The dream was embarrassing.
—I used to have dreams of mushroom clouds when I was thirteen, confessed Ben.
—But not since then.
—Never, said Ben. —There are too many other ways the world could end.
She gazed up into the mosquito net that hung from the beam above them on its circular frame, turning and turning back at a leisurely pace in the stream of quiet air from the fan. They had not unfurled the net; it hung above them knotted, gauzy and white, untouched, awaiting the plague.
She thought: being hurt and forgetting, the two easiest tasks in the world. Millions and billions we forget every day, we forget the others.
She closed her eyes to shut it out though there was nothing before them, nothing but the rotating net and the curtains in the dark. Between the two curtains was a strip of window, and outside a bluer, paler dark than the thick felt dark of the room. She thought: We can’t even live without forgetting.
Ben put his lips behind her ear and then pressed them against her temple.
—I mean, what is there to be afraid of? he asked gently. —Endings? The end is simple. One day all of this will be gone.
At work she studied the history of Los Alamos when she was not helping patrons. She found a book that contained a blurry photograph of two men: Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer and General L. Groves, it read, Scientific and Military Leaders of the Manhattan Project. They were standing beside the twisted remains of a steel tower. Oppenheimer wore a suit with a button on the lapel, and his hat shaded his features; General Groves was in an army uniform, a fat man with a caterpillar mustache and a babyish face.
The steel tower had housed the first bomb, the one exploded in the test named Trinity. It had stood a hundred feet tall and after the explosion lay crumpled on the ground. The sand had fused into a green glassy rock they called Trinitite.
When the “gadget,” as they called it, exploded, Oppenheimer and another physicist named Kistiakowsky, who had designed the bomb’s trigger, were watching from a control station five miles from Ground Zero. General Leslie R. Groves, along with physicists Fermi, Rabi, Morrison, and others watched from a base camp ten miles from Zero, Fermi through a hole in a board covered with welding glass. Physicist Robert Serber watched with the naked eye, twenty miles from Zero; physicist Luis Alvarez watched from a B-29, at a distance of about twenty-five miles. Leo Szilard, who had catalyzed the A-bomb project but subsequently been cut out by Groves, was not in New Mexico at all but at the University of Chicago.
There was a flash, there was a bright expanding disc and then a roiling ball of smoke, red and orange, which rose to more than thirty thousand feet on a purple column, growing and swelling and pushing out a wall of dirt in a vast ring on the land below it.
Beneath the violet pillar, in the vacuum before the roar of the cloud, there came a soft sound that might have been heard by those who listened closely: the gentle sigh of an idea unbound.
After the explosion all the men watching, the physicists and the technicians and the Army men, knew the world had changed and that this change could never be reversed. Science, like time, seems only to move forward.
Some of the men who saw Trinity had high hopes, others were chilled to the bone and would never recover. Groves said, rather optimistically as it turned out, “This is the end of traditional warfare.”
Oppenheimer said later—maybe a little too neatly—that he’d thought of a line from the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”
Kenneth Bainbridge, the British physicist who was the official test director, shook Oppenheimer’s hand and said only, “Now we’re all sons of bitches.”
Kistiakowsky said: “I am sure that at the end of the world, in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence, humanity will see what we have just seen.”
People living hundreds of miles away had seen the flash too. For them it was something quick and bright and inexplicable on the horizon. They were not told what it was until some years had passed. The day after Trinity, in fact, they were given misinformation. The New Mexico newspapers bore stories claiming the flash had been a munitions warehouse exploding—an explanation that came to them from the Manhattan Engineering District’s PR man.
So the people saw the flash but could not see in the flash, as the scientists had, the shudder of history petrified.
It had been out of the question, Ann saw, for the physicists of the Manhattan Project to abandon their good idea before they had followed it as far as they could. They were men on a road with no choice but to walk it: they only wanted to keep going.
And they adored the idea, pursuing it with a devotion they never considered could be anything but virtuous. With their minds they had fastened onto a secret, which went on and on forever and had never before been known.
Further they justified it this way: once the good idea was had at all, they said and knew, it would be had again. Across the globe the good idea would spread, and if they did not bring it to fruition surely someone else would do so instead.
Across the globe, they said, some other so-called geniuses, because they could, would take the good idea and run with it. And so, in perpetuity, the mere presence of so-called genius would guarantee the final efflorescence of knowledge.
In the second book she flipped through there was another photograph of Oppenheimer, a portrait. He was hatless in it. She stared.
Stunned, she peered
