The following must receive a massive re-write--a time warp, if you will. Placed here with only minor edits for context.
That first successful test would later be immortalized in dozens of awestruck accounts, with the first sight of the mushroom cloud and the big guy quoting the Bhagdivad Gita: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
More like destroyer of a good time, he thought.
In his downtime while working on the project, he had become the champion lockpicker of Los Alamos. A math whiz from childhood, his uncanny ability (and generous offers) to fix everyone's radios proved to the neighborhood kids of Schenectady that he was not some effete intellectual to be ignored. He moved onto locks in highschool; he didn't go a week without breaking into someone's locker after sophomore year, usually replacing their textbooks with comics and girly mags.
Now he was the terror of the Manhattan project. He relished the thought that all those self-important army guys were waking up at 4 a.m. in a cold sweat, paralyzed with fear that they might be the next victim whose briefcase of presentation materials was replaced with a pack of dirty playing cards. Fear, not anger. They couldn't get too mad at him, because the next day they would have to come to him with a big scary problem for their big, scary bomb. He was going to pick the big guy's safe today, but got called away to attend the test.
This was it. All those years of deciphering equations for some mammoth purpose he didn't understand had come down to a drive through the desert at dawn with a gaggle of his glum-faced colleagues. Though he couldn't help but be impressed by the big, red fireball (which he could see plainly because he refused to wear those stupid dark glasses they handed out) and the undeniable shockwave that swept him off his feet, he still would have much rather been picking the big guy's lock. He never would have seen it coming.
