The Green Glass Sea (10 page)

“We're top priority here. The government wants to keep all of us happy, so we'll work hard and win the war. ” He took another long drink of beer. “Go get your shoes on. ”

Suze went to her room to find her sneakers, wondering about the war. The war was the reason everyone was on the Hill, but somehow it seemed less real here, like a story she'd seen in a movie. There were soldiers everywhere, but they weren't fighting or going off to die. No one's father was gone, nobody had a blue star hanging in their window.

She tied her shoelace and frowned. If the government really wanted them to be happy, why did they read her mail? Why did they have barbed-wire fences and guards, sirens and passes? Her mother said the front gate was just like the tollbooth on the Golden Gate Bridge. But Suze had never seen a tollbooth man carry a rifle.

War stuff just didn't make any sense.

Suze and her father walked to the Lodge in companionable silence. He had lit his pipe, and the smoke blew over her head, smelling like sweetish-sour burning leaves. The Daddy smell. She could tell by looking at him that he was thinking about a work problem. He moved his fingers, just a little, when he was calculating.

The sun was beginning to drop behind the mountains to the west, and Suze watched her shadow, long and thin, flow over the ruts and bumps in the road. She loved this time of day, because of the shadows and the light. The light was almost magical, like the Maxfield Parrish pictures in her fairy-tale book. He was her favorite artist. They were passing through the darker shadow of the water tower when her father suddenly snapped his fingers.

“Hold up a sec, ” he said. He pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket and wrote a few numbers and symbols on the back of his wrist, next to his watchband. Suze had no idea what they meant.

“That's Greek, isn't it?” she said, guessing.

He looked startled. “Yes, as a matter of fact. ” He pointed to a little blue triangle. “That's the letter
delta
. It means ‘change. ' How did you know?”

“Oh, some kids and I were talking about Greek this afternoon, ” Suze said casually. “Because of the Gamma Building. Gamma's like a kind of G, but in Greek, right? What does it look like? Do all the letters mean something else? Will you teach me?”

Her father chuckled. “Slow down. One question at a time. ” They started walking again. “Okay, ” he said after a moment. “First lesson. Greek letters mean one thing if you're actually talking Greek, and something else if you're talking math. ”

“Math isn't a language, ” said Suze.

“Actually, it is. It's the language we use to describe patterns. ” He stopped and lit his pipe again, which was what he always did when he wanted a little bit of time to think. He exhaled a cloud of bluish smoke. “Take a circle, for example. There's a pattern to circles. ”

“They're round, ” Suze agreed. She liked to use a compass to draw circles, because they came out perfect every time.

“More than that. There's a pattern to the relation of their diameters—how big they are across the center—to their circumferences, how big they are around. ” He looked down at her. “With me?”

“So far. ” Suze scrunched up her eyes and imagined drawing a circle.

“Okay. If you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter, the answer is always 3. 14159, with a lot more numbers after the nine. ” He waved his hand off into the air, dismissing the other numbers. “It's the same number, for any circle, no matter how big or how little. 3. 14159. So instead of writing that out every time, scientists just use the Greek letter
pi
. Like this. ” He uncapped his pen and drew what looked like a little blue gate on Suze's wrist. “
Pi
. Elegant, isn't it?”

“I guess so. ” The circle in Suze's mind had changed into a round apple pie. She could tell by her father's voice that he thought this pie thing was really interesting and exciting. A Greek letter that was also a long number that was really a circle. Maybe it was like a secret science code. But she liked that he was sharing it with her, just the two of them. She slipped her hand into his, and after half a second of hesitation, or surprise, she felt his larger hand close around hers.

They walked the rest of the way to the Lodge without saying anything more out loud.

FULLER LODGE WAS
the center of social life on the Hill, and the tallest building, three stories of big pine logs like giant forest columns, with windows in between. Philip Gordon stopped to knock the dead ashes out of his pipe against the big stone steps of the front porch before replacing the briar in his shirt pocket. “Shall we?” he said. He held the left-hand door open for her, and they went inside.

The dining room in the Lodge was one of Suze's favorite inside places on the Hill. It was a long room with log-column walls hung with bright, patterned Navajo rugs. Balconies ran along both sides. At one end stood a big stone fireplace with an elk head mounted over it. On this hot summer night, all the windows were open to catch any breeze. With wooden walls and wooden floors and more than a hundred people all talking and laughing and eating, it was very noisy. Waitresses in white uniforms bustled among the tables, bringing food and clearing away plates.

“Over here, Phil, ” called a man in a plaid shirt, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. Her father put his hand on her back and steered her over to a table near the far wall. He sat down across from her.

“Where's Terry?” asked the other man. He had an accent and it sounded like
Vere's
.

“Still in her lab. You know how it is, Hans. ”

“We all put in our time, ” the man said, shaking his head. “And you,
liebchen
? How are you tonight?”

“Fine, Mr. Bethe, ” Suze said. She was pleased that she remembered to pronounce his name the way it wasn't spelled—Beh-teh.

He nodded and glanced down at the newspaper folded by his plate. “Still, we're getting there. And maybe we won't need to? The Allies are just outside Paris. It won't be long. ”

“Good news, ” agreed her father. “But there's still the Japs. We may need it there. ”

Suze thought “it” was probably the gadget gun, but knew better than to ask. The waitress came over and her father ordered a steak, medium rare, and coffee. Suze had the same thing, except with milk.

She played with her fork, trying to balance it on the rim of her glass, while the men talked about things she didn't understand. Mostly work. At the other end of the table, a man and a woman she didn't know were talking in a
language
she didn't understand at all.

Suze was sorry she hadn't brought
Wonder Woman
with her. She had just gotten to the part where Wonder Woman found the hideout of the bad guy, a Nazi mad scientist who was going to blow up the world. You knew he was a scientist because he wore a long white coat and had a pointy beard and thick glasses.

She looked around the room and thought about that. Just about everyone she could see, every man at least, was some kind of scientist in real life. But nobody, not one of them, looked like the one in the comic. No white coats, just T-shirts and plaid shirts and blue jeans. A couple of people had moustaches, but no beards. A lot of them
did
wear glasses, though.

The steaks came, with yellow corn on the cob, glistening with butter, and a baked potato with steam that smelled like edible laundry when she smooshed it open with her fingers. The men kept talking, but Suze didn't mind as much, now that there was food.

Dessert was butterscotch pudding. It was a very satisfying texture to cut, because it made nice clean shapes, and Suze was slicing tawny orange arcs out of its slightly rubbery surface with her spoon when she saw her mother walk into the room. She was with three men, and they were all talking and shaking their heads as if they were arguing, but they were smiling, not mad. When she spotted Suze she waved and threaded her way through the maze of tables.

Dr. Marjorie Gordon—Terry—an athletic-looking woman in gray shorts, had short, honey-brown hair and blue eyes. She was very tan, with crinkly lines at the corners of her eyes when she smiled. A pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses perched just above her forehead. Like most of the women on the Hill, she wore no makeup. Her only jewelry was a gold wedding ring and a watch with a brown leather band.

“Hi, sweetie, ” she said to Suze. “Coffee, cream, ” she said to the waitress. She gave Suze a quick kiss on the temple and sat down in the empty chair next to her, then reached across the table and squeezed her husband's hand. “How was your day?” she asked.

“Not bad, ” he said. “I talked to Cyril about the procurement schedule for forty-nine. I had lunch with some of the X boys. We started looking at the diffusion data. Nothing really new. How was yours?”

She made a face. “Tedious. One of the IBMs broke down again, and we lost half a day's calculations. Dick Feynman got it up and running, thank god, but not until almost four. I managed to get some preliminary results, but they weren't at all what I was hoping. ” She added a long stream of cream to her coffee and stirred.

“Are you going back tonight?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I'm too tired to think straight. Besides, the computers have gone home for the night. I'll tackle it fresh in the morning. ”

As far as Suze was concerned, they were both talking in code. Except she knew that the computers were women who ran big adding machines. She thought about asking what they were talking about, but they wouldn't tell her. And it would probably be boring, even if she understood.

“Who were those guys you came in with?” she asked instead. “Do you work with them?”

“Two of them. The bald one is in my singing group. Oh!” She snapped her fingers. “That reminds me. We changed our rehearsal time for the show tomorrow night. I need to find Jimmy, our tenor, and let him know. Glorious Irish voice, and he's got to be there, or we're sunk. ” She looked around the room. “I don't see him, ” she said after a minute. “Maybe I'll run by his place later, on the way home, and let him know. ” She shook her head. “Sometimes it's damned inconvenient with no phones up here. ”

“What are you going to sing?” asked Suze. Around the house, her mother sang along with the radio, and she used to sing her lullabies, when she was little. But neither of them seemed like the kind of songs you'd do for an audience.

“Schubert, mostly. Edward Teller's going to play piano for us, ” she said. “Imagine that. ”

“Oh, ” said Suze. Classical stuff, not real songs.

She sat and ate her pudding in tiny bites, trying to make it last, trying to make circles with secret pies in them, while her mother ate and her father had another cup of coffee. They were talking about grown-up things again. Not work, but groceries and drinks and did they want to have dinner with so-and-so. It was just as boring.

“Oh, say, what do you think of this?” her father asked, showing his wife what he'd written on his wrist.

She squinted, pulled her glasses down onto her nose, and said, “Nice. ” Then they were both talking in science code again, talking really fast and smiling at each other. They looked like they were having fun. A minute later her mother grabbed a paper napkin, and began scribbling numbers and Greek things on it.

“Okay, but if lambda is the rate of beta decay, ” she said at one point, and Philip nodded, then said, “Oh! Oh!” He grabbed the mechanical pencil from her hand and scribbled more.

“Is that Greek too?” Suze asked.

He didn't look up. “Yes. Not now, ” he said, and continued to write.

Suze slumped back in her chair. Right then, it seemed like her parents were from another planet, one that she would never be able to visit. She thought wistfully about
Wonder Woman
, back on the kitchen table.

A few minutes later her father folded up the napkin and put it in his pocket. “This could be good, ” he said, smiling at his wife. “I'm going to go run it by Cyril. ” He stood up, patted Suze on the cheek without really looking at her, and walked out of the dining room.

Suze watched him go. “Is Daddy going back to work?”

“Just for an hour or two. ” Her mother finished her coffee.

“Oh. ” She would be in bed by then. Suze kicked the rung of the chair.

“What's wrong?”

“Daddy was going to teach me the Greek alphabet after dinner. ”

“Greek?” Her mother raised one eyebrow. “How come?”

“So I'll be able to talk in math, ” Suze said. “Like you two do. ” She bounced her sneaker off the rung of her chair again.