I’d brought a blanket and we cuddled on the riverbank.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked him.
After a pause, he answered: “Japanese children.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Tell me this,” Charlie said, shifting his hips, changing the subject to my favorite topic. “From our lovemaking so far, what do you like best?”
My first impulse was to describe a particular position, or maybe a place and moment that had brought special release. But I thought before answering.
“I like trust best,” I said eventually. “How safe I feel with you, how I can count on you to be a good guy, and how that allows me to let myself go. I enjoy not being afraid.”
Charlie was smiling. “Great answer.”
“What about you? What do you like best?”
His smile faded. Charlie stared into the distance. He kissed my forehead absently.
“What?” I said.
“Well, the thing I like best with you is how the world goes away. My work, the war, everything becomes small and distant. All I can think about is you, and what we are doing, and how fantastic it feels. It’s like we’re on an island.”
“Yes,” I said. “A universe of two.”
But then. As I snuggled closer against him, and the river gossiped at our feet, I had the smallest, most subtle and secret feeling that there might be something else in that universe. Who can say where the idea came from? Of course it was impossible, we’d only just finished making love. There was no way my body could be aware of anything that quickly. Yet I genuinely had a sense of being changed. Something inside me had begun. Without understanding how, I felt myself enter an entirely new kind of knowing. We had become more.
44.
Giles spotted Charlie on the bench outside the mess tent, and tottered over with a grin. “I have something unexpected to show you.”
“This is the place where I was introduced to David Horn,” Charlie replied. “Back when we didn’t know how to detonate.”
“I submit that you two solved that problem rather well,” Giles said.
“Does that make Horn a hero, therefore? Or a villain?”
“Both, of course.” Giles held his arms wide, as if to indicate the mess tent, the technicians passing by, the truck traffic below. “Like all of us.”
Charlie mused a moment. “What do you know about the guillotine?”
“They used it in the French Revolution to decapitate aristocrats. Why do you ask?”
“I read up on it in the Santa Fe library.”
Giles sat beside him, a palm on each knee. “Educate me.”
“France had many forms of execution—hanging, burning at the stake. Punishment was based not on the crime but on the condemned person’s economic status. In the 1700s, the government decided capital punishment should be egalitarian, regardless of the criminal’s class.”
“A rather brutal form of equality, by the sound of it.”
“They also decided to separate torture from execution. Killing by the state might be just, but should not be inhumane. The courts hired Tobias Schmidt, a German whose trade was building harpsichords, to make a machine that killed people without pain.”
“Fascinating. And this has been an item of interest for you why?”
“Because Schmidt failed. The execution itself probably didn’t hurt, but there was plenty of suffering.” Charlie counted down on his fingers. “In knowing that certain death was coming. In walking out to the scaffold.” His voice accelerated. “In placing your head in the groove. Perhaps you smell the blood of those beheaded before you. Perhaps the crowd jeers, mocking your terror. Perhaps it’s raining. Perhaps you shit yourself.”
Giles turned in his seat. “Charlie, are you all right?”
“But the agony, you see,” and he formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger, as if holding a paintbrush to make a fine point. “The pain is all in the anticipation.”
“Ah.” Giles sat back. “Now I understand you.”
“I have been nervous countless times in my life. I’m afraid twenty times a day. But never before have I lived in such a complete state of dread.”
Giles put an arm over Charlie’s shoulder. “You are speaking for all of us here.”
“Whatever happened to Oppie’s idea of a demonstration?”
“He was speaking as a scientist,” Giles replied. “But the actual masters of this project are military, and the only language they speak is victory.”
“Victory without annihilation might be possible.”
“Perhaps. But we will never know.”
Charlie rubbed his neck. “So we place our heads in the groove, waiting for the blade to fall.”
“My friend, that is a dark thought. But look.” Giles pointed. “An amusement.”
Down the slope, Mather had ducked his head out of the tent. He spied them and strode in their direction, a bounce in his step.
“Gentlemen,” Mather hailed them. “And I use the term loosely.”
“Hello, Mather,” Giles said. “What brings you over from Theoretical? Desire to rub elbows with the rabble?”
“An appetite for intellectual consensus. The elusive idea that by now, all of us might find agreement about where we are and what presumably will happen next.”
Instead of answering, Charlie began to pick at the paint on the bench. Giles scratched himself under the arm. “Elusive would be an understatement.”
“What dissent can there be? We’ve seen the power of our creation. Are we now to toss it on the junk heap? A footnote in the physics textbooks of tomorrow? ‘Oh yes, there was this minor invention in ’45, but we moved past that.’ And so on.”
“Perhaps we don’t merit mention at all,” Giles said.
“Less than two and a half years from the birth of this project to the test three weeks ago?” Mather chuckled. “I believe future generations will judge our achievement to be the fastest transformation of human power in history.”
“Then why am I filled with dread?” Charlie asked, continuing to pick at the paint.
“Because you are not a warrior,” Mather said. “The rest of us, in a moment of doubt, would march to the library and read old newspapers. In two minutes, you can find editions from the second week of December, three years ago. The photos alone will persuade you: burning ships, sinking in the harbor, hundreds of men trapped inside. A more intelligent person might find an inner resolve.”
“Like Szilard?” Charlie said. “And the seventy others who signed his letter?”
Mather made a sour frown. “The test frightened them, that’s all. Had they waited ten days before all of this clucking and squawking, they’d have returned to reason.”
“What about the Franck Report, then? Other men who lack resolve?”
“Exceptions to the rule, Fish. One hundred thousand people across the country work on the Manhattan Project. Any group that large will have dissenters. Among any random hundred thousand Americans, five hundred will refuse to say the sky is blue.”
“Ha,” Giles said, though it was not at all a laugh. He peered up, a perfect noontime in early August. “The sky is not blue.”