Stallion Gate by Smith Martin Cruz

Author:Smith, Martin Cruz [Smith, Martin Cruz]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780307809742
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

17

In the Explosive Assembly Building on Two Mile Mesa, Joe held a 20-inch model of the Trinity bomb steady on a wrestling mat. It was a sphere of steel plates bolted together at the edges. It looked like a large steel spore—or a steel seed pot with a jagged rim, because Foote and a private named Eberly were still adding the last lenses of high explosive. The temperature inside the green sheetrock building was 120 degrees; all three men were stripped to the waist and wore a second, fluid skin of sweat. Foote was a baronet, the lowest of British titles and affected the greatest number of eccentricities found on the Hill. In the sun, he wore a Mexican sombrero; in the assembly building, he wore a chain rattling with religious medals. Eberly was a graduate student who had first come to the Hill as an easygoing civilian scientist, then been drafted and sent right back to the Hill at a quarter of his previous pay. He was gawky and crew-cut, with as much neck as head. Now his Adam’s apple pumped with incessant outrage.

The lenses were cast wedges of Baratol and Composition B, both TNT-based explosives but with different speeds of detonation. Just as glass lenses bent and focused light, so the sooty-gray lenses of high explosive focused their shock waves from the outer circumference of the bomb toward the center, creating an implosion. Of course, this was merely a model to be detonated on the mesa, so there was a Spalding baseball in place of a plutonium core.

Other wrestling mats were covered with other models of the bomb in different stages of assembly, nonsparking bronze tools, red wagons, tubs of water and bottles of warm milk. The walls bore blueprint diagrams, ghostly X-ray negatives, a portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a prized picture of Hedy Lamarr in the nude and, every twenty feet, a fire extinguisher and bucket of sand. The latter items were the most purely ornamental because it was understood that if ever there was an accident in the assembly building, it would be at stratocirrus level before anyone could shout “Fire!”

Foote prepared each lens—a little Kleenex into this hole, Scotch tape over that crack. After he slid it into place, Eberly wielded a bronze wrench, bolting a steel plate over the lens, pentagonal plate interlocking with pentagonal plate like a puzzle being slowly solved, building up the walls of the sphere. Joe simply kept the ball from rolling.

“I hate the Army,” Eberly said.

“The Army wants you to hate it,” Joe said. “It’s the Army system. It’s what bonds us all together into a fighting unit.”

“No, it’s an individual thing,” Eberly insisted. “You know the new security campaign? Lesbians! Why, of all the WACs here, does security pick out my girl and ask if she’s a lesbian?”

“Joe, I do appreciate your helping out.” Foote delicately changed the subject and slid another heavy lens into place, its smaller, concave tip resting against the baseball. “Oppy keeps sending my boys down to Trinity.

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