He tried to remember what Jaworski had said about hiding, about depressions and the flash. But he was too close and he could see nothing through the brush except baked flat earth. And toads, a soft, resolute migration of them everywhere he looked.

It was unfair. A whole year encased in hard dirt, waiting for it to be mud, to squirm freely to the surface, to see the moon and sing in passionate chorus at the rim of a temporary desert pool, only to be fried by General Groves.

The Voice of America wandered in and out, like a spectator who couldn’t keep his mind on the event at hand. Now it was playing “Sentimental Journey.”

A hare darted in front of him, looked back in alarm and dashed off at an angle.

There was a long warning siren for everyone to go to the trenches behind the shelters and Base Camp. Only a few men, including Harvey and Oppy, would actually stay at South-10,000. Three minutes.

Never knew my heart could be so yearny, he confessed.

More and more the toads were underfoot, singly and in groups crossing the roads, stopping to sing. Sometimes the whole ground seemed to move. As one hopped before Joe, he saw Groves plopping on his belly, toes to the tower.

The final warning rocket sputtered overhead.

In fact the song of the toads was a powerful, sonorous trembling. Cello and flute at the same time.

“Do not look at the blast,” Harvey was warning. “When you do look, use your red goggles or a welder’s glass.”

A last warning gong frantically beat.

The Voice of America slipped into classical strings, rousing sleepy Latins everywhere. Mexicans, Peruvians, Tierra del Fuegans lifted their Polaroid all-purpose red goggles and looked north.

“Ten.”

Cirrus and stratocirrus fluttered in the dark. Rattlers stiffened at attention.

“Nine.”

He glanced back and the tower floated in a cloud, with impatient, circling beads of light.

“Eight.”

He felt Oppy sway, eyes on a door that would safely catch the image cast from a periscope. Breath held, a burnt, unraveling string through the heart. Fuchs watching from a hill twenty miles away, the only man there standing for the blast. Harry Gold strolling on the Alameda, looking south.

“Seven.”

Dolores had left pots in the fire. A gust worked between cedar coals and clay, shooting sparks around Rudy. There was a bootlegger’s truck in the corral, and rabbits packed like snow in the hutch.

“Six.”

Billy and Al put their hats on their hearts, not noticing that from dark kivas everywhere figures stole to the surface.

“Five.”

The car crashed the gate and the band rushed for the parade ground, striped clowns with trombones, saxophones, clarinets. In Harlem’s Palais de Sport, the French heavyweight swooped to the rafters, his satin shorts as bright as a macaw.

“Four.”

A piano toured the Rio Grande, its lid raised as a black sail.

“Three.”