Connolly glanced at a tall man, his apple cheeks bellowing out with the draw on his pipe. He had the white hair and gentle, puckish face of a thin Nordic Santa Claus.
“Niels Bohr,” Connolly said. “I’m impressed.”
“Nicholas Baker. Code names only, please. All physicists are ‘engineers,’ and he is Mr. Baker.”
“I’ll try to remember.” Connolly grinned. “Who else?”
“Henry Farmer.”
Connolly thought for a second. “Of the Italian Farmers?”
“You’re catching on.”
“Is he here too?”
“He’s the one with Mr. Baker.”
Connolly looked at the modest figure with thinning dark hair, bent over to catch the soft-spoken Baker’s words. Fermi. “A penny for their thoughts.”
“You wouldn’t understand them even if you heard them. You’ll get used to that too.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Forever. Since ’forty-three. It was a lot smaller then. When I first got here, we only had the old school and a few buildings in the Tech Area. One telephone line. The road up the mesa was still dirt.”
“The good old days?”
“Not really. For the scientists, maybe. They were gung-ho-real pioneer times for them. For the rest of us it was—” He searched for a word. “Quiet. You felt like you’d dropped right off the edge and nobody knew where you were.”
“Nobody knows now.”
Mills shrugged. “Like I say, you get used to it. And of course things got busier and busier so you didn’t have much time to think about it. I suppose it’s a little like overseas, except nobody gets killed.”
“Until now.”
“Yeah, until now. Not exactly a war casualty though, was he?”
“No.” Connolly shifted. “What did you do before the war?”
“Lawyer.”
“Is that how you ended up in security?”
“I wish I knew. Maybe they thought law meant law enforcement. They aren’t famous for being logical. Maybe they just thought I’d make a rotten soldier and I’d be better off pushing paper somewhere.”
“Criminal law?”
“Estates and trusts. I know, boring, but you’d be surprised. Besides, it makes the firm a ton of money and everybody wants to marry you.” He grinned. “They don’t even notice the hair,” he said, running his hand along his balding top.
“But nobody did, I take it,” Connolly said, gesturing toward Mills’s bare finger.
“Not yet. But wait till I make partner.”
“So meanwhile, what do you do for a social life?”
“You know, you have a delicate way of asking rude questions.”
“Okay.” Connolly laughed. “Withdrawn.”
“What the hell, I don’t care. Mostly there isn’t any. Just like any army base. But I suppose there’s enough going on if you look for it. You don’t want to go near the wives-we’ve had a little of that and that’s always trouble. The WACs are something else again. We tried to keep the dormitories off-limits to single men for a while, and it was the WACs who screamed bloody murder, so the parties started right up again. You can’t blame them. Nobody’s allowed to fraternize with the locals for security reasons, so every night’s prom night for the WACs. They’ll never be this popular again.”
“What about Santa Fe?”
“Not much. It’s an old town, and the Spanish won’t even look at you. Albuquerque’s better. Some of the guys go on a spree there if they get a weekend pass, and sometimes we have to go get them out of the tank, but mostly they’re so afraid of getting a dose that they just get drunk and end up at the movies.”
“I found some prophylactics in Bruner’s drawer.”
“Did you?” Mills looked away. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It usually means he was sexually active.”
“One way or the other.”
“Yes, one way or the other.”
“Christ,” Mills said, “I don’t know. Maybe he just kept them around, you know, the way some guys keep them in their wallets.”
“Maybe. But we have to assume they were used sometimes.”
“Look, I know what you’re after, but I can’t help you. I don’t know anything about his sex life. Christ, I can’t even imagine it. He never said a word. I keep trying to think of something he might have said or some look-I mean, we worked in the same office, for God’s sake. All this time. How could you not notice something? I mean, what do you look for, anyway? He was here almost a year and I had no idea. Never. I still can’t believe it.”
“Does it bother you?”
“Of course it bothers me. Wouldn’t it bother you? I mean, I don’t care if he didn’t like women. That’s his business. He could fuck goats for all I care.”
“Then why does it bother you?”
Mills paused and looked at him. “I guess because it means he was another person all along. I never knew it. I mean, what’s the matter with me? Hell of a thing not to know if you’re in security, don’t you think?”
He felt the glow of the drinks as they walked toward Theater-2. His body was still tired but his mind was fresh now, eager to take things in. Everything was sharper in the cold air, bright in the glare of the mounted floodlights around the Tech Area. The whole place seemed not quite real. With its dusty, unnamed streets, its wire fences and plain clapboard buildings, it became a frontier town, but backlit, insubstantial. The strangeness of the mesa delighted him. After months in Washington, with its weighty masonry and stuffy rooms and routine, everything here was raw and new and interesting. There were still ditches in the street to catch the runoff. Even at this late hour, lights burned in the laboratory buildings and MPs walked on patrol. The night air smelled of diesel and pine.
They heard the music even before they got to the building, sawing fiddles of a Western band pouring through the open doors like the soundtrack for a movie saloon. The big room was as smoky and raucous as Connolly expected, but the cowboys were only servicemen in uniforms and bushy-haired civilians dressed up for a night on the town who had, inexplicably, wound up in a barn instead. It was one of the oddest things he had ever seen. At one end of the room, on a raised stage, a make-shift band of soldiers, country boys all, played loud accompaniment to a caller in blue jeans and a bandanna who clapped out the beat as he sang instructions to the dancers. Stamping feet echoed off the polished hardwood floor of the basketball court. There were tables of food and punch bowls and bottles along one wall and folding chairs scattered everywhere but on the dance floor itself. People talked over the music and laughed at their unfamiliarity with the steps. They all seemed to be at the wrong party, moving awkwardly but gamely through their paces, stocky middle-aged men in ties determined to be good sports and young pale men whose jeans looked as stiff and uncomfortable as a second language. Here and there someone executed steps with confident precision, but off-rhythm, as if he had mastered the dance as a matter of scientific principle. What should have been fluid was jerky and tentative, but no one gave up, and the more complicated the maneuver, the more inevitable the missteps and the better they liked them. The fun, for these engineers of perfect measurements, was not caring. Physics had come to a hoedown and seemed to be having a great time. The room hummed with high spirits.
“Quite a party,” Connolly said, smiling.
“Wait till they really start drinking,” Mills said.
He led Connolly toward the drinks table, where a ruddy-faced man whose hair stuck out on the sides like flaps was furiously attacking a block of ice in a zinc wash-tub. Chips flew out on the table as he drove the pick up and down.
“Careful, professor,” Mills said.
“Gott im Himmel,” the man said. “You would think in such a place someone would invent a machine for this. Here,” he said, handing Mills a glass with ice. “On the rocks, yes?”
