The article in the magazine had been about ultrahighspeed photography and the technical challenges that faced its pioneers. And some of the milestones. The first photograph of a drop of water as it touched the surface of a pool, surrounded, surprisingly, by a tiny crown of answering droplets. The first picture of a bullet in flight, suspended in mid-air and trailing a spiraling wisp of smoke. A photograph of the detonation of the first atomic bomb on a steel tower in New Mexico, taken microseconds after the explosion began, and microseconds before the tower vaporized, the plasma of the explosion swelling like a giant malignant cancer looming over the desert.

The stillness of the photographs struck her, the way even the air seemed solid and present in a way never apparent in ordinary pictures. Liquids were rigid, static; fabrics stiff and abstract, impervious to motion or influence. Objects in motion seemed frozen as if cast in amber. As the camera sliced time thinner and thinner it distanced the events further and further from everyday experience. It was a novelty to be able to see events that occur on a different timescale.

She saw that even a bullet has a shadow.

Focusing on the images and ignoring the written article, she had lingered over a series of black and white pictures that had been made of a bursting balloon. It was set up on the end of an upright drinking straw and shot with a twenty-two. There were eight photographs in the sequence from the instant before impact until the bullet disappeared out of the frame on the left and the tatters of the balloon wilted from the mouth of the straw.

In the first image the bullet was an inch or so away from the balloon, and the pressure wave traveling in the air just ahead of the bullets nose made a small round depression in the curving elastic surface.

As the bullet penetrated the taut rubber, a tiny shock wave bulged the surface of the balloon and spread out concentrically, a tiny ripple. Behind it, fissures opened up in the rubber and forked away from the point of entry like strokes of lightning, rupturing the surface into shards of still-tensed latex poised in the air, still formed around the sphere they had enclosed the previous instant, the bullet now within it.

Then they collapsed and fell.

She remembers being at a carnival one night young and free, walking with her friends, mouths full of laughter and cotton candy. On their way to the house of mirrors they turned a corner to see a young couple with their daughter in a stroller walking towards them. The little girl had a big blue balloon on a stick and she was laughing and waving it to everyone, her bright blue eyes sparkling. Just as they approached, the balloon burst with a sharp little crack! There was a half-beat of silence and then the little girl's desolate wailing rose up over the din of the midway, her grief unconsolable as her whitened fingers clung to her stick with the tiny little torn blue rubber rag on the end of it, the magic all gone away.

She sips her drink. Beyond the oval window next to her the clouds are graced with the moon's white, white light, and the gray wing of the plane slowly rocks up and down in the darkness.



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