Like a conscience, a state trooper's motorcycle emerged, siren wailing, from behind a sign that said "War Bonds Are Bullets!"
The general's travels were secret; it was understood he didn't want to talk to any local justice of the peace. Joe floored the accelerator. New Mexican troopers had black uniforms and black bikes. At 100 mph, the dark silhouette became a dot in the rear view mirror. Swaying on passenger straps, Groves and Oppy went on talking about construction schedules. Fuchs spoke only when asked, otherwise he was as quiet as a drawer. Information on hand but only when demanded.
In the fields, the breeze rattled rows of chili, unpicked because a farmer could walk into Boeing's Albuquerque office and keep on straight to Seattle to build B-29s and draw more money in a month than he'd ever seen in a year.
"Explode. Implode. Two apparently contradictory events at the same moment," Oppy was saying. "I wouldn't suggest trying to explain it to the President. Still, it is a sweet concept."
Past Albuquerque and through the lower valley, crossing the Rio so often it seemed a dozen rivers, Oppy and Groves discussed problems ranging from plutonium assembly to sugar for the commissary. The car pressed against a headwind towards gray clouds that built and receded at the same time. At Antonio, a farming town of dimly lit windows, they left the highway for an eastbound single lane of frayed tarmac, crossed the Rio one last time and entered a vast, tilted basin of scrub and low cactus. There, the clouds moved forward and snow began to fall, lightly to begin with, tracing the wind, more heavily as the sun was covered, packing on the wipers and coating the headlights.
"If Hitler had the bomb…" Groves said. "We get reports that this winter offensive of the Germans is just to stall while he finishes some secret weapon. Suddenly he has jet-propelled planes, new rockets."
"If Hitler has the device, he'll use it on the Russians," Oppy said.
"Is that a bad idea?" Groves asked.
Joe swung off the road and stopped the car. Its nose pointed at barbed wire fence and white flakes. The fence posts were split pine, as gray as bones, spaced eight feet apart and leaning from habit away from the wind. There was no proper gate with crossbeam or hinges, just a section with two strands of barbed wire stretched to a stick hung by plain wire to a post, so stick and section could simply be unhung and dragged out of the way. Inside the fence was meager grazing land, brushwood and sage flattened by the headlights. Yucca spines dipped and waved in the snow.
"Stallion Gate," Joe announced.
"There's no one here." Groves looked up and down the road. "There's supposed to be a half-track and two jeeps waiting for us. You're sure this is it?"
"Yes, sir." Joe pointed to the slightly whiter double track of an access road that ran under the bottom wire. "They would have come to the gate. I'll see if I can raise them."
The field radio was a pre-war crank model with a range in good weather of forty miles, and the answer, when it came, hovered on static. The party from the Alamogordo base had lost a track and lost time, but would still meet them at the fence.
As Groves slumped back in his seat the entire car moved on its springs. "I'm supposed to be in Washington tomorrow and here we are twiddling our thumbs at a barbed wire gate."
"Joe, you're the only one who's ever been here before," Oppy said. "What's your advice?"
"The weather's getting worse. I suggest we wait."
"Sergeant, I have never accomplished anything by standing still." Groves sat forward, decision made. "There's no more than an inch on the ground. We'll meet them en route."
It took ten minutes for Joe to put chains on the rear tires, untie the gate, drive through and, for etiquette's sake, tie it up again. Everyone got back into the car, slapping flakes from their coats, and they started off on the faint trail that wandered across the field.
Joe drove in second gear, trying to keep his lights on the ruts without getting his wheels into them. Fuchs studied a grazing service map.
"How do you think they lost a track?" Oppy asked.
"Link pins," Groves said. "Tanks, half-tracks, bulldozers, same thing. If they had trouble with a drive wheel, they'd be stopped dead."
Joe shifted to low as the road vanished.
"We're almost in Mexico. How much snow can there be?" Fuchs wiped condensation from the windshield. "They said they were coming to meet us, yes? We should be seeing them any minute."
After a long silence, Joe said, "We should have seen them half an hour ago."
Snow rushed in sheets against the car as it pushed over the rise and fall of the ground. When Joe found the road again, he was happy to lay his wheels in the ruts and try to stay in them. He put his head out of the window to avoid Fuchs' urgent wiping. There were signs of humped earth, craters, moments of impact frozen in the snow.
"It's like sailing." Oppy was delighted. "Same dark sky, same white, same swells."
"I remember my first time at sea," Fuchs said, suddenly talkative. "It was when the British shipped us to Canada as enemy aliens at the start of the war. U-boats attacked the convoy. They sank the ship just before us."
"I didn't know you were an enemy alien," Groves said.
"I'm British now," Fuchs assured him.
"German and British," Groves added dryly.
Implode. Explode. Two events at the same time. On the troopship to Manila, Joe had watched the ocean. For lack of anything else to do, there being no women on board, and no card-playing either because the officers were so wound up about going to serve under MacArthur Himself, Joe stood on deck and observed the sea. He watched for big events and little events, from surfacing whales through families of dolphins to haphazard flying fish. One day he noticed something new: contradiction. The wind was stiff and easterly, driving rows of whitecaps from stern to bow. But the ship was plunging, trudging like a farmer in boots, through heavy swells churned up by storms a thousand miles ahead in the west. The surface of the water, the ragged spume, was merely sliding, a deception, over the true internal intent of the sea. The hidden intent. Joe remembered because it was the first moment he realized he and everyone else on the ship might not be coming back from Manila.
"Sir, I think we're there." Joe killed the car engine and lights. An easier snow of fewer, fatter crystals fell.
Fuchs sat bolt upright and said like a vaudeville comic. "Was ist das?"
Heading over a rise and towards the car were three men carrying rifles.
"Mescaleros," Joe said. "Apaches."
"Talk to them," Oppy said.
Groves said as Joe got out, "Keep them away from the car so they don't recognize us."
Two of the men were father and son, each almost as big as Joe, both in snowshoes. They had long hair, wool hats, greasy jackets, one sheepskin and the other corduroy. Clothes and hair were dusted with snow and their faces shone with sweat. The third man had a slightly squarer head, shorter hair, a plaid Pendleton jacket, rags wrapped round his hands and feet. Navajo, Joe thought. None of them looked like they would recognize Groves and call Tokyo. But what the hell was a Navajo doing down here?
"See the horses?" the old man asked Joe.
"Horses?"
"Horses everywhere," the old man said.
Joe passed out cigarettes. Apaches were Chinese to Joe. Navajos were thieves. Likewise, Apaches and Navajos thought all Pueblos were women. The Navajo moved close enough to take a cigarette and stepped back. Flakes drifted down. The storm was resting, not leaving. The Navajo's rifle was casually held towards the car.
"They kicked off the white ranchers," the father said. "They," Joe knew, meant the Army. "Still horses, though. If we don't take them, they just shoot them."
"They come over in planes and machine-gun them," the son said. "Sometimes, they bomb them. Day and night."
"Could be Texans," Joe said.
The Apaches erupted. They slapped each other on the shoulder and they slapped Joe. Even the Navajo laughed nervously.
"Those bastards," the son said. "Army planes, they're crazy."
&nbs
p; "Army bought the ranchers out," the father confided, "but they made it in one payment so the ranchers had to give it all back in taxes, and if the ranchers try to get back on the land, they bomb them."
"Sheep up north." The Navajo had a high voice and clipped his words in half. "Someone in Washington says an Indian can only have eighty-three sheep. Part of the War Effort. What do sheep have to do with the war?"
"Nothing," Joe said.
"Indian Service comes and kills the sheep. Shoot you if you get in the way."
Joe remembered now. Near Gallup, a gang of Navajos had taken a couple of Service riders hostage and then vanished. Across the state, newspapers were treating it like an uprising. The Indian Service and the FBI were looking for the fugitives all the way north to Salt Lake City. Not south, with Mescaleros.
The young Apache looked speculatively at Joe. "You ever fight in Antonio?"
"Yeah."
"You fought my brother in Antonio. They put up a real ring at the motor lodge behind the café. Kid Chino?"
"He was drunk, he shouldn't have got in the ring."
"He was sure sober when you were done." He stomped his snowshoe for emphasis. "That was the soberest I ever saw him."
Joe recalled the brother, all piss and steam the first round, throwing up in the second.
"Pretty good fighter, your brother."
"A good boy." The old man glared at the son with him.
Joe passed the cigarettes round again. The Apaches examined the lighter, a Zippo. "Battery C, 200th Coast Artillery" was engraved on one side.
"Bataan." The son handed it back.
The father looked up. "Good weather. Bombers can't fly and it's easy tracking in the snow."
Joe didn't see any signs. He was a fair tracker, but he was no Apache.
"Better you get the horses than no one."
Finally, the Navajo shivered and lowered his rifle. The four men smoked, contemplating the quiet between the low sky and snow-covered ground. Then the father and son killed their butts and nodded to Joe. The Navajo followed. The three men, the Navajo on the outside, moved off to the north, making a wide arc round the car. Wouldn't that have been an interesting end to the atom bomb, though, Groves and Oppy gunned down in the snow in return for sheep?
Joe opened the general's door. "I don't think they recognized you, sir. I told them they were trespassing on the Alamogordo Bombing and GunneryRange and would have to leave."
"Seemed a little touch and go," Oppy said.
The Apaches and their friend were already moving out of sight, not so much getting smaller as disappearing between points of snow. The real horizon could be 500 yards away, 1,000, a mile. Oppy emerged from the car, lit a cigarette and lit Fuchs' cigarette, too, with a flourish of relief, as he got out. Groves stepped on to the snow and tilted his head back to perform a professional sweep of the four directions.
Oppy spread the map over the hood. "This is where we are. Latitude 33 40' 31", longitude 106 28' 29"."
"So, where is that?" Groves asked.
"East are the OscuraMountains." Joe pointed. "South, Mockingbird Gap; west, three volcanoes the locals call Trinity; north, Stallion Gate." Each way was a wall of white.
Where Joe had pinned the map down with his finger, Fuchs made an X with a soft pencil and drew a perfect, freehand circle around the X.
"If this is Ground Zero, the point of detonation, we will desire a distance of ten kilometers to the first control shelters."
Groves set a surveying transit in the snow, planting the three legs firmly. The air bubble sat in the middle of the transit level. Flat ground. Confidence was the general's face; he sniffed the air with anticipation. The errant party from Alamogordo was forgotten.
"Just the way we chose Los Alamos," he called to Oppy, "the top men on the spot."
While Groves sighted through the transit telescope, Joe paced off fifty yards with a tape, flags, stakes. Oppy and Fuchs paced off in another direction.
When Groves waved, Oppy set a red flag at Joe's feet.
"Captain Augustino tells me there's a spy on the Hill," Joe said.
"Did he say who?" Oppy looked up with the eyes of an innocent.
"No," Joe lied.
"No names at all?"
"Let's say the person was just a security risk."
"He'd have to be pulled off the project."
"His reputation?"
"Ruined. No names?"
"Let's say I wanted off the Hill. Say I wanted combat."
"That's an Army matter, Joe. The Hill is an Army base, after all. You'd have to go to the head of military administration."
"That's Augustino again."
"The captain is a powerful man in his own little realm."
"Which is the Hill."
"He really didn't give you any names?"
"I suppose he'd tell you if he had a name in mind."
"True." Oppy was relieved. He gave Joe a conspiratorial grin. "Remember, the captain is an intelligence officer. It's his duty to be paranoid."
With the next set of flags, Oppy and Fuchs swapped places.
"It must be interesting to be an Indian." Fuchs followed Joe's measured steps. "To be free of civilization, to live simply as men and women with nature."
"You mean, go naked?"
"No, I mean defy all bourgeois standards of behavior. You understand what I mean by bourgeois?"
Joe watched Oppy slowly pacing through the snow. A frail figure, his coat whipping around him. He spread his arms, turning, holding flags, and seemed, in his ungainly way, to be dancing in the snow.
They created a model of the test site to come, red flags for directions, lettered stakes to indicate relative distances to control shelters, base camp, observation posts, evacuation roads, populated areas. By the time they gathered by the transit, the model's Ground Zero, snow had almost stopped. Groves' manner was brisk and expansive, an engineer breaking ground. Waving his hand, he described the test tower, miles of wire, roads and trucks he saw in his mind. Oppy had brought a bottle of cognac, and even Groves, who usually drank nothing more than the smallest glass of sherry, accepted a ceremonial sip. Alone in the car, Joe radioed the convoy that was supposed to have met them hours before. He opened his own flask. Vodka. This was not sophistication. Wartime distillers made vodka from potatoes, corn, molasses, grain. From ethane, methane and petrochemicals. From horse sweat and purified piss. Santa Fe liquor stores wouldn't sell a bottle of anything unless you bought a bottle of vodka. Another subversive communist connection.
He drank from his flask while he fished in the static.
"… difficulty… lost a drive wheel… soon, over."
Joe read and repeated his map co-ordinates to the static and signed off. The general would miss his flight; he'd have to see Roosevelt another day.
Suddenly it was colder and darker. Clouds flowed by on either side, and directly above was a stream of evening stars. When Joe returned, he made a fire from cow chips he dug out of the snow. The other three, exhilarated from mapping the test site, were still sharing the cognac. It occurred to Joe that these minutes of waiting for the party from the base probably were the first moments of relaxation, of complete and powerless rest, that either Oppy or Groves had had in years.
"You have to wonder whether the Chinese alchemists who discovered gunpowder," Oppy said, "when they were on the verge of discovering gunpowder, were fortunate enough to have a night as quiet and beautiful as this. Perhaps the Emperor of China had horsemen searching for them, as jeeps are searching for us. Perhaps we'll meet them."
"What do you mean?" Groves asked.
"Einstein says time bends around the universe in a curving line. On that line you can go backwards or forwards. We'll never find this same Stallion Gate here again, but we can always find it on some cusp of time. If we could do that, we could meet those Chinese horsemen, too."
"I'll tell you about going back in the past," Groves snorted and filled his hand with caramels from his pocket. "The bitterest day of my l
ife was when I was ordered to rescue this project. I had just been offered my first combat command the week before. A soldier wants to see combat. My father was an Army chaplain, and even he saw combat. There I was, Army born and bred, ordered to spend history's greatest war at home overseeing a bunch of scientific prima donnas who, as far as I could tell, had sold the President a bill of goods." He popped a caramel into his mouth and ruminated. "Well, I don't run phony projects that don't show results. A lot of scientists and so-called geniuses tried to sell me a bill of goods on how to make this atomic bomb. The greatest American physicist is E. O. Lawrence. I like Lawrence. He put the cyclotron on the map and he won the Nobel Prize, but he's hardly produced a speck of uranium. Nevertheless, I will make this project a success. It's largely a matter of plumbing, albeit complicated." Oppy's eyes glittered with amusement. Groves wiped his fingers in the snow. "In fact, I have never been more positive of success than I am at this very moment, at this very place."
"This will be your monument," Oppy said.
"Monument?" Groves sighed. "After I built the Pentagon, I calculated that in my career I had moved enough earth and laid enough cement to build the pyramids of Cheops two hundred times over."
"This is a different kind of pyramid," Oppy suggested. "This has different blocks, some steel, some gold, some of water, some so radioactive you can't touch them or even come close to them, and the pyramid must be built according to a blueprint no one has ever seen."
"Let me tell you the kind of monument I want," Groves said. "I've seen the estimates of the casualties we're going to suffer in the invasion of Germany and Japan. I wouldn't mind a monument of a million American lives saved."
Groves' sincerity was ponderous and real and demanded silence. Embers slipped and rose.
"The Hindus say that the final vision of Brahma will be mist, smoke and sun, lightning and a moon." Oppy paced in front of the fire, too excited to be still. "Brahma would be a good name for the bomb."
Joe stood on the arc of the fire's light. Outside the arc were rattlesnakes curled up, cold and asleep under the snow. There was a whole map of winter sleep: mice balled up in burrows, toads suspended in mud, night jars tucked into the folds of the earth. Memory was out there, a map of women curled up in the dark. Japs.