“Oh, don’t let this fool you,” Oppenheimer said, raising his glass. “We start early here. Officially at eight, and I’m afraid I’ve got a meeting scheduled first thing, so we’ll have to make it earlier. I do apologize-not very civilized, is it? But Janice will get you a good cup of coffee-the commissary stuff is swill-and besides, it’s really the best part of the day here. Wonderful for riding. Do you ride?”
“No. Just the subways.” The phrase was involuntary, a casual signaling of the distance between his New York and the Riverside Drive where Oppenheimer had grown up, busy with lessons and parties and privilege. But Oppenheimer seemed not to notice.
“That’s a shame. We’ve still got a few horses left from the ranch school, and there’s nothing like it in the mornings. Wonderful trails up the mountains, all the way to the caldera. Well, maybe someone will give you a few lessons-there’s nothing to staying on.”
“I doubt I’ll have the time.”
It might have been rude, but Oppenheimer caught it and chose to ignore it.
“No, none of us have that, do we? Less and less. But we must have some of this,” he said, gesturing with his cigarette to the dancing, “or we’d all get very dull. I expect you’ll be especially busy.” He looked directly at Connolly. “But we’ll discuss all that tomorrow. Have another drink?” He turned toward the table to find his colleague still standing there, waiting to continue the interrupted conversation. “Friedrich, I am so sorry. Let me introduce Mr. Connolly. Professor Eisler.”
Connolly looked up at the tall, graying man with soft, almost liquid eyes, but after a shy nod, Eisler ignored him. “We were discussing Planck’s lectures,” Oppenheimer said politely. “Hardly anybody reads them anymore, which is a pity.” But Eisler now had all his attention again, and Connolly saw how much of Oppenheimer’s charm lay in exclusion-you were so interesting there wasn’t room for anyone else. What could be more flattering than attention? Connolly wondered if the scientists fought for it like students, all of them eager for their private time with him. Even he had felt his spirit dim slightly when the light passed to someone else. And it was all done gently, with flawless courtesy. He had not been dismissed but released to drift.
He wandered slowly around the room, thinking he’d have one more drink before heading for bed. The altitude and his sudden letdown had made him lightheaded, and he worried that he had passed the point of making sense of what he saw. The whole party seemed improbable. The ordinary people stumbling out of time to country music had won Nobel prizes. The young American kid in cowboy boots might be an expert in quantum mechanics. The man in the boxy suit holding a brownie might be-what? A chemist, a metallurgist, a mathematician? The two nattily dressed gentlemen, refugees from a gossipy afternoon tea party, might be discussing critical-mass geometry or, for that matter, the real secrets of the universe. Nothing was farfetched here. People lived in air as rarefied as the altitude. And it must be just as exhilarating for them. Their ideas could leap from one mind to another, racing with the excitement of meeting none of the usual resistance of the ordinary world. The army had strung wires around them to keep the rest out, and it had worked. With all the bad water and dirt roads and inconvenience, they lived in a state of excitement. Everybody was intelligent; everything was possible. Something as ordinary as a murder victim seemed almost vulgar, an unfair intrusion.
The band played a few foxtrots and even one faltering lindy, but they were lining up another square dance when Connolly got his drink. Warm from the liquor, he stood against the wall not far from the punch bowl, trying to catch a breeze from the open doors at the end of the room. The vanished Mills had reappeared on the dance floor, linking arms with an attractive young girl and dancing with surprising ease. She was looking up at him as if, his prediction right, she wanted to marry him. Next to her a formally dressed, swarthy man with luxuriant eyebrows scowled in concentration. Connolly became fixated on the eyebrows; they arched over the man’s eyes like dormers, tufts spilling out on top and then running off in unexpected corkscrews on the side. His partner, a pleasant-looking woman in a print dress and sensible shoes, never looked at him but stared straight ahead, a smile fixed on her face. Connolly began making up stories for them. Given another drink, he could do this all night.
“Lovely, isn’t it?” she said. “Norman bloody Rockwell.”
