Trucked south for the duration, the author reaches base camp on the dead man's road and takes up his dials among the scorpions, the visitors, and a tower he declines to wonder about. He conducts the one campaign of his war he ever planned in person — the seating — and wins it in every direction the mail cannot reach. —Ed.
The trucks put the Hill behind us in the dark and ran south the length of the morning, and a little after noon we came through a gap in burnt hills onto the flat itself — the Jornada del Muerto,1 which the drivers translated for each new load with relish, every version thrown over the shoulder at speed. The Spanish had crossed it at night, at a trot, praying; we crossed it at noon, at convoy speed, with dust devils standing up off the creosote and falling over again with nobody to watch them drill. Base camp was the carcass of a cattle ranch the government had taken up for its loneliness — a low ranch house, a windmill, two rows of tar-paper barracks run up since winter, and wire around the lot. At the gate a military policeman matched my face to a photograph and the photograph to a list, and passed me in with no return date named anywhere in the transaction. Out on the flat stood a steel tower with something at the top of it under canvas.
A master sergeant named Cobb formed the new draft up between the barracks and issued the country's standing orders. "Shake your boots out mornings — scorpion likes a boot as well as you do. Turn your bedding at retreat; that's for tarantulas. Snake takes the shade at noon, and so does every fool, so look before you sit. And go easy on the water." A boy from the radio section asked what to do if something rattled. "Apologize," Cobb said, "and back away." Behind him the wire was ridden day and night by military police on horseback, horse and rider matched to a nicety: neither could be told what he was guarding, and both could stand all day in the sun without an opinion forming. The tarantulas came out onto the company street at dusk and walked it with an air of tenure, which was fair, they being from there; and by the third morning no man in camp put on a boot he had not first upended and beaten on a tent pole. One boot paid out — a scorpion the size of a watch fob — the owner making his reputation on the width of the jump.2
The water Cobb had warned us off came up hard with gypsum and went through a man like a process server, and inside two days the latrine queue was the sovereign assembly of the post — rank meant nothing in it, urgency everything — where every rumor in camp got tabled, read twice, and passed along. I heard the tower certified there as a weather mast, a lightning catcher, and a gallows for a spy already chosen, and I contributed nothing and carried off everything. When the beef ran thin the police shot antelope and the cooks issued it as beef, the Army's whole conscience behind the word, and the flies worked the serving line in relays, having held the position first.
The duty was my hundred-ton trade grown up: recording stations strung out on the desert, dials to be read at every rehearsal and logged. I have been slow at every science ever set in front of me, but distance I took to like a native. By first supper I had the map by heart — ten thousand yards from the tower to the nearest holes men would sit in on the night, ten miles from the tower to my cot, twenty to a rise in the northwest whose purpose I will come to. Other men spent that week memorizing circuits and call signs; I memorized ranges, and to this day I can misplace that summer's physics entire and recite the yardages out of a dead sleep.
The rosters went up on the orderly-room board the second day — names wanted forward for the shelter crews, the rest to stay in camp — and I did my reconnaissance before my arithmetic, in my own ledger. The betting book had come out of the sock roll the first evening, most of my depositors having ridden south on the same trucks, and it read better than any map: the men holding the top lines were the same men agitating for the close seats, a big number and a front pew flattering the same arithmetic, and the forward lists ran three doctorates deep before any corporal could be wanted. So I volunteered — promptly, audibly, and in the hearing of Lieutenant Deems, who ran the recording detachment and believed its paper — for whatever station stood nearest the event. Deems wrote my name on a waiting list with warmth.
Meanwhile I dug in. After every rehearsal the stations' returns came back to camp wanting collation, and on the third day I put the gap to Deems as a defect in his arrangements: one hand, one master log, one place where a colonel could set his finger on any dial's whole night without sending a jeep. He hunted through his memory while I stood by being ordinary. "You're the Station Nine man," he said. "Complete and legible." "Under field conditions, sir," I agreed, and by supper the master log desk stood on the ranch-house porch, in the shade, with my name attached — the farthest working surface from that tower the war could offer a man of my grade. The commendation was on its second tour of duty, and it had been forged entire the first time out; I have known honest papers that never worked half as hard.
On the Friday my courage came within an ace of being honored. A seat opened in the south shelter's crew — jaundice; the country took men off rosters faster than the enemy had managed all year — and Deems came up the porch steps holding the roster like a citation. "You put in early, Klipspringer. It's yours if the desk can spare you." The desk could not spare me; the desk existed so that it could not spare me; but an honor refused is remembered, so I arranged for the honor to withdraw itself. I looked at the roster with all the reluctance I could get onto one face. "Sir, the master log can't ride south on the night. Unless—" and I let him watch it strike me. "Marcum. He's been at me all week to get forward, and he has the young eyes for the dials." Marcum was the same T/5 who had raised his hand at the hundred tons to ask what the exercise was for; he had since given up asking and taken up betting, held the top line of my book at one dollar, and wanted a seat to watch his money come in. Deems entered my selflessness wherever officers keep such deposits; Marcum shook my hand a quarter-minute by my watch; I banked both and kept the shade. Cobb had watched the whole transaction from the orderly tent, thumbs in his belt. "Some men volunteer to get forward," he said. "Some volunteer to get seen volunteering." "Which am I, Sergeant?" "Rested," he said, and went inside.
That same week the professors opened a book of their own, and I speak of it as one banker of another. The small quick Italian3 I had last watched crossing a Chicago courtyard came through the mess at supper with a pocket notebook, taking wagers on whether the shot would set fire to the atmosphere, and, if it did, on whether it would take New Mexico only or the world entire. He booked the room a line at a time, gravely, and each man laughed exactly once. I gave the product a professional read and declined to compete: the man had built the only book on earth that could not lose, there being no result in which the winner collects. By Thursday the horsemen on the wire had heard of it, imperfectly, and one reined in at the porch — the camp's money being known to lodge with me — to ask, low, whether it was true the professors had bet the state. "Only the state," I told him. "The world was taken." He finished his beat looking at the sky.
The Director was in camp much of that week, thinner than his own shadow at noon, lighting each cigarette off the last as though the matches were rationed and the cigarettes were not. After the second rehearsal he stopped at the urn while his coffee poured and read my practice log upside down — the same trick, two years on. "Clear," he said, handing it back. "You keep a clear record, Corporal." "The flimsy says so, sir." He looked out the door at the piece of dark where the tower stood, said a line of verse to the doorframe — I knew the symptoms from Fuller Lodge, though this time I did not write my mother that it was Hindu — and went.
The second week the observers began to arrive, by staff car and by rumor: stars, homburgs, civilians in new field boots, one naval uniform nobody could explain at that altitude. They gathered the way relations gather at a rich man's deathbed — grieved, rested, and in good time for the reading of the will. The rise twenty miles out was being groomed to receive them, benches contemplated, latrines dug. On the Saturday a brigadier toured the mess line shaking hands down the serving counter; that evening his aide came around behind the mess hall with a five-dollar bill and no name attached. I opened him a numbered line, Geneva rules, and the bank asked nothing.
After that the duty was waiting, and the desert ran the program. Lightning walked the ranges every evening like it was paid by the strike; cars ran out to the tower at ungodly hours with their lights taped down to slits, and the men who came back from them said nothing at an unusual volume. Evenings there was poker, the plainclothes security men sitting in, identifiable at any table by laughing half a beat late. Sunday came without coffee for the first time in a year — Fisk's Sundays had stayed on the Hill with Fisk — but divine service drew men I had two years' documentary evidence believed in nothing an agency could not fund; they stood at the back with their hats in their hands, opening a small account against the morning, and a fair number called at my ledger on the way out.
Mail call ran twice a week through a box number three towns from the truth, and the second Friday it did its full day's work on me in two envelopes. Bunny's came up top — three pages of Lake Forest lawns, Clipper first at Onwentsia and vindicated — passed beaming by the censor, as everything of hers was passed. Under it lay a plain envelope, no return, my name in a small tidy patient hand I knew better than my own signature; I have varied my signature. One line inside: The accommodations are simple, I hear, but the air out there is said to be improving. There will be a small thing, when you are at leisure. — A. I read it twice by the cook's firebox and gave it to the coals. The postmark said San Antonio.4
The name is not the Army's poetry but the ground's own history. In 1670 one Bernardo Gruber, a German trader, escaped from the cells of the Inquisition in New Mexico, where he had been held some two years on a charge of selling slips of paper which, swallowed according to instructions, were warranted to keep the swallower proof against all harm for twenty-four hours. He fled south across this desert ahead of the pursuit, and the desert killed him; the place where his remains were found was called El Muerto, and the stretch of road the Jornada del Muerto — the dead man's stage — ever after. The particulars vary in the telling, as particulars do at that range; the charge and the flight are documented. The first recorded casualty of that ground was thus a dealer in protective paperwork, traveling fast, some distance ahead of a review of his claims. The editor draws no conclusion and expects the reader to need none. —Ed.
Base camp was as described: the buildings of the abandoned McDonald ranch, some ten miles southwest of the tower, wired in, tar-papered, and garrisoned by roughly two hundred and fifty men in the week in question. The natural history is confirmed by every memoir the site produced — rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas, and water so charged with gypsum that the camp's plumbing arrangements figure in the recollections nearly as often as the physics; the mess was supplemented by antelope, against standing orders no account claims were enforced. Of Sergeant Cobb, Lieutenant Deems, and Technician Marcum the detachment's surviving rosters hold nothing; the reader has met this arrangement before and knows what the author does with it. As for the ranch: the government had taken up the land under wartime lease, with assurances of return when the emergency passed. In 1982, two members of the ranching family, by then old, reoccupied their house on the range and were escorted off again. The lease has not been honored to date. —Ed.
The wager is historical, and the bookmaker was Enrico Fermi. In the days before the test he offered to take bets on whether the shot would ignite the atmosphere and, if so, whether it would destroy New Mexico merely or the world. The question itself was old business, raised in 1942 and retired by calculation long before the tower went up; the offer is generally read as a great man's method of passing a nervous week. The record adds that it was not read that way by all of the guard detail, who had not been shown the calculation. The author's professional finding — that the house in such a book need never fund a payout — is the only actuarial opinion the wager ever received, and the editor has found no error in it. —Ed.
San Antonio, New Mexico — no relation to the Texas city — is a river hamlet on the highway west of the site, at that time a store, a bar, a scatter of houses, and a post office. The camp itself was sealed to a standard the Army was proud of: passes checked at the wire, travel forbidden, telephones removed, mail routed through cover addresses and read in both directions. How an envelope postmarked one town up the road entered a sealed camp's mail call, the surviving files do not say. The editor exhibited a stub once (No. 6, note 3) and exhibits a postmark now. —Ed.