“Did you see any more of the doctor who got you out?”

“He seduced me. A lot of men seduced me in the beginning.”

“Communists?”

“Who knows? The world is full of Communists. In Germany the only ones who stood up to the Nazis were Communists.”

“And Oppy?”

“What do you mean?”

“How did you run into Oppy again?”

“He needed a mathematician. He was rounding up refugees like stray cats. Do you know what my work is? I turn my equations into programs for an electronic computer. I turn each millionth of a second of an imaginary Trinity into a deck of punch cards so that we can estimate what will happen at the real Trinity. You see, everyone else is working toward Trinity. Oppy inspires everyone to work so hard.”

“Oppy feels personally about the bomb. There wouldn’t be a bomb without him.”

Anna refilled his glass and her own. “There wouldn’t be an Oppy without the bomb. There are other physicists here more brilliant by far.”

“Come on. If Harvey starts a sentence, Oppy finishes it for him.”

“He’s quick to finish other people’s thoughts. But they’re still other people’s thoughts. What I meant to say, though, is that no one looks ahead to after the bomb is used. Or asks whether the bomb should be used, or, at least, demonstrated to the Japanese first. Because they haven’t reached the event of Trinity itself, they don’t think of the consequences. I have. On the punch cards are not only the fireball, the shock wave, the radiation, but also an imaginary city—so many structures of steel, of wood, of concrete. Houses shatter under shocks of one-tenth to one-fifth of an atmosphere. For steel buildings the duration of the shock is important. If the pulse lasts several vibration seconds, peak pressure is the important quantity. I can stop the blast at any point. I can go backwards or forwards. Nobody else sees it, as if they can’t imagine a shadow until the sun is up. I see it every day. Every day, I kill these thousands and thousands of imaginary people. The only way to do it is to be positive that they are purely imaginary, simply numbers. Unfortunately, this reinforces a new fantasy of mine. There are times when I feel as if I am one of those numbers in one of the columns on one of the punch cards flying through the machine. I feel myself fading away.”

“To where?”

“To Germany. Freud was right, after all. It is difficult to be a refugee once you think you are dead.”

Joe pulled a crate from under the bed and out of the crate took a wadded ball of newspaper. He unwrapped it at the table and set down by the lamp a small, gleaming black pot with a tiny top hole. “It’s a seed pot. It’s the last pot I have of my mother’s.”