After nondenominational services at the Base Camp picnic tables, with the bomb in place at the top of the tower and only awaiting the arrival of General Groves, some men spent the hours before Trinity hunting antelope or searching the area for arrowheads or silver mines. Oppy searched for Fermi and Joe drove.

“We left dummy rigs of the detonators and the firing rig back on the Hill.” Oppy spoke more to himself than to Joe. “Yesterday morning, the detonator dummy failed. Yesterday afternoon, the firing-unit dummy failed. Truman is in Berlin expecting news of our great success and I already know that we will fail. If Fermi thinks we’ll fail, I’ll call it off.”

“Fermi is checking blast measurements. He could be anywhere on the test range,” Joe said.

“Then we’ll cover the test range. Everyone here seems to think they’re at summer camp. It would be good to speak to one serious person.”

At the lean- to that constituted the North-10,000 MP station, Sergeant Shapiro said he hadn’t seen Fermi. “We did have some intruders last night, though. Could be locals, maybe Indians.”

“Maybe rabbits, maybe deer, maybe cactus in the moonlight?” Oppy asked.

Shapiro backed off. “Could be.”

Oppy pointed into the brush and Joe swung the jeep off the road, maneuvering to drive a course generally on the tower’s six-mile periphery, where many of the last-minute adjustments to instruments were taking place. It occurred to Joe that searching for Fermi might be Oppy’s excuse to get away from the tower and the Base Camp. The bomb wasn’t the only thing on the point of collapse. “What time is General Groves coming?” he asked.

“Our general is arriving with presidential advisers this evening. Our failure will be well attended. We’ll even have a reporter from the New York Times watching from a hill twenty miles away.” Oppy glanced at Joe. “Do you have any idea what intruders that MP was babbling about?”

“Mescaleros.”

He braked and stopped to avoid running over a sunburned figure lying on the ground. The man was threading coaxial cable into a garden hose. His back and legs were covered with Vaseline and dirt, and pinned to his shorts was a badge that showed he, too, was an elite scientist of Trinity.

As he stuffed the hose he said up to them, “In a circle of Hell, men are doing precisely this right now. We can thank Foote and those other fucking Brits for this, because all the cable they insisted on importing and using here has melted under the New Mexico sun and has to be insulated again with thirty thousand feet of hose. Have you ever run a catheter up the ass of a thirty-thousand-foot-long snake?”