Belinda could feel the sweat dripping down her torso as she gave her presentation. She had been expecting that she would be teaching the local Aerojet engineers and their manager at their branch office in Socorro, so she had dressed appropriately for a formal training seminar in a venue with functional air conditioning. Her skirt and matching blazer with a demure blouse normally enhanced her professional image. Her wardrobe couldn't really obscure much less conceal her womanly charms, but dressing modestly could deemphasize them. Unfortunately; the Aerojet people had belatedly informed Belinda that she would have to meet with them in this Hell hole. Now she was burning in the inferno.
The White Sands missile range was only a fifteen minute drive South on Interstate Twenty-Five then East on Highway Three-Eighty from Socorro. Belinda had been teary eyed all morning. Today was her son's twenty-first birthday. Today was the first anniversary of her son's death.
Belinda had been confronted by two formidable looking guards at the main gate. Both of the guard dogs had been particularly attentive to the view down her blouse. She was almost certain that they hadn't been checking for weapons concealed in her deep cleavage. A young lady steeped in the Me Too Movement would have become irate. Belinda might have been flattered and amused by the young men taking an interest if they hadn't reminded her so much of her lost son. In spite of her grief, their attention had reminded her to button her blouse up to her clavicles and button her jacket.
Unfortunately; the Global Positioning System in the rental car had gone insane. The navigation system had misdirected her to a confusing maze of dirt roads that were little better than goat tracks. Belinda had finally realized that she was truly lost when she passed an old adobe house then a few miles further, noticed the obelisk in the middle of a crater that marked ground zero of the Trinity nuclear weapons test.
Belinda understood the concept of exponential decay. She had taken Freshman Calculus, Chemistry and Physics during her aborted college education. She could still derive the equation that related half-life to decay rate. Although she had understood intellectually that the most intensely radioactive isotopes had the shortest half-lives and that the residual radioactivity of the fission products and any remaining Plutonium was trivial, the Trinity site had terrified her on a visceral level.
Belinda's decision to indulge herself by renting a Range Rover Evoque had been validated. The all wheel drive convertible wasn't as capable as her Subaru Forester, but it was far more elegant. The little sports car had handled the goat tracks at high speed. The Evoque had even enabled her to drive a few miles cross country whenever the goat tracks seemed to take her in the wrong direction. She had used the rising sun rather than the car's confused and catatonic navigation system to drive due West until she had escaped from that purgatory to find a paved road. The drive had convinced her that this barren wasteland had been the perfect location to test a nuclear weapon. She had found herself wishing that they would nuke the place again.
The steel building that looked like an oversized Quonset hut had actually been a welcome sight when Belinda finally found it. Unfortunately; she had soon discovered that the corrugated steel panels that formed the arch and end walls were uninsulated. Even worse, the wood framed, twenty foot by twenty foot cubicle inside the cavernous building that was their classroom was also uninsulated. Four-hundred square feet was too small a space to accommodate two dozen warm bodies. The little air conditioning unit set in a window labored like Sisyphus. Unfortunately; the laws of thermodynamics made its efforts to cool the uninsulated room almost as futile as the mythical Greek king's efforts to defy gravity by rolling a boulder up a hill.
Belinda once again considered taking her jacket off. However; she knew from experience that while her white blouse was far from indecent, if she removed her jacket the attentions of every man in the room would be fixated on her breasts rather than the anachronistic chalk board that she was writing on. As her husband often assured Belinda, motherhood had enhanced her. Her decision to wear one of her lacy white bras without a slip in deference to the heat made removing her jacket especially inadvisable. The men in her audience were obviously some of the smartest people that she had ever met. They literally were rocket scientists. However; men were men, even if the men were nerds. The sensation of the sweaty fabric of her blouse clinging to her curves forewarned her that her white blouse had become translucent. She dare not take her jacket off.
The class was interrupted yet again when one of her students received a text message. He was polite about interrupting her presentation yet again, but Belinda knew better than to object. She stood aside as the nerd herd stampeded for the door lest she be trampled under their thundering hooves. She might have tried cowering in the building again, but the previous tests had proven that attempting to hide would be futile. The noise would not have been so terrifying if it hadn't revived memories of her murdered son. She grabbed the earmuffs that they had issued to her and followed the nerd herd outside again. She waited at the building while her students climbed into half a dozen Humvees for the ridiculous quarter mile drive to the monster.
The monster resembled a tank, but Belinda had overheard the engineers referring to it as a "Paladin" and a "howitzer." Her students milled around the monster as the crew prepared for the next test firing. She noticed that everyone, military and nerds alike, seemed to defer to an enormous black man. They seemed to be respectful rather than intimidated by his formidable physique. She idly wondered who he was to command such deference.
Once again the noise of the explosion was so loud that Belinda could actually feel her entire body reverberating. One of the nerds had explained the concept of "overpressure" to her. He had then suggested that they might invite her to their next nuclear simulation so she could experience the glorious detonation of a thousand tons of Ammonium-Nitrate and fuel oil. They always set up bleachers and portable toilets for spectators and even had a beer truck on hand for refreshments.
One of the nerds had assured Belinda that it wasn't just her imagination. Once again, she could actually see a black dot as the projectile emerged from the muzzle of the cannon to fly down range. She could also see other, smaller specks. The nerds had refused to answer her questions, but she had overheard them using the words "saboted," "hypervelocity" and "precision guided munition." Googling had been informative.
