that he wasn’t sure he should resent it.
“Did he ever ask for any sexual details? You know—”
“No. You don’t talk about stuff like that.”
“So it was just ‘I had a good time last night,’ or ‘Boy oh boy, you should see-’ ”
“Yeah. Like that. Nothing dirty. Look, he asked. What was I supposed to say?”
“Maybe your reputation preceded you. Maybe he was looking for pointers.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“So how often did you guys compare notes?”
“For two cents I’d push your face in. You got a right to ask all this, I suppose?”
“All the way up to Groves himself.”
“Shit,” he said, disgusted. “Look, you’re making a big deal out of this. It’s just the way guys talk. You know. Every once in a while.”
“I thought you were scoring all the time.”
“Hey, more than you, I’ll bet,” he said, sullen, childlike.
“You’d win that one,” Connolly said, smiling. “Listen, I don’t care if you fuck around. More power to you. I just want to know what you said about it to a murder victim.”
“I don’t know nothing about that. The guy liked to kid around once in a while, that’s all. We didn’t compare notes. He had something going all by himself. And then they broke it up, I think. Anyway, he didn’t say anything much lately, so that’s what I figured. And then I came down here. I was just kidding around, you know? Not some federal case. He liked to listen. He was that kind of guy. And he wasn’t no fruit.” He said this with emphasis, as if it were important to him that Connolly agree.
“I wonder how you can be so sure.”
“I’d know. I’d just know.” He drew himself up, almost physically taking a stand.
“You got a lot of them down in East Texas, huh?”
“Not alive.”
There were four other security guards who’d been reassigned from the Hill, and by dusk Connolly had interviewed them all without learning anything he didn’t already know. Oppenheimer still hadn’t returned as he lined up with the others for dinner, so preoccupied that he barely noticed the food filling his tray. He sat with a group of machinists who were working on protective aluminum goggles to keep off the alkali dust. It was cooler now in the mess and he lingered over coffee, even after the men at his table had filed out for an open-air movie. He smiled at the idea of one of Hannah’s nightclubs lighting up a patch of the nighttime desert. Even here, in the Jornada del Muerto, people danced. He stirred the coffee and absentmindedly played with the spoon, lifting it out of the cup, then lowering it to watch the coffee rise.
“Displacement theory,” Eisler said, interrupting his thoughts. “You see how scientific principles never change. First Archimedes in his bath, now a coffee spoon. May I join you?”
Connolly smiled and opened his hand to the empty chair. “Did he really run through the streets naked, shouting ‘Eureka’?”
“I hope so,” Eisler said. “It makes a lovely story. But perhaps only after he’d written his report to the scientific committee.”
“In duplicate. With copies for the file.”
“Yes.” He smiled. “In duplicate.” His soft eyes were tired, his skin pink from the sun. He leaned forward over the tray as he ate, his shoulders slumped in the same concession to weariness Connolly had noticed in Oppenheimer. While he had been looking at the desert and toying with an overgrown teenager, they had been working hard.
“Where’s Pawlowski?” Connolly said.
“Oh, he won’t be coming back with us tonight. He’s here for the week, poor devil.”
Connolly felt a surge of happiness, so sudden and unexpected that he was afraid it would show. A week.
“I hope you had some rest,” Eisler was saying. “Oppie doesn’t like to drive, and it’s difficult for me to see at night. Such a long drive. It would be better, you know, to stay the night.”
“No, we need to get back,” Connolly said, now eager to start.
Eisler misinterpreted him and smiled again. “Yes, it’s not the Adlon here, I agree. Think of Daniel. All day at Station South. Every step you have to watch.”
“Snakes?”
Eisler shuddered. “Or scorpions. Who knows? I confess, I am a coward in the desert.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“Am I allowed to tell you? Is this a security test?”
Connolly shrugged. “I’m pretty safe. I won’t understand it anyway.”
“The instruments to measure the radioactivity. Not the actual, of course. Simulated, at low level.”
“The test isn’t the real thing?” Connolly asked, surprised.
Eisler smiled. “This is for the test before the test. Only this time, TNT, one hundred tons, to study blast effects. Actually, to test our instruments. So we put one thousand curies of fission products in the pile to simulate the radioactive material. I’m sorry, do you understand this?”
“I understand one hundred tons of TNT. My God.”
Eisler smiled weakly. “That’s the trial run only. The gadget will produce more, as many as-well, nobody really knows. They have a pool to guess. A game, you see.” His sad voice trailed off in thought. “How many tons of TNT blast can we produce with one gadget? A hundred? Five thousand? More? We cannot know yet.”
“How many tons did you bet?”
“Me? I don’t bet, Mr. Connolly. It’s not a lottery.”
“But think?”
“Twenty thousand tons,” Eisler said matter-of-factly.
Connolly stared at him, appalled. “Twenty thousand,” he repeated flatly, as if he were trying to confirm the figure.
“My friend,” Eisler said softly, “what do you think we are doing here? Why do you think we call it a gadget? Security code? I don’t think so. Maybe we don’t want to remind ourselves what it is we are making. Yes, twenty thousand tons. My calculations are quite precise. I would bet on it.” He smiled ironically. “Of course, we can’t yet calculate the dispersion. There are no good formulas for radioactivity. Even our Daniel recognizes that.”
Connolly felt stunned by the figures. They were calmly talking in a makeshift mess hall in the desert; the rest was beyond imagining. He could only fall back on the details of what was real, like a terminal patient still interested in medical procedure.
“Is that what you do too?” he asked. “Measure radioactivity?”
“Partly. We are not allowed to say, you know.”
“You work with Frisch in G Division, Critical Assemblies Group.”
Eisler flinched, surprised. “How do you know that?” Connolly didn’t say anything. “I see. Another test. So if you know, why do you ask?”
“I know where you work. I don’t know what it means.”
“So. Do you know fast neutrons? Do you know critical mass? How can I explain?” His eyes looked around the table, searching for props. “How much uranium do we need for the gadget-that’s the problem. We know it theoretically, but how to test the theory?” He moved Connolly’s coffee cup to the space between them. “Suppose this coffee were U-235. If we took enough, if we reached critical mass, there would be a chain reaction and, of course, the explosion. But when does that happen? So we take the coffee we think we need but we keep a hole in the middle-you must use your imagination here, I’m afraid-so the neutrons can escape. No reaction. The spoon will be the coffee we took out.” He held it over the cup. “If we lower it, like this, the neutron bombardment increases, the chain reaction accelerates. You have then the conditions for an atomic explosion.”
“But not the explosion.”
“We cheat a little-we use uranium hydride so it reacts more slowly. And we drop the slug very quickly. But yes, when we pass through the core,” he said, letting the spoon fall in, “we momentarily form a critical mass. It’s as close as we can come to an atomic explosion without having one. Of course, you can also produce this effect by simply stacking cubes of U-235 in a tamper of beryllium blocks. A critical assembly. But the other is more sophisticated. Perhaps also a little safer.”
