“Been upgraded. The estimate is now five thousand tons. Another difference is that your ordinary bomb will generate temperatures of a few thousand degrees. A nuclear explosion can be ten million degrees. Different animal altogether.”

Eberly dusted the final lens with baby talc. As he lowered it into the last hole, Foote steered the descending tip with a boot horn.

“If she is a lesbian,” Eberly said, “what does that make me?”

The lens stuck with an inch to go. Foote laid the last plate over the lens and picked up a rawhide-covered mallet. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose. Like a diamond cutter tapping a stone, he had to hit the obstinate lens hard enough to move it, but not so hard as to shatter the goods. In fact, considering the expense of the project, the lens was at least as valuable as a diamond. And a diamond cutter didn’t have to worry about sparks.

Foote licked his lips. “Lesbians, indeed.”

He rapped the plate. The explosive lens underneath seemed to shrug and then slide into place. Eberly aligned the plate and began bolting it down.

“I think I could use the fumes of a good cigarette,” Joe said, and rose limply from the mat.

“Go ahead. We’ll finish.”

No smoking was allowed inside or within fifty feet of the building, but everyone took nervous cigarette breaks over a sand bucket at the far wall. Joe lit up. On the wall over the bucket was Hedy Lamarr floating on her back. A few feet away were five X-ray negatives tacked up in sequence next to someone’s scribbled note that they had been taken a millionth of a second apart through an X-ray bunker at the Hanging Garden.

On the first dark film were twelve lights like a ring of flares. It was detonation. The X-rays had turned shock waves into pure light.

On the second film the lights had expanded and joined to form a flower shape, a burning daisy.

By the third film the lights were twelve lines reaching for the center.

In the center of the fourth film the lights outlined a dark disk, a metal core. Some of the lights rebounded into a corona.

On the last film the core was crushed to half its size, the rays swirling. A collapse not into darkness but into light.

Joe looked back at the bomb on the wrestling mat. Completed, it was a two-foot quarter-ton puzzle ball of steel plates. Nothing that the X-rays showed, which was a small sun.

That evening, everyone crowded into Theater 2 to see a film that had just arrived from Washington. Robert P. Patterson, the undersecretary of War, his desk and his flag filled the screen. He had a pug face, a nap of gray hair and big hands folded between an array of pens and phones. The film was grainy and the sound uneven, adding to the sense of urgency.