The Heat of the Sun
had never explained. In Japan, I had believed him when he said he had renounced America. Perhaps the threat of
war, when he realized it was real, had shocked him at last out of his foolish course. But he had not only come back to America; he had returned to his family as if all had been forgiven. I wished I
could see into his mind, his heart. Perhaps, if I worked slowly, carefully, I could make him reveal himself. But I was not sure how to start.
He asked after Aunt Toolie, and I told him she was still happily married. ‘They have a place up in Carmel – Wobblewood West! I’m going for a weekend – next weekend, in
fact, if I still get that leave I’ve booked. I do get time off after looking over this base of yours, don’t I?’
Two days had passed since I received my summons.
I had been bewildered. ‘The senator wants me?’ I said. ‘But why?’
Trouble’s voice fizzed over long-distance wires. ‘Why do you think? A new job! How about that?’
For three years, nearly four, I had been deployed in propaganda. Trouble had secured me my commission, pulling strings in his new assignment as Senator Pinkerton’s right-hand man. When my
papers came through I was overjoyed, imagining I would spend the war in Washington, DC, with Colonel B. F. Pinkerton II perhaps only a stroll away down Constitution Avenue.
I had been disappointed. I wrote recruiting copy in an office in New York, then army information manuals in Richmond, Virginia. In Los Angeles, seconded to Paramount Pictures, I script-edited
war films and for a time served as publicity officer, and minder, for a Hollywood he-man; too drunk for the forces, he stumped back and forth across the country, selling war bonds.
The road climbed between rocks and pines.
We had just turned a corner when the bright day shattered. First came the report, sharp as a whip crack but twice as loud, then the streak through the air, zinging past my ear.
‘Duck!’ cried Trouble, and I jerked back.
He accelerated wildly. Another whip crack sounded. Dust whirled up from beneath our wheels. I was almost tossed from the jeep. Crouched low, I clung to the edge of the door as we squealed around
bend after remorseless bend, pain stabbing through my damaged leg with every lurch and jolt. The desperate ride had begun so suddenly; it was as if we had plummeted from one world into another, a
world of wild caprice where nothing mattered but speed and flight. We almost hurtled over the edge of a cliff.
When we slowed at last, Trouble arched back his neck and I saw his Adam’s apple straining in his throat. Whether he was frightened, I could not be sure. Flushed, I clambered back into my
seat.
‘What was that?’ I asked, when I could speak again.
‘Sharpless, please’ – he turned to me, earnest – ‘don’t tell the senator. Please, just don’t.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘I don’t even know what happened!’
He put on speed again. I feared he would say no more, but after I had sat in silence for some moments, numb with shock, he said flatly, ‘Sniper in the rocks. Must I spell it
out?’
‘Well, yes . Why do I get the feeling this has happened before?’
‘Just don’t tell the senator. Please, Sharpless.’
We drove on down the dusty road.
Los Alamos lies on a verdant mesa some seven thousand feet above sea level. The first sentry post had been several miles from the base, a stripy barrier beside a hut stuck
alone in the woods, where two crew-cut privates loitered on duty, rifles at the ready. Closer to the base came two further checkpoints: gates in fences topped with wire, opening the way to a
collection of huts and hangars sprawled across the mesa like a boomtown on Mars.
‘Main Street,’ Trouble announced as we passed between stores and bars. Another jeep, driven by a corporal, nosed by us with a honk; a becalmed truck, juddering smokily, with a cargo
of crates stamped us army, blocked half the road; men, some uniformed, some in lab coats, and one or two secretarial-looking women crossed Main Street here and there, but the place had about it a
sense of sleepiness, as if, in these weird mountain lands, human imperatives could not count for much. None of this is permanent, the mesa seemed to say; boomtowns turn into ghost towns soon
enough.
The base, Trouble informed me, had been built on the site of a school for boys called the Los Alamos Ranch School. Commandeered by the military some years before, the original school, with its
stately
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