I was at the top fixing the packaging, making sure the angle was right so it wouldn’t hit the scaffolding on the way down. The Gadget had a three-foot radius, and in the tests I ran, it could have a horizontal variance of three inches before the blow. I’d told them to make the drop chute at least eight feet wide, and they gave it ten. It was the middle of a rainstorm, and the lightning was coming down all around me. You could see it hit the desert and the chain-link fences around our compound. Obviously it occurred to me that on top of a metal tower next to the Gadget wasn’t the safest place to be with lightning dropping, but someone had to do it. I had heard the theorist squad two days ago asking if everyone was sure this wasn’t going to blow holes in the atmosphere. Because then we’d really be cooked. I got off the tower and they drove us ten miles away to a bunker.
Two guys from Washington were there to observe, and they were standing a few people away from me. Oppenheimer told everyone to squat on their knees. Then he made us turn in the opposite direction of the tower. Ten seconds before it happened he told us to put our palms over our eyes. The Washington guys looked at each other and one said, What’d we come all this way for then? But they did it and then it dropped and we saw our white bones under the skin of our hands.
That night Lise and I climbed out her window onto the roof. One of the German émigrés was playing Tchaikovsky two buildings over. She wanted to dance, and we did, and it was good to be doing something, getting the motion out of our veins. The dust was still coming down at the edge of the horizon, and it was still colored green and purple and pink from the radiation. The thing just blew. I wanted to jump, or pound my fist on the rooftops, or cover Lise with my entire life up to now. Something happened. Something had changed. When Lise pulled off my belt, I almost ripped the top of her blouse. The chipped paint scratched up my back. Later, she asked, Was that your first time? And I lied.
We heard the news about the Gadget going overseas in the morning. There were loudspeakers set up around the compound on top of telephone poles. They played the national anthem and then a sober-voiced man said the tests had worked as well as our wildest dreams. There was champagne at the laboratory benches. Someone was pouring bourbon from imported bottles into beakers, and we toasted.
Lise was with the observation team that was going over to help the crew’s training for three weeks. We put a chair under the doorknob in her bathroom and her roommate just knocked and knocked. When she tried to get out, I threw her back against the shower again and again. Her eyes got wide and then wider. We ran to the landing strip, which they’d doubled in size over two weekends. They dressed the observational team in fatigues, and a lot of us, including Oppenheimer, went to wave the plane good-bye.
• • •
During that time we played a lot of pickup baseball on the compound. We were waiting for the OK to get started on the new project, working with hydrogen, 400,000 times more powerful. Everyone was banging on the chalkboards to get going, but Washington said wait. Oppenheimer was traveling back and forth from the East Coast.
The field was yellow with half straw at this heat in August, though the Army Corps people watered the diamond every other week. There was a layer of fine sand over the infield base paths, which made it easy to get grounders. You could just sit back and wait for them to die and swirl in the dust. I liked taking rounds and rounds with the number theorists and some privates, switching off who would hit and then getting in line, seeing who would let the ball through their legs first. It was a game my father would play with other handymen, in the one part of the park that had dry dirt. I had a letter from him, and the un-blacked-out part said, Double-decker boardwalk canceled, from — to — Island. No more restaurants on the top half — I didn’t read the rest. It didn’t feel right in letters. The bat was made of aspen wood from a tree on the compound, and some genius had carved on the power spot, Los Alamos, Home of Explosions. We spent long afternoons there, lying in the dusty outfield, looking at the sun. It was a pulsing, living thing that summer, its image burned into our retinas while we waited.
When Lise came back I went to meet the plane, and I asked her if she wanted to go to the cantina for a drink. The particle physicist from the office next to hers was holding a banner, and they were pumping music through the loudspeakers. I tried to press the khaki of her shirt against my chest. But she pushed me off and went to her room. When she came out she was in civilian clothes and she wanted to get dinner. In town we were stopped at a green light waiting for jeeps to go by, and she told me she wasn’t going to stay.