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“The glass stops the UV.”
“What stops the glass?”
It wasn’t in the words, it was in the voice that Feynman had heard the cynicism. Not that he had never heard that from Teller before, after all the man was carrying himself around as if he owned the place - the world - but this was more than that. He could hear from those four little words in his outlandish, stupid accent, that he would have sat through seeing the windshield shatter and fall into Feynman’s lap and face, and he would have done it with a straight face.
Would the blast crack the windshield? Maybe. Probably not. Oppie wouldn’t have stood him parking the car there if there was a significant chance that the glass would blow into his and Lawrence’s faces. …Right?
It didn’t. When the bomb lit the sky, he had to squint, and when the tremor hit them he held onto the seat, the whole world was shaking, he was scared for a split second… but the windshield didn’t bust in, it didn’t even crack. But if it had, Teller would have watched it with a smug grin, because he would have enjoyed being right. As always, the asshat.
And so when Feynman got out of the car, he knocked on the (intact!) windshield and made a face at Teller when the man had turned his back. It was childish, yes, but he had just watched the turn of history unfold before his eyes, and while it was happening his colleague, supposed friend perhaps, told him in a casual tone that he would unironically sit through his death on his little podium of egotism.
What was even worse was that Teller was right.
Nothing would have stopped the glass.