“Hmm. Like the radio.” He exhaled, thinking. “Hardworking-enjoys working. Bethe thinks the world of him. Determined, even stubborn,” he said, playing with it now, as if he were composing an applicant’s recommendation. “Wonderful mind, but interior. I’ve always thought that physics became a substitute world for him, but that’s just a guess. Actually, it’s not so unusual here-we’re all a little interior. No patience with showboating. He can be a little-what does Herr Goebbels call us? Stiff-necked. Thinks Teller’s an ass, for instance, and wouldn’t work for him. Not a homosexual either, by the way.”
“No. I’ve met his wife.”
“Emma? Yes. She’s quite a girl.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning she’s quite a girl. English. Most beautiful rider I’ve ever seen. You have to be brought up with it to ride that well.”
“Unusual marriage.”
“Is it? I wouldn’t know. I think all marriages are unusual unless you happen to be in them.”
“No, I mean coming from such different backgrounds.”
He laughed. “Don’t be such a snob. You obviously don’t know the English. Least conventional people in the world-once you get to the gentry level, anyway. She fought in Spain, you know, so there must be a wild streak somewhere. You should watch her ride. You can tell everything about an Englishwoman by the way she rides.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “On the other hand, what could it possibly matter to you?”
He dropped it lightly, like an ash on the seat, and for a minute Connolly didn’t know what to say.
“It doesn’t.”
“Just looking at everything,” Oppenheimer said. “I had no idea you were casting your net quite this wide.” He paused, waiting for Connolly to respond. “She’s an attractive woman.”
“Yes, she is,” Connolly said flatly. He felt, talking to Oppenheimer, that he was always moving a piece into place. But the game was unfair-it didn’t matter to Oppenheimer, so he didn’t have to play carefully. “I was wondering. The way science works? If you guess wrong, there won’t be any connections to make, will there?”
“No, not if you guess wrong.”
Connolly let it drop. Then, annoyed at himself for having somehow started it in the first place, he grew even more annoyed at not knowing whether Oppenheimer had meant anything or not. It was a reporter’s instinct to hide behind a one-way mirror, not revealing anything himself. Now he felt he was too close to the surface, unreliable, as if the slightest poke would show his hand.
“Dr. Eisler said something interesting the other night.”
“That’s unusual,” Oppenheimer said, bored. “Friedrich doesn’t usually say anything. Maybe you have a gift for drawing people out.”
“What if the Germans give up before you finish the project?”
“Friedrich said that?” Oppenheimer said, drawing his neck up, turtlelike.
“Not exactly. He said the Nazis, the fact of them, gave us permission to make the gadget, so what would we do without them?”
Oppenheimer took off his hat and rubbed his temple. Connolly saw that his face had grown taut with disapproval.
“We haven’t made it yet,” he said finally. “His qualms are premature. He may be premature about the Nazis as well.”
“But if he isn’t?”
“That’s something devoutly to be hoped for. Every minute this war goes on.”
“But would you keep building it?”
“Of course,” Oppenheimer said simply. “Do you think we’ve come this far not to build it?”
“But if we didn’t need it to win the war?”
“Then we’d need it to end the war. The Germans aren’t the only ones fighting. Sometimes our European friends forget that, but that’s understandable. How many more casualties are acceptable in the Pacific? Another year? Less? I don’t know how anyone makes that determination. I certainly can’t.”
“No,” Connolly said quietly.
“Mooning about ‘permission’ when there’s so much at stake.”
“But you can see what he means. That’s why they wanted to build it.”
“We wanted to build it because it was going to be built. By someone. We wanted it to be us, all of us here wanted that. Does that shock you? Sometimes it shocks me. Where do our egos come from? We are trying to release the energy of matter itself-literally transform the composition of things. What physicist would resist that? Would you? The science is there. It doesn’t ask for permission. It asks to be revealed. But so difficult. Expensive. The price was the military-how else could we have done it?”
The sun was still high when they passed the test site perimeter guards and exchanged their passes at the security office. The base camp, another instant city of hutments and army buildings wrapped in miles of overhead wires, baked unprotected in the glare. Most of the men were shirtless, a few even down to skivvies, but despite the heat they moved quickly, full of purpose, like stagehands making last-minute adjustments before an early curtain. The only shade lay in the slim patches next to the east side of the buildings. At noon there would have been none at all.
