Connolly was struck yet again by the sheer scale of the project. On the Hill, with buildings sheltered by trees and water tanks or tucked away in nearby canyons, it was easier to imagine it a familiar city in the grip of a construction boom. There were wives and clotheslines and musical evenings. The land rolled away to calendar mountains. There were ranches. But here, on the endless stark desert, the site was undisguised in all its strangeness, a bleached oasis willed into existence overnight. Connolly knew the Manhattan Project had factories elsewhere in the country, huge plants created just to make the gadget’s fuel, but it was at Trinity that he finally grasped the enormous ambition of it all, because nothing belonged here, and when the test was finished nothing would remain. A whole city-all those millions of tons of materiel-had gone up for a single moment in time.
Oppenheimer had one inspection to make-a bunker almost completed, about six miles away to the south-and then a series of meetings back at the camp, so Connolly was left to his own devices, as smoothly dismissed as a family servant. Despite a creaky air cooler, the mess was stifling. He took a cold Coke and went outside to sit in the dusty wind. The beads of condensation on the glass evaporated instantly in the hot air. He leaned against the side of the building in a sliver of shade and watched men stringing more wires overhead, working in bulky gloves to prevent scorching, their eyes covered by goggles against the blowing sand. Jeeps went back and forth, throwing up dust, but each time they passed they left silence. There were no birds. Only men ventured aboveground; the rest of the desert burrowed in, waiting for night.
The camp lay in a hollow bowl whose far sides, the Oscura Mountains, were too distant to be much more than hazy frames. Connolly had never seen so much space. If you walked into it, stepped beyond the plywood shacks and telephone poles, you would be lost. He had spent most of his life trying to find enough room-the cramped pull-out couch in his boyhood living room, the cubicle at the newspaper, where there never seemed any surface to put down a cup of coffee-and now, unexpectedly, he had found it. This was as far away as you could
Everything here seemed remote-the war, the office in Washington, all the life of the past. The desert erased it away. He stared at the landscape blankly. It was impossible to think here-the sun burned through the connections, allowing only stray thoughts to float out like the little eddies of dust, meaningless. He drained his Coke, and the thick bottom reminded him of Manny Wonder’s glasses, smeared from constant wiping so that Connolly thought he barely saw at all. Manny was the paper’s columnist, a short, perpetually sweaty man who turned every morning to page 10 of the Mirror to see what Winchell had done, then spent the rest of the day sifting through the reams of press-agent tips to make a column out of what was left. An assistant cut up releases and sorted them in piles for him: Wonders of the City, Seven Wonders, Wonderfuls. He never took his jacket off in the newsroom, as if he might have to leave any minute for El Morocco, and treated the copyboys with elaborate courtesy, his thin voice barely audible above the typewriters. In his column debutantes did the rumba, idle women got divorced, actresses sacrificed their careers to war bond drives, and the country saw Manny with them, up all night on the town, but in the newsroom he was a sweaty little man with the manners of an accountant. He had had four wives. Connolly smiled. What was his real name? He had never asked, and now he would never know, because Manny too drifted away, just another ghost on the desert who might never have existed at all.
He wasn’t going to return to the paper. He had loved it then-the handlers at City Hall, the cops on their free lunch-but he didn’t care anymore. He was tired of those stories too. The war had taken him away and parked him finally here at the end of an army lifeline down Route 85 on the edge of something new. It was what gave the project its exhilaration-not the high mesa air, not ending the war, but this feeling that they might be the only people in the world who were not still sorting out its past. Everything here was brand-new-the raw wood, the calculations, the profound mystery of what it would be. Maybe that’s what Oppenheimer had meant. They were staring at a blank piece of paper, like this endless white sheet of desert. Nobody knew what would be on it.
