horn right now.”
No one answered. They knew that even in silence, they had one another, while Horn at the switch was entirely alone. He would need to decide whether or not to proceed, based on an array of indicator dials, before the countdown reached six. After that the process was irrevocable. The observation planes arced up and away, out of range. A lovely shape, Charlie thought, the arc.
The one-minute flare rose, bright red in the black sky. As advised, everyone in the vicinity—inside and out, the MP included—lowered welding goggles into place. Silence draped on the bunker like a fog.
“Hey,” Giles said. “Who wants to head out for a nice cold beer?”
No one laughed. Time had momentum, a weight they all felt. Ten, nine, eight. The signal surged down the wire. Seven, six, five. By then they knew Horn had not stopped it. Four, three, two. The greatest fuse in human history was lit. One.
The first instant was darkness, the whole sky black for the merest fraction of a second, followed by a light later calculated to equal the brightness of one hundred suns. It illuminated everything—stones, men’s faces, the distant mountains—with a cruel and brilliant clarity. A blast of heat came next, as if someone had opened an oven door.