The dune fields, the alkali flats, the whiteness, the whole white sea-bottomed world, the lines of white haze in the distance, the six-thousand-year-old mummified baby found in a cave near White City, yes, and there were animals that bleached themselves white over the eons, a once-brown mouse that color-matched itself to the gypsum drifts to escape the gaze of predators.

The wind blew out of the Organ Mountains, busting up to fifty miles an hour, refiguring the dunes and turning the sky an odd dangerous gray that seemed a type of white gone mad.

And the men and women of the Pocket, mainly men and mainly single, with only a small cluster of marrieds and their albino, was the joke, children-they lived in semiattached bungalows at the edge of the missile range and listened to the wind that the sages of the old nations spoke about, evolving metaphors and philosophies, and it recrested the dunes, blowing steadily, sometimes, for days.

Do you work with sound waves? Do you gauge the effects of blast on delivery aircraft? Do you do physics packages and dream about a girl back in Georgia, the one who put her hand in your pants at the drive-in near the swamp? Do you long to see a fireball, an actual test shot- they are outlawed of course by now, atmospheric blasts, but you wish you'd seen one of the monster shots that vapored an atoll way back when.

He ate lunch in the underground mess with Eric Deming, a tall shuffly man in his early thirties, a couple of years younger than Matt, and one of the bombheads.

There was a droop to Eric's shoulders and clothes. He tended to eat with his hands-french fries, sure, but also lettuce, beets, boiled rice, corn niblets, anything he could pincer and lift in units.

"When's Janet coming?"

"Soon. We're working out the details," Matt said.

"Will you show her to us? We haven't seen a woman from the outside world."

"You're in Alamogordo all the time."

"That's not outside. You have to go a thousand miles before you're outside. You know that. In this state, Matty."

"She's not coming here."

"Okay but in this state do you know the percentage of people who have security clearance? Isn't that why we love it?"

"We're meeting somewhere west of here and then we're going camping. Remote remote remote. If I can talk her into it. She's not eager to do this, Janet."

Eric worked in a lab area that Matt was not cleared to enter. He used to work with radioactive materials inside a sealed glove box. He wore protective gloves, he wore overgloves attached to his sleeves, he wore layers of treated clothing equipped with a number of film badges and rad-detectors and he worked with bomb components-the neutron initiator, the detonators, the subcritical pieces, the visceral heat inside the warhead.

He was doing something else now and Matt didn't know what it was. He wore a Q badge with yellow edges and spread astounding rumors.

The bombheads loved their work but weren't necessarily pro-bomb, walking around with megadeath hard-ons. They were detail freaks. They were awed by the inner music of bomb technology. Matt watched them. He went to their parties and learned their language. They carried an afterglow of sixties incandescence, a readiness to give themselves compulsively to something.

They thought he was angling for a transfer in, ready to become one of them, wear the coded badge, the Q-sensitive access that would get him through the last gate and into the tunnel that led to bomb design.

But Matty was sneaking looks at outdoor magazines, at camp bags and dome tents, because he needed time to get away and think.

He had doubts about the Tightness of his role.

Down route 70 a ways, near the sign for the missile range, an area that is white on your map-this is where the protesters stood, seven or eight men and women, sometimes only two or three, and they carried a sign stretched between wooden uprights, World War HI Starts Here, and base personnel taunted them, or just smirked, or were flattered by the sign, or felt sorry for the sign carriers because they were windswept and unattractive.

Matt liked seeing them. He counted on it in a way. It began to be important to him, knowing they were there, four, five, six people, usually women outnumbering men, or maybe two grim figures clinging to the uprights, never saying a word as military vehicles passed, or flatbed trucks with draped objects, or civilian workers and construction crews, the odd finger flipped their way.

The white places on your map include the air base, the army base, the missile range, the vast stretch to the northwest called the Jornada del Muerto and the interdunal flats as well-the flats were map-white, on the page and in living fact, and a few low buildings were situated here, fenced structures with propane tanks, to service the underground operation in the Pocket, where weapons were conceived and designed.

They worked to strict deadlines. There were always deadlines to meet. The bombheads complained about this. They were the people of superior sensibility, the ones who'd gained a rational mastery over themselves, who were not subject to moral ambivalence, to the sentimental babyshit of consequence and anguish. They were the ones who understood the hard-ass principles of the conflict and they did not like bureaucratic pressures exerted from the surface.

But the deadlines persisted. There were deadlines all the time. There was the urgency of war without a war.

Eric said, "Hear the latest secret?"

They were walking beyond the bungalows at sunset, totally alone on the sand plain, and Eric kept looking around for eavesdroppers, comically of course, and he affected a side-of-mouth murmur that might frustrate even a lip-reader recruited to study surveillance tapes.

"It's an old thing just now surfacing," he said, "in the form of very faint rumors."

"What old thing?"

"Workers at the Nevada Test Site in the days of aboveground shots."

"What about them?"

"And people living downwind. These people have a name, incidentally, that totally defines their existence."

"What is it?"

"Downwinders," Eric said.

They ambled out past low growths of saltbush toward the electrified fence.

"What about them?" Matt said.

"Nobody's supposed to know this. It's something that's more or less out in the open but at the same time."

"What?"

"Secret. Untalked about. Hushed up."

"What's the secret?" Matt said.

"Multiple myelomas. Kidney failures. Or you wake up one morning and you're three inches shorter."

"You mean exposure to fallout."

"Or you start throwing up one day and you throw up every succeeding day for seven, eight weeks."

"But isn't this something we have to expect? Occasional miscalculations. It's dangerous work, you know?"

Eric seemed to enjoy this remark. No, he seemed to expect it, he seemed to find it encouraging. They walked out past a large parabolic dune and it was so draggingly hot out here that the air seemed a form of physical hindrance.

"Little farm communities downwind of the tests. Nearly all the kids wear wigs," Eric whispered.

"Doing chemo?"

"Yeah. And here and there a kid that's born with a missing limb or whatnot. And a healthy woman that goes to wash her hair and it all comes out in her hands. She's a ravishing, you know, brunette one minute and totally bald the next."

"Where?"

"Mainly southern Utah, I hear, because it's downwind. But other places too. Adenocarcinomas. Old Testament outbreaks of great red boils. Great big splotches and rashes. And coughing up handfuls of blood. You look in your cupped hands and you see a pint of radded blood."

They walked along the electrified fence past a warning sign graffiti'd by a protester or some apostate working slyly in the Pocket.