Anton's second note reaches the author in the second week of July 1945, under the blotter of the master log, inside a wire the Army believed sealed, and asks for the date of the test. He could not learn it, could not buy his way clear, and could not run; the number that follows records the arrangement he settled on instead, and the next number finds him keeping it. —Ed.
By the second week of July the camp had quit asking when. The trucks went out to the tower at all hours with their lamps taped to slits, and the men who rode them home ate supper looking at the middle of the table. Whatever stood up there under its canvas was nearly finished.
Below a certain floor nobody knew the day; my desk sat on a porch.
No man on earth had ever fired such a weapon: not once, not a small one first in a quarry to see how it took. The men who built it were betting money on whether the burning would ever stop.
That was the small Italian's book: would the shot catch the sky alight, and if it did, whether it burned New Mexico only or the whole works. I had taken the short side of it at the coffee urn, in daylight, called it the book that cannot lose, and pocketed my laugh. Mind that laugh; I will show you what it was worth after dark.
On the morning of the ninth I lifted the blotter off the master log to get at a carbon, and under it lay a folded paper I had not put there. The hand on it was small, tidy, and patient. I had fed its last letter to a firebox three weeks before, and here it was again, indoors.
The small thing, when convenient: the date of the performance. Should any keepsake of the manufacture come to hand, a shaving, a wrapper, the least of it would answer besides. There is no hurry a week will not cure. — A.
I read it twice standing and finished it sitting down, no decision of mine intervening. Then I shuffled it among the morning's spoiled carbons, carried the batch to the cook's firebox at a clerk's pace, and stirred the coals until the last flake went up the pipe.1 The cook allowed that burn detail was Thursdays; I told him carbons breed in that heat.
The first note had come through the mails, which let me keep my creditor at a comfortable range. This one had been laid under my blotter, inside a wire the Army showed to visitors, by one of the two hundred and fifty men who drew beans from the same line I did. I sat that supper reading hands up and down the tables until I made myself stop.
Counter-intelligence had salted the camp with men got up as civilian workmen, trained two years to be inconspicuous, and you could pick out the training at forty yards. I did not take them my trouble. A man who walks that note into the security office volunteers to explain how he comes to be in correspondence with its author.
Anton I knew of old, and the week was no mercy. He set due dates the way a claims adjuster sets a figure, after the property has been walked, and a hand that could reach under my blotter could reach the security officer's next, with my name folded inside. That was the whole of his collateral, and it was plenty.
Paying him I disposed of in one cigarette on the porch steps. The keepsake was out: the manufacture sat ten miles off at the top of a hundred feet of guarded steel, and the one time I had offered that customer a counterfeit he handed it back graded. It was the date or nothing.
There was exactly one date in New Mexico that summer, and I did not have it.2 The men who held it would not have filled a command car; the greenest of them outranked everything on that porch, furniture included.
Nor would I have sold it holding it, and the reader can put the handkerchief away. So few men owned that number that any leak would be run to ground inside a week, and leaks run to ground the way water does: downhill, to the lowest man on the distribution. You may guess who that was.
Yet I wanted that date, wanted it harder than Anton did and for the opposite trade. He meant to report that the roof was coming down. I meant to know my corner before the plaster moved.
One door in camp looked worth a knock. Deems ran the recording detachment and trusted a completed return the way other men trust a communion wafer. I came at him at his trestle table, where he was signing his way through a stack of rehearsal returns.
"The volume in use fills by the middle of August, sir," I said, laying a fresh ledger at his elbow. "Name me the opening day and I'll rule the new one a month ahead, clean into fall, no seam in the record."
He looked at the ledger a long time and at me not at all. "You will be told when you are told, Corporal. I will be told when I am told."
"Yes, sir," I said, and left the ledger lying open, forty ruled lines with nothing on them. He signed two more returns with it in the tail of his eye, and on the third his pen slowed. "Rule it now. Leave the date blank."
I ruled it that evening, a month of clean pages hanging off an empty heading, and the ruling settled it. Deems could no more leave a blank on purpose than send a return unsigned; had he held the date, it would have stood at the top of sheet one. The date was not in that camp to be had.
The rest of the post carried guesses the way it carried flies. The motor sergeant held the twelfth and would fight you; the cooks stood sworn to the twentieth; the weather section hedged the entire month. Money wanted a pool made of it, with me to keep the stakes, and I turned every dollar away, the only wagers I ever refused in my life. A book of dates is an exhibit.
Now the nights, because the days I could manage. By night the short position would not hold, and I lay taking inventory of what no man could tell me: that nobody alive had fired one, that the builders were laying odds against their own arithmetic, that the government's whole provision between my cot and the answer came to ten miles of creosote and one course of adobe.
Around two the trucks went out to the tower. I counted gear changes until the desert took the sound, and then lay listening to nothing, which was worse.
The sweats came on after midnight, punctual as a guard relief, and one reveille I found eight little half-moons in my palms where the nails had sat. By seven I was at the urn with the laugh on, selling the short position to anyone who would carry it off.
Marcum stopped by the porch to thank me again for the forward seat I had wangled him, ten thousand yards out with the south crew, near enough to feel the heat of her on his neck, he said, grinning. I told him he had earned it, which was true; he was the only man in camp who had asked. That handshake sat on my chest half the night.
And the week kept a private hell for me besides. My nose is on the record in these Papers: it smells ruin two days out, and it has walked me out of every burning enterprise last, one step ahead of the latch. The instrument was useless, the first time in its working life.
This catastrophe kept a schedule. It stood announced in everything but its hour and carried a muster roll with my name on it. Nobody had cut an early door in it for anybody.
If the date could not be had, distance might. One conveyance rolled out of camp without a pass: the ambulance, running the genuine cases north to the Army's beds at Albuquerque on the signature of Captain Prather, the medical officer, lately of a Texas induction center, where the draft boards had shipped him the republic by the trainload and he had sent it back sorted.
I chose the appendix, an organ with everything to recommend it: invisible, urgent, and beyond argument by anything short of a knife. I rehearsed the walk for a day behind the latrines and brought the piece to sick call on the eleventh.3
The house was against me before the curtain went up. The gypsum in the water had half the post honestly folded over, grey and stepping small, and there is no market for a counterfeit in a queue of the genuine article. Prather worked the line at half a minute a man, an orderly behind him with salts for a regiment.
My turn came and I gave him the piece as rehearsed: pain low on the right since first call, sharper coming upright, and I held the stoop to prove it. He put two fingers into my left side, the wrong side altogether, and pressed. I flinched to specification.
"The appendix keeps a fixed address, Corporal. Yours has been to town and come home. Salts."
"Sir, men have ridden to Albuquerque on less."
"Appendixes ride, Corporal. Salts, and next."
He wrote something short against my name, and it traveled. At the next call the orderly stood over my thermometer all four minutes, thumb on his watch, eyes on my mouth; I was being handled as a known artist. I did not go a third time.
As for walking: passes had dried up without an order ever saying so, and the mail rode north while its authors stayed. A man afoot on the Jornada is a line in the morning report by noon, and the water arithmetic killed the rest.
That night I took stock on the cot, and it was quickly done. Two doors tried and both locked, and the date held floors above anything on that porch. And under the whole account, in the dark, lay the item I had laughed at over coffee: the air catching, the sky going up like a struck match, and nobody within reach qualified to swear me off it.4
Anton's week expired somewhere in there, and nothing arrived to mark it. No third note, no face at mess declaring itself. I did not mistake the quiet for pardon; I have carried delinquent paper in my trade, and the accounts I let go quiet were the ones I meant to collect entire. From that quarter silence was interest running.
So before taps I gave up being gone and settled for being wrong. When the night came, whenever it came, the Army could chalk my name on any dirt it pleased; I would not be on it. I would be in against the thickest adobe that ranch afforded, with the recording detachment's returns in my arms.
The returns were my own charge; paper wants seeing to; and a clerk seeing to his paper is on duty wherever he stands. Deems himself would have blessed it.
What the borrowing might cost the men whose readings lived in that paper, if I came through the night and their records did not, I never reckoned then, and I will not start at seventy-seven. It was the easiest decision of my war. That night I slept through to reveille for the first time since the ninth.
After that, waiting, which was the whole camp's occupation anyway. The returns came back from every rehearsal wanting collation, and I handled them with a care the detachment entered as diligence. By Friday I had my wall chosen, old adobe two feet through, and I never passed it without my eye running down it the way other men's ran down a girl.
Somewhere beyond the wire Anton was waiting too, in no hurry a week had cured. Ten miles out the tower stood over the answer. Between them, on the porch, I ruled my clean lines and waited with the rest, wall picked, paper spoken for, wanting nothing for the night but the number at the top of the page.
The editor has exhibited a stub (No. 6, note 3) and a postmark (No. 18, note 4); this time there is nothing to exhibit, the note having passed from a blotter to a firebox without ever entering a mail sack, so that its wording rests on the author's memory, an instrument whose tolerances the reader has had occasion to measure. The request itself needs no help from him: the Soviet cable traffic decrypted and published half a century later shows a standing appetite, at every address where the project had been entered, for precisely the two articles named, the dates and the material. The material was in due course supplied, by other hands and from other addresses, as the public record sets out. The author's housekeeper attests that in 2000 he laid this installment against the published decrypts twice, with the ruler, and said nothing when he had finished. —Ed.
The date the author did not have was 16 July 1945. It was fixed in June and held through the first days of July, and what fixed it was a conference calendar: the President was sailing for Potsdam and wanted the result in his pocket at the table, so that the date existed in Washington before it existed in New Mexico and came down the ranks no further than it had to. A corporal at a porch desk stood well below the lowest level the forcing ever reached, and his claim of ignorance is accordingly among the best-corroborated statements in the Papers. A week of grace dated from the morning of the ninth the reader may set against that calendar without help from the editor. —Ed.
The camp's sick rate that month is a matter of record, the gypsum in the water having done more damage to the garrison than the enemy managed all war, and the genuine cases went north by ambulance to the Army's wards at Albuquerque. The complaint the author brought to sick call appears, together with the exact counter-examination that met it, in the Medical Department's wartime literature on malingering, which by 1945 ran to chapters and reads like an answer key. Of Captain Prather no roster of the post holds any trace; the reader has met the arrangement before. The captain is shown doing nothing the literature had not instructed, in a week when the line at his tent offered him the genuine article for comparison at every third man. —Ed.
As to the fear, the editor is obliged to report it historical. The question of whether the shot might ignite the atmosphere was raised in earnest in 1942 and retired by a calculation that circulated among a handful of men, none of them enlisted men at base camp; the project meanwhile held press releases drafted in graduated versions against the event of disaster, one of which conceded loss of life, and plans stood ready for evacuating the ranches and towns around the site. The fear was, in short, general issue at ten miles. What distinguishes the author from the two hundred and fifty men drawing the same ration is confined to what he resolved to be holding when it arrived. —Ed.