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established to continue nuclear fission research, which might lead toward the making of an atom bomb.

7
    Sorry awakened when the sun was a quarter of the way to the horizon, ran down to the lagoon, and plunged in, then got a spear from the canoe and began walking toward the barrier reef. As he neared the ocean, moving by the windward brush, threading through the last palms on that side, he was suddenly face-to-face with an angry
hak,
its wings stretched to the full seven feet. Guarding a nest of chicks, the frigate let out a throat rattle and Sorry backed down to the edge of the water, aiming his spear at the bird.
    Within a few minutes he had a blacktail snapper flapping on the tip of the spear. He killed it with the usual bite behind its head, then circled back to where he was camping. He scaled the fish with a shell and ate some of it uncooked.
    As twilight, with all its shades of Pacific blue, began to cast shadows in the palm grove, the bird cries grew fewer and softer, except for an occasional outburst. Sorry took up the magazine and started at the front again. He wondered again why the Japanese people, with all their wonderful machinery, couldn't live in peace.
    When darkness finally spread over the lagoon and island, he put the magazine away in the plaited pouch and waited for the moon to rise. When full, or near full, the moon gave the night hunter the gift of light, shining down on the shallow, low-tide water on the shelf inside the barrier reef. The tide would be high again in a few hours, higher than at any other time during the month.
    If the ocean was behaving, the hunter could always see the glistening blue-green backs of clawless lobsters that lived down in the outer reef's crevices and canyons and came up on the knee-deep, clear-water inner shelf at night to feed. It was easy to spear them in the ivory light. So at the time of full and near-full moon, there were feasts in the village.
    When the moon had risen a quarter of the way up from the sea, a white-orange ball in the eastern sky, it took Sorry no more than an hour to get a lobster each for the eleven families. He put them in the netting he'd brought along, pulled it tight with twine, and then staked the net in a tide pool for pickup in the morning. He knew the same thing was happening over on Bikini. A dozen men would be out with their spears.
    Later, when the moon was overhead and beginning its descent to the west, he bedded down. The day had been a good one. Tomorrow morning he'd pick green coconuts and then set sail for home.
    Best of all, he'd been alone, thinking no thoughts except the ones he wanted to think. He'd done everything exactly as he'd planned. That was what his father had done on Bokabata, and he had come home happy.
    Yet, all day here on Nantil, he knew he hadn't really been alone. August was still around, just as everyone who had died and was buried on Bikini was still there, according to Grandfather Jonjen. Grandmother Yolo believed they walked the beach at night.
    Before the time that Yolo had entered her world of near silence, she'd told Lokileni and Sorry stories of Micronesian demons and ghosts and demigods and trees and fish that spoke. Mwoakilloa was home to the lazy giant Lodup. Ebadon, an islet of Kwajalein, was home to a female demon who kidnapped the four children of Likidudu. Yap lagoon was the home of a
galuf,
a monstrous sea lizard. Lokakalle, a murderer, lived on Ijoen, an islet of Arno Atoll. As a child, Sorry couldn't get enough of old Yolo's stories.
    Bedded down so close to where August had been torn to little pieces, Sorry felt his presence and remembered him, but not in a frightened way. In his mind, August was saying that the war had killed him on Nantil and he'd done nothing to cause it. The selfish war itself had done it.
    Sorry remembered August's smiles, his laughter. They'd fished together, played games together, wrestled in the surf and sand, raced along the beach, come to this very island together. He