Black Sun

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The air-raid siren sounded at dawn. Its rising wail was relayed across the sleeping town by loudspeakers mounted on lampposts, in the corridors of dormitories and barracks, and in the entrance halls of laboratories and workshops. It reverberated from the abandoned church belfry that faced Lenin Square, sending flights of startled pigeons up into the gray October morning. The birds wheeled over the rooftops of the old town center, over the new parks and apartment buildings, over guard towers and the three concentric rings of barbed wire. Finally they flapped over the dark forest that encircled the secret city of Arzamas-16 like a sea.

In the main machine hall, the whining lathes slowed to a whir. Banks of fluorescent lights snapped off, leaving the operators blinking in morning light that filtered through the glass roof. In the parachute workshop, needles nodded to a halt between the seamstresses’ spread fingers. The women straightened stiffly, grateful for the weekly air-raid drill and an early end to their night shift. In the blueprint room, tousled young engineers swept Lucite rulers and set-squares off their drawing tables, rolled plans into long asbestos tubes, and clattered down the stairs toward a row of fireproof safes.

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