Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [94]
“My father knew him a little,” said Kip. “You probably met him yourself.”
“Not personally, but he had his impact on my life.”
“All our lives. Not only did he build that first cyclotron at Harvard that they moved up to the Hill when they were just getting started, but he was there at the end.”
“Top of command down at Trinity—oversaw the building of the tower, positioning of the device, that first explosion. They say if it’d hangfired, he’d have been the one to go out there to see what went wrong.”
“You wish it’d hangfired.”
Delfino said, “Let’s get this straight. I didn’t want us to lose the war. In my small way, I was trying to help us win. All I’m saying is, they could’ve done their work, then kept their word. What good’s a homeland if you got no home? When it comes to nukes, the brass has always had a hard time keeping its word about anything. Pretty weird getting screwed by the government when all’s you’re doing is acting like a patriot.”
Kip saw the half-smoked cigarette in his trouser cuff. Marcos offered him a fresh one but he declined, relighting the fag.
They had their way of making you feel you were the one who was nuts, and even if you were, a little, they rendered the definition of nuts obsolete, passé. Delfino had seen so-called UFOs, but knew they’d been launched from quite close quarters and so never for a moment bought into extraterrestrials. Spacemen were for the birds, even if they did exist.
“Look here, a lot of things exist that shouldn’t.” It didn’t matter a good goddamn, Delfino continued, whether we were or weren’t being observed by intelligences from other solar systems. They were out there, most likely. So? What he had learned during his years of research sickened him, earned him the badge in his heart of the disgusted, the abused, the ruined.
Kip sat listening, empathizing more than Delfino might have thought. A pragmatist, he knew that when things went wrong one needn’t point one’s finger to the heavens at either God or green men.
In 1951, Delfino went on, the Atomic Energy Commission established three-point-nine rads as the max threshold for troop exposure to ionizing radiation. Seven miles from ground zero was set as the safety distance for nuclear tests in Nevada. A year later, eight volunteer officers were hunkered down in shallow trenches, flanked by cactuses and nothing else, at a distance of just two thousand yards out, to play a part in Shot Simon. A dozen others were located at twenty-five hundred yards for Shot Badger, and other officers beheld Shot Nancy from the same distance. These shots were umbrellaed under the dumbshit code name Upshot-Knothole, or as one clever serviceman renamed it, Up Your Nuthole. The officers were exposed to at least a hundred rads on deton. Some were temporarily blinded. All were burned, leaving them with skin ulcers that looked like silvery purple worms wandering a scrapheap of shriveled beets. The men underwent physical and psychological exams before and after the guinea-pig tests, but none was given any intelligible consent form to sign off on. Other troops were ordered into combat attack mode. They ran with bayonets toward ground zero, shouting and crying as the earth rolled under their feet in waves, like some dirt ocean heading for shore. They returned to camp bleeding from noses, eyes, ears, and muted mouths. As for the phantom enemy who was supposed to be frightened by all this, he heard none of their shouting that day because he had no ears. He didn’t see their bayonets because he had no eyes.
“Ever since they thought up nukes, they been moving people around like chess pieces, packing some of us off to get us out from underfoot, sending others to slaughter. Worse damn invention in the history of man.”
Marcos continued to toss stones. Kip sat at a kind of weird attention, hands spread on thighs, spine erect. Whenever the bomb came up in conversation