Charlie straightened. “I don’t need a newspaper to tell me what the Gadget does.”
“Then try these. A day later.”
The first thing Charlie saw was a death toll estimate of one hundred thousand people. One hundred thousand. One blurry photo showed a city leveled, every structure gone but one or two chimneys standing bent and alone. Complete destruction.
“Dear God,” he said. “Have the Japs surrendered?”
Mather snorted. “Incredibly, no. Call it an indication of how persuasive a demonstration would have been.”
Charlie scanned the various front pages, fanned on the table like a hand of playing cards. “We don’t know that.”
“The emperor saw an entire city destroyed, and still did not quit. So actually, Fish, we do know.”
“We will never know for certain.”
Mather shook his head. “You sound like the editorials. All bleeding hearts.”
Charlie shuffled through the pages. “Where are they?”
“Move over.” Mather flipped to the bottom of the stack. “Here are a few. All half-informed, and too late to matter.”
Charlie closed his eyes. If Giles had delivered this news, he might have cried. If it were Monroe, they would have wept together. Why did it have to be Mather?
“Let me see.” Blinking, he leaned over the opinion page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But he had begun to tear up, and could read only fragments. The editorial asked the reader to imagine Denver obliterated in an instant. Science had “signed the mammalian world’s death certificate, and deeded an earth in ruins to the ants.”
He opened the Milwaukee Journal. There was a map of Milwaukee, with circles to show which parts of the city would be obliterated, which ones ruined, which ones burned. The editorial predicted “a self-perpetuating chain of atomic destruction” that could destroy the planet like “a forest fire sweeping before high winds.”
Last came the United States News. “We cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it. . . . Since we lately had been warning the people of Japan against air attacks on certain cities, we might have warned them against staying in the specific area where we first wished to demonstrate the destruction that could ensue from the continued use of the atomic bomb.”
Charlie wiped his face on his sleeve. “Wow.”
“Yes.” Mather nodded. “Apparently everyone has forgotten that our firebombing was every bit as catastrophic. Use a new tool, and your critics suddenly have amnesia.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” Charlie said.
Mather sniffed. “One struggles to comprehend precisely what you do in fact mean by the great philosophical treatise known as ‘wow.’”
“How did you manage to come by all of these papers?”
“Bronsky trusts me.” He shrugged. “The army sent someone to Albuquerque to bring him the latest news.”
Charlie found himself tidying the papers, folding them closed again.
“It’s all right,” Mather said. “He was finished with them anyway.”
Charlie kept folding. “I want to put it all away.”
“There’s more, you know. Not news, but evidence of your role.”
Don’t answer, Charlie said to himself. Don’t take the bait. He went to his desk and, as ordered, began sorting papers into two piles: keep, destroy, keep, destroy.
“Your math, you see,” Mather continued. “It was instrumental.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“Of course you do,” Mather scoffed. “It’s history now anyway. Remember that day, long ago in Chicago, when you had to calculate the timing of an object falling from thirty-five thousand feet to other various heights?”
“Of course,” Charlie said. “With no idea why. It was absurd.”
“We weren’t permitted to tell you,” Mather replied. “That wasn’t absurdity. It was caution.”
“Caution? With me? I’ve been loyal, and kept all my secrets.”
“But you’re weak,” Mather said. “Who could predict what you might do?”
Charlie took a stack of papers to the bin labeled Documents to Destroy and dropped them in. “I am finished with this conversation.”
“Now I’ve hurt your feelings,” Mather said, “when I meant to pay you a compliment. Because of course what you were calculating, in all your wrestling with pi, was the fall time of the bomb. All of your hypotheticals proved conclusive.”
Charlie returned to his desk without answering.
Mather went to the window, hands on his hips like a landowner surveying his fields. “You are the one who calculated the forty-three-second fall.”
“So?” Keep, destroy, keep.
Mather glanced out the window. There was no activity, no one hustling across the tech area. The place was deserted. “So after forty-three seconds, a B-29 going three hundred and fifty miles an hour would be six miles away.”
“Mather, you are tiresome. What’s your point?”
He turned from the window. “You proved that they would survive, Fish. The B-29 crew, I mean. Your math demonstrated that they could drop this gigantic bomb, and be far enough away when it blew, and the detonation would not obliterate them. See?”
Charlie shook his head. “Not really.”
“The military didn’t have to recruit men for a suicide mission. Your math made the whole thing possible.”
Charlie rubbed his face with both hands. “I feel like I’ve been used.”
“On the contrary.” Mather shook his head. “You have received advancements, based on legitimate accomplishments. I would not have predicted it, Fish, but you have come a long way since Chicago.”
Charlie took a sheet from the destroy pile and turned it over. He poked around and found a pencil. “How many men do you estimate worked in that math room?”
“I don’t estimate. The exact number was thirty, plus our manager Cohen, that worthless windbag.”
“All right.” Charlie did quick division on the paper. “That’s three thousand, two hundred and twenty-six each.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning the number of Japanese people killed in Hiroshima per math person.”
“Don’t be infantile.” Mather began pacing. “Their nation started this. The imbeciles are still fighting us too.” As if insulting someone was balm, he calmed, half-sitting on a desk. “Those bastards invited this destruction on themselves.”
At that, Charlie realized what the conversation was actually about. Giles would have spotted it sooner, but it was apparent to him now: Mather was filled with guilt. He had come here not to deliver news, but to shed culpability. Whether by exaggerating Charlie’s role or by blaming the Japanese, the man was seeking exoneration.
Charlie knew with every cell in his body that this was not something he could give. Especially given the culpability he felt himself.
“Tell me, Mather,” he said. “Whatever became of your sister? The pretty tennis player you said none of us would ever touch. Did she make it through the war all right?”
“My sister.” Mather laughed to himself. “My untouchable sister.”