He stumbled onto the walkway and made his way to the stairs and down them, where, in front of a door marked OFFICE, which was all too brightly lit but untenanted, he saw a newspaper box.
Ye gods, it claimed the price of the paper was 35 cents! He laughed aloud and leaned down to look through the clear panel and discover what marvel of the Fourth Estate might be worth this king’s ransom. The Santa Fe New Mexican. Santa Fe, by God, he had always felt at home here. But a newspaper like this? It was slick.
Although, straightening up and looking around, he didn’t know this part of this city, if it was Santa Fe: a slum, industrial, concrete and asphalt everywhere. He could pick out almost no trees in the darkness. It had to be a bigger place, possibly Albuquerque.
But good lord, the date on the paper was a joke too. March 1, 2003.
He was exhausted. He had been working long hours and forgetting to eat. This was delirium, thick and heavy on him as though a large man was pushing down on his shoulders from behind. Groves, possibly. He felt burdened. Yes: and the burden was intolerable, finally. Sleep was required. Look at him!—he might be mistaken for a hobo and thrown out of here on his heel. His clothes were wrinkled and needed to be pressed.
He squinted at the cars in the parking lot and though it was too dark to see well he thought their shapes were strange, the cars were small and strange, both sleek and complicated at once, jarring and shiny hulks. Maybe this was an Army outpost after all, one he had never known; possibly like the mesa it was a locus for the development of new technologies. Leave it, though: in the morning things would be clearer. Right now he was overcome by fatigue. He would go back to bed.
Veering away from the newspaper box to go up to his room again he suddenly smelled garbage, a rank, rotten smell, and then saw a kid walking by carrying a large flat box marked PIZZA.
—Excuse me? he asked the boy. —Did you see the date on this paper?
—What?
—The date on the newspaper here.
The kid leaned over and looked, nodded briefly.
—So what?
—Kind of an odd gag, isn’t it? H. G. Wells?
—Sorry. I don’t get it, said the kid, and shrugged before he continued walking, the pizza box on his shoulder.
—I mean what’s the date today? called Oppenheimer the man after him.
—It’s the first, said the kid.
—But what year?
—Get outta here, man, said the kid.
In the office he rang a bell, but no one came to the desk. Another of the gray-screened boxes hung on the wall. The counter featured machinery he had never seen before. Was this a foreign country? No: they were selling the New Mexican right outside. Still, hard to put his finger on it, but few of the objects on the desk looked familiar. He had spent time in many well-equipped offices over the past three years and never had he seen one like this. Flat dark adding machines lying there with buttons barely raised from their surfaces, another box with a screen that blared bright, near-royal blue, and white words stood out from it, holding tight and vibrating, both at once. He could not read them; the glare of the light was too bright.
No one came to his assistance, but turning around to leave he caught sight of a calendar on the wall.
Again: 2003.
Stupid. How dare they allow this to happen to him, after all he had given them.
All he wanted was sleep.
For a while after the dream Ann did not think about Oppenheimer, the so-called Father of the Atom Bomb, physicist and genius.
She had no reason to think about Oppenheimer in her waking life and she seldom remembered her dreams. When she did they tended to be dreams she thought were trivial: dreams in which her hair had been elaborately curled and was weighing down her head, dreams in which she had not been warned there was a test, dreams of wooden spoons, breadfruit, and once an angry monkey.
She did not think about Oppenheimer per se but she remembered the bent man and the death-light. She remembered waking up sweating, and staying up until the sun rose, and the bitter, dry aftertaste.
Szilard, in his first conscious minute in the new world, was kicked in the ribs by a freshman named Tad. Tad’s real name was Thaddeus Baysden Newton III, originally of Columbia, South Carolina, and currently of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, whose brothers were commonly referred to in the University of Chicago Greek community as Deeks, renowned for courageous beer swilling. Tad was wearing a bulky shoe on his size twelve foot and the fat man grunted loudly when the toe of it caught him sharply in the sternum, causing Tad to bend down and look under the cafeteria’s formica-topped booth with the expostulation—What the fuck!
What Tad saw was a fat man, jowls drooping like a Basset hound’s, lying on his side on the floor, bleary-eyed and disoriented.
—A fucking homeless drunk on the floor, man.
—What is the world coming to, said his fellow DKE, name of Gil short for Gilman, shaking his head in disgust.
They picked up their orange trays and trudged over to the next free table.
When he was a boy Ben had read voraciously with a weak flashlight under a threadbare brown blanket: comic books, works of fantasy, science fiction, horror. On the other side of the flimsy wall his mother had been wracked with coughs as he read. His father, a kind man but short of words, had worked on the lot
