“One more thing,” Groves said, putting his damp jacket on. “You want me to go out on a limb for you. No questions. So just tell me one thing: what do you think the odds are this can actually work?”
Connolly shook his head. “The odds are always good when it’s the only hand you’ve got.”
His bravado evaporated as he walked toward the infirmary. How many times did a long shot come in? Except this time it wasn’t just the bet, it was what he’d have to use to make it. Everything would depend on her. It wasn’t right. But it had sat there, his only idea, and he’d had to pick it up. He wondered, in that moment, why he’d jumped at it, excited by something he knew was wrong, then caught in a tangle of inevitability, deaf now even to himself. Could he lose her? No, he’d stop if it came to that. He thought of Eisler in his lab, those desperate seconds lowering the cube before it went critical. The trick was to stop in time, before the dragon turned. But what if it took on a life of its own? What if simply starting the process demanded its only conclusion? He looked around the Hill-clothes near the McKee units flapping on lines in the bright, dry air; a repairman high up on one of the overhead transformers; soldiers in jeeps-and it seemed to him utterly ordinary. Everyone was just getting on with the day, making a bomb.
In the infirmary, someone was sitting on Eisler’s bed. He took in the bruised side of the face, the bandage over the forehead cut, before he recognized Corporal Batchelor.
“What happened to you?”
“I walked into a door,” Batchelor said, his voice flat. Next to the neat pile of Eisler’s effects, his battered face was jarring, the disorder of violence. “How did you hear?” he asked, embarrassed.
“I didn’t. I came for these. Are you all right?”
The boy nodded.
“That must have been some door,” Connolly said, moving toward Eisler’s things. “You going to let him get away with it?”
The soldier shrugged. “It was just a door. I’ll live.”
“The unfriendly kind.”
The boy smiled weakly, wincing a little from the cut at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, the big unfriendly kind. I’ll have to be more careful at the PX.”
“Maybe next time you should just stay away,” Connolly said. Then, hearing the tone of his voice, “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“It’s all right,” the soldier said, his face weary. “I had it coming.”
“Nobody has it coming,” Connolly said, suddenly angry for him, then aware that he didn’t know anything about it. What was it like living this way? Was every meeting a risk? He thought again of the ordinary world outside, so bright that it made any other invisible. And then it occurred to him that it might have been a different kind of misstep, the wrong question. Connolly’s fault.
“This didn’t have anything to do with-I mean, I hope you weren’t-”
“Snooping?” The boy shook his head. “No. Nothing like that. Just a door. I never heard a word, by the way. Since you ask.”
“I know. He wasn’t-we made a mistake.”
The boy looked at him. “So what was it?”
“We know it wasn’t that. Don’t worry. Nobody’s going to bother anybody.”
He nodded his head again. “Good. I’m glad about that, anyway.”
“So don’t go banging into any more doors. Not because of that.”
The soldier shrugged. “I’m just a bad judge of character, that’s all. I never was good at that. How about you?”
The question caught Connolly off-guard, as if it had come from another conversation. “Not very. Sometimes.” He moved to gather up Eisler’s things. “I still think you’ve got a lot of guts, though.”
The smile this time was fuller, a wry grimace. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“I also think you’re a damned fool to let him get away with it. You ought to turn the bastard in.”
When Batchelor looked up at him, his eyes seemed almost pleading. “I can’t. Don’t you know that? That’s the way it works. I can’t.”
Connolly thought about him as he walked toward Eisler’s apartment, carrying the valise. It shouldn’t be that easy to get hurt. He wondered what would happen to Batchelor after the war, when he would drift off the Hill to some other life, hidden from Connolly and everyone else until it showed up again on his face.
