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Daria Sloane spent her war pushing numbers in the desert. Her days were filled with the soprano chorus of her fellow computers, the private jokes born of long proximity, the incessant ringing of the Marchant calculators in all their ears, as they circulated figures that stood for shock waves and superheated turbulence. Half her dreams were nightmares about implosion and the dying microseconds of supercritical plutonium.
She was mastermind of the big wall chart that indicated which theory group had time on which chain of calculators, and who had a spot in the queue for the IBM electronic devices. Most of her fellow computers were also wives of Los Alamos men, working at fractional salary. Tom had alienated his parents the better part of a decade earlier by being vocally anti-Nazi before that was fashionable. He had forsaken Bromwell for Swarthmore, where he had met Daria, who was coming up through Bryn Mawr, riding an enthusiasm for mathematics stoked by a teenage meeting with Emmy Noether.
Daria could work after waking from the implosion dreams. The others....
The IBM devices were giving the girls a headache, or more precisely, the physicists attached to them were. First Metropolis, and then Dick Feynman, had sniped themselves with the challenge of exploring all the things the manual didn't say they could do: clatter out the beat of cheerful songs, recalculate trig tables and the zeroes of Bessel functions from scratch... "You know," Daria said conversationally, "my maiden name was Morgendorffer." The physicists tinkering in the wiring cabinets looked up at her. She continued, "The only Morgendorffer of intellectual note studied with David Hilbert at Göttingen." She paused. "He's dead now." The why did not need to be said. "On task, please?"
So, the physicists were not so hard to manage, and the other computers weren't a bad lot.
The dreams, though.
Flashes of a woman's hands, hair, a turquoise pendant that matched her eyes.
Daria had first visited San Antonio, a dot of a town on the road from nowhere to nowhere, accompanying Tom and two others on a Jeep adventure to scout testing sites for the Gadget. Just a note-taker with security clearance. They had stopped for cheeseburgers.
The test site was chosen in September '44. This meant more trips, calculations that had to be done on-site. It meant more hot cheeseburgers dripping with Hatch chilis and cold longnecks dripping with condensation.
She knew about the girl who handled the grill and carried the cases of beer. She was a painter, she was mad for petroglyphs, she dreamed of being a photographer who traveled the world. She had a brother who'd been in the Army and was invalided home, alive thank God. She was Daria's age and not snapped up yet, despite how well she matched her pendant to her eyes.
Then came the day that Hitler died, no doubt jacking his one ball for the last time. And the "prospectors" and "mining engineers" still filled the bar, still slapped down legal tender for the best burgers in Socorro County, in New Mexico, maybe in the world.
"Hey, Jane," she said at last. They stood across the bar from each other, at the far end from the raucous "engineers". No one would hear a quiet conversation over a crew of beer-battered physicists. "Do you want to hear a secret?"
Jane replied, "Loose lips can sink ships, I hear."
"Not a lot of ships in the desert."
"Well, all right, then."
Daria lifted herself to lean closer. She whispered in Jane's ear. A date, a time, a compass direction. "Stay here, and watch the Jornada del Muerto."
* * *
The next time Daria visited the bar, Jane was unloading crates from a truck. She took Daria's arm, pulled her into the empty building and swept her into an embrace. "Why did you tell me about—that!?"
"That was the Gadget," Daria said. "We built it to stop Hitler. The next one will be aimed at Japan." Her level tone and steady gaze could not hide the doubts, the Faust and Prometheus imagery already taking root in a few of the lethal geniuses on the mesa.
"And you wanted me to see the, the test run go off because...?"
"Because," Daria swallowed, "I think I needed to see it with someone I could face the future with. Or as close to with them as I could."
Jane held Daria's hand, gently, and ran her index finger over Daria's wedding ring. "And the fellow who gave you this isn't...?"
"It's been a very convenient marriage. I wore a white veil to cover his preference for lavender. Very convenient, for both our purposes."
"Oh... Oh." She pulled Daria in tightly again. "Nothing's going to be the same now, is it? For anyone."
"Or for us," Daria whispered. "I hope."
"Or for us," Jane affirmed.