In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

S I M E O N B E R RY Los Alamos We’re all sons of bitches now. —Bainbridge to Oppenheimer at zero plus one minute We called it the Dragon, they called it Project Omega, though it came down to Slotin checking the potency of the bomb fragments. He poked them together with a screwdriver until the Geiger counter ticked like the metronome in the cockroach’s antennae and he could read the runes shaped in that ruined puzzle. He worked months before he slipped: they gave off a blue glow and the other six knew they might be dead in that instant, but not know it, might go back to their wives in their clean coats but with the symbols they’d created twisting the chalk in their bones and rewriting the red spirals in their veins. Slotin knew, and Graves, who had stood with his hand on Slotin’s shoulder as if he were already staring into the cataracts, but they called Graves’s wife to calculate his chances. She punched in equations until someone told her it was her husband. But Slotin knew he had looked too deep into the unlight while the radiation sunk pure uninflected arrows into him. 176 ❚ The 1990s He knew the chaos that instantly bred, the parts erased from the atom’s glazed circle. Subtracted from space, he was raised, incorruptible in the knowledge of his own end. And he was the one, lunging across the desk toward that scattered square, who shut the box with his own body. The 1990s ❚ 177 ...

Share