An Atomic Romance Read Online Free PDF Page B

he seemed fully alive.
    Eisenhower stood on Reed’s toolbox, his feet taped down. He was upright and realistic, with a mortician’s grin. For verisimilitude, Reed had added a few white spots of caulking beneath the bird’s tail. Everybody on the floor knew Eisenhower.
    Reed took a deep breath and cut off his oxyacetylene torch. Big-band music filled his head, but the melody was indistinct, vapors of wandering sounds within the howling of the Cascade. He resumed his welding. Even though the plant no longer enriched uranium for bomb fuel, but instead supplied nuclear-power plants, Reed was still proud of doing this dangerous kind of work. In college he had majored in chemistry, after a guidance counselor steered him away from astronomy, saying there was little money to be made in that field and that he would need graduate school to go into research. After college, Reed had to earn a lot of money quickly, so that he could marry Glenda, whose expectations included a king-size bed and fancy vacations. New jobs were opening up at the plant, and the money was exceptional. He was following in his father’s footsteps, and he had grown to love the work. Now Glenda was gone, their kids grown, and the same stars were still shining in their mysterious canopy.
    But it was Julia he wanted now. In the deafening noise of the Cascade, Reed heard her name whispered over and over. Her name was always near his lips, the song bearing her name a deep undercurrent in his being. With her perfect self-possession, she always seemed to know clearly what she was doing. She never overindulged. She wasn’t overweight. Her moves were so graceful they seemed unconscious. It was a discipline she learned from tai chi, he was made to understand.
    Julia had the casual air of a fashion model, the kind of person who would look good even in a tow sack and kneesocks, but she didn’t seem to need to shop or complain about her hair. She seemed self-guided, like one of those museum tours with headphones. She was the opposite of most women he had known—dolls with every hair pasted in place, the skin paved like asphalt with brilliant makeup, the gestures calculated and coy. Julia possessed a kind of aloofness that self-confidence produces—she was never beseeching, needful, weak, or self-conscious. Even when dressed in her lab wear, with aqua cotton pants and sneakers, Julia was cool.
    Usually women simply disregarded things about him that didn’t appeal to them, such as his interests in quasars or chemicals or asteroids. But Julia would cheerfully study anything, like a forensics expert with a lapful of dirty bones. When he showed her his Hubble slide show—hundreds of stars and galaxies on a CD-ROM—she was astonished, gasping at the Starbirth Region of Nebula NGC 604 as if she were witnessing it at an IMAX theatre. With Julia, he ranged through the Cat’s Eye Nebula, the Eagle Nebula, the Crab Nebula, and the Horsehead Nebula, fading then into the diseased-looking Cone Nebula rearing its phallic sea-worm head and belching out stars.
    “Here comes a supernova,” he said, ducking. “A star on its deathbed.”
    “We need 3-D glasses,” she said.
    “If you let your eyes go out of focus a little, you can imagine you’re inside.”
    She squinted and stared. “Very nebulous,” she remarked. “I see what you mean.”
    Together, they traveled light-years through the universe. She began to recognize the repeats. She liked the dense, busy print designs of millions of stars.
    “Oh, there’s a face in that one.” She pointed out the beady eyes, the mustache, and the chin at the center of a nebula. “My ex-husband,” she said.
    “Burl says it’s God.”
    She laughed. “My ex-husband thought he was God.”
    “I get lost in these,” Reed said, moving the cursor to click a new folder.
    “Close-ups of disease germs look a lot like this,” she said. “Under a microscope, a lot of them are like impressionist paintings. Anthrax is really pretty.”
    He