At eight in the morning, Foote struck the tent at the base of the tower and Joe hooked a pulley cable to the rim of the bomb. Since it ran a hundred feet down from the trapdoor in the tower platform—a long way to lift five thousand pounds of steel and explosive and eleven pounds of plutonium—the cable was stabilized by side ropes to skates on two tower legs. The sky was a paralyzing blue, blue as a burst of water, not a ragtail hawk up yet, only the dots of weather balloons basking in the sun.

As Foote waved up to the platform the two-cycle engine of the pulley motor started overhead. As the cable went taut and the sphere and its cradle cleared the ground enough to stir, a truck backed up to the tower and Foote’s team began throwing GI mattresses down from the truck bed. The bomb rose cautiously an inch at a time while Joe and Foote slipped mattresses under the ascending sphere.

“This is the greatest scientific program in the history of mankind?” Joe asked.

“Absolutely,” Foote said.

“If the cable snaps, you’re going to catch a two-and-a half-ton bomb with mattresses?”

“I concede we may have reached a certain point of intellectual exhaustion.” Foote blithely watched the bomb rise. “Reminds me of the late Queen Victoria being lifted on board a ship. A feeling somewhere between the religious and the ridiculous.”

Much of the exhaustion was located next to the tower, in the jeep where Oppy was talking to Jaworski. Oppy’s face was ashen and his eyes were reddened from the alkali dust.

The bomb rose smoothly as a plumb, the side ropes stretched to skates that jerked up the rails within two opposite tower legs. Joe and Foote could stack mattresses up to ten feet, but no higher. The bomb, rocking gently in the air, rose to twenty feet, to fifty feet. After all the security back at the Hill, it occurred to Joe that he was looking at the easiest potshot of the war; if a saboteur wanted a chance, this was it.

“Where is Augustino?” he asked as Oppy approached the pile of mattresses.

“The people back on the Hill tested a dummy of the detonators last night.” Oppy ignored Joe and told Foote, “There was no symmetrical shock. I am informed as of five minutes ago that we have a dud.”

“It will work.” Foote tipped the brim of his sombrero the better to keep his eyes on the bomb.

“Two billion dollars.” Oppy laughed. The laugh became a cough that sounded as if his lungs were ripping. While he bent over he lit a cigarette. “No, Joe, to answer a question of immaculate irrelevance, I haven’t seen Captain Augustino. Please get it through your skull that I don’t care about Captain Augustino. Captain Augustino does not concern me.”