“You’ve got an eight o’clock in five minutes,” she said.
“Right.” Oppenheimer glanced at his watch and stood.
“Where this time?”
“B Building. You’ll need the Critical Assemblies notes.”
“Walk with me, would you?” Oppenheimer said to Connolly, an apologetic command, putting the cigarette in his mouth to pick up a thick folder from the desk. And then he was out the door, leaving Connolly to trail after him.
“I don’t like where this is going,” Oppenheimer said as they walked through the Tech Area, nodding to people in a kind of civilian salute. “And I suggest you leave the poor man in peace. And his friends-if he had any, which I doubt. You keep forgetting he was forty miles away when this happened. That’s not exactly slipping out behind the bushes here for a little refreshment. Maybe he felt he needed the distance. Maybe there were no opportunities here. I don’t know.”
“But you admit that it would be useful to find someone who does, who could tell us about his life.”
“Yes,” he said reluctantly, “Of course I see that. But how do you propose to do that? Go through the library cards to see who checks out Andre Gide?”
Connolly smiled involuntarly at the Berkeley view of the world. In B Building they stopped in front of an open door. Over Oppenheimer’s shoulder, Connolly could see the scientists already assembled, canvas director’s chairs forming an impromptu circle around a portable blackboard. Half the board was filled with a chalk diagram, a ring of pointed arches surrounding a core, like a flower folded inward. A short man in a rumpled double-breasted jacket was filling the other half with the hieroglyphics of higher mathematics, numbers and squiggles as meaningless to Connolly as a lost language. No one turned around. Most of the men were wearing jackets and ties, but a few in open-necked shirts sat back in the chairs, legs draped casually over the arm, chins resting on pointed fingers in concentration. The rowdy hospitality of the dance was gone, replaced by an intense quiet, as if they were straining to hear, not read, the chalk scratching across the board. Connolly didn’t know what he had expected-lab coats and Bunsen burners and tubes-but instead he felt himself back at Fordham, eager and attentive, waiting for Father Healy to begin the day’s assignment. They were making war in a classroom. But what were they actually saying inside? The room seemed as closed to him as Karl’s life.
“I found some prophylactics in his room. He must have been having sex with someone.”
Oppenheimer sighed. “Oh, how I wish this had never happened. Well, do what you have to. Could I simply ask that you start at the scene of the crime, as they say, before you leap to conclusions and start interviewing everyone on the Hill? The work has to come first,” he said, indicating the sounds of the room behind him.
“I intend to. The likelihood is he was so afraid of his secret that he went as far away as he could go before he could trust anyone with it.”
“Yes, that’s possible. Except for his being afraid. Bruner was never afraid of anything.” He drew on his cigarette, thinking. “It was probably the deviousness of it that appealed to him. Not a very trusting sort, Bruner. Well, what did he have to be trusting about? Of course, I suppose that came in handy in his job.”
“You found him devious?”
“I hardly knew him,” he said. “Devious may be unfair. He was a survivor. Quite literally. I think we’re always a bit surprised to find survivors often aren’t very nice. Goes against the grain, doesn’t it? We’d like to think it’s the noble spirit that pulls us through, when so often-Well. I sometimes think there isn’t any moral quality to it at all. A purely neutral act. Like the insects. But then, who are we to say? Don’t you often wonder what you would do to survive? I don’t know how Bruner got through it, all those terrible things, but it didn’t make him any nicer. I know it’s unkind of me, after all that suffering, but he always struck me as something of a shit.”
The drive down from the mesa was spectacular. The morning was beautiful, and under the cloudless blue sky the land stretched out for miles, waves of pink and brown earth dotted with clumps of pinons rolling all the way to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the far distance. After the busy claustrophobia of the base, the country felt even larger, and Connolly’s spirits rose to meet it the minute he passed through the gate. The fences and sentry boxes were behind, ahead only the bright freedom of the high desert. Mills had told him that Oppenheimer had selected the site-he’d had a vacation ranch in the area, about sixty miles away-and Connolly wondered if this was another of those paradoxes he relished, working with the smallest particles of matter in one of the most open landscapes in the world.
