“All the way up to Groves himself.”
“Shit,” he said, disgusted. “Look, you’re making a big deal out of this. It’s just the way guys talk. You know. Every once in a while.”
“I thought you were scoring all the time.”
“Hey, more than you, I’ll bet,” he said, sullen, childlike.
“You’d win that one,” Connolly said, smiling. “Listen, I don’t care if you fuck around. More power to you. I just want to know what you said about it to a murder victim.”
“I don’t know nothing about that. The guy liked to kid around once in a while, that’s all. We didn’t compare notes. He had something going all by himself. And then they broke it up, I think. Anyway, he didn’t say anything much lately, so that’s what I figured. And then I came down here. I was just kidding around, you know? Not some federal case. He liked to listen. He was that kind of guy. And he wasn’t no fruit.” He said this with emphasis, as if it were important to him that Connolly agree.
“I wonder how you can be so sure.”
“I’d know. I’d just know.” He drew himself up, almost physically taking a stand.
“You got a lot of them down in East Texas, huh?”
“Not alive.”
There were four other security guards who’d been reassigned from the Hill, and by dusk Connolly had interviewed them all without learning anything he didn’t already know. Oppenheimer still hadn’t returned as he lined up with the others for dinner, so preoccupied that he barely noticed the food filling his tray. He sat with a group of machinists who were working on protective aluminum goggles to keep off the alkali dust. It was cooler now in the mess and he lingered over coffee, even after the men at his table had filed out for an open-air movie. He smiled at the idea of one of Hannah’s nightclubs lighting up a patch of the nighttime desert. Even here, in the Jornada del Muerto, people danced. He stirred the coffee and absentmindedly played with the spoon, lifting it out of the cup, then lowering it to watch the coffee rise.
“Displacement theory,” Eisler said, interrupting his thoughts. “You see how scientific principles never change. First Archimedes in his bath, now a coffee spoon. May I join you?”
Connolly smiled and opened his hand to the empty chair. “Did he really run through the streets naked, shouting ‘Eureka’?”
“I hope so,” Eisler said. “It makes a lovely story. But perhaps only after he’d written his report to the scientific committee.”
“In duplicate. With copies for the file.”
“Yes.” He smiled. “In duplicate.” His soft eyes were tired, his skin pink from the sun. He leaned forward over the tray as he ate, his shoulders slumped in the same concession to weariness Connolly had noticed in Oppenheimer. While he had been looking at the desert and toying with an overgrown teenager, they had been working hard.
“Where’s Pawlowski?” Connolly said.
“Oh, he won’t be coming back with us tonight. He’s here for the week, poor devil.”
Connolly felt a surge of happiness, so sudden and unexpected that he was afraid it would show. A week.
“I hope you had some rest,” Eisler was saying. “Oppie doesn’t like to drive, and it’s difficult for me to see at night. Such a long drive. It would be better, you know, to stay the night.”
“No, we need to get back,” Connolly said, now eager to start.
Eisler misinterpreted him and smiled again. “Yes, it’s not the Adlon here, I agree. Think of Daniel. All day at Station South. Every step you have to watch.”
“Snakes?”
Eisler shuddered. “Or scorpions. Who knows? I confess, I am a coward in the desert.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“Am I allowed to tell you? Is this a security test?”
Connolly shrugged. “I’m pretty safe. I won’t understand it anyway.”
“The instruments to measure the radioactivity. Not the actual, of course. Simulated, at low level.”
“The test isn’t the real thing?” Connolly asked, surprised.
Eisler smiled. “This is for the test before the test. Only this time, TNT, one hundred tons, to study blast effects. Actually, to test our instruments. So we put one thousand curies of fission products in the pile to simulate the radioactive material. I’m sorry, do you understand this?”
“I understand one hundred tons of TNT. My God.”
Eisler smiled weakly. “That’s the trial run only. The gadget will produce more, as many as-well, nobody really knows. They have a pool to guess. A game, you see.” His sad voice trailed off in thought. “How many tons of TNT blast can we produce with one gadget? A hundred? Five thousand? More? We cannot know yet.”
“How many tons did you bet?”
“Me? I don’t bet, Mr. Connolly. It’s not a lottery.”
“But think?”
“Twenty thousand tons,” Eisler said matter-of-factly.
Connolly stared at him, appalled. “Twenty thousand,” he repeated flatly, as if he were trying to confirm the figure.
