The wooden table and steel sphere were gone, erased from the pad. The exposed cables had disappeared and the ground around the pad was baked and reverberating, without a weed or an ant, only a shimmer of the finest particles of graphite and gold. In a wider radius were glass and the metal commas of broken gauges. At the edges of the hilltop, the gilia and sage burned. Overhead, the black clouds were gone, as if blown from the sky. The mountains rose and fell on heat waves. There was no Harvey.

“It was the lightning.” Jaworski caught up with Joe. “An electrical surge.”

“Cordite!” someone shouted and everyone dove to the ground.

Cordite was another hazard of the Hanging Garden. There was no more reliable explosive than slotted-tube cordite, but it had the habit of blowing free of a blast, then catching fire and detonating at a later test. His face in the dirt, Joe saw smoke sputtering near a cable trench. It was the acetone in the cordite that smelled.

A figure rose from the trench. It held half a clarinet in one hand, half in the other. Its head looked like a sunflower, a carbon-smudged face in the center of stiff blond hair, just a touch of red at the nose, like half a mustache. The front of his shirt hung down over his belly, which sparkled with black and gold.

“Harvey!” Joe called. “Get down!”

Harvey dropped the separate halves of the clarinet as he stepped up to the smoldering cordite and, with elaborate fumbling, opened his fly. A pink organ popped into view. He hesitated, scanning the bodies lying around the test pad until he spotted Jaworski.

“I’ve thought about it. The plutonium core will be exactly the size of a croquet ball.”

Then he played his golden stream upon the burning cord to the last faint whiff and last triumphant drop.

7

“The Japanese soldier is fanatical, well trained and confident. He has seized the Korean peninsula and he has routed the armies of China. He holds sway from Singapore to Saigon, and from Shanghai to Peiping, dominating his larger Asiatic counterparts and surprising the British. But—and this is a big but—he has yet to face the prepared forces of the United States and the Philippines.”