Other wrestling mats were covered with other models of the bomb in different stages of assembly, nonsparking bronze tools, red wagons, tubs of water and bottles of warm milk. The walls bore blueprint diagrams, ghostly X-ray negatives, a portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a prized picture of Hedy Lamarr in the nude and, every twenty feet, a fire extinguisher and bucket of sand. The latter items were the most purely ornamental because it was understood that if ever there was an accident in the assembly building, it would be at stratocirrus level before anyone could shout “Fire!”

Foote prepared each lens—a little Kleenex into this hole, Scotch tape over that crack. After he slid it into place, Eberly wielded a bronze wrench, bolting a steel plate over the lens, pentagonal plate interlocking with pentagonal plate like a puzzle being slowly solved, building up the walls of the sphere. Joe simply kept the ball from rolling.

“I hate the Army,” Eberly said.

“The Army wants you to hate it,” Joe said. “It’s the Army system. It’s what bonds us all together into a fighting unit.”

“No, it’s an individual thing,” Eberly insisted. “You know the new security campaign? Lesbians! Why, of all the WACs here, does security pick out my girl and ask if she’s a lesbian?”

“Joe, I do appreciate your helping out.” Foote delicately changed the subject and slid another heavy lens into place, its smaller, concave tip resting against the baseball. “Oppy keeps sending my boys down to Trinity. It’s a hell of a place, they tell me. Jornada del Muerto. Dead Man’s Journey, it used to be called by the Spanish. Scorpions, deserts, snakes, stinging ants, hostile Indians. I keep asking how all that distinguishes it from the rest of New Mexico. Saw you dance, by the way. Very impressive.”

“Anything for the tourists.”

“What does a man like you do after the war? Obviously, you’re too old and too intelligent to be a boxer anymore. You’re the least likely sergeant I’ve ever seen.”

“Groves is going to be the atomic general. Maybe I’ll be the atomic sergeant.”

“She could be the atomic lesbian,” Eberly said.

“Going to get it done in time?” Joe asked.

“The uranium device is so much easier,” Foote said. “Here you have to crush a solid ball of plutonium into a denser, super-critical mass, which is theoretically conceivable if the ball is crushed by a perfectly symmetrical shock wave. Which is possible if every one of these lenses is detonated in the same millionth of a second.”

“ ‘Critical,’ ‘symmetrical.’ It’s just another bomb, right? When I took Oppy and Groves down to Trinity at Christmas, they were talking about a blast equal to about five hundred tons of TNT. That’s big, but it’s not fantastic.”