Joseph Kanon - Los Alamos

“Censored here?” Connolly asked.

She smiled. “Dear me, no. I’m not that much of a busybody. Army censors. Off-site. Wouldn’t be fair to have someone you know poking around in your mail, and of course I know everybody.”

“Of course.”

She blushed. “I don’t mean it that way, to brag or anything. It’s just what I do. That and try to find an empty seat when the general decides to fly out of Albuquerque on the spur of the moment and that means bumping somebody else, who’ll be madder than a hornet.”

Connolly smiled. “Well, there’s a war on.”

She smiled back. “You’d be surprised what little ice that cuts at the airport. I wish he’d take the train, the way he usually does. But we’ll get him on somehow.”

And of course she would. Connolly looked at her, surprised at how quickly he’d been taken in and charmed. Everything about Los Alamos seemed disjointed-the train that stopped somewhere else, this city that didn’t seem to be in America, and now this good-natured, competent woman who managed emigre physicists and army generals as if they were hungry customers at a church potluck supper. He wondered how much she knew, what she made of it all. A secret project that would help win the war-was that enough? Was that all she needed? According to his briefing, there were now four thousand people at Los Alamos. Mrs. McKibben had been there from the start, settling them in, handing out numbered identities. What did she think they were doing, all these people with unpronounceable names and housing problems, working into the middle of the night on a hilltop?

“Now, if you need anything else at all, you just let me know.”

“Thanks. I’m sorry to have put you to so much trouble.”

“That’s what we’re here for.” For a moment he thought he saw in her eyes the inevitable question: what are you here for, with your car and your wad of coupons? But if she wondered, she said nothing.

“The car. Where do I pick it up?”

“Why, you’ve been in it. That is, once the motor pool assigns it to you.”

“Which they will.”

“You bet. I signed the papers.”

They drove for almost an hour before they got to the long twisting road up the mesa. It was graded and paved now but still had all the debris and scattered equipment of a permanent construction site. Bulldozers and back-hoes perched at the edge of hairpin curves, and halfway up they passed a car awaiting rescue, one of its thinly patched tires finally done in by too many rocks and baked-over ruts. Once the road had all been dirt, a glorified mule track for pack trips up to the school, and even now it looked temporary and risky, ready at any moment to be reclaimed by scrub. It must be a hell of a drive at night, Connolly thought as he watched the soldier negotiate the curves, pulling hard at the wheel, an amusement park ride.

The landscape changed as they climbed, sagebrush and stunted junipers giving way to taller pinons and alpine trees. The air smelled fresh, as if it had been rubbed with astringent, and the bright blue sky went on forever. Connolly felt the alertness of higher altitude, awakened from Santa Fe’s timeless nap. There was traffic on the road now, trucks grinding up the steep grade or jerking and halting their way back down, and everything moved quickly. The entire hill was on the march. As they approached the east gate, the activity increased. Cars waited to be passed through security, and beyond the fence Connolly could see a giant water tower and the instant city, a jerry-built ant farm of dull green army-issue buildings, Quonset huts, and barrack apartments. They were still building it. The air itself seemed obscured by dust and tangles of overhead wires, noisy with construction and running motors. Men, mostly civilians, darted through the unpaved dirt streets with the quick steps of people who had somewhere to go. Connolly’s first thought was that a whole college had somehow been dropped accidentally into an army camp. While Santa Fe dreamed on below, up here in the high, cool air, everything was busy.

They passed through the tollbooth checkpoints and parked just outside the Technical Area, a group of buildings surrounded by yet another high wire-mesh fence with two strands of barbed wire running along the top. Connolly glanced up at the watchtowers, where bored MPs gazed out toward the mountains. It was an indifferent concentration camp, too cheerful to inspire any alarm. Girls in short dresses and sweaters, presumably secretaries, passed through the fence, barely flashing badges at the young guards. The two largest buildings were long barracks of offices, connected by a second-story covered passageway over the main road, which gave the town its own form of grand portal. It was late afternoon, and buses were filling with day laborers for the trip back home, down the mesa. Connolly noticed a busload of Indian women, with their stern faces and braided hair, pulling away toward the gate. In the most secret place in the world, there was maid service.

Connolly and his bags were deposited at the security office with Lieutenant Mills, tall, pencil-thin, and prematurely balding in his twenties, who smiled nervously and kept glancing away, as if he wanted to examine his new colleague from an angle before meeting him head on.

“Look, we’ve got a lot to go over, but General Groves wants to see you right away, so it’ll have to wait. I’ll show you around afterward. Colonel Lansdale’s away, as usual, so it’s just us. And the staff, of course.”

“How many?”

“Altogether twenty-eight military and seven civilians in G-2, but only four of us here.”

“Not a lot, then.”

“Well, we’ve never had any security problems before.”

“Do you have one now?”

Mills looked at him and took the bait. “I assume that’s what you’re here to find out.”

“But you haven’t been told?”

“Me? I just run the bodyguards. They don’t have to tell me anything.”

“Who gets the guards?”

“All the top scientists-Oppie, Fermi, Bethe, Kistiakowsky. Anyone considered vital to the project who needs protection outside.”

“Or surveillance.”

This time he didn’t rise to it. “Or surveillance.”

“That must make you popular.”

“The groom at every wedding.”

Connolly laughed. “Yeah, I’ll bet. Well, let’s see the boss. What’s he like, anyway?”

“Straight shooter,” Mills said, leading him out of the building. “Built the Pentagon in a year. Made this place out of nothing. Does drink, doesn’t smoke. Clean living. No detail too small.”

“That easy, huh?”

“Actually, he’s all right. This business with Bruner’s got him spooked, though, so give him a little room.”

“Generals are all alike.”

“Just like happy families.”

Connolly smiled. “You’ve been to school.”

“Here we are. Mind your head,” he said, opening the door.

Inside was a plain anteroom, barely big enough for the desk and the pink middle-aged woman who fluttered behind it.

“Mr. Connolly? Thank goodness you’re here. The general’s got a plane to catch, and he’s been asking for you all afternoon. I’ll just tell him—”

But there was no need, because the door behind her was opened by a big man in khaki who seemed to fill the entire doorframe, absorbing the space. He was not sloppy-he was tucked in as neatly as a hospital corner at inspection-but he had the pudgy flesh of an overweight businessman and his large stomach strained at his belt. There were damp patches under his arms, and Connolly imagined the Washington summers were torture for him. The overall effect was boyish, like someone who had ballooned out at puberty and couldn’t, even now, pass up a jelly doughnut. But the mustache in the middle of his round soft face was surprisingly trimmed and small, the borrowed look of a thin clerk.