Stallion Gate
The truck drove directly under the wide calipers of a chain and pulley that was suspended down the center of the tower. When the truck's tarpaulin was removed, Joe and Ray bolted the calipers to the bomb. Steel cable groaned as it turned through the pulley sheave. The truck rolled out from under and the dangling bomb was lowered to a knee-high steel cradle, where it resembled a globe on a stand, a matt-gray moon four and a half feet wide, with two rims and patches where the detonator ports were taped. As soon as Ray disengaged the calipers and the pulley was lifted free, Foote's men set a canvas tent over the bomb and the security cars drove off.
"Want to join the pool?" Foote asked Joe. "A dollar apiece."
"For what?"
"The bang, what else. The new official anticipated yield is 5,000 to 10,000 tons of TNT. Jaworski and I have both bet on 10,000. I think it's the first time we agreed on anything. Teller bet on 40,000 tons. He's always an optimist."
"Oppy?" Joe was supposed to find him, now he was at Trinity.
"Oppy predicts 300 tons. Three hundred tons is a dud. We're a little worried about Oppy."
Harvey and the plutonium core had arrived earlier that morning at a ranch house a mile south of the shot. The rancher had been bought off and pushed out, but, except for Harvey's Plymouth and the four jeeps parked with their backs to the house and their motors running, the place still looked from the outside like any ordinary spread: barn and corral, a windmill to pump water and a cistern to hold it, a one-storey house within a low stone wall. Inside, the parlor walls were blue with a genteel white band below the ceiling line. The oak floor had been vacuumed and the windows sealed with plastic sheets and masking tape. All the furniture had been removed except the table, which was covered with brown butcher paper.
Working at Trinity, Harvey had already joined the two silver-plated plutonium hemispheres into one 11-lb sphere the size of a grapefruit. Dressed in a white surgical coat, rubber gloves on his hands, he was now filling holes on the sphere's shining surface with tiny wads of Kleenex, the fill-all of Trinity. Geiger counters conversed on the floor. Six silent men in lab coats monitored the counters, gave Harvey one tool and then another. The only person without a task was Oppy. A man six feet tall began to look strange when his weight got down to seven stone. Oppy's head seemed gaunt and swollen at the same time, too large for the neck that stuck out of the lab coat. His hands wrung a cold briar. Somebody had hammered a nail in the wall for him to hang his porkpie hat from, the same as in his office on the Hill. The hat was there, but Oppy seemed oddly out of place and miserable, not triumphant at all.
"Remember the Dragon," Harvey said although he hadn't looked up from the core when Joe came in.
Joe stayed back by the wall, which was a foot thick, making the room relatively cool, maybe ninety degrees. The plastic-covered window faced the idling cars, poised for flight in case of a mishap, in case of a slip of Harvey's hands. Joe's mission orders now that he was at Trinity were to stay with Oppy at all times and make sure the project Director survived any accident.
Harvey gave the core a final polish with an emery cloth. "I gave away my clarinet."
"Too bad. You had great potential," Joe said.
Harvey's Critical Assembly team followed his every move with the intensity of chicks watching their mother turn an egg. One of them put on the table long brass tweezers and a small, shockproof case studded with plugs. He unlocked the case and raised the lid. On a bed of foam rubber lay a pearl, a one-inch ball of platinum-coated polonium. This was the core within the core, an "initiator" which would emit a burst of neutrons in the first millionth of a second of detonation.
"I think I'll stick to what I'm good at," Harvey said. He re-opened the larger core, propping the top hemisphere with his finger. With his free hand he picked up the brass tweezers and used it to lift the tiny ball. He had to place the "initiator" in its nest in the center of the core, and the insertion had to be done in slow motion while the building radiation was monitored. Harvey blinked through his sweat, but his hands didn't falter. His finger prodded open the core a little more, a little more as the ball and tweezer advanced. The ticking of the Geiger counters rose like the pulse of excited hearts. Oppy looked like he was going to sway and drop.
"Those icy atoms up and down my spine," Harvey sang softly. "The blue of ions when your eyes meet mine. A strange new tingle that I feel inside, and then that radiation starts its ride."
Oppy's pipe hit the floor and spun across the boards. Harvey froze, fingers in the maw of the two hemispheres. "Joe, will you please take Oppy for a walk?"
Outside in the hot, dry air, Joe found his shirt had soaked through with sweat. Oppy sat on the low stone wall, hat on his knee.
"I suspect that before his flight, Icarus was throwing up. I wish we could just go into the mountains again, Joe, go riding again like we used to. I've ridden that horse of mine just once this year. I know they don't need me in there, but it's my test, Joe." He looked up at Joe. While the rest of Oppy had been worn down to bones and clothes, the blue eyes had the intensity of a man enduring pain. "I asked Groves for another week or just another four days. When this is over, we'll go riding."
"Sure."
Harvey called Joe inside. The core was closed and complete and sat in a lead-lined wooden box.
"He's been like this since he got here. Maybe he should go back to the Hill."
"It's his test," Joe said.
They carried the box on a litter out to Harvey's car and put it on the back seat. Joe took Oppy in the jeep and slowly led the way to the tower. The breeze of late afternoon was picking up. Dust devils whipped around the tower base.
Inside the tent, Foote and Jaworski had removed the polar cap at the top of the bomb and taken out a brass plug so that the plutonium core could be inserted. Harvey opened his box and attached the core to a vacuum cup. He tested the seal, then hooked the chain of a manual hoist on to the cup's eye. He pulled off his lab coat and kicked it away. Tested the seal again. Harvey looked like a plump and innocent boy, the sweat coursing off his belly, his fine blonde hair standing as if magnetized. Foote cranked the core up from its box. From a corner of the tent, Oppy and Joe watched Jaworski steady the core with a pencil as Foote swung it over the waiting bomb.
Wind beat on the tent. "One proper dust devil and a few grains of sand and we can put our symmetrical implosion into a pisspot," Foote said.
He lowered the core. One moment it hovered over the bomb like a moon above a larger body, the next it was descending by its chain into the bomb's interior. And stuck.
Jaworski waved his hand up. His moustaches had started to sag. Foote cranked up the core and lowered it into the bomb again. It stuck.
Foote cranked the core halfway out of the bomb, slipped the hoist's ratchet and painstakingly let out the chain again. The core made its slow downward passage, nudging lenses of high explosive as it descended.
And stuck. By a millimeter or so, the plutonium core was simply too big, or the hollow inside the bomb was too small.
"I don't believe this," Oppy said and stared first at the bomb and then at Foote. "It isn't possible. You measured wrong?"
The tent walls shook. Measured wrong? Wouldn't fit? Like a pair of tight jeans? Joe pictured anyone telling that to General Groves, and he could see every man was imagining the same scene.
Harvey laughed.
"It's the desert heat. The plutonium's hot, expanded. Grade school physics. Leave the core where it is, it'll cool."
It took five minutes, but the temperature of the plutonium and high explosive equalized and the core slipped meekly into place. Jaworski unsealed the vacuum cup, and as Foote raised the chain Harvey inserted a three-foot-long manganese wire down to the resting core to check its neutron count. Connected to a Geiger counter, the wire detected a cascade of ions, a noise like a hive.
"I'm done." Harvey withdrew the needle. He paused at the hole as if he couldn't trust the moment, then slipped quickly out of the tent flap.
At once, Fo
ote and Jaworski began replacing high explosive. Lenses that appeared loose they made snug with Scotch tape. As the work went on into the evening, lamps were brought in. Thunder could be heard walking across the valley.
"Italy has just declared war on Japan." Harvey returned to the tent.
"Hell, this war is almost over," Joe said.
SATURDAY, JULY 14
26
Joe ran in the early morning; he did roadwork whenever he had the chance now. Punching the air, ducking, slipping punches right, left. Cool sweat ran down his chest.
As he ran, he played music in his head. He worked on a "Fugue for Night". He thought it could be bebop, but it became a double waltz for minor chords, constantly changing, rising and falling because there were so many kinds of night. Mountain night. Desert night. Even the deep, fungal night of the Philippines had variations. Then there was the interior void without moon or heart that was life without Anna. Sometimes the physical reaction came before the thought itself. A burning in the throat, a hollowness in the chest, and then memory. If she was driving to Chicago, she was still on the road. It was as if his body were actively betraying him. Sometimes his eyes told him they actually saw her in the dark, as if hope could gather shadows and take on human form. Then the shadows would fade and he was alone again on the flat void, and he knew how much he preferred even illusions.
Sometimes, with sweat and concentration, he didn't think of her at all.
He brought down the moon on flatted fifths.
The sweat poured.
At eight in the morning, Foote struck the tent at the base of the tower and Joe hooked a pulley cable to the rim of the bomb. It had to rise 100 feet to the trap door in the shed on the tower platform – a long way to lift 5,000 lbs of steel and explosive and 11 lbs of plutonium. The sky was a paralyzing blue, blue as a burst of water; not a ragtail hawk up yet, only the dots of weather balloons basking in the sun.
When Foote waved up to the platform, the two-cycle engine of the pulley motor started overhead. As the cable went taut and the sphere and its cradle cleared the ground enough to stir, Foote's team began throwing GI mattresses down from the back of a truck. The bomb rose cautiously an inch at a time, while Joe and Foote slipped mattresses under the ascending sphere.
"This is the greatest scientific program in the history of mankind?" Joe asked.
"Absolutely," Foote said.
"If the cable snaps, you're going to catch a 2½-ton bomb with mattresses?"
"I concede we may have reached a certain point of intellectual exhaustion." Foote blithely watched the bomb rise. "Reminds me of the late Queen Victoria being lifted on board a ship. A feeling somewhere between the religious and the ridiculous."
Much of the exhaustion was located next to the tower, in the jeep where Oppy was talking to Jaworski. Oppy's eyes were red from the alkali dust.
The bomb rose smoothly as a plumb, stabilizing side ropes stretched to skates that jerked up the rails within two opposite tower legs. Joe and Foote could stack mattresses up to ten feet, but no higher. The bomb, rocking gently in the air, rose to twenty feet, to fifty feet. After all the security back at the Hill, it occurred to Joe that he was looking at the easiest potshot of the war; if a saboteur wanted a chance, this was it.
"Where is Captain Augustino?" Joe asked as Oppy approached the pile of mattresses.
"The people back on the Hill tested a dummy of the detonators last night," Oppy told Foote, ignoring Joe. "There was no symmetrical shock. I am informed as of five minutes ago that we have a dud."
"It'll work." Foote tipped the brim of his sombrero the better to keep his eyes on the bomb.
"Two billion dollars." Oppy laughed. The laugh became a cough that sounded like his lungs were ripping. While he bent over, he lit a cigarette. "No, Joe, to answer a question of immaculate irrelevance, I haven't seen Captain Augustino. Please get it through your skull that I don't care about Captain Augustino. Captain Augustino does not concern me."
"I suppose he concerns Joe." Foote craned his neck. "From rumors I've heard, I supposed he'd like to nail Joe's cock to the ground and shoot him through the head."
"The captain is after bigger game than that," Joe said.
The bomb shook. A skate rattled down a track, its rope whipping the air until the skate dug itself into the dirt at the tower base. Forty feet overhead, the bomb slowly yawed from side to side, still attached to the other skate and twisting with a new inertia.
"Fucking Mother of God," someone said.
"Dear me," said Foote.
The bones in Oppy's face seemed to sag.
"The cable's stuck!" the man on the platform shouted. "Coming off the wheel. I'll have to free the other skate."
It was Private Eberly. A soldier in shorts. Crew cut. Gawky as a crane, but he came down the tower's steel rungs like a hero, taking each flight of steps Navy-style. The second landing put him on a level with the skewed bomb, but one tower leg away. He'd have to walk across a narrow, open horizontal brace of the scaffolding fifty feet above the ground. Diagonal braces would support him most of the way, but in the middle where the braces rose out of reach, Eberly would have to be a tightrope walker. Why not? After the most powerful weapon in the world left the hands of geniuses like Oppy and Harvey and Foote, why shouldn't its fate hang on the nerve of an ordinary soldier? Let him be the man of the day.
Jaworski ran from the jeep. "Don't try it!"
"Try it," Oppy whispered.
Eberly clung to the rising brace as long as he could, then spread his arms for balance. The steel was about four inches across, and Eberly moved on anxious, splayed feet. Don't stop, Joe thought. The soldier tilted, regained his equilibrium and stood motionless in the center of the horizontal brace. Don't look down, Joe thought. Eyes level, Eberly started again towards the far tower leg. He misstepped. He pulled his foot back on to the steel. His arms waggled like duck wings. He looked down and dived.
Eberly turned in the air and landed on his back in the middle of the mattresses. He slid off the stack to the ground and to his knees, winded but unhurt.
"Joe?" Oppy said.
Joe was already propping the ladder against the tower. He climbed to the steel steps of the tower leg and climbed those to the second landing, where Eberly had been standing a minute before. Because Joe was taller, he could hang on to the diagonal strut longer. The breeze was stronger at forty feet than he'd expected. The steel ball slowly rolled and although Joe knew he was being watched from below he felt oddly alone with the bomb, as if it had been waiting only for him. He spread his arms wide, catching the wind, and walked with a quick, steady pace across the beam to the descending diagonal brace and to the tower leg.
The skate was jammed. Joe called down for a hammer and caught it as it spun up. He hit the skate and freed it, and the bomb gently swung to the center of the tower. Joe tucked the hammer into his belt and walked, arms out, back across the beam.
Joe was vaguely aware of someone saying "Bravo" down on the ground. He continued up the tower steps, rising to the second and third landings and on to the platform at the top. Most of the platform was taken up by the eight-by-twelve shed of corrugated sheet iron. Outside was the engine and hoist. Joe started the engine. As the pulley wheel turned, the cable slipped back into its groove. Joe could see the bomb inching up the scaffolding again. He kept his heel on the engine switch, ready to stop it in case the skate jammed a second time.
West, he had a distant view of volcanic cones. South was more interesting. A blast smudge showed on the desert floor where a practice blast, a mere 100 tons of TNT spiced with isotopes, had been set off on V-E Day. Fire-breaks had been ploughed around the blast, giving it the look of a bulls-eye. Farther on was the ranch house where Harvey had assembled the core the day before. There were random scars of tire tracks and a tarmac road that ended in the middle distance at South-10,000, the control bunker six miles away that would fire the bomb. Joe could just make out the slap-up buildings and the windmill of the Base Camp ten miles
away. Behind the camp was a dry sea of brush and dust that lapped against the OscuraMountains. The name meant "dark". And, low and broken, the Oscura seemed to lie in the shadow of larger, invisible mountains. It was a region of illusion. On the other side of the Oscura were snowy dunes called White Sands. Joe noticed that tarmac roads also ran west and north from the tower, new roads virtually without traffic, in place purely for disaster.
"The fact is, I'm scared of heights." Eberly climbed back on to the platform.
"Heights are about the last thing you need to be afraid of around here," Joe said.
As the bomb eased up through the platform, Eberly removed the trap door from the shed roof. When the bomb was halted at the pinnacle of the hoist, Joe and Eberly gently swung the hoist 180 degrees, so that the sphere hung over the open roof. Then Eberly lowered the bomb and Joe bolted the cradle to its new home on the shed's floor of solid oak planks.
Oppy, Jaworski and Foote arrived up the steps while Eberly and Joe swung the hoist again to bring up the heavy detonator gear. The Explosive Assembly team carried up electrical leads and coaxial cable. Harvey climbed to the shed to open the bomb's polar cap and re-check the neutron count with the manganese wire.
"Forty-two hours," Foote muttered to Joe.
"You'll make it."
"Oh, I know the bomb will, I mean him."
Oppy leaned against the shed wall, eyes intent on the bomb. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and showed wrists like straws. His entire body seemed to maintain a faint existence only to carry the painfully brooding skull.
Joe ran at night and on the road met what he first thought was Einstein, but was Santa, stumbling along, his white hair drooping, mouth gnawing distractedly on his moustache, wearing a jacket and long scarf.
"How are the hives?" Joe asked.
"Much better. Really under control. Up to my chin. A walking bandage of skin salve."
"I thought you weren't going to volunteer for Trinity."