Martin Smith - Stallion Gate

"The fact is, I'm scared of heights." Eberly climbed back on to the platform.

"Heights are about the last thing you need to be afraid of around here," Joe said.

As the bomb eased up through the platform, Eberly removed the trap door from the shed roof. When the bomb was halted at the pinnacle of the hoist, Joe and Eberly gently swung the hoist 180 degrees, so that the sphere hung over the open roof. Then Eberly lowered the bomb and Joe bolted the cradle to its new home on the shed's floor of solid oak planks.

Oppy, Jaworski and Foote arrived up the steps while Eberly and Joe swung the hoist again to bring up the heavy detonator gear. The Explosive Assembly team carried up electrical leads and coaxial cable. Harvey climbed to the shed to open the bomb's polar cap and re-check the neutron count with the manganese wire.

"Forty-two hours," Foote muttered to Joe.

"You'll make it."

"Oh, I know the bomb will, I mean him."

Oppy leaned against the shed wall, eyes intent on the bomb. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and showed wrists like straws. His entire body seemed to maintain a faint existence only to carry the painfully brooding skull.

Joe ran at night and on the road met what he first thought was Einstein, but was Santa, stumbling along, his white hair drooping, mouth gnawing distractedly on his moustache, wearing a jacket and long scarf.

"How are the hives?" Joe asked.

"Much better. Really under control. Up to my chin. A walking bandage of skin salve."

"I thought you weren't going to volunteer for Trinity."

"I wasn't in the La Fonda," he told Joe, "so someone else volunteered me, naturally. They gave me a hut down at the Base Camp. Already getting some interesting cases, GIs who hear the scientists talking and, as a result, focus their anxieties on the end of the world."

"That's what you predicted."

"Thank you. So, in fact, it's worked out. It's really an opportunity to be here. If you think about our psychological history really being built on anxieties. Of a sexual nature or a religious nature or a combination of the two. Then we may be on the ground floor of the primary anxiety of the rest of history."

Joe ran on to Shapiro's station at the North-10,000 bunker.

On his return leg, Joe met no one. The valley floor lay empty in the semi-dark cast by a half-moon. Beyond the mountains on either side were storms, lightning muffled in clouds so far off they were silent. In his mind, he saw Anna step again out of the Rio, water and light flowing from her. In memory, the river was black and filled with coral, shell and turquoise.

27

SUNDAY

After non-denominational services at the Base Camp picnic tables, with the bomb in place at the top of the tower and only awaiting the arrival of General Groves, some men spent the hours before Trinity hunting antelope or searching the area for arrowheads or silver mines. Oppy searched for Fermi and Joe drove.

"We left dummy rigs of the detonators and the firing rig back on the Hill." Oppy spoke more to himself than to Joe. "Yesterday morning, the detonator dummy failed. Yesterday afternoon, the firing unit dummy failed. Truman is in Berlin expecting news of our great success and I already know that we will fail. If Fermi thinks we'll fail, I'll call it off."

"Fermi is checking blast measurements. He could be anywhere on the test range," Joe said.

"Then we'll cover the test range. Everyone here seems to think they're at summer camp. It would be good to speak to one serious person."

At the lean-to that constituted the North-10,000 MP station, Sergeant Shapiro said he hadn't seen Fermi.

"We did have some intruders last night, though. Could be locals."

"Local rabbits, local deer, local cactus in the moonlight?" Oppy asked.

"Could be." Shapiro backed off.

Oppy pointed into the brush and Joe swung the jeep off the road, manoeuvring to drive a course generally on the tower's six-mile periphery, where many of the last-minute adjustments to instruments were taking place, although it occurred to Joe that searching for Fermi might be Oppy's excuse to get away from the tower and the Base Camp. Maybe they weren't looking for anyone, maybe they were hiding. The bomb wasn't the only thing on the point of collapse.

"What time is General Groves coming?" Joe asked. "Our general is arriving with presidential advisers this evening. Our failure will be well attended. We'll even have a reporter from the New York Times watching from a hill twenty miles away." Oppy glanced at Joe. "Do you have any idea what intruders the MP was babbling about?"

"Mescaleros."

Joe braked to avoid running over a sunburnt figure lying on the ground. The man was threading coaxial cable into a garden hose. His back and legs were covered with vaseline and dirt, and pinned to his shorts was a badge that showed he, too, was an elite scientist of Trinity.

As he stuffed the hose, he muttered, "In a circle of hell, men are doing precisely this right now. We can thank Foote and those other fucking Brits for this, because all the cable they insisted on importing and using here has melted under the New Mexico sun and has to be insulated again with 30,000 feet of hose. Have you ever run a catheter up the ass of a 30,000-foot-long snake?"

Further on, they found more physicists digging up the cables they had buried the day before, because they'd buried them taut and, under the weight of the earth they'd thrown back on, the cables had snapped. Two other physicists stood mournfully at a silver barrage balloon. The helium balloon was designed to carry neutron counters aloft; however, Trinity's elevation was so high and the air was so thin that the balloon clung to the desert floor. On a gentle rise stippled with pinons, a radiologist had strung wires on the branches and was hanging white mice from the wires by their tails to determine the effect of the blast on living organisms. The first mice hung had already perished from the heat.

"He's been out in the sun too long himself," Joe said after Oppy had sent man and mice back to the Base Camp.

"It all looks so sane on paper. Do you have a drink, Joe?"

"Sorry."

"Since when don't you have a flask? You're looking fit all of a sudden, unlike me. Two days ago, I touched the plutonium. I told Harvey it was shaking. He said I was shaking." Oppy took a deep breath. "So, Mescaleros?"

"Just what Groves was afraid of, I guess. They still think this is Stallion Gate. They still chase horses out of the mountains and round them up here."

"I recall the mustangs we saw."

"The trackers come in around dusk and stay until dawn. They're bound to see the shot unless I cut them off."

"That means you wouldn't be getting back until morning. You may miss Trinity entirely."

"You don't want any roasted Apaches, do you?"

At the West-10,000 bunker, Oppy left the jeep to talk to meteorologists releasing weather balloons. The balloons bounced as they rose, as if they were rolling up an invisible hill.

Behind the bunker, Ray Stingo was riding on a Sherman tank, taking a practice spin, treads flattening cactus. The tank had been painted white, the cannon removed and the machine-guns replaced with automobile headlights. Air bottles for the crew were clamped to the side armour. Behind the turret was a rack of rockets.

Ray jumped from the tank.

"Isn't it amazing, Chief? Lead-lined, air-filtered, air-conditioned. This baby's the first thing in after the blast to collect samples. The way they do it, they're going to ride up to the crater and shoot rockets with scoops on one end and cables on the other. They just pull the rockets back. That's a garbage truck!"

"Sounds like a professional endorsement."

Joe studied the thin seam of black above the mountains. They were the clouds from last night. Patient clouds.