The site for the nuclear plant that Grady ultimately located lay about twelve miles east of Coproliabad, a broad sandy flat scarred by a few outcrops of schist. Within a few weeks, construction was well under way and proceeding with unexpected efficiency. A large rounded shell had sprung up in the desert, like some fatso in a sandbox, sheltered on one side by a few stunted trees. The core baskets and the fuel assemblies for the generators had been requisitioned, and were on their way across the ocean. Chatterton and Gorelik were tooting away in their wing. In the vast, comparatively cool basement, like the keep of a castle, Grady had installed his band of brothers—more accurately, stepbrothers, as he was too inaccessible, distrustful, and secretive to merit “fraternal” as a modifier in his relationship with his workforce. As a gesture of goodwill, he had invited the Assamans to build the facility with their very own indigenous ingredients, in hopes of giving himself the chance to examine the BRITs up close and unimpeded. And so he spent his days shadowing them, scrutinizing mixing pits and dung heaps, secreting samples back to his lab for analysis.

“We’ve got the recipe,” he insisted one day, “we know the process, the approximate ratios…” But he never could get his shit together. Trembling with pique, in a tantrum of frustration, he whined about the ineptitude of his gurus in the lab, with their PhDs and their failed expertise. “They think they know more about BRITs than Einstein knew about relativity—charges and currents and procedures—more than this whole damned population of primitives rolled into one, but these stumblebums can put it together and we can’t.” His moaning fused imperfectly with the singsongs and clickity-clacks that the Assamans who did all the ball-breaking labor produced in unison, an atonal yowl whose constancy turned my stomach and ground my teeth.

Grady was a bundle of convulsive energy, full of weighty decisions, crackling with his own brand of voltage as he led Assama toward another colonization. He was always moving, obsessively demonic. Somehow he managed to maximize the reluctant grunts, wringing more sweat out of them than they had to give, as if they were dehydrated tea bags.

“These people are an impediment,” he said to me, “and you’re not much better.”

True. I was no help to him, out there half-dissolved in sunlight.

“Whatever I do,” he said angrily, “your heart’s not in it.”

He was right. Maybe my heart was in the highlands or somewhere east of Suez or over the rainbow, but it sure as hell wasn’t in this tacky desert galvanizing Assaman grunts.

“You might at least mingle with the rank and file while I am otherwise occupied.”

“I do mingle.”

“No, you don’t. You affiliate.”

It was true. Time and again I found myself drawn in to the position of mediator between Grady and the workers.