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expect to have enough plutonium for two bombs, by August enough for two more, and by September plutonium for another two, but there is no certainty the design will work. It’s the plutonium device we have to test, and it’s the armory of plutonium devices that will end the war, not the single detonation of our uranium device. You can tell the President that choosing a test site is a sign of confidence.”
    “We’re depending heavily on this site being right. The alternative test sites are some islands off California, sandbars off Texas, some dunes in Colorado. The last place I want to hide an atomic blast in is California,” Groves said.
    “That depends on how big it is, of course,” Oppy said.
    “Well, how big will it be?” Groves demanded.
    “Five hundred tons of TNT is the current estimate of the yield,” Fuchs answered. He was along because he was part of the Theoretical Group estimating the blast.
    “Couldn’t it be much larger?”
    “Theoretically it could be five thousand tons, fifty thousand tons. Almost no limit.”
    “Five hundred is a start.” Groves was mollified. “I’m going to tell the President we’re going to set it off on the Fourth of July.”
    “Wonderful,” Oppy said.
    Too bad we missed Christmas, Joe thought. Maybethis was the time to tell the general that the head of security on the Hill was of the considered opinion that Joe Stalin’s special agent was Robert Oppenheimer and they ought to pull off the road and get the whole thing sorted out. Even if there was nobody capable of taking Oppy’s place, and even if test, bomb and ultimate victory had to be scuttled. But maybe this wasn’t the time. Perhaps this was the best time to be a dumb sergeant, the “Indian companion.”
    As soon as they hit the highway at Esperanza, Joe stepped on the gas. The wartime speed limit was 35 mph, but the general always preferred to cruise at 85. Gas rationing had largely emptied the roads, and the Buick could roll on a blacktop of two lanes, sometimes one, with wide shoulders for slow-moving donkey trains, carts, wagons.
    Santa Fe passed as an electric glow under an ashcolored sky. An Army hospital was pumping money into the town. Signs offered drinks, boots, curios.
    As Oppy and Groves droned on about problems of the isolation of isotopes and allotropic states of plutonium, Joe wondered why he had gone to bed with Mrs. Augustino. Was it her he wanted? Some other woman? Any woman?
    Like a conscience a state trooper’s motorcycle emerged, siren wailing, from behind a sign that said, WAR BONDS ARE BULLETS !
    The general’s travels were secret; it was understood he didn’t want to talk to any local justice of the peace. Joe floored the accelerator. New Mexico troopers hadblack uniforms and black cycles. At 100 mph, the dark silhouette became a dot in the rearview mirror. Swaying on passenger straps, Groves and Oppy went on talking about construction schedules. Fuchs spoke only when asked.
    In the fields the breeze rattled rows of chili, unpicked because a farmer could walk into Boeing’s Albuquerque office, keep going straight to Seattle to build B-29s and draw more money in a month than he’d ever seen in a year.
    “Explode. Implode. Two apparently contradictory events at the same moment,” Oppy was saying. “I wouldn’t suggest trying to explain it to the President. Still, it’s a sweet concept.”
    Past Albuquerque and through the lower valley, crossing the Rio so often it seemed a dozen rivers, Oppy and Groves discussed problems ranging from plutonium assembly to sugar for the commissary. The car pressed against a headwind toward dull clouds that built and receded at the same time. At Antonio, a farm town of dimly lit windows, they left the highway for an eastbound single lane of frayed macadam, crossed the Rio one last time and entered a vast, tilted basin of scrub and low cactus. Here the clouds moved forward and snow began to fall, lightly to begin with, tracing the wind, more