Stallion Gate by Martin Cruz Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

behavior. You understand what I mean by bourgeois?”
    Joe watched Oppy slowly stepping off the direction. A frail figure, his coat whipping around him. As he spread his arms, turning, holding flags, he seemed, in his ungainly way, to be dancing in the snow.
    They created a model of the test site to come: red flags for directions, lettered stakes to indicate relative distances to control shelters, base camp, observation posts, evacuation roads, populated areas. By the time they gathered by the transit, the model’s Ground Zero, the snow had almost stopped. Groves’ manner was brisk and expansive, an engineer breaking ground. Waving his hand, he described the test tower, miles of wire, roads and trucks he saw in his mind. Oppy had brought a bottle of cognac, and even Groves, who usually drank nothing more than the smallest glass of sherry, accepted a ceremonial sip. Alone in the car, Joe radioed theconvoy that was supposed to have met them hours before. He opened his own flask while he fished in the static. Vodka. Wartime distillers made vodka from potatoes, corn, molasses, grain, from ethene, methane and petrochemicals, from horse sweat and purified piss. Santa Fe liquor stores wouldn’t sell a bottle of anything unless you bought a bottle of vodka. Another subversive Communist connection.
    “… difficulty … lost a drive wheel … soon, over.”
    Joe repeated his map coordinates to the static and signed off. The general had missed his plane; he’d have to see Roosevelt another day.
    Suddenly it was colder and darker. Clouds flowed by on either side, and directly above was a stream of evening stars. When Joe returned, he made a fire from cow chips he dug out of the snow. The other three, exhilarated from mapping the test site, were still sharing the cognac. It occurred to Joe that these minutes of waiting for the party from the base probably were the first moments of relaxation, of complete and powerless rest, that either Oppy or Groves had spent in years.
    “You have to wonder about the Chinese alchemists who invented gunpowder,” Oppy said. “When they were on the verge of discovery, were they fortunate enough to have a night as quiet and beautiful as this? Perhaps the emperor of China had horsemen searching for them, just as jeeps are searching for us. Perhaps we’ll meet them.”
    “What do you mean?” Groves asked.
    “Einstein says time bends around the universe in acurving line. On that line you can go backwards or forwards. We’ll never find this same Stallion Gate here again, but we can always find it on some cusp of time. If we could do that, we could meet those Chinese horsemen, too.”
    “I’ll tell you about going back to the past,” Groves snorted, and filled his hand with caramels from his pocket. “The bitterest day of my life was when I was ordered to rescue this project. I had just been offered my first combat command the week before. A soldier wants to see combat. My father was an Army chaplain, and even he saw combat. There I was, Army born and bred, ordered to spend history’s greatest war at home overseeing a bunch of scientific prima donnas who, as far as I could tell, had sold the President a bill of goods.” He popped a caramel into his mouth and ruminated. “Well, I don’t run phony projects that don’t show results. A lot of scientists and so-called geniuses tried to sell me a bill of goods on how to make this atomic bomb. The greatest American physicist is E. O. Lawrence. I like Lawrence. He put the cyclotron on the map and he won the Nobel Prize, but he’s hardly produced a speck of uranium. Nevertheless, I will make this project a success. It’s largely a matter of plumbing, albeit complicated.” Oppy’s eyes glittered with amusement. Groves wiped his fingers in the snow. “In fact, I have never been more positive of success than I am at this very moment, at this very place.”
    “This will be your monument,” Oppy said.
    “Monument?” Groves sighed. “After I