Oh Pure and Radiant Heart - Lydia Millet (ebook reader online TXT) 📗

shoulder again, heat rushing to her face, her hands shaking on the wheel.

—Can you see who it is? she asked.

—The windows are too dark, said Szilard. —Drive fast!

—Here, she said, and rummaged in her purse as she floored the gas. —Call 911!

—Give it to me! said Szilard, and grabbed the phone from the purse just as the Hum-V rammed them a third time and stayed with them, pushing their car in front of it. Ann smelled burning rubber and screamed, and as she lost control of the steering vaguely heard the hoarse sound of the others screaming too. They were veering, pushed, veering off the road again, the right half of the car in a ditch, undercarriage grating against the road, more burning, and the car was up on its right wheels, up, up, and they came off the ground and flipped sideways, rolling.

Kneeling to fix a spigot on the irrigation system Ben knew suddenly that he could not let Ann to go to Japan without him. They had never been apart for more than three days, and the scientists, unpredictable as any unknown quantities, could not be entrusted with her welfare. Also, there was enough new distance between them already.

He got up, brushed the dirt off his knees and went to find Lynn, who was stretching on a mat in the living room in a purple leotard.

But Lynn was not used to breaches of contract.

—No fucking way! she said. —I mean we have a timeline here. We’re having the Fourth of July party and what if it’s not finished by then? You can’t just go away for two weeks. It’s ridiculous. I mean Yoshi can’t tell the workers what to do, the guy doesn’t even know how to speak English! Are you fucking kidding me?

—I realize his English is still improving, said Ben quietly. —He’s not up to speed yet. So I thought I’d hire a temporary foreman for you. He’s very reliable. I’ll bring him in tomorrow and if you don’t like him for any reason I have a great second alternate. They both have excellent credentials.

—I didn’t hire them, I hired you!

—I know, said Ben. —Of course I understand your position, and these weeks will represent a financial loss for me. But you’d actually be getting someone who’s out of my league professionally, who’s a lot better known than I am, Joe Kessler, his work has been in magazines, Connoisseur maybe? Or Architectural Digest? I can have him send over a portfolio. He’s actually taking a two-week break from working on a place in Malibu. Joni Mitchell, I think he said. I mean this is a guy we’d be lucky to—

—Joni Mitchell?

She woke to the car door being jerked open. She was upside down and they were pulling her out. Her head was heavy, throbbing with blood.

—Incredibly lucky, said the emergency worker, and led her over to the ambulance, where she sat down on a stretcher as they moved around her, touching her hair and temples, dabbing her with something wet, asking questions as they prodded at her torso. The scientists stood nearby, apparently unhurt. Oppenheimer was smoking in rapid puffs as he met her eyes, Fermi sat on the hood of a police car with his head in his hands, and Szilard paced on the dead grass jabbering into her cell phone. —All of you.

When they got home Ben was beyond relief to have her back whole and safe. Szilard had called and thrown him into a panic.

It never occurred to him that the crash had been anything more significant than a road rage incident.

Oppenheimer read steadily, informing himself through the books Ann brought him from the library.

In his memoirs, Truman had described the factors that influenced his decision to drop the bomb and his emotions at the time. He wrote: “Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt it should be used.”

When the bomb fell on Hiroshima, Truman was aboard ship. Said a reporter of his expression as he announced the attack to crewmen: “He was not actually laughing, but there was a broad smile on his face.”

Without reading the mind of Truman or his military advisors, however, it is nonetheless possible to make some stipulations, reflected Oppenheimer as he read. First, though the line taken officially was different, some commentators suggested that the bomb was dropped not primarily to defeat the Japanese but to demonstrate American military superiority over the Soviet Union, erstwhile ally, and thus indemnify American hegemony against the burgeoning power and imperialist designs of Stalin, whatever those might be.

Second, it was a fact that the Japanese were definitively losing the war in August 1945, and despite their militaristic and nationalistic will to victory they had already begun to make attempts to surrender, via these same Soviet allies. But the U.S. chose to discredit their overtures and insist that it would accept only unconditional surrender. Under the terms of such a surrender the emperor could be compelled to forfeit his throne, and perhaps more importantly the Japanese would not be permitted to save face. This was the public rationale for dropping the bomb.

Since unconditional surrender would be required, the fight must continue until the Japanese were forced to their knees. And given that the fight was to continue there was, to be sure, a need to minimize the loss of American and yes, suddenly, even Japanese lives. The bomb would save lives by taking them; by killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians instantly the bomb would save the lives of American soldiers.

The elegance of this argument, he felt, was that its validity could never be determined. Certainly many lives would also have been lost if, in order to effect the all-important unconditional surrender, conventional warfare continued.

In the early summer of 1945 U.S. military planners estimated a ground invasion of Japan would cost twenty to sixty thousand American lives; George Marshall set the figure at forty-six thousand. Yet curiously, after