Los Alamos (16 page)

“You new on the site?” He was one of those people whose most innocent question came out like a challenge, as if he hadn’t learned to mask some fundamental belligerence. Connolly imagined him starting a bar fight, a redneck quick to take offense.

“Just down for the day. Guard duty.”

“No shit. Join the club.” He grinned, easier now that Connolly had explained himself. He flashed a security badge to establish club contact. “Who’d you draw?”

“Oppenheimer.”

He grunted. “You’re lucky. He never stays over. You don’t want to stay here. No fucking way.”

“You been down here long?”

“Twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight fucking days. They moved a bunch of us down last month. Let me tell you, this is about the hardest time there is.”

Connolly looked at him with interest. He thought he’d already talked to everybody in the intelligence unit. No one had mentioned transfers to Trinity. “Yeah, it’s hot.”

“It ain’t the heat. We got heat in East Texas. It’s the Mickey Mouse. They got this tighter than a rat’s ass. Nobody goes out. There ain’t nothing to do but shoot rattlers. The well water’s got all this shit in it so’s you can’t drink it—gypsum and stuff—but you wash in it so everybody gets the runs anyway. You got to stamp on scorpions in the latrine. Said they wanted only the best for Trinity duty, so naturally we all thought it was something special. It is.”

“So what do you guard?”

“Them Gila lizards mostly. There ain’t nothing
down
here to guard. Worst problem they got is all the antelope tripping over the sensor wires they got running everywhere.”

“That’s why they shoot them?”

“Yeah, that’s the excitement. Just the shooting. Nothing to eat and nothing to fuck. At least they got women on the Hill. Once some of the WACs came down to keep us company, but they don’t put out, never, so what the fuck?”

Connolly put out his cigarette. “Well, it won’t be much longer.”

“According to who?”

Connolly shrugged. “What do they tell you?”

“You kidding me? Brother, they don’t tell us nothing. We’re not supposed to know. They told us when Roosevelt died—that’s it. For all I know, the war’s over.”

“It’s not,” Connolly said.

The kid took off his hat to wipe his forehead, the skin now turned permanently red under the short blond hair. “Well, I got to get going. I was just on my break. Nice talking to you.”

Connolly looked at him to see if he was joking, but the face was earnest.

“Watch out for the centipedes, they sting like hell.”

“I’ll do that. Mind if I ask you a question?”

The kid, about to move away, turned toward him, his eyes suddenly wary. Connolly had seen the look before, the automatic reaction of someone used to the police, the legacy of too many Saturday night brawls that had got out of hand. He waited.

“When you were on the Hill, did you know a guy called Karl Bruner?”

“Karl?” he said, looking puzzled. “Sure. He was G-2. Everybody knew him. Why?”

“He’s dead.”

“Karl?” He was genuinely surprised. So not even gossip had penetrated the news blackout. Or maybe nobody had cared.

“He was killed.”

“No shit. How?”

“He was murdered.”

The kid stared at him. “You kidding me?” he said quietly.

“No. He was found in the river park in Santa Fe, off the Alameda. You hadn’t heard?”

“I told you, we don’t hear nothing down here. Who did it?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“You’re a cop,” he said, an accusation, as if Connolly should have declared himself earlier.

“No. Army Intelligence. We’re looking into it on our own.”

“I don’t understand. What happened?”

Connolly watched his reaction as he answered. “We don’t know. The police think it might have been a homosexual murder.”

It was a surprise punch. The kid caught his breath with a nervous laugh of disbelief. “That’s fucking crazy.”

“Why?”

“Why? Karl wasn’t any fruit.”

“How do you know?”

He sputtered. “How do I know? He just wasn’t, that’s all. Christ Almighty. Karl?”

“Did you know him well?”

“He was just a guy in the office. He used to give me duty assignments after I came off the mounteds.”

“So you don’t know who his friends were? Whether he was seeing anybody?”

“No.”

“Okay. I just thought you might have noticed something. He talk to you much?”

“Some.”

“What about?”

“Nothing. Stuff. You know.”

“What kind of stuff?”

He hesitated for a minute, and Connolly could see him debating with himself, embarrassed.

“Did he ask about your girlfriends?” Connolly said, steering him.

“Like whether I was getting any? Yeah, he asked that.”

“And you liked to tell him.”

“Go fuck yourself,” he said, angry now.

“No, it’s important. Did you get the sense that he was interested or just making conversation to make you
think
he was interested?”

But this was too complicated for him, and he looked at Connolly blankly. “He was interested. He liked to know where you could go, things like that.”

“And who?”

“Sometimes.”

“And did you tell him?”

He darted his eyes away, searching for a way out, wondering how they had got here. “Sometimes.”

“But he was just curious? He didn’t want the names for himself?”

“No,” he said, seeing the implication, “but not because he was a fruit. He was already fucking somebody.”

Connolly was quiet, unsure where to go with this. It was possible that in the Texan’s mind, bored and adolescent, somebody always had to be fucking somebody. It was possible that Bruner had used this as a cover, a lure for a braggart’s gossip. But it was just possible that it was true, the missing link.

“What makes you think so?”

“I don’t know—things he said, I guess. You know, like he’d say he had a date.”

“Those exact words? He had a date?”

“Something like that. Yeah, exact, I guess. I didn’t pay much attention.”

“He mention a name? How did you know it was a woman?”

The Texan flushed. “Well, what else? Jesus Christ. I mean, why would he want to hear about what I was doing if he was a fruit?”

“That’s a good question.”

“What do you mean by that?” It was at once hostile and uncertain, as if the situation were so foreign to him that he wasn’t sure he should resent it.

“Did he ever ask for any sexual details? You know—”

“No. You don’t talk about stuff like that.”

“So it was just ‘I had a good time last night,’ or ‘Boy oh boy, you should see—’ ”

“Yeah. Like that. Nothing dirty. Look, he asked. What was I supposed to say?”

“Maybe your reputation preceded you. Maybe he was looking for pointers.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“So how often did you guys compare notes?”

“For two cents I’d push your face in. You got a right to ask all this, I suppose?”

“All the way up to Groves himself.”

“Shit,” he said, disgusted. “Look, you’re making a big deal out of this. It’s just the way guys talk. You know. Every once in a while.”

“I thought you were scoring all the time.”

“Hey, more than you, I’ll bet,” he said, sullen, childlike.

“You’d win that one,” Connolly said, smiling. “Listen, I don’t care if you fuck around. More power to you. I just want to know what you said about it to a murder victim.”

“I don’t know nothing about that. The guy liked to kid around once in a while, that’s all. We didn’t compare notes. He had something going all by himself. And then they broke it up, I think. Anyway, he didn’t say anything much lately, so that’s what I figured. And then I came down here. I was just kidding around, you know? Not some federal case. He liked to listen. He was that kind of guy. And he wasn’t no fruit.” He said this with emphasis, as if it were important to him that Connolly agree.

“I wonder how you can be so sure.”

“I’d
know
. I’d just know.” He drew himself up, almost physically taking a stand.

“You got a lot of them down in East Texas, huh?”

“Not alive.”

There were four other security guards who’d been reassigned from the Hill, and by dusk Connolly had interviewed them all without learning anything he didn’t already know. Oppenheimer still hadn’t returned as he lined up with the others for dinner, so preoccupied that he barely noticed the food filling his tray. He sat with a group of machinists who were working on protective aluminum goggles to keep off the alkali dust. It was cooler now in the mess and he lingered over coffee, even after the men at his table had filed out for an open-air movie. He smiled at the idea of one of Hannah’s nightclubs lighting up a patch of the nighttime desert. Even here, in the Jornada del Muerto, people danced. He stirred the coffee and absentmindedly played with the spoon, lifting it out of the cup, then lowering it to watch the coffee rise.

“Displacement theory,” Eisler said, interrupting his thoughts. “You see how scientific principles never change. First Archimedes in his bath, now a coffee spoon. May I join you?”

Connolly smiled and opened his hand to the empty chair. “Did he really run through the streets naked, shouting ‘Eureka’?”

“I hope so,” Eisler said. “It makes a lovely story. But perhaps only after he’d written his report to the scientific committee.”

“In duplicate. With copies for the file.”

“Yes.” He smiled. “In duplicate.” His soft eyes were tired, his skin pink from the sun. He leaned forward over the tray as he ate, his shoulders slumped in the same concession to weariness Connolly had noticed in Oppenheimer. While he had been looking at the desert and toying with an overgrown teenager, they had been working hard.

“Where’s Pawlowski?” Connolly said.

“Oh, he won’t be coming back with us tonight. He’s here for the week, poor devil.”

Connolly felt a surge of happiness, so sudden and unexpected that he was afraid it would show. A week.

“I hope you had some rest,” Eisler was saying. “Oppie doesn’t like to drive, and it’s difficult for me to see at night. Such a long drive. It would be better, you know, to stay the night.”

“No, we need to get back,” Connolly said, now eager to start.

Eisler misinterpreted him and smiled again. “Yes, it’s not the Adlon here, I agree. Think of Daniel. All day at Station South. Every step you have to watch.”

“Snakes?”

Eisler shuddered. “Or scorpions. Who knows? I confess, I am a coward in the desert.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“Am I allowed to tell you? Is this a security test?”

Connolly shrugged. “I’m pretty safe. I won’t understand it anyway.”

“The instruments to measure the radioactivity. Not the actual, of course. Simulated, at low level.”

“The test isn’t the real thing?” Connolly asked, surprised.

Eisler smiled. “This is for the test before the test. Only this time, TNT, one hundred tons, to study blast effects. Actually, to test our instruments. So we put one thousand curies of fission products in the pile to simulate the radioactive material. I’m sorry, do you understand this?”

“I understand one hundred tons of TNT. My God.”

Eisler smiled weakly. “That’s the trial run only. The gadget will produce more, as many as—well, nobody really knows. They have a pool to guess. A game, you see.” His sad voice trailed off in thought. “How many tons of TNT blast can we produce with one gadget? A hundred? Five thousand? More? We cannot know yet.”

“How many tons did you bet?”

“Me? I don’t bet, Mr. Connolly. It’s not a lottery.”

“But think?”

“Twenty thousand tons,” Eisler said matter-of-factly.

Connolly stared at him, appalled. “Twenty thousand,” he repeated flatly, as if he were trying to confirm the figure.

“My friend,” Eisler said softly, “what do you think we are doing here? Why do you think we call it a gadget? Security code? I don’t think so. Maybe we don’t want to remind ourselves what it is we are making. Yes, twenty thousand tons. My calculations are quite precise. I would bet on it.” He smiled ironically. “Of course, we can’t yet calculate the dispersion. There are no good formulas for radioactivity. Even our Daniel recognizes that.”

Connolly felt stunned by the figures. They were calmly talking in a makeshift mess hall in the desert; the rest was beyond imagining. He could only fall back on the details of what was real, like a terminal patient still interested in medical procedure.

“Is that what you do too?” he asked. “Measure radioactivity?”

“Partly. We are not allowed to say, you know.”

“You work with Frisch in G Division, Critical Assemblies Group.”

Eisler flinched, surprised. “How do you know that?” Connolly didn’t say anything. “I see. Another test. So if you know, why do you ask?”

“I know where you work. I don’t know what it means.”

“So. Do you know fast neutrons? Do you know critical mass? How can I explain?” His eyes looked around the table, searching for props. “How much uranium do we need for the gadget—that’s the problem. We know it theoretically, but how to test the theory?” He moved Connolly’s coffee cup to the space between them. “Suppose this coffee were U-235. If we took enough, if we reached critical mass, there would be a chain reaction and, of course, the explosion. But when does that happen? So we take the coffee we think we need but we keep a hole in the middle—you must use your imagination here, I’m afraid—so the neutrons can escape. No reaction. The spoon will be the coffee we took out.” He held it over the cup. “If we lower it, like this, the neutron bombardment increases, the chain reaction accelerates. You have then the conditions for an atomic explosion.”

“But not the explosion.”

“We cheat a little—we use uranium hydride so it reacts more slowly. And we drop the slug very quickly. But yes, when we pass through the core,” he said, letting the spoon fall in, “we momentarily form a critical mass. It’s as close as we can come to an atomic explosion without having one. Of course, you can also produce this effect by simply stacking cubes of U-235 in a tamper of beryllium blocks. A critical assembly. But the other is more sophisticated. Perhaps also a little safer.”