"Yes, yes."

. Fuchs seemed to regard Augustino the same way he did Joe. The captain was sallow-faced but his short hair was thick and glossy as fur, giving him a half-animal quality which also clung to Joe. A pair of predators, while Fuchs and his Anna Weiss had evolved to the next stage of human development.

"Do you mind if I speak to the sergeant alone?"

"Please," Fuchs said.

The arc of Augustino's cigarette waved Joe out. He couldn't tell how long the captain had been standing, listening.

"Our Germans. I'll say one thing for Fuchs, he's scrupulous about security, unlike some people. Sergeant, are you aware of the improvement in the living standards of the people in the local pueblos since you arrived on the Hill? Cigarettes, tyres from the motor pool, sugar from the commissary. Particularly disturbing is the rumour that Indians have opened some of the old turquoise mines."

"You don't like Indian jewelery, sir?"

"What I don't like is the idea that they're blasting open the mines with high explosive. There's only one place in this part of the country for them to get explosives, Sergeant, and that's the Hill. I'd hate to think any of my men was stealing Army property to sell for personal profit."

"Indians are pretty poor, sir. He can't be making too much profit."

"Then that makes him stupid too."

"If he's that stupid, he'll make a slip. I'll watch for him, sir."

"Do that. In the meantime, General Groves has arrived at the guest house. Wrap up the music. Since you'll be taking the general and Dr Oppenheimer to see the Alamogordo range tomorrow, I want you to get a good night's sleep. The fate of the world will be riding in the car you'll be driving, so it would be nice if you were bright and sober. Agreed?"

"Yes, sir."

"Please be aware, Sergeant, that I am unhappy with the quality of information that you've been giving me lately. We have a deal. You're on provisional assignment to me. That's probation. You go back to the brig any time I say. Now you get back inside the lodge, give them a couple more tunes and send our civilians home happy. By the way, do you know the difference between a nigger playing the piano and an Indian playing the piano?"

"No, sir."

"Funny, neither do I."

Joe tried to concentrate on the music for the last set. He did a little serious work on "I Got It Bad", turning the chorus into bebop flat fifths, followed with the tom-tom rhythm of "Cherokee", then moved into the placid waters of "More Than You Know". The jitterbuggers got one last shot with "The GI Jive" before he U-turned through "Funny Valentine" and slid into the final tune of the night, "Every Time We Say Goodbye". Fuchs was doing a Hapsburg ballroom number with Anna Weiss, as if he was waltzing to "The Blue Danube". She seemed graceful enough in his arms, and smiled as if she found him either amusing or ridiculous. Across the floor, Oppy kept his eye on Fuchs and the girl with a concentration that was unusual even for him. At the same time, Kitty was behind Oppy and watching him and the girl. Perhaps it was the novelty of a new face or her bizarre coveralls, but everyone seemed to watch Anna Weiss; on the dance floor she seemed to be the only one completely alive. It was a trick of the light that followed one person around. Joe had seen the quality before; it was rare, but not unknown.

Every time we say goodbye… Porter had written an intimate ballad for lovers parting at train stations, troopships, beds. At previous dances, Fuchs's style had struck Joe as ludicrous; tonight, it was irritating. When he saw Fuchs and his partner heading for a dip, he skipped a bar, went on four bars, inserted the missing bar of music and continued. Fuchs looked like a man trapped by a traffic signal. The girl looked at Joe. The other dancers didn't notice because they were all dancing close and slow. As Fuchs stared at the piano, Joe drew the tune out. It was full of the loveliest A-minor chords. He got Harvey to sustain an E and came down the whole keyboard on the ninths like Tatum, returning to catch Harvey's dying note and stretch it into melody with the right hand while he brought the left softly up the keys like a rabbit. Harvey stopped playing and stood with the reed at his open mouth, eyes big. Joe turned the rabbit into a bebop bopping from chord to chord as softly as a lullaby until he merged the melody again and made it swell until Fuchs couldn't help but start dancing again. When Fuchs was in full spin, he dropped into "The Skater's Waltz", still in A-minor. The girl was laughing , taking him up on it. Juchs tried to stop but she wouldn't let him; Oppy wiped tears of laughter.

Slowly, as if it were a force taking control, syncopation came out of the bass and the waltz became a dreamy rag, then escaped into a comic stride that left Fuchs not knowing whether to put down his left foot or his right until Joe marshalled the notes into a resolute 2-4 and marched them into a proper waltz, where he left them for dead and reprised Porter as if nothing at all had happened, no Strauss, no bebop. Then he cut it short with a nod to Harvey, who came through with a flutey arpeggio. Joe hit a last chord and that was that.

3

In the beginning, Oppy thought he could build the bomb with just five other physicists. They could take over the schoolmasters' houses and eat at the school lodge. What laboratories were needed could be squeezed in between the canyon rim and the little man-made pond that graced the front of the lodge.

After deeper thought, Oppy doubled and re-doubled the number of physicists and added some mathematicians, chemists and metallurgists. The Army brought in the Engineers Detachment to man the labs, run the power plant, maintain the roads and drive the trucks. Two hundred MPs were shipped in for security. WACs came for clerical work. The labour had to be expanded because work that had been expected from the outside world, the real world so far away from New Mexico, couldn't be done there. Volcanic tufa was bulldozed for foundries. Cyclotrons and particle accelerators were jimmied up the canyon road. The British Mission arrived. Dormitories, hospital, school were built and babies born. Soldiers, MPs and WACs were again doubled and needed more barracks, cafeterias, commissaries and theatres. The civilian machinists who cut high explosives would leave if they didn't have their own housing. Civil servants had to be housed. By December 1944, five thousand people were crammed on to the mesa, and they were without streetlights because the Army was still trying to hide its most secret project.

From the dance, Joe cut across the playing field and behind the beauty shop to an area of low, rounded Quonset huts, so-called "Pacific hutments" designed to be thrown up on tropical islands, not New Mexico in the winter. This was where the construction workers who built the housing for everyone else were expected to live. He found the fight by the noise.

The ring was in the day room of the central hutment. Sergeant Ray Stingo was fighting one of the workers. Like Joe, Ray was a bodyguard and driver with security clearance, and had been a fighter, a heavyweight, before the war. He sported a black spit curl over a beaten-down nose and showed a stomach still hard as a washboard, but he must have had ten years on the kid he was boxing.

Joe edged open the door just enough to see. And smell the deep, sour reek of stale beer and dead cigarettes. The Hill had recruited and suffered through successions of construction men, each group meaner than the one before, as healthy workers without police records were likely to be drafted. The latest bunch were Texans who laboured stripped to the waist but, like a caste mark, always wore their hats. They'd put on their stetsons and pointy boots for the evening's entertainment and stood on sofas and chairs to root their boy on. Ray's backers were MPs, a corps of uniformed thugs who looked nearly civilized next to the Texans. Even with helmets and sticks, the MPs usually stayed clear of the hutments on Saturday night. Joe saw money passing between the two camps. There was probably $2,000 or $3,000 riding on a fight like this.