“It’s a branch of anthropology dealing with a group’s culture. Why?”

“Grady’s got some kind of a wild hair about Lipgloss’s ethnology. Says he wants you to get with it.”

“No way. I can’t do it.”

“Can’t do what?”

“I can’t even read his writing. It’s illegible.”

For a moment she was silent, chewing a lip, scratching a bruise on her arm.

“You don’t get it,” she said at last, “do you?”

“Get what?”

“Don’t you realize we’re stuck here till Grady gets his recipe for BRITs? That he won’t leave unless—”

“So let him figure it out.”

“You like it here? Enjoying every moment? Waiting till we cook to death one day or freeze to death some night or flake out from malaria or dengue or scurvy or just plain squat to death from diarrhea?”

“Val, what Lipgloss calls ethnography is just a hybrid of what he imagines he’s heard and seen with an added scoop of porno fantasies.”

“How do you know if you haven’t read it?”

“He told me.”

“In five minutes? Ten minutes?”

I didn’t answer. After a moment, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said, “I’ll do it.”

It took more than a moment before her sturdy decision registered. When finally it did, “What a good idea,” I said.

Grady was desperate for workers—every day, another armada was sweeping out of the sky, C-130 Hercules transports and giant helicopters flailing the earth with the arrogant roar of their engines, depositing yet another consignment of strange twisted girders, coils of metal, vats of chemicals for the nuclear complex. It was Chatterton who guilelessly ensnared Grady’s ragtags; nine-tenths of them, it seemed, were irresistibly drawn into his inharmonious orbit, which left a constantly diminishing few in the field to haul all the components of atomic alchemy into place: reactors, breeder cores, axial compressors, blocks of graphite, beads of resin, assorted acids, corrosion resistants, enricheners, processors, converters, reflectors, centrifuge assemblies, jet-nozzle separators, vortex units, explosives and implosives, sealants, coolants, claddings, concrete shields and diffusion barriers, extruded aluminum ladders and landings, consoles of instruments that measured ergs and rads, curies and dynes, switches, knobs, gauges and computers, protective clothing, air conditioners, fire extinguishers, iodine tablets, Band-Aids, a library of manuals and advisories, a rash of closed-circuit TV cameras and screens for under-the-plume monitoring, and an ice machine (for Grady’s parfaits and martinis). Just off the airstrip, all was readied to receive the more volatile elements of nuclear fusion, the climactic excitants scheduled to arrive later, but there was near to nobody to do it. They all preferred turns on my old abandoned tuba.