Martin Smith - Stallion Gate

Joe carefully slid on the gun's safety and tucked it in his trousers.

"Half price?"

"For you."

"Serious?"

"Have I ever joked about the club?"

"There are laws about Indians drinking liquor, let alone serving it."

"There are laws about bootlegging and your father was a bootlegger. Afraid?" Pollack smiled a yellow grin. "You want it or not?"

"I want it," Joe said and knew at the same time. The future was here. The future had come coasting in as a silent Cadillac. "I want it."

"You have the $50,000 now?"

"I need a month."

"A week. Eddie Jr's coming in from Italy and I'm going to be there at the dock."

Joe had, after pocket and black market, a little over $15,000. If he sold all the tyres and nylons he could lay his hands on, he still couldn't raise another $500 in a week. And he'd be leaving for Trinity in ten days.

"Two weeks. If I don't have the money for you then, you can still sell for twice as much and blow the difference on Eddie's welcome home party."

Pollack gave his hand through the window.

"Two weeks, Joe, not one day more. We'll show the white trash what this war was all about."

Joe watched the Cadillac roll away down the road and across the dark plaza. When he turned around, Anna stood in the doorway. He didn't know how long she'd been there or how much she'd heard. Some ghost of the headlights still seemed to play on her and the house. She and the house glowed. Joe Pena's Casa Mariana.

19

Omega was at the bottom of Los Alamos Canyon, a natural trench of basalt and pines deep enough and narrow enough to shield the Tech Area, a mile away, from any explosion. The hangar itself was divided by a cement barrier. One side was occupied by the miniature reactor that Fermi called his "Water Boiler". On the other side was an experiment of Harvey's called "Tickling the Dragon's Tail".

A croquet ball sized round of plutonium coated in glittering nickel was the Dragon, the core of the bomb. It nestled snugly in a twenty-inch paraffin bowl on top of a hydraulic piston. Over it, suspended face-down by a chain, was a second, hollow bowl of paraffin. The idea was to check whether an outer sphere of high explosive "lenses" would, simply by being in place around a nearly critical core, reflect enough neutrons for the plutonium to go critical and explode prematurely and relatively ineffectually. The paraffin was mixed with sooty-gray carbon flour so that it had basically the same atomic make-up as high explosive, without the risk, in case of mishaps, of wiping out the eastern end of the canyon.

Only Harvey, Joe and Oppy were in Omega. Harvey's usual Critical Assembly team was scouting Trinity, and Fermi's team refused to be near the hangar when the Dragon's Tail was being tickled. Harvey had protested that at least two physicists had to be present for the experiment, and Oppy had answered that while General Groves had done his best to turn him, Oppy, into an administrator, he was still a physicist. Oppy had insisted that Joe stay and push the red and green buttons on the wall that raised the lower bowl holding the Dragon up to the hanging hollow bowl.

Drawn up to the Dragon on steel tables were a Geiger counter, a radiation graph that drew a red line on rolling paper, and a neutron sealer that measured radiation with a bank of six red lights. If the Dragon got too hot and Joe didn't react in time, the three counters were wired to drop the hydraulic piston, bottom bowl and core to the floor.

Wearing a long white lab coat, Harvey plotted the curve of criticality with a slide rule and clipboard.

"Raise it ten inches," he said.

Joe pushed the green button as Oppy continued the argument that had gone on all morning.

"You say, Harvey, that the Japanese are all but defeated. By any rational measure, they should be, I agree. You think it would be feasible to set off the bomb in a publicly announced demonstration. An island in Tokyo Bay would be ideal. Somewhere they could bring their best scientists and generals. If we do drop the bomb on them, you want it to be employed against a remote, purely military target, a base as far as possible from civilians. You don't see why women and children should die simply because we want to make a point. You add that there are American POWs in a number of the Japanese cities we may have contemplated attacking. You believe that if we are the first nation to use such a weapon we will be historically tainted. That we will sacrifice the good will of the entire world. Much worse, you fear an armaments race, a building of horrible weapon after horrible weapon, such as mankind has never known and cannot survive. That our actually using such a weapon in war will poison any chance of international agreement on the future control of such apocalyptic devices. Last, we bear the direct and special responsibility of these weapons because we are the men and women who created them. Who should say how and if these weapons are used if not us?"

Those indeed were Harvey's points better than Harvey himself had put them. Abashed, he kept his eyes to the clipboard.

"Eight inches more."

"We all have the same nightmares," Oppy said as he walked, hands in his jacket pockets, toes out, around Harvey, the tables, the Dragon. "These are the years of nightmares and they are not ended yet. If you walked away before Trinity, I would not blame you. I'd envy you." Oppy lifted his gaunt face, evidence of his fatigue. "We'd all envy you."

Joe did figures in his head. By calling in loans and cashing his last gas coupons and travel vouchers, he could bring his bankroll to $20,000. How could he more than double it in two weeks? How much scotch and commissary sugar could a man sell?

Maybe high explosives were the answer. Hilario had mentioned contractors down in Albuquerque. With a couple of mules, he could clean out the magazine bunkers on Two Mile Mesa.

"To go up into the mountains for a year," Oppy said. "Not see a headline or hear a radio. Not come down until the entire, awful thing is over."

Harvey glanced at Joe for psychic support. "Five inches."

Assuming he got the money together, there was the problem of musicians. He could only afford a couple of men from New York or Kansas City. He'd have to use some Mexicans. Horn players. There was a trolley that ran from Juarez to El Paso, and he could slip them over the border that way.

As the two bowls came within a foot of each other the Geiger counter started to concentrate on what was happening, taking a definite interest. The sealer measured fast neutrons by multiplication. One light for two neutrons, two lights for four. Up to six lights for sixty-four escaping particles, then starting over again. The red lights blinked like eyes rousing from a nap.

"It won't be over soon." Oppy's voice took a sharper tone. "The Japanese didn't give up on Iwo Jima or Okinawa. They will fight ten times harder on their own islands. It won't be just kamikaze planes. Army intelligence says they're building kamikaze boats and teaching people to strap dynamite to their chests. The estimate I've seen for the invasion is one million casualties. Japanese and American, soldiers and civilians."

"Four inches," Harvey said.

There was a bar and kitchen to stock. Utilities, water, linen. It might be tricky, getting around the liquor laws on Indians. He might not be allowed to pour a bottle even if he owned the place.

The Dragon shone like ice.

"A demonstration on an island sounds like a good idea," Oppy said. "With a bunker for the Emperor and his generals. But what if a single enormous blast didn't convince the Japanese that it was caused by a single weapon? We can barely convince our generals, let alone theirs. And what if the bomb was a dud?"

"Eighty percent critical." Harvey watched the red line on the graph paper, and then for the first time answered Oppy. "The uranium bomb works."