The truck drove directly under the wide calipers of a chain and pulley suspended down the center of the tower. When the truck’s tarp cover was struck, Joe and Ray bolted the calipers to the bomb. Cable groaned as it turned through the pulley sheave. The truck rolled out from under and the dangling bomb was lowered to a knee-high steel cradle, where it resembled a globe on a stand, a matte-gray moon four and a half feet wide, with two rims and patches where the detonator ports were taped. As soon as Ray disengaged the calipers and the pulley was lifted free, Foote’s men set a canvas tent around the bomb and the security cars drove off.

“Want to join the pool?” Foote asked Joe. “A dollar apiece.”

“For what?”

“The bang, what else? The new official anticipated yield is five thousand to ten thousand tons of TNT. Jaworski and I have both bet on ten thousand. I think it’s the first time we’ve agreed on anything. Teller bet on forty thousand tons. Edward’s always an optimist.”

“Oppy?” Joe was supposed to find him now that he was at Trinity.

“Oppy predicts three hundred tons. Three hundred tons is a dud. We’re a little worried about Oppy.”

Harvey and the plutonium core had arrived earlier that morning at a ranch house a mile south of the shot. The rancher had been bought out and pushed off, but except for Harvey’s Plymouth and the four jeeps parked with their backs to the house and their motors running, the place still looked like any ordinary spread: barn and corral, a windmill to pump water, a cistern to hold it, a one-story house within a low stone wall. Inside, the parlor walls were blue with a genteel white band below the ceiling line. The oak floor had been vacuumed and the windows sealed with plastic sheets and masking tape. All the furniture had been removed except the table, which was covered with brown butcher paper.

Working at the table, and dressed in a white surgical coat, rubber gloves on his hands, Harvey already had joined the two silver-plated plutonium hemispheres into one croquet-ball-sized, eleven-pound sphere, and was stuffing holes on the sphere’s shining surface with tiny wads of Kleenex, the fill-all of Trinity. Geiger counters conversed on the floor. Six silent men in lab coats monitored the counters and gave Harvey one tool, then another. The only one without a task was Oppy. Six feet tall, Oppy now weighed a hundred pounds. His head seemed gaunt and swollen at the same time, too large for the neck that stuck out of the lab coat. His hands wrung a cold briar. Somebody had hammered a nail in the wall so he could hang up his porkpie hat, the same as in his office on the Hill. The hat was there, but Oppy seemed oddly out of place and miserable, not triumphant at all.