Connolly smiled. “Well, there’s a war on.”

She smiled back. “You’d be surprised what little ice that cuts at the airport. I wish he’d take the train, the way he usually does. But we’ll get him on somehow.”

And of course she would. Connolly looked at her, surprised at how quickly he’d been taken in and charmed. Everything about Los Alamos seemed disjointed-the train that stopped somewhere else, this city that didn’t seem to be in America, and now this good-natured, competent woman who managed emigre physicists and army generals as if they were hungry customers at a church potluck supper. He wondered how much she knew, what she made of it all. A secret project that would help win the war-was that enough? Was that all she needed? According to his briefing, there were now four thousand people at Los Alamos. Mrs. McKibben had been there from the start, settling them in, handing out numbered identities. What did she think they were doing, all these people with unpronounceable names and housing problems, working into the middle of the night on a hilltop?

“Now, if you need anything else at all, you just let me know.”

“Thanks. I’m sorry to have put you to so much trouble.”

“That’s what we’re here for.” For a moment he thought he saw in her eyes the inevitable question: what are you here for, with your car and your wad of coupons? But if she wondered, she said nothing.

“The car. Where do I pick it up?”

“Why, you’ve been in it. That is, once the motor pool assigns it to you.”

“Which they will.”

“You bet. I signed the papers.”

They drove for almost an hour before they got to the long twisting road up the mesa. It was graded and paved now but still had all the debris and scattered equipment of a permanent construction site.