Nemesis (28 page)

“The
Tsar Bomba
. A wonderful thing,” Judy smiled. “It was really a hundred-megatonner but they configured it for fifty when they exploded it in Novaya Zemlya. Even then you could pick up its pressure wave on ordinary domestic barometers anywhere in Europe. We think it weighed thirty tons.”

“So, what have we got to match it?”

“Zilch. Our military asked permission to develop sixty megatonners way back in the fifties, but this was denied. We’ve always gone for precision targeting rather than massive zaps.”

McNally slid his sunglasses down his nose and looked over them at Judy. “We lack the nuclear punch to deflect Nemesis? Are you serious?”

“If it needs more than nine megatons.”

McNally took a few seconds to absorb this startling new information. “Tell me about your neutron bombs.” A small town was drifting about twenty thousand feet below them, narrow white roads radiating from it through the desert. A plume of smoke rose from a farmhouse some miles to their left.

“Jim, they’re just tactical tank-busters. Artillery shells with no more energy than a Hiroshima. Armoured personnel are hard to kill, but neutrons penetrate armour. Some tanks, like our M-1, are reinforced with depleted uranium, which is very dense and hard to penetrate with explosives. But listen, this is really smart. If you set off a neutron bomb you activate the depleted uranium so the soldiers find themselves cocooned in a radioactive tank at the same time as the neutrons from the bomb are penetrating it. At a few miles’ range their blood drains out from every orifice in a few minutes. Closer up and they just dissolve into a hot ooze. Closer still and they explode. More chocolate?”

McNally declined. He loosened his tie.

“But as a Nemesis killer, they’re far too small. They’re made that way so you don’t have military commanders wiping out too many towns at a time when they’re hitting Russian tank brigades in Europe. I don’t believe our stockpiles include neutron bombs in the multi-megaton range.”

The NASA Administrator responded to some chatter on the radio. “By the way, we’re now in New Mexico. What’s a three-stage weapon, Judy?”

She hesitated. “I guess I can say. Start simple, with a gun firing two sub-critical masses of uranium together. That’s fission for you, a straight one-stage atom bomb. The trouble is, it has limited power. The fission reaction is slow to develop and the bomb blows itself apart before all the fissile material is used. The Hiroshima bomb was only 1.4 per cent efficient, for example. You can’t get much more than a critical mass to explode. But fission bombs do give you a plasma a metre or less across with a temperature of about fifty million degrees, and that’s hot enough to start you on the fusion route, transmuting four hydrogen atoms into one helium one with the mass deficit emerging as energy through
E
=
mc
²
.”

“I’ve never been clear what form of hydrogen you use,” McNally said.

“That’s classified too, but what the hell. It varies. Liquid
hydrogen is best but you can use compressed gas and we’ve even used a hydrogen-impregnated solid. Anyway, more than eighty per cent of the energy from a simple fission bomb comes out as X-rays. Teller and Ulam got the bright idea that, because the X-rays are moving at the speed of light—they
are
light—maybe you could use them to compress a large capsule of hydrogen at very high speed, before the assembly got disrupted. The fastest reaction at fission temperatures is between the heavy hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium. So you stir these isotopes into the brew, light the touchpaper and retire a long way back. Four hydrogens fuse to give you one helium, as per undergraduate physics courses, but this leaves surplus mass in the form of a 14 MeV neutron and an eighteen MeV photon which is an impressive quantum of energy.”

“That’s a two-stage weapon, the touchpaper being an A-bomb.”

Judy finished the chocolate bar with a satisfied smile. “Correct. Not only Teller and Ulam, but also Sakharov in Russia got the radiation implosion idea. So let us give thanks unto these gentlemen for the hydrogen bomb. But why stop at two stages? If you want a bigger bomb, use the fusion explosion to compress and explode a third, fission stage. It makes for a dirty bomb but a powerful one, and no new scientific principles are involved. Each stage can be ten or a hundred times more powerful than the one before. No question,
Tsar Bomba
—King of Bombs—must have been a three-stager. There was even a Soviet design for a layer cake at one stage.”

“The mind boggles,” said McNally, his mind boggling.

More radio chatter. McNally explained, “We’re now entering restricted airspace. Let’s hope Noordhof fixed it like what he said he would.” He spoke into his mouthpiece and trimmed the aircraft. Far above them, two Tomcats passed swiftly across their bows, right to left. A third fighter appeared from nowhere and started to probe inquisitively, looking at them from all directions and keeping a safe
twenty metres away. They flew on for some minutes. Then the pilot waved, and the jet tipped its wings and hurtled into the sky above.

“Judy, it seems to me you’re going to have to tart up a B-53, turn it into a neutron bomb.”

She brushed little flakes of chocolate off her white sweater. “But Jim, the way a neutron bomb works is that you let the neutrons escape during fission instead of absorbing them to create more energy. That means a neutron bomb will always be a low-energy device. If we’re going on a last-minute deflection, meaning we need energies in the megaton range, the neutron bombs we need don’t exist.”

“Make one, very very fast.”

She shook her head emphatically, setting her earrings swinging. “Jim, where is your sense of realism? Whether it could be done even in principle I don’t know. But it absolutely can’t be done in the time available.”

“Hey, that’s my line,” McNally complained. He nudged the joystick forwards and the altimeter needle began to drift slowly down.

“Jim. Just how much weight can you push into interplanetary space?”

“Depends where you’re going and how fast you need to get there. The old Galileo probe weighed about 750 pounds and it had a 2,500-pound spacecraft to push it around. But we used several gravitational slingshots to get it out to Jupiter.”

“Give me a number.”

“At the extreme? Think of four thousand pounds.”

“Six B-61s, each seven hundred pounds, ten feet long and a foot wide. A third of a megaton each if we use the Model Seven version. Could you launch those?”

“Maybe. But it’s not enough.”

Judy fingered her necklace thoughtfully. Suddenly her mind seemed to be elsewhere.

The Sandia Corporation’s newest building, Number 810, took up about 8,000 square metres of the centre of Technical Area One, deep inside Kirtland AFB. With the love of acronyms which characterizes large corporations everywhere, the building was labelled CNSAC: the Center for National Security and Arms Control. Security began with its physical layout, which had been designed so as to guarantee secure communications within and between the four elements of its programme: Systems Analysis, Advanced Concepts, Systems Assessment, and Remote Monitoring/Verification.

Judy loved Advanced Concepts. Its remit was to investigate new technologies whose development might threaten the defence of the USA, and to propose countermeasures in the event such techniques were identified. She loved the Group because of its creativity, the wonderful and wacky ideas which it tossed around, the sheer fun of it, like the vacuum bomb concept which they had been running with, pre-asteroid. There were no fools here.

Not even Advanced Concepts could stop the unstoppable. But at last, depending on answers she got here, Judy thought there might just be a way. An extremely long shot, longer even than Ollie’s deranged story about a manuscript. She turned into the secure building. Her slim fingers were still running over her pearl necklace.

We, the undersigned, by the Grace of God, Cardinals of the Holy Roman Empire, Inquisitors General throughout the whole of the Christian Republic, Special Deputies of the Holy Apostolical Chair against heretical depravity.

Whereas this Holy Congregation has found that you, Vincenzo Vincenzi, son of the late Andrea Vincenzi of Florence, aged seventy years, have been found to advocate the proposition that the Sun is at the centre of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth moves and is not at the centre of the universe; which propositions, due to Copernicus and Galileo, are contrary to the authority of the Holy and Divine Scriptures, and are absurd and erroneous in faith; and whereas it has also been found that you embrace the belief of Giordano Bruno that the stars are suns scattered through infinite space, and that living creatures may inhabit planets orbiting these stars, which opinion is also absurd and erroneous in faith; and that you instruct pupils in the same opinions contrary to the Holy Scriptures; we find, pronounce, judge and declare, in the name of Christ and His Most Glorious Virgin Mother Mary, that you have rendered yourself guilty of heresy.

So we the undersigned cardinals pronounce.

F. Cardinal of Cremona
F. Cardinal Mattucci
M. Cardinal Azzolino
Cardinal Borghese
Fr. D. Cardinal Terremoto

Webb thought,
plus ça change
: I meet little cardinals at every conference. He looked out of the little window. The 747 had now entered the dark hemisphere of the Earth, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.

Ollie darling. Okay so the Holy Roman Inquisition gets a bad press but Vincenzo can’t really complain. If he’d been tried in Germany or the Alps he’d have been tortured and executed, no question. The good Doctor Karpzov of Leipzig, a contemporary of Vincenzo, managed to procure the deaths of twenty thousand witches in the course of his saintly life. Such was his virtue that, in between carbonizing old ladies, he read the Bible fifty-three times.

Was the Holy Office paving the way in this Madness? It was not. On the contrary it was often accused of being soft on witches. An accused witch in the custody of the Holy Office had protection, in the form of the
Instructio pro formandis processibus in causis strigum, sortilegiorium, et maleficiorum
. This little document puts women in their place:
genus est maxime superstitiosum
. The silly things are prone to vivid imaginings, false confessions and the like (my vivid imaginings would set your kilt on fire). The
Instructio
therefore insists on caution in proceeding to an arrest, accepting testimony and so on. Torture was applied only after the suspect had had a chance to mount a defence. Even when
maleficio
was established, first-time offenders who repented were only banished, or made to abjure on cathedral steps, or put under house arrest or whatever.

There were, however, three classes of felon who risked being barbecued: second offenders (two strikes and you’re out), hard core heretics (
e.g
. denying the Virgin Birth), and the stubbornly impenitent, like
Vincenzo. Policy was to burn the first lot and have a go at last-minute conversion for the other two.

Anyway, what are a few hours or days of pain measured against the everlasting torment of Hell? If those few hours or days will persuade a heretic to recant, and so attain Heaven, then surely true cruelty lies in withholding the services of the torturer? To flinch from applying a little unpleasantness is to fail in one’s duty to the Blessed Virgin, to the Church and to the heretic him/herself. It’s all spelled out in Masini’s
Sacro Arsenale
2nd ed., Genoa 1625.

You have to be cruel to be kind, as Miss Whiplash said to the bishop.

So where does that leave our Vincenzo? Read on, sailor.

Remarkably, given the ferocious attack on them by Vincenzo, the cardinals had provided him with an escape clause. Perhaps the Grand Duke had thrown a long shadow, and there had been a nod from His Holiness; who could say? At any rate, on condition that he recanted, cursed and reviled the said opinions, the Inquisitors declared, he would be sentenced only to life imprisonment.

Vincenzo now had a choice. He could die for his beliefs, like Giordano Bruno before him, who had gone to the stake convinced in the plurality of worlds. Along that route lay the rack and the strappado; and beyond that the stake. Or he could adopt Galileo as his role-model, and abjure on his knees, his hand on a Bible held by the Inquisitor.

Vincenzo recanted. The
territio realis
—showing him the horrific instruments of torture as a prelude to using them—had done the trick. He was duly sentenced to
carcere perpetuo
. Whether by nudging from the Grand Duke’s emissary was unclear, but the sentence was commuted to confinement, for life, to the estates of the Duke of Tuscany. Since the Duke
owned much of northern Italy the sentence was, finally, nominal. Vincenzo and his mistress had spent the remainder of their days in obscurity, under the Duke’s protection.

The Grand Inquisitor had taken vows of poverty. However the small print, had there been any, did not forbid the possession of a wealthy brother. And like many wealthy Romans from the Emperor Hadrian onwards, the Inquisitor’s brother had a villa in the hills near Tivoli. It was a place to escape the hot, stinking, malaria-ridden plain of Rome during the summer months. And shortly after the trial, Vincenzo’s books and instruments were delivered, for disposal, to the Inquisitor, who was then in residence at his brother’s Tivoli villa.