Stallion Gate (20 page)

Anna was shaking. “That was crazy.”

“Maybe. But we proved you’re here.” He moved his hand from hers, down to her necklace and shirt and the weight and heat of her breast, where he felt the accelerated rhythm of her heart. “And alive.”

The nimbus at the window became brighter and harder. For a moment Joe thought perhaps the moon had turned back, pulled by the pot’s dark flight, a vying gravity. If
he could raise the dead, he could raise the mountains and affect celestial bodies. The nimbus became a beam of light gently probing the dim outlines of lamp, table, chair rail, then a white shaft that poured through the window and filled the room. A car engine idled outside. It must have rolled in neutral on its own momentum all the way from the road behind the Reyeses’ yard.

“Who is it?” she asked.

He set the pot on the table and opened the door a crack to look out, but the headlights were too bright and whoever was in the car wasn’t getting out. “Can’t see,” he said.

He slipped his .45 from its holster and tucked the gun into his pants, then crouched below the light and pulled Anna into the kitchen. Through the shutters over the sink, he had a view of his jeep parked by the side of the house, of a cornfield, the stalks standing in ranks, and of the Reyeses’ yard. There was no more smoke in the yard. He remembered Sophie’s nightmare and deciphered it. Sophie said she saw a devil with yellow skin and a rifle. The silver horns were captain’s bars and the devil was Augustino. He didn’t know why the captain had come, but his own mind was decided. He eased the casement window open.

“Why not wait to find out?” Anna whispered.

“Because I think I know.”

He went out the window headfirst, rolling between the jeep and the wall of the house. There were no more cars, no footsteps, but Augustino was capable of coming alone. Joe rose, his back sliding against the corner of
the wall. He freed the .45 from his belt, cocked it and thumbed off the safety. As the wind brushed over the field, rows of corn dipped and rustled. Dogs were quiet. He heard nothing in the corral, nothing on the roof.

In one long step he swung around the corner of the house and through the headlights, and stuck the .45 in the face of the driver, a colored man wearing a tuxedo. The car was a Cadillac.

“Joe?” Pollack asked. His eyes opened so wide and white that they seemed to ooze. “Joe, don’t you shoot your bestest friend. Don’t do it.”

Joe let the gun drop and hang. “What the hell are you doing here at this hour?”

“Leaving you a note.” Fountain pen and paper were still frozen in Pollack’s spidery black hands. “How else can I get into communication with you working on the Hill? I can’t reach you there. All I can do is leave a note.”

“At this hour?”

“I didn’t know you’d be here. You were supposed to come by the Casa Mañana last weekend and sign those papers.”

“It’s been busy on the Hill. Sorry. If you have the papers, I’ll sign them right here.”

“I have them,” Pollack said, although he made no move to produce them now that he’d regained his composure. “Know what the buyers want to do? They want to tear down the club and build garden apartments. They have the money.”

“That’s what counts.”

Pollack sighed. “A sad end for the Casa Mañana.”

“You’ll have a new club in New York.”

“But it will be one of many good clubs in New York. There was only
one
good club in New Mexico. It was the best, right?”

“The best. You have the papers?”

“The only
authentic
jazz in New Mexico. Even if I was gone, it would be like a last laugh.”

“You want me to sign or not?”

“They’re from Fort Worth, the buyers. I heard them talking to each other. Calling me ‘Rastus’ and ‘tar baby.’ Called me ‘the dinge’ in my own club. Joe, can you get your hands on fifty thousand dollars? If you can, the Casa Mañana is yours. Club, license, lot, everything.”

Joe carefully slid on the gun’s safety and tucked it in his pants. “Half price?”

“For you.”

“Serious?”

“Have I ever joked about the club?”

“There are laws about Indians drinking liquor, let alone serving it.”

“There are laws about bootlegging, and your father was a bootlegger. Afraid?” Pollack smiled a yellow grin. “You want it or not?”

“I want it,” Joe said and knew at the same time: the future was here. The future had coasted toward him in a silent Cadillac. “I want it.”

“You have the fifty thousand dollars now?”

“I need a month.”

“A week. Eddie Junior’s coming in from Italy, and I’m going to be there at the dock.”

After pocket money and black market profits, Joe had a little over $15,000. Even if he sold all the tires and nylons he could lay his hands on, he still couldn’t raise another $500 in a week, and he’d be leaving for Trinity in ten days.

“Two weeks. If I don’t have the money for you then, you can still sell for twice as much and blow the difference on Eddie’s ‘welcome home’ party.”

Pollack gave his hand through the window. “Two weeks, Joe, not one day more. We’ll show the white trash what this war was all about.”

Joe watched the Cadillac roll away down the road and across the dark plaza. When he turned around, Anna was standing in the doorway. He didn’t know how long she’d been there or how much she’d heard. Some ghost of the headlights still seemed to play on her and the house.

Joe Peña’s Casa Mañana.

Omega Site was a hangar at the bottom of Los Alamos Canyon, a natural trench of basalt and pines deep and narrow enough to shield the Tech Area a mile away from any explosion. The hangar itself was divided by a cement barrier. One side was occupied by the miniature reactor that Fermi called his Water Boiler. On the other side was an experiment of Harvey’s called Tickling the Dragon’s Tail.

A croquet-sized ball of plutonium coated in glittering nickel was the Dragon, the core of the bomb. It nestled snugly in a twenty-inch paraffin bowl on top of a hydraulic piston. Over it, suspended facedown by a chain, was a second, hollow bowl of paraffin. The idea was to check whether an outer sphere of high explosive lenses would, simply by being in place around a nearly critical core, reflect enough neutrons for the plutonium to go critical and explode prematurely and relatively ineffectively. The paraffin was mixed with sooty-gray carbon flour so that it had basically the same atomic makeup
as high explosive, without the risk, in case of mishap, of wiping out the eastern end of the canyon.

Only Harvey, Joe and Oppy were in Omega. Harvey’s usual Critical Assembly team was scouting Trinity, and Fermi’s team refused to be near the hangar when the Dragon’s Tail was being tickled. Harvey had protested that at least two physicists had to be present for the experiment, and Oppy had answered that while General Groves had done his best to convert him into an administrator, he was still a physicist. Oppy especially insisted that Joe stay and push the red and green hydraulic buttons on the wall that raised the lower bowl holding the Dragon up to the hanging hollow bowl.

Drawn up to the Dragon on steel tables were a Geiger counter, a neutron scaler that measured radiation with a bank of six red lights, and another radiation graph that drew a red line on rolling paper. If the Dragon got too hot and Joe didn’t react in time, the three counters were wired to drop the hydraulic piston, lower bowl and core to the floor.

Wearing a long white lab coat, Harvey plotted the curve of criticality with a slide rule and clipboard. “Raise it ten inches,” he said.

Joe pushed the green button as Oppy continued the argument that had gone on all morning.

“You say, Harvey, that the Japanese are all but defeated. By any rational measure, they should be, I agree. You think it would be feasible to set off the bomb in a publicly announced demonstration. An island in Tokyo Bay would be ideal, somewhere they could bring their
best scientists and generals. If we do drop the bomb on them, you want it to be employed against a remote, purely military target, a base as far as possible from civilians. You don’t see why women and children should die simply because we want to make a point. You add that there are American POWs in a number of the Japanese cities we may have contemplated attacking. You believe that if we are the first nation to use such a weapon we will be historically tainted, that we will sacrifice the goodwill of the entire world. Much worse, you fear an armaments race, a building of horrible weapon after horrible weapon such as mankind has never known and cannot survive. That our actually using such a weapon in war will poison any chance of international agreement about the future control of such apocalyptic devices. Lastly, we bear the direct and special responsibility of these weapons because we are the men and women who created them. Who should say how and if these weapons are to be used if not us? Is that a fair summation of your arguments?”

These indeed were Harvey’s points better than he himself had put them. Abashed, he kept his eyes to the clipboard. “Eight inches more.”

“We all have the same nightmares,” Oppy said as he walked, hands in jacket pockets, toes out, around Harvey, the tables, the Dragon. “These are the years of nightmares, and they are not ended yet. If you quit before Trinity, I would not blame you. I’d envy you.” He lifted his gaunt face, evidence of his fatigue. “We’d all envy you.”

Joe did figures in his head. By calling in loans and cashing his last gas coupons and travel vouchers, he could bring his bankroll to $20,000. How could he more than double it in two weeks? How much scotch and commissary sugar could a man sell?

Maybe high explosives were the answer. Hilario had mentioned contractors down in Albuquerque. With a couple of mules, he could clean out the magazine bunkers on Two Mile Mesa.

“To go up into the mountains for a year,” Oppy said. “Not see a headline or hear a radio. Not come down until the entire, awful thing is over.”

Harvey glanced at Joe for psychic support. “Five inches.”

Assuming he got the money together, there was the problem of musicians. He could only afford a couple of men from New York or Kansas City. He’d have to use some Mexicans. Horn players. There was a trolley that ran from Juarez to El Paso, and he could slip them over the border that way.

As the two bowls came within a foot of each other the Geiger counter started to concentrate on what was happening, taking a definite interest. The scaler measured fast neutrons by multiplication. One light for two neutrons, two lights for four. Up to six lights for sixty-four escaping particles, then starting over again. The red lights blinked like eyes rousing from a nap.

“It won’t be over soon.” Oppy’s voice took a sharper tone. “The Japanese didn’t give up on Iwo Jima or Okinawa. They will fight ten times harder on their own
islands. It won’t be just kamikaze planes. Army intelligence says they’re building kamikaze boats and teaching people to strap dynamite to their chests. The estimate I’ve seen for the invasion is one million casualties. Japanese and American, soldiers and civilians.”

“Four inches,” Harvey said.

There was a bar and kitchen to stock. Utilities, water, linen. It might be tricky, getting around the liquor laws on Indians. He might not be allowed to pour a bottle even if he owned the place.

The Dragon shone like ice.

“A demonstration on an island sounds like a good idea,” Oppy said. “With a bunker for the Emperor and his generals. But what if a single enormous blast didn’t convince the Japanese that it was caused by a single weapon? We can barely convince
our
generals, let alone theirs. And what if the bomb was a dud?”

“Eighty percent critical.” Harvey watched the red line on the graph paper, and then for the first time answered Oppy. “The uranium bomb works.”

“We have two bombs. The uranium bomb we think will work, and the plutonium bomb we hope will work. We don’t have enough refined uranium to make another. The plutonium bomb must be tested at Trinity. We can get more plutonium, though it won’t matter if Trinity doesn’t work. The point is, we have none to expend on good intentions and mere fireworks.” Oppy spoke through a veil of weariness. “God knows, I wish we did. But the invasion will be carried out before bad weather sets in over the Japanese islands. It won’t be
postponed while we build more bombs or while we negotiate when and where the Emperor should sit for a better view of a peaceful demonstration. Should he come to Trinity? Trinity is in twelve days. Stop time for me, Harvey. Give me more bombs and a cushion for the divine Emperor to sit on and watch.”

“Three more inches, Joe. Then at least a base, Oppy, not a city.”

“A waste. A waste of the bomb and a waste of the soldiers. The Japanese would censor every report and all that would be left would be a wisp of smoke and rumors. You know the blast effects, Harvey. There wouldn’t even be that much to see in a camp—not like a city, not like buildings.”

“Not like civilians?”

“A target that will end the war, Harvey.”

“Civilians and American POWs?”

“They’ll put POWs in every city. And how many more POWs and dead and wounded will there be after the invasion? How many cities will we conventionally bomb off the map? How many American graves?”

“I didn’t become a physicist to learn how to vaporize Japanese.” Harvey’s voice rose.

“None of us did.” Oppy’s voice became nearly tender. “But you tell a mother of a young soldier who died on the beach of Japan—and there will be many thousands of them—that you had a bomb that could have ended the war and that you chose not to use it. Tell his wife. Tell his children.”

The Geiger counter ticked like a speeded clock. The
scaler lights multiplied rapidly now that the two bowls were only eight inches apart. In the shadow between, the ball still glittered, like a note between two cymbals. A chain reaction of one kilogram of plutonium released as much energy as thirty-four million pounds of TNT, Joe had heard. Some percussion.

“The issue is not the weapon, Harvey, but the war. Ending the war and saving us from the hideous slaughter to come.”

The trade-off for that kind of power was an alpha radiation that could destroy first the borrow, then the kidney. Everyone knew that the doctors on the Hill refused any responsibility for the Dragon.