Chapters (48)
As the bomb eased up through the platform Eberly removed a trapdoor from the shed roof. When the bomb was halted at the pinnacle of the hoist, Joe and Eberly gently swung the hoist 180 degrees, so that the sphere hung over the open roof. Then Eberly lowered the bomb and Joe bolted the cradle to its new home on the shed’s floor of solid oak planks.
Oppy, Jaworski and Foote arrived on the platform as Eberly and Joe swung the hoist again to bring up the heavy detonator gear. The Explosive Assembly team carried up electrical leads and coaxial cable. Harvey climbed up to the shed to open the bomb’s polar cap and withdraw the manganese wire to recheck the neutron count.
“Forty hours,” Foote muttered to Joe.
“You’ll make it.”
“Oh, I know the bomb will. I mean him.”
Oppy leaned against the shed wall, eyes intent on the bomb. Fatigue had worn away his cheeks. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and showed wrists like straws. His entire body seemed to maintain a faint existence whose only purpose was to carry the painfully brooding skull.
Joe ran at night, and on the road met someone he first thought was Einstein. It was Santa, his white hair thinned and drooping, mouth gnawing distractedly on his mustache, and wearing a jacket and long scarf as he stumbled along the shoulder of the blacktop.
“How is the skin?” Joe asked.
“The hives? Much better. Really under control. Up to my chin. A walking bandage of salve.”
“I thought you weren’t going to volunteer for Trinity.”
“I wasn’t in the La Fonda,” he told Joe, “so someone else volunteered me, naturally. They gave me a hut down at the Base Camp. Already getting some interesting cases—GIs who hear the scientists talking, and as a result focus their anxieties on the end of the world.”
“That’s what you predicted.”
“Thank you. So, in fact, it’s worked out. It’s really an opportunity to be here if you think about our psychological history being built on anxieties. Of a sexual nature or a religious nature or a combination of the two. We may be on the ground floor of the primary anxiety of the rest of history.”
Joe ran on to Shapiro’s station at the North-10,000 bunker. On his return leg he met no one. The valley floor lay empty in the semidark cast by a half-moon. Beyond the mountains on either side were storms, lightning muffled in clouds so far off that they were silent. In his mind he saw Anna step again out of the Rio, water and light flowing from her. In memory, the river was black and filled with coral, shell and turquoise.