The second note names its bill in two coins, and the author holds neither. What follows is an inventory of exits, each tried and found locked — the date he cannot give, the sample he cannot get, the ambulance he cannot board — taken in the week the camp sealed itself around the event assembling ten miles from his desk. It ends in a private resolution which the editor lets stand without comment, it being the plainest passage in the bundle. —Ed.
By the second week of July the camp had stopped asking when and settled into how soon. Traffic ran out to the tower at all hours, headlamps taped to slits, and men who had never once looked at it took to not looking at it in a marked way. Everybody inside the wire knew the event was coming; nobody at my altitude knew the date. I set that down at the start because the date is the whole of this chapter — the thing every man in camp was waiting on, and the thing I was about to be billed for.
The second note did not come by the mail. Our mail reached us photographed and re-glued through a box number in Santa Fe; Anton's note was under the blotter of the master log itself, on the ranch-house porch. I lifted the blotter on the morning of the ninth to get at a carbon, and there it lay, folded once, in the small tidy hand: The small thing, in two parts, when convenient: the date of the performance, and some keepsake of the manufacture — a shaving, a wrapper, the least of it would answer. There is no hurry a week will not cure. — A.1 It went to the cook's firebox, same grate as the first, and I did the morning's books standing up. Then I did the other books. The first note had come through the mails, which argued distance. This one said that somebody inside the wire — one of the two hundred and fifty faces at mess — had lifted my blotter and set it back square. I made a point, the rest of that week, of not wondering which face. I made the point about every four minutes.
And I knew my creditor. Anton had never in our acquaintance raised his voice, hurried a client, or forgiven a debt; the week of grace in that note was not mercy but a payment schedule, set down with the patience of a claims adjuster who has already valued the property. Nor did I need telling what non-payment looked like. A man who can lay a note under my blotter can lay one under the security officer's, with my name folded inside it. There was no version of ignoring Anton. There was paying him, and there was not being there to be dunned.
Start with the first coin. There was exactly one date in New Mexico that summer, and I did not have it. It was held by fewer men than would carry a coffin, and no corporal on a porch was among them2 — which was my safety, since a man cannot spill what was never poured into him, and my sentence, since I had nothing to put Anton off with when his week ran out. Nor, let me set it down plainly, would I have sold it had I owned it. Not from starch — from arithmetic. So few men held that date that any leak would be run to ground inside days, and it would be run to ground at the lowest man in the chain, and the lowest man in the chain was me.
I went after the date all the same — wanting it for my own calendar, not his ledger — and proved only that it was not in the camp to be had. I offered Deems a fresh volume, ruled a month in advance, if he would name the day it ought to open. "You will be told when you are told, Corporal. I will be told when I am told," he said — and then, unable as ever to resist a clean page: "Rule it now. Leave the date blank." That settled it better than any confession: the lieutenant who believed in the file above every other thing in uniform did not have a date to write in one. The rest of the camp had guesses, which is a different commodity. The motor sergeant said the twelfth; the cooks said the twentieth; the weather section, who if any men below God ought to have known, hedged both ends of the month. Men came to my porch wanting a pool got up on it, and I turned every bettor away — the only wager I have refused in my life, on the ground that a ledger with dates in it is an exhibit. So much for the first coin. It could not be paid, because nobody within reach of me possessed it to be robbed of.
The second coin stood ten miles off, up a steel ladder, behind more sentries than guard the Constitution. The nearest manufacture in my reach was gypsum water and antelope issued as beef. I will own that I gave one evening to the counterfeit — a twist of desert sand in oiled paper — before I remembered my Norwegian, handed back to me marked like a schoolboy's theme. A man who passes that customer a fake sample is not settling his debt; he is applying to be collected himself. I unpicked the twist and poured the sand out the window, and that was the whole life of the scheme.
Which left the course a sensible coward reaches for first, and I had saved for last, having some idea of the odds: not to pay the creditor, but to be beyond his reach — and, in the same motion, beyond reach of the thing on the tower. One conveyance left the wire without a pass. The ambulance ran the genuine cases north to the Army's beds at Albuquerque, a hundred-odd miles away, and it rolled on the signature of the medical officer, a Captain Prather, late of a Texas induction center, where he had put in two years grading the nation's flesh like a produce buyer.
Sick call formed at the dispensary at seven, and on the morning of the eleventh one look down the queue told me the market was spoiled. The water had half the camp doubled over on merit, and there is no way to stand out in a choir where every man is genuinely dying. Prather came down the line at a man per half-minute, issuing salts with both hands. I gave him the appendix: pain low on the right, since reveille, worse when I straightened.
"Since reveille," he said, and set two fingers low on my left side and pushed. I flinched to specification.
"It takes you on both sides. That's rare. That gets written up in journals." He was already looking at the next man. "The appendix keeps a fixed address, Corporal. Yours has been to town and come home. Salts."
"Sir, if it should burst—"
"Then you'll be the first man this month with something the water didn't do, and I'll want to see it. Next."
Whatever he wrote after that was short, and it followed me.3 At the next morning's call the orderly held the thermometer himself and watched me through the whole four minutes, and I understood that I had been entered in somebody's book as a known artist, and that the ambulance would leave that camp with every other man in New Mexico aboard before it left with me. I did not go back a third time; there is no profit in teaching an examiner your whole repertoire.
That night on my cot I took stock, and the stock was quickly taken. My nose for catastrophe is on record in these Papers: I smell a disaster two clear days out and go through the door last, before it latches. The instrument was worthless to me now, for the first time in my life, because a disaster that is scheduled, announced in everything but its date, and mandatory to attend has no early door for anybody. As for running: passes were suspended; the mail went north but not the mailer; the ambulance rolled on Prather's signature; and a man on foot in that desert is a column in somebody's report by noon of the first day. Socorro might as well have been Portugal. Anton's week ran out somewhere in the middle of all this, and for the first time in our long association my perfect record of giving him nothing was not craft but insolvency — the debt stood open, the creditor sat silent, and silence, from Anton, was never the same thing as forgetting. Nobody was going to let me out, and nothing I owned would buy me out.
So, sometime before taps, I gave up being gone and settled for being wrong. When the night came — whenever it came — I would not be on my assigned mark. I would be off it, in against the thickest walls the ranch afforded, with other men's paper in my arms for an alibi and some other man standing in my luck; and what the borrowing might cost the men the paper belonged to, I did not count then and will not pretend to have counted since. It was the easiest decision of my war, and I slept on it like a bishop. All I lacked was the date.
How a note reached the underside of a blotter inside a sealed camp, the surviving files do not say. The editor exhibited a stub once (No. 6, note 3) and a postmark last number (No. 18, note 4); this time there is nothing to exhibit at all — the note never entered the mail, and it went to the firebox unphotographed, so the reader has the author's word for its wording, an instrument whose tolerances are by now familiar. The requisition itself wants no corroborating: the decrypted Soviet traffic of those years shows a standing appetite, wherever the project had been entered, for precisely the two articles named — dates and material — and the second article was in due course supplied, by other hands, from other addresses, as the published record shows. It may bear on the question that in 2000 the author is attested — the housekeeper again — to have laid this installment against the published decrypts twice, with the ruler, and to have said nothing when he finished. —Ed.
The date the author did not have was the sixteenth of July. It was fixed in June and confirmed in early July, and the deciding pressure was a conference calendar's: the President was crossing to Potsdam and wanted the result in hand at the table, so the date existed in Washington before it existed in New Mexico, and it descended no further down the ranks than it had to — the hour was still being argued, against the weather, after midnight on the night itself. A corporal at a porch desk stood, on that distribution, several floors below the weather. His claim of ignorance is therefore among the best-corroborated statements in the Papers, and the editor notes that it is also the one he has least reason to lie about in either direction. As for a week of grace dated from the morning of the ninth, the reader may do that arithmetic unassisted. —Ed.
The camp's sick rate that month is a matter of record; the dispensary issued salts by the fistful, and the genuine cases went north by ambulance to the Army's beds at Albuquerque. The migrating symptom the author brought to sick call appears, with its exact counter, in the Medical Department's own wartime literature on malingering, which by 1945 ran to chapters; his Captain Prather — of whom no roster holds a trace — is shown applying the standard answer key to the standard repertoire, in the one week of the war when the sick list was long, genuine, and universally retained. —Ed.