Stallion Gate (21 page)

“Eighty-eight percent critical at three inches.” Harvey scanned the rolling graph. “The issue is the future after the war. Two inches, Joe.”

After the war the Army would close its bases in New Mexico, Joe thought. The soldiers would be coming home from Europe and the Pacific, though, and they’d flock to the Casa Mañana.

“Teller had the same fears. I’ll tell you what I told him: that if the issue is the world’s postwar future—and I agree it is—the only way to demonstrate the implausibility of any more war is to use this bomb, to make all mankind a witness. This, finally, will be the war to end all wars. Edward Teller will be with us at Trinity. In fact, I had hoped that you would do the countdown for the test.”

“Eighty-nine,” Harvey read.

The Geiger counter sounded like a bow drawn across
a bass string. The lights of the scaler flickered, drawing nervous red dashes.

“One more inch, Joe,” Harvey said.

“After the war there will have to be international control of all nuclear devices, and international cooperation for the peacetime uses of the atom. A sober, frightened world will do that, Harvey. But we will have to take the moral lead. We will share information with our allies.”

“With Russia?” Joe asked.

“Yes, with Russia. Of course,” Oppy said.

“Ninety percent. Half an inch, very slowly.”

The Geiger counter echoed an accelerating, snapping wave of electrons.

“The future is then,” Oppy said. “The war is now. The Japanese would use the bomb if they had it. They wouldn’t hesitate. They started this war. Our cause is just. It is written in the Bhagavad Gita that ‘There is a war that opens the gates of heaven. Happy are the warriors whose fate it is to fight such a war. Not to fight for righteousness is to abandon duty and honor.’ We scientists are soldiers, no more. We are on this mesa by an accident of history, because our nation has been attacked. We have no special competence in political or social or military affairs. We are not the people elected or trained to make those decisions. We are not an elite divinely chosen, simply because we are physicists, to govern mankind.”

“Stop.”

Closed to within an inch, the Dragon’s two bowls
nearly made a single gray moon, almost hiding an inner, brighter moon. There was a faint rise in the Geiger’s pitch, a touch more hysteria in the red lights.

“Still ninety percent,” Harvey said happily. It was just what he had predicted.

“Yes?” Oppy asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Ask Joe. This is why I wanted Joe along, because he is the only man you know who has actually fought. Speaking for the men who will be on the boats that will hit Japan in a few months’ time, Joe, what would you say to Harvey?”

You sly son-of-a-bitch, Joe thought. He took his hand from the button and found his thumb had cramped. He’d listened to the ticking of atomic particles, but what had filled the hangar were words, a web of them spreading and connecting from roof to floor. And all preamble to ensnare Harvey so that Joe could strike the final blow.

“Tell me, Joe,” Harvey said.

“Speaking for the boys in the boats,” Joe said, “I’d say you were a phony, I’d say you were lower than a Jap. I’d say you were actually a traitor.”

Harvey swallowed. The Geiger amplified electrons at the anode, ions at the cathode. Neutrons danced to the beat of lights.

“On the other hand …” Joe moved closer to the Dragon. “Speaking as a friend, I don’t think you should care what anyone says.” He leaned across the Dragon’s
near-moon and nearly buried core. “If you really think the bomb is that bad, then—”

Ticking soared into whine. Stylus flew from graph paper. The six scaler lights were solid red, flashing so fast that no intervals could be seen. The hydraulic piston dropped, carrying the bottom bowl with it, shaking the concrete pad of the floor. The silvery core lurched up to the lip of the bowl’s hollow, made an indolent circuit, then dropped heavily back into place. The whine plummeted. Red lights flashed again with a slow, regular pulse.

“What the hell was that?” Joe looked at the stylus, still vibrating free. A red line led off the paper. “The Dragon went off all by itself.”

“Don’t move!” Harvey began sketching on his clipboard.

Joe was close enough to Harvey to see him draw an outline of the room, the position of each man around the Dragon, equations, a curve of criticality. There was a foul greasiness to the air, a taste of melted paraffin.

Joe still wanted to finish what he was going to say, but the moment had gone. Imploded. Oppy knew it; the blue gaze said it. That was the color of Oppy’s eyes, Joe thought: ion-blue.

“You set me up.”

“I asked you to tell the truth and you did,” Oppy answered.

“I’m not done.”

“Yes, you are.”

Harvey stared up from his scribbling. “You did it!” he told Joe.

“Me?”

“The core was already near the margin of criticality. The human body is composed mostly of water—hydrogen dioxide—which reflects the neutrons. Oppy and I didn’t matter. You’re bigger. When you leaned over the Dragon, you triggered the counters.”

“You’re a more unpredictable factor than I’d thought,” Oppy said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Harvey said, “we got the data.”

“Well, are we radioactive now?” Joe asked.

“We’re fine,” Harvey said. “Nothing really happened.”

“Nothing really happened,” Oppy agreed.

They looked at Joe with twin scientific detachment, a sudden, palpable line between them and him. He stared back, for the first time his mind fully engaged. It was obvious that Oppy had won. What was interesting was Harvey’s surrender, his relief about it.

“You know,” Harvey said and turned to Oppy, “it occurs to me that the bomb would probably be flown to Japan. What if the plane crashed? Maybe I should run the Dragon in salt water.”

Even his Southwestern tonalities seemed to change subtly, to ape unconsciously Oppy’s Eastern croak. His stance shifted, his enthusiasm grew.

The effort of winning Harvey back had taken a toll on Oppy. Each crisis appeared to take an ounce of flesh, and now he looked cadaverous and more determined
than ever. He nodded proudly, encouraging the flow of ideas that was purely Harvey, until Harvey asked, “You really wanted me to count down Trinity?”

“I wanted an American physicist to do it,” Oppy answered, “and my first thought was you. An American voice.”

“Listen.” Joe broke the mood.

Oppy snapped, “What?”

“Just listen.”

Omega was hidden in tall pines, amid the calls of jays and canyon wrens, the wind tugging at treetops. It took a moment to hear the siren.

“Fire,” Harvey said.

They counted the blasts together. Oppy wore an ironic smile, as if disaster were only to be expected.

“Tech Area,” said Joe.

In the middle of the Hill, squeezed between the Main Drive and the mesa’s southern rim, the Tech Area held twenty-six nondescript buildings. Each structure was labeled with a placard from “A” to “Z,” but this was the only sense of order to them. Half were white Army clapboard, half green Army sheetrock. They were at all angles to one another and shared a military style that decreed that every side look like the back.

A transformer was burning. In some ways the fire was well located: at the back of the Tech Area, away from the gas stocks, cyclotron and particle accelerator, near the fire station and close to hydrants. But it had taken time to cut power to the transformer, and by the
time Joe and Oppy arrived, both power poles, cables, switching equipment and the high wooden fence around the transformer were throwing flames and creosote-black smoke into the afternoon. Because of the fence, firemen couldn’t get their hoses as close to the transformer as they wanted.

Watching the firemen and the fire was the whole population of the Tech Area: physicists from the cyclotron shack, soldiers from the boiler house, doctors from the medical labs, office clerks and, in front, the Indians who swept every building. A truckload of construction workers rolled up to join the spectators.

Oppy stared at the fire. “No, no, no,” he insisted.

His prayer was answered. The Texans leaped from the flatbed of the truck. As soon as they were off, the driver honked and moved toward the fire. The truck was an old Reo with a girder for a bumper, and as fire fighters ran from its path, the truck accelerated until it rammed through the burning fence and into the concrete barrier around the transformer. The truck backed up, lurched forward again and crashed into the burning gate of the fence. The driver rammed the fire a final time, taking out the other fence posts and shoveling more rubble into the transformer and around the base of the power poles. He backed into the clear, kicked open the cab door and hopped down like a rider who had just busted a cow in record time. He was big, in a blue work shirt and jeans, the only construction man in a shirt. He was young, with a fair crew cut and the
fluid, arrogant grace of an athlete. A hero. He thrust his left fist into the air. A southpaw.

While technicians swarmed around Oppy, as if the truck had been a manifestation of his will, Joe stood aside and was joined by Felix Tafoya. On the Hill, with his khaki work clothes and push broom, Felix was invisible; in Santiago, he was the calf cutter and brander, an honored figure. His nose had been kicked askew by a hoof years before.

“That
tejano
,” he told Joe, “that’s Hilario’s fighter.”

“Seen Hilario lately?”

“I’m cutting tomorrow. Hilario’s bringing someone who wants to see a real old-fashioned cutting.”

The fire chief led Oppy and Joe around the remains of the transformer. He was a civilian named Daley. Smoke had turned to a film of ash on his face, rubberized coat and boots. He coughed up phlegm dark as tar. Both high-voltage poles were charred and iridescent. Burned cables and wire floated on mud. Joe imagined that Daley was conducting the tour out of professional habit, as if they were stepping through the smoking bricks of a tenement.

“This is really what I wanted to show you and the sergeant.” Daley picked out of the mud a carved zigzag, half blistered gold, half blackened wood.

“The dancers had those at the pueblo,” Oppy said.

“It’s a lightning wand. It’s supposed to bring lightning,” Joe explained. “Did it?”

“People saw the bolt hit,” Daley said.

Oppy looked impatiently in the direction of his office.
When he glanced back, he was smiling. “Joe, arson by Indian wand is your department. You handle this. I can walk from here.”

“I heard some calves are being cut in Santiago tomorrow,” Joe said quickly. “I ought to be there in case any of them are hot.”

“Cows and wands are definitely your crucial responsibility. Just make sure you’re at the La Fonda by eleven. We have visitors coming.”

Oppy stepped out of the mire, slapped soot off his hat and headed in the direction of the administration building.

“Arson is what Captain Augustino says,” Daley told Joe. “He’s got a dozen of these sticks from different fires. Brush fires. He’d be here now, but he’s down at Trinity.”

“This is not an incendiary device,” Joe said and took the wand. “It’s a stick. Someone threw it in the fire. You have a lot of Indians up here.”

“They really think they can bring lightning?”

“They think they make the world go round.”

Joe noticed that the paint that remained on the wooden head had a micaceous glitter, a fancy Taos touch.

“If you say so.” Daley spat, grinned and wiped his chin. “Hell, you should know.”

Three hours of riding brought Joe to the far side of Santiago Canyon. There the foothills between the canyon and the mountains rose in swells of yellow rabbit brush. He had taken Oppy’s horse, the tall bay called Crisis. The stallion hadn’t been taken out for a month and it ate up the distance with an eager lope.

While he dismounted to water Crisis at a tank he saw the Indian Service riders crossing the rise ahead of him. Al and Billy halted to stand in their stirrups and examine the tank through binoculars, then moved on. Joe waited another minute in the shadow of the tank until a second pair of Service officers riding drag followed. When they were out of sight, he swung up on Crisis and started again toward the Jemez.

Though he rode in warm, glassy sunlight, a rare rain was falling in the Jemez, covering the peaks with a gray as faint as waves in a stone. As the trail ascended, it reached ponderosas, cedars, cattle bones and a new profusion of wildflowers. Where the canyon before it folded into the mountain was a mesa the general shape
of a battleship. He had to kick the horse up a steep path of loose stones to the top.

The mesa was not a mile long and less than a hundred yards across at its widest point. Cedar huddled over dwarf sage. The cedar was twisted and vigorous, half dead and half alive. It was the same with the cholla he saw, half green stem and half empty lattice. A trick to survival in the high desert was to bloom and die at the same time. Cedar made good firewood. A dead cedar branch could last for years if it didn’t touch the ground. He tied Crisis to a live bough and went the rest of the way on foot.

In the middle of the mesa were ruins, a worn knee-high grid of stone walls. The stones were volcanic ash. Adobe had long since washed away, along with any sense of what had been storeroom or living quarters. All a puzzle now, Joe thought. White nuggets in the stones were timber cinders a million years old. When he picked a cinder out, it turned to talcum between his fingers.

The only excavation on the mesa had been performed by animals. Between the walls were gopher mounds of soft earth, richly mixed with shards of pottery that were black, white, reddish brown, and bits of obsidian strewn like jewelry.

Joe sat down for a smoke next to a kiva filled in by a gooseberry bush. The sun dropped over the far side of the Jemez, turning clouds red, rung by rung.

“Hello, Joe.” Roberto and Ben Reyes stepped out of the cedars. They were in blankets and braids.

“Brought you some cigarettes.”

“How did you know we were here?” Ben asked.

“The clay. Sophie was seeing you and was getting her clay. This is the place.”