The Heat of the Sun

Batter my heart, three-person’d God... Oppenheimer had a way with literary allusions. He also had a way with
blasphemy.
    ‘Don’t worry, Meyer.’ Maybee, the Boston Brahmin, spectacles glinting in lamplight, looked up from his book. ‘If the bang’s as big as they say, we’ll see it
perfectly well. Even from twenty miles.’
    ‘In this weather?’ said Miller. ‘The firecracker’s damp, I tell you! What time is it now, Sharpless?’
    ‘Nearly five.’ I huddled into my coat.
    Shame consumed me. I should never have been there. Why see history? I should turn my back on it. History was Oppenheimer blowing up the world. All the day before and all that night, fellows had
been taking bets on the bomb and what it would do. Some, with a bravado I did not quite believe, insisted it would never work. Some wondered how many thousand tons of TNT the blast would equal;
there were numerous rival estimates. Some said the blast would ignite the earth’s atmosphere. Some said it would rain down radioactive dust, infecting us all. Psychiatrists were on hand in
case any of us went mad.
    Trinity had been scheduled for more than an hour ago, but deep in the night a storm had broken over the desert, pelting the roof like a rain of rocks. God, Maybee observed, was doing His best to
upstage us. Lightning split the sky; thunder boomed and cracked. Only now, with daybreak, was the storm easing. Word had come that the test would go ahead.
    ‘Potsdam,’ announced a lean Englishman in an RAF uniform, swaying over to our little group. His moustache disturbed me; it was matchstick thin, a dark line above his upper lip. I
imagined him shaving around it and wondered if his hand ever wavered. Mine would.
    Miller moaned, ‘Not Potsdam again!’
    The Englishman blinked. ‘It’s still true,’ he said. ‘Why do you think Truman delayed meeting the other leaders until now, two months after victory in Europe? I’ll
tell you why. He wants a big stick to beat Stalin with, and he’s hoping this bomb is it.’
    ‘Stalin?’ said Meyer. ‘Stalin’s our ally.’
    ‘Shows how much you know.’ The Englishman jabbed a Camel into a long holder. ‘Enemies, that’s what you Yanks need. Do you really think you’ll shut down all this
– this funfair of yours – after the war’s over? You’ll need a good excuse to keep it going.’
    There was a blast of cold, and Meyer yelled for somebody to close the fucking door.
    ‘Major Sharpless? Major Sharpless, sir?’
    A young man, a corporal with a prominent Adam’s apple, peered with curiosity through the crowd.
    ‘The cripple,’ said Miller, pointing in my direction.
    ‘I’m Sharpless.’ I rose. ‘Who wants him?’
    ‘Orders from Senator Pinkerton, sir,’ said the corporal, saluting me. ‘I’m to take you to him.’
    Meyer goggled at me, outraged. ‘Him? The fucking cripple’s going to get a ringside seat?’
    I made a rude gesture at him as I left.
    ‘So what’s this all about?’ I asked the corporal, following him from the hut. I had tried to see the senator for days. He had ignored me. Why summon me now, out of all these
observers gathered in Alamogordo?
    ‘This way, sir.’ The corporal held a groundsheet over me as I struggled towards his jeep. The jeep’s cover was up, but rain seeped through, and a flap of canvas, torn half
free, billowed beside me as we churned off through the mud.
    I watched the windshield wipers slap back and forth. ‘It’s base camp we’re headed for?’
    ‘Closer. Senator Pinkerton’s in one of the VIP shelters, sir.’
    Rain had ceased by the time we arrived. Our destination was a concrete bunker barely visible in a rise of scrubby hillside. Far off, in the purplish dawn, a steel tower rose like a rocket ship
one hundred feet tall.
    The corporal led me down concrete steps.
    Inside, the bunker was bleak as a locker room, but for the desert scene, like an artist’s impression of Venus or Mars, that flickered behind an oblong of toughened glass. I half-expected
Oppenheimer to be there – poised over a detonator, grimly exultant – but, of course, he was at base camp. This was only an observation point, where Senator Pinkerton, his wide back
towards me as I entered, conversed heartily with a congressman I recognized from the papers. A famous general and several other top brass pored over a map or chart; the base chaplain from Los
Alamos clutched a prayer book with a harried air; scientists hovered, white-coated, over meters