Don DeLillo - Underworld

Miles cut the cards and listened.

And at the all-crucial moment Rochelle Abramowicz looked over the boy's shoulder into the eyes of Klara Sachs and said to her, thoughtfully, What do you think the F stands for?

And Klara said, What F?

And Rochelle said, The F in Fred F French.

This was a good thing to say, maybe it was the best thing anyone had ever said, then or now, under the circumstances, and it made them friends again. They dissolved, as the saying goes, in laughter, they practically disappeared into their constituent elements, into atoms and molecules, a couple of girls in a gangster Packard, blown forward in time, and Klara stood on the roof sipping tepid wine and hearing people say, We need theater, and she knew she would tell this story to Miles and she also knew she could never again have a friend like Rochelle or a mother like her mother for that matter and she looked across ledges and parapets to the old skyscraper with the massed midsection and the sunburst paneling, ten blocks north, and thought how wonderful it was, what an accidental marvel to come upon a memory floating at the level of a glazed mosaic high on a mid-town tower-the old spoked sun that brings you luck.

The poets of the old nations of the basin told stories about the wind.

Matt Shay sat in his cubbyhole in a concrete space about the size of a basketball court, somewhere under the gypsum hills of southern New Mexico.

This operation was called the Pocket.

There were people here who weren't sure whether they were doing weapons work. They were involved in exploratory research and didn't know exactly what happened to their findings, their simulations, the results they discovered or predicted. This is one of the underlying themes of the systems business, where all the work connects at levels and geographic points far removed from the desk toil and lab projects of the researchers.

Matt used to do consequence analysis, figuring out the lurid mathematics of a nuclear accident or limited exchange. He worked with data from real events. There was the thing that fell to earth on Albuquerque in 1957, a thermonuclear bomb of jumbo tonnage mistakenly released from a B-36- nobody's perfect , okay -and landing in a field within the city limits. The conventional explosives detonated, the nuclear package did not. The incident remained a secret to this day, seventeen years later, as Matty sat in his cubicle reading a camping guide.

He'd been in the Pocket for five months and was definitely doing weapons work but of the soft-core type, involved with safing mechanisms mainly, his face pressed to a computer screen. He wasn't sure how he felt about this. He'd wanted to do weapons, he'd wanted the edge, the identity, the sense of honing his silhouette, knowing himself a little better-a secret installation in the desert.

They named it the Pocket after a creature called the pocket gopher that lives in tunnels it frantically digs under the furrowed dunes.

The dune fields, the alkali flats, the whiteness, the whole white sea-bottomed world, the lines of white haze in the distance, the six-thousand-year-old mummified baby found in a cave near White City, yes, and there were animals that bleached themselves white over the eons, a once-brown mouse that color-matched itself to the gypsum drifts to escape the gaze of predators.

The wind blew out of the Organ Mountains, busting up to fifty miles an hour, refiguring the dunes and turning the sky an odd dangerous gray that seemed a type of white gone mad.

And the men and women of the Pocket, mainly men and mainly single, with only a small cluster of marrieds and their albino, was the joke, children-they lived in semiattached bungalows at the edge of the missile range and listened to the wind that the sages of the old nations spoke about, evolving metaphors and philosophies, and it recrested the dunes, blowing steadily, sometimes, for days.

Do you work with sound waves? Do you gauge the effects of blast on delivery aircraft? Do you do physics packages and dream about a girl back in Georgia, the one who put her hand in your pants at the drive-in near the swamp? Do you long to see a fireball, an actual test shot- they are outlawed of course by now, atmospheric blasts, but you wish you'd seen one of the monster shots that vapored an atoll way back when.

He ate lunch in the underground mess with Eric Deming, a tall shuffly man in his early thirties, a couple of years younger than Matt, and one of the bombheads.

There was a droop to Eric's shoulders and clothes. He tended to eat with his hands-french fries, sure, but also lettuce, beets, boiled rice, corn niblets, anything he could pincer and lift in units.

"When's Janet coming?"

"Soon. We're working out the details," Matt said.

"Will you show her to us? We haven't seen a woman from the outside world."

"You're in Alamogordo all the time."

"That's not outside. You have to go a thousand miles before you're outside. You know that. In this state, Matty."

"She's not coming here."

"Okay but in this state do you know the percentage of people who have security clearance? Isn't that why we love it?"

"We're meeting somewhere west of here and then we're going camping. Remote remote remote. If I can talk her into it. She's not eager to do this, Janet."

Eric worked in a lab area that Matt was not cleared to enter. He used to work with radioactive materials inside a sealed glove box. He wore protective gloves, he wore overgloves attached to his sleeves, he wore layers of treated clothing equipped with a number of film badges and rad-detectors and he worked with bomb components-the neutron initiator, the detonators, the subcritical pieces, the visceral heat inside the warhead.

He was doing something else now and Matt didn't know what it was. He wore a Q badge with yellow edges and spread astounding rumors.

The bombheads loved their work but weren't necessarily pro-bomb, walking around with megadeath hard-ons. They were detail freaks. They were awed by the inner music of bomb technology. Matt watched them. He went to their parties and learned their language. They carried an afterglow of sixties incandescence, a readiness to give themselves compulsively to something.

They thought he was angling for a transfer in, ready to become one of them, wear the coded badge, the Q-sensitive access that would get him through the last gate and into the tunnel that led to bomb design.

But Matty was sneaking looks at outdoor magazines, at camp bags and dome tents, because he needed time to get away and think.

He had doubts about the Tightness of his role.

Down route 70 a ways, near the sign for the missile range, an area that is white on your map-this is where the protesters stood, seven or eight men and women, sometimes only two or three, and they carried a sign stretched between wooden uprights, World War HI Starts Here , and base personnel taunted them, or just smirked, or were flattered by the sign, or felt sorry for the sign carriers because they were windswept and unattractive.

Matt liked seeing them. He counted on it in a way. It began to be important to him, knowing they were there, four, five, six people, usually women outnumbering men, or maybe two grim figures clinging to the uprights, never saying a word as military vehicles passed, or flatbed trucks with draped objects, or civilian workers and construction crews, the odd finger flipped their way.

The white places on your map include the air base, the army base, the missile range, the vast stretch to the northwest called the Jornada del Muerto and the interdunal flats as well-the flats were map-white, on the page and in living fact, and a few low buildings were situated here, fenced structures with propane tanks, to service the underground operation in the Pocket, where weapons were conceived and designed.