Detached south for the great rehearsal — one hundred tons of TNT on a timber tower, fired before dawn so the instruments could practice for the real thing — the author is issued nine dials and a logbook. The largest explosion yet made finds him in a bed in Socorro; he returns to compose the most commended document of his military career. —Ed.
The trucks went at four in the morning, as advertised, and I went with them, fourteen days or the duration of the task. My orders said south twice that summer, if the register is believed1; I tell it as one trip. We came off the mesa in the dark, and by ten were deep in country the Lord had roughed out and never come back to finish. The Spanish named their road through it the Jornada del Muerto and crossed it at night, at a trot, praying. The United States Army moved in and put up a mess hall.
The camp was tar-paper and water trailers behind wire, and two miles out on the flat stood a timber tower. Up that tower all week went the strangest freight of my war: one hundred tons of TNT in wooden crates, passed up hand over hand and stacked square, like a co-op putting up preserves.2 A boy from Ohio watched the stacking and said it was a lot of dynamite. A T/5 out of the radio schools corrected him: TNT. The boy said it was a lot of that too. Somewhere north the real thing was ripening, and before it fired, the end of the world would have an out-of-town tryout. Socorro was the town it would be out of.
The briefing came the second evening, a first lieutenant with a pointer and a blackboard with nothing on it. "At the hour, you will observe, and you will log. You will not ask what the exercise is for. The bang is over in a second. The record is the exercise." A hand went up at the back — the T/5, wanting to know what it was for. "Monday," said the lieutenant, and dismissed us.
We were there to rehearse. The Army rehearses everything; it had rehearsed the French landings on an English beach the year before and drowned more Americans there than the real beach cost on the morning, then kept it dark for forty years, being modest about its successes only. So nobody blinked at rehearsing an explosion — we rehearsed the rehearsal. Sergeants walked the station line with clipboards. "Oh-four-hundred, you are awake," mine recited at me. "Oh-four-thirty, you are at your dials. What are you?" "At my dials, Sergeant." "You are at your dials." He made a check against my name for sitting there, and moved along.
My post was Station Nine: a lean-to, nine dials, a logbook, a lantern, and four miles of creosote between me and the tower. The duty was to write down, at stated intervals, what they said. Two years adjacent to the finest minds alive, and the war had at last located my level: copying numbers nobody would explain to me, for men who would never read them. Two miles east at Station Ten sat T/4 Dewey Pruitt,3 out of Chanute, Kansas, a serious boy with a haircut you could true a level against. Pruitt kept carbons of everything he wrote — his logs, his requisitions, and I am satisfied his letters to his mother. "A record can burn," he told me, squaring the edges. "A carbon's just being ready."
The shot was set for before dawn Monday. Sunday noon I went quietly short of log sheets and reported to Sergeant Grady that forms waited unclaimed at the Socorro depot. Grady studied me the way sergeants study all private enterprise, for the toll. "Ration truck goes in at six," he said. "There's a bar in that town called the Val Verde. Two cases. Bottles, not cans. Miss that truck, Corporal, and you'll wish the tower fell on you." The truck back was Corporal Ott's. "Midnight, off the plaza," Ott said. "I honk twice and I roll." Midnight gave me four hours of margin, and I had never in my life needed four hours to get out of a bar.
Socorro4 had been a silver town while the silver lasted, which it stopped doing in the nineties, and it had been taking the news lying down for fifty years since; the male population divided evenly between men who had worked at the smelter before it shut and men resting up in case it reopened. The Val Verde was the hotel — Mission arches, rooms above — and its bar held the county entire.
Behind the bar was Tencha — Hortencia on some license, if there was one — a wide, calm, black-eyed woman of forty who had run out of curiosity about men sometime around the fall of France. She took the beer order without writing it down: cases out when the truck came, drinking meanwhile cash. I gave her the manner of a man under orders he cannot discuss, which in wartime is worth two ranks and a ribbon. "Another one who can't say what he does," she said, pouring. "The last one couldn't say either. He turned out to drive the ice truck." I said there was a truck for me at midnight. "There's always a truck," said Tencha, and left the bottle.
Of the evening I will report only the architecture: the bottle was the house's, the room upstairs was the house's, and the theory that I would hear a horn through both was mine. Tencha named the room's rate unasked and added, "Eleven you were leaving. It's twelve." She came up when the bar shut, on terms likewise hers. Ott honked twice at midnight, I am told, which for a corporal verges on devotion, and rolled. I heard nothing. The United States Army next reached me through the floor.
What woke me was the window going white. Not lightning — lightning lets go, and this held, held long enough for me to sit up and see the room by it: washstand, tunic, Tencha's shoulder. It died to a dirty orange along the sash, and I had time — better than two minutes; I have since done the sum — to think, with the clarity of a man still half drunk, my dials are watching that, and I am not watching my dials.
Then the ground's report came in, and the bed walked. I do not mean it trembled; it walked, west, the better part of an inch, with me aboard. The washstand pitcher rang in its bowl, the sash chattered, and under the floor the bar's whole shelf of bottles sang one long chord. Every dog in Socorro opened at once, each satisfied he had done it. Last came the sound proper over the hills, running on so long I had time to lie back down inside it.
Tencha was up on one elbow. She watched the window until the orange died, and gave the occasion its only review in that county. "The Army," she said, in the voice of a woman confirming rain. "They practice out there." She was asleep before the dogs were — the soundest intelligence estimate produced in New Mexico that year, and given to the window for nothing.
I lay still and did the arithmetic. It was Monday; I was twenty-six miles from nine dials reporting to nobody; and no regulation ever printed addresses the case of a man in a walking bed. Panic at that range is merely insomnia. The Army holds an account of that morning over my signature, and there is not a line of it I witnessed; the morning I witnessed is in no record at all. The space between the two documents is my whole career. I went back to sleep.
The panic came at eight, with the church bells. Boots, tunic, stairs. Tencha was down ahead of me with coffee on, and when I asked where a man bought a ride south she named a price, a nephew, and a feed truck in one sentence. The nephew was Beto; the truck smelled of chickens; and I rode south wedged between Grady's cases and my own excuses, assembling the night against the windshield — the depot clerk nowhere to be found, the truck that left while I argued the government's case. Every lie the plain size of the truth.
I came through the checkpoint as the relief column, and the sentry helped me unload. Nobody asked for my night. The camp had watched the sky fall upward at half four and had the discipline of a kicked anthill, every man describing it to every other, the flash two colors richer by noon; a corporal's whereabouts was not that morning's subject. Grady took his cases and my depot story in the same motion, with equal use for both. Station Nine stood as I had left it: a log sheet bearing the date, my name, and nothing — the cleanest confession I never signed. The logs would be collected at one.
At half ten I walked into Station Ten wearing the collection point's manner. "Cross-check," I told Pruitt. "They want one clean set held against the masters. Yours is the tidy one — their words." He went pink to the ears. "The whole night?" "The whole night, Dewey." He squared the carbons' corners and handed his war to a stranger without a receipt, asking nothing — not why a cross-check travels on foot, nor why it left in the direction of Station Nine. Earnest men do not audit a compliment. He never suspected, then or since, and I set it down once: Pruitt took no part in the taking. The sin travels under one name.
Then I sat under my lean-to with his night spread before me and manufactured mine, and the craft had matured since Pasadena. In '42 I drew too well. Plate five died of beauty — a gentleman of my acquaintance, reviewing the corpse, observed that an artist must know when to stop — and I had spent the years since learning where. Real instruments disagree; real hands cramp at four in the morning; real lanterns gutter.
So I copied nothing: I translated. Where Pruitt read steady, I wandered a hair, two stations two miles apart having no business agreeing to the decimal. I let the column slouch toward dawn the way a cold hand slouches. At the minute itself I let the pen jump its line, the ground at Nine being owed the same say it had at Ten. In the dead of night I dug a hole: twenty-two minutes of no entries at all, and against the gap, in a level hand, fuse — replaced. A fuse is the ideal culprit — cheap, mortal, and past interviewing. Nobody audits a record that confesses a small failure; it is the flawless night that invites the comparator. Plate five had been worth admiring. This was worth nothing whatever, except belief.
The jeep came at one, a first lieutenant collecting. He leafed my night through while I stood by being ordinary. "Fuse?" "Replaced, sir." "Log the lot number next time." "Sir." The true logs read hysterical. Mine read employed. Pruitt's carbons went back with my thanks. "Did we check?" he asked. "Within tolerance, Dewey," I said, which was the truth, for I had set the tolerance.
Fourteen days after the trucks took us down, trucks brought us back, and late in June a flimsy came through channels: the recording detachment commended on its returns, and the log of Station Nine cited by number — complete and legible under field conditions, the phrase that had sent me south. Pomeroy read it at the urn twice. Then July: a second list, shorter and quieter, the same trucks. Pomeroy came himself, holding the flimsy like a christening card. "You're asked for, Klipspringer. By name. For the real one." The hundred tons had been the overture. The man who slept through it was booked for the opera. No fourteen days on this flimsy. The orders said the duration.
The reader deserves the bookkeeping the author waves away. The hundred tons were fired before dawn on 7 May 1945 — several weeks before the June detachment on which No. 15 closed. The registers, where they survive, allow the author two southern journeys that summer, and he has told them as one. The practice was conceded once already in these notes, over a card tray (No. 13, note 1): the author's memory moves the furniture to where the story needs it. The editor concedes it again here, and has stopped expecting the furniture to stay put. —Ed.
The rehearsal is historical. On the morning of 7 May 1945, approximately one hundred tons of TNT, stacked crate by crate on a timber platform, were fired in the New Mexico desert so that the recording crews could practice for July — the largest deliberate explosion mankind had produced to that date. It went at 4:37; the flash was seen and the ground felt at distances well beyond the author's bed, and the towns thereabouts were told nothing. Every station is carried in the record as manned. The editor reports what the record carries. Germany surrendered at Reims the same calendar day; no connection has ever been alleged, and the editor alleges none, though he regrets that the author never noticed the coincidence, an invoice having plainly been available. —Ed.
Of Technician Fourth Grade Dewey Pruitt the record holds nothing: no such name appears on the recording detachment's rosters, in the pay records of that summer, or anywhere else the editor has looked. The habit was real — duplicate logging was Army-wide, and the carbon paper was government issue — and some technician at a neighboring station did keep a faithful record of that morning, went home, and grew old believing his night's work stood alone in the file. The reader has met the arrangement before: where the author needs a sin, he supplies his own man to carry it. Here, for the first time, he has also supplied the lender. The editor sees no kindness in identifying the original and has not tried. It is perhaps worth setting down that the only men in these Papers who never suspect the author are the ones he invented. —Ed.
Socorro is real and has survived worse notices. The name is Spanish for help: it commemorates the food and water the pueblo there gave a Spanish column that staggered out of the Jornada del Muerto in 1598, so that the town's first recorded act was the relief of overextended travelers arriving from the south — a tradition the author may fairly claim to have continued testing. The Val Verde Hotel is real, opened in 1919, Mission arches and all, and its bar was the town's evening address for decades. Of Tencha its register preserves nothing — hotel registers preserving, as a class, exactly what their guests intend. Her estimate of the Army's business out on the flat was correct in every particular. She appears in no other record the editor has found. —Ed.