They smoked nonstop on the day their creation was detonated. It was the first day in which their hands were completely idle, and they reached furiously, almost accusingly, for a new cig the moment the last one was snuffed out in an ashtray or ground under a heel.

Only a few of the men, the ones who savored a reputation as loose canons, dared muse out loud that the creation might be a dud. Such talk brought glowering silence from the others, who would drop their half-smoked cigarettes in the dust around the cynic's feet and walk slowly away. Other men laid odds -- a longshot bet, but possible all the same -- that their bomb might set fire to the earth's atmosphere, burning off the tender layer of oxygen surrounding the blue-green planet in a bright and final flashbulb-pop. A celebrity flameout, God's gifted child rising to the precipice of glory and then blowing it all in one night. If they were right, nothing would be left living on the landscape at tomorrow's sunrise but a smear of anaerobic bacteria. In one instant, the clocks of planetary evolution would be set back to a minute after midnight, day one.

They were not asked whether this risk was an acceptable one, only what they believed the possibility to be. When asked, they leaned their elbows on the table and took the cigarette for a moment away from their face, and said they thought it was small. Perhaps, a few thought privately, we are all beyond caring. The desert in which they worked made it seem the global catastrophe had already taken place. Through the interminable months in which they created the device, cut off from their families and stolen away from their old lives, dust blew in through open windows and coated clothes with a bland layer of fade. The sun baked and bleached the paint on their Army cabins. It was like the whole world was already in the process of disappearing.

They talked about little but the project. Their lives fell away from them, vanishing through neglect. But sometimes still they talked about Chemistry Sets. Most of them, they found, had owned a chemistry set as boys. Invariably, their probing intelligence and youthful innovation had led them to use it in ways never intended by the manufacturer. Many had explored the thrill of fire, the lure of a violent transformation. One made flash paper that burned with white heatless light when a spark was struck near it. Another specialized in combining chemicals that produced huge quantities of foam, tinted with a hint of iron brown or sodium blue. Three others had developed, to a greater or lesser degree, bombs, small devices that were detonated in backyards and woods and in one unfortunate basement. The young chemists had no real desire to destroy anything in their perfect worlds -- they just wanted to see something new. They wanted to made a noise louder and deeper than their boyish voices could yet create. They wanted to strike out with power that their small bodies yet lacked.

Parents became concerned about the chemistry sets, often after an experiment had an expectedly violent outcome and damaged the boys' homes in some way. The adults grew angry as they realized they'd been duped by their innocent children. The future men of science were creating something dangerous and ugly with the allegedly harmless ingredients. The parents had unwittingly placed the tools of destruction in the hands of their irresponsible children. They had placed the makings for bombs under the Christmas tree and received bright guileless smiles from the boys as the wrappings were torn away from the box.

The men around the table savored this cigarette, knowing the project awaited their return. Time was their only enemy -- not the Germans, nor the ghastly destructive capacity of the device itself. They laughed at the shared memory of their parents taking away the chemistry sets, the hurt anger on the parents' faces as they made a desperate show of throwing away the boys' one obsession. They smirked at their own childish attempts to implore their parents to let them keep just the less volatile chemicals, promising to do no more harm. Of course, the act of throwing out the chemistry set was mostly ceremonial -- it had had little effect on the development of the boys' scientific minds. If anything, it challenged them to find new ways to explore the world around them, discover the capacity of science to do for men what men could not do for themselves.

Today they smoked without ceasing, grinding each incremental cigarette in the dust outside their faded cabins, waiting for the cars to take them to see their device detonated. They would watch their creation as it became fully itself, blossomed in milliseconds from a childish mess of potentials into its adult form: perfect bomb, world destroyer, or dud. The young scientists would save their world, strike a blow for their parents and their distant children, or end it all in the attempt.