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“No, no, please. We are not sentimentalists. It’s important to know. We can observe the elements break down-how the body reacts.”

Oppenheimer walked over to the sink and doused his cigarette under the faucet. “I’m not asking you to-”

“No, not you. I volunteer. It’s my idea. My wish. For the project.” Eisler’s voice was clear, eager. “It seems fair it should be me.”

Connolly looked over at him, puzzled, but there seemed no irony in his voice. He was back at the blackboard, going about his business, getting ready to keep the chart on his own death.

Oppenheimer turned away from the sink, and Connolly saw that his eyes were moist. “Is there anything I can get for you?”

Eisler thought for a minute. “You have morphine? For later? I’ll need that, I think. I’m a coward when it comes to that. And there’s nothing to learn then. Just the pain.”

“Of course,” Oppenheimer said, almost a whisper.

“Nothing to learn,” Eisler repeated.

The nurse drew a screen between them at night, white cotton stretched on a wheeled frame, but Connolly couldn’t sleep. He had never been in a hospital before and it unnerved him-the constant light in the hall, the discreet sound of rubber soles in the corridor, even, once, the faint smell of night-shift coffee. But Eisler was quiet behind his screen, so Connolly was forced to lie still as well, listening to occasional bursts of rain on the asphalt shingles of the roof. He would drift into a kind of half-sleep, then find himself peering at the shadows on the ceiling, his mind moving from one to the other, making pictures, until he no longer knew when he was awake.

He saw Eisler bending over the lab table, then Emma biting her bottom lip, then, oddly, his friend Lenny Keazer, who had been killed in New Guinea. Shot down. Connolly wondered whether he’d seen anything more than a flash before the plane tipped. He had never imagined dying before. Now he saw that it was being nothing. And everything else just went on. Lenny didn’t know whether they’d won or-But what was the point? It wouldn’t matter if you weren’t there. Karl found his secret and then it didn’t matter. And Eisler, who’d said his war was over. Then Connolly was back on his street in Washington, home that afternoon, with the bay window of the little room open to the spring air. Magnolia trees. And he leaned out to see the brown army car move slowly down the street, looking for house numbers. Was anyone else looking out, holding a crack open in the curtains? A soldier got out across the street, carrying an envelope, and walked up the steps to the house, and the next thing Connolly heard was a scream, a long wail that tore the air. A sound from the ancients, a lamentation. He watched the soldier get back in the car and drive away. Then a truck drove down the street, the paper boy on his rounds, another car, and everything went on. That had been the afternoon he thought he had seen the war, the brown car going down one street after another. It would be worth anything to end that. A quick flash and it would stop, the Japanese, finally, startled out of their mad reverie. A hundred to save a thousand. A new kind of mathematics. Did Oppenheimer think of it that way?

The rain woke him, a little spurt of gunfire, and he heard Eisler breathing. The fancies of the night. The ceiling was dark, like the blackboard, and he filled it with chalk marks. So many minutes, so many meters. Eisler had saved his life, then calmly gone about his business. Connolly had been the surprise. He closed his eyes, looking at the lab again, the steady hand on the cube, the cool dispassion of science. He watched Eisler bend over, carefully inching the metal down, and suddenly he knew what was bothering him, all this fitful dreaming. There hadn’t been any accident. He had been the accident, quickly corrected. The cube had been deliberate. It had done just what Eisler had wanted it to do. Not an accident. He heard him tell Oppenheimer, an easy lie. He wanted to be nothing.

Connolly turned toward the screen, his whole body awake now, and listened. The breathing was light, barely audible, not the heavy patterned rhythm of sleep.

“Professor Eisler,” he said quietly.

“Mr. Connolly?” Eisler’s voice was alert, politely surprised.

“When you said before that it was fair it was you, what did you mean?”

Eisler did not answer right away. When he did, his tone was interested, as if the phrase intrigued him. “Did I say that? I don’t remember. You must have-what is the sound equivalent of a photographic memory?” The question, disembodied, seemed to rise in the dark. Connolly stared at the ceiling, waiting for it to float over the screen. He said nothing. “I suppose I meant that one of us should feel-what? The effect of what we’re doing here. Yes, you might put it that way.”

“Won’t people be killed outright? Like an ordinary bomb?”

“Most, yes. But there will be others. We just don’t know.”

“But why you?”