The Detonators (34 page)

Now I was facing another legendary weapon. Not the gun that won the West but the bomb that won the East. Like the old six-shooter and its more durable and deadly successors, it had solved the violent problem that had brought it into existence only to leave society saddled with more and greater problems, leaving people wishing they could make it go away. Ban the handgun. Ban the bomb. The character who finds a way of uninventing the inventions that folks decide not to like is going to make a fortune… All of which was merely, of course, the wandering of my mind as it refused to come to grips with the thing in front of me.

I pulled myself together with an effort and told myself firmly that I was a courageous and experienced gent who’d confronted all kinds of nasty homicidal devices without flinching. Facing this king-sized can of radioactive destruction, I definitely wasn’t going to act all girlish and panicky like Amy Barnett when she’d suddenly found herself holding a lousy little .38. After all, I told myself, I wouldn’t have been so nervous wandering into a warehouse containing a mere ten or twenty or thirty thousand tons of TNT. Or would I?

Anyway, I reminded myself, it was actually the Winchester that won the West, or claimed to have. If it mattered.

“Isn’t she wicked and lovely?”

I turned to look at the man who’d spoken, who’d come up without my noticing him, a measure of my unprofessional preoccupation. He was a rather plump, middle-aged gent in a starched white laboratory smock. He had thinning fair hair, and very pale blue eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. The dossier had said nothing about glasses, but maybe they were a recent necessity. Nobody gets any younger. His plump hands were clasped together in an attitude of loving admiration as he looked proudly at the object on the cradle. I noted that the hands looked tougher than the man; they were callused with work and stained with chemicals.

“She?” I said.

“Anything so dangerous must be female, mustn’t it? But I have her under control. I always have them under control, Mr. Helm.”

I was barely aware of Gina’s voice saying, unnecessarily “Matt, this is Albert Pope.”

“Oh, Mr. Helm knows me, he knows me very well,” the plump man said cheerfully. “We have friends in common, don’t we, Mr. Helm? At least one friend; a very delightful little friend.”

He was needling me about Amy Barnett, who’d left me and gone back to him. It didn’t seem wise to react. Instead I jerked my head at the bomb and made my voice very matter-of-fact when I asked:

“What’s inside, plutonium or uranium two thirty-five?”

“Oh, you know something about atomic weapons?” Minister’s voice was patronizing; still, he seemed intrigued at meeting somebody who shared his pleasant hobby, even me.

I shrugged. “I know what everybody knows. That you use conventional high explosives to slam some subcritical mass of radioactive stuff together to make a supercritical mass; and bang she goes. That plutonium was the basic ingredient of the implosion bombs set off in the Trinity test and at Nagasaki. That the Hiroshima bomb was quite different, a gun-type job employing U235. It hadn’t been tested before, but it seemed to work pretty well, anyway.” I glanced at the man in the white coat and said deliberately, “As a matter of fact, neither kind seems to be very tough to make, now that we know it can be done. Nobody who’s really tried has failed to come up with one that fired. As far as I know there are no fizzles on record.”

His eyes narrowed. I wasn’t showing proper appreciation for his achievement. “It may be easy for a great government laboratory, but under conditions like these… There were many problems to solve!”

I ignored his protest. “What’s the cooling system for, if that’s what it is?” I asked, glad to hear that my voice still sounded nice and casual, just mildly curious.

“That was one of our problems.” He’d decided that he was happy to discuss his toy. “For initiating the reaction, I wanted to use a particular explosive that has some very desirable characteristics; actually a considerable improvement over what was probably used at Hiroshima. However, I had to do the preliminary work at sea; and this space is not air-conditioned. With the sun beating down on the deck above, I knew it would get quite warm down here. That particular explosive material tends to be affected by high temperatures, above forty-five degrees Celsius, say one hundred and thirteen degrees Fahrenheit. I thought it best to store it under refrigeration. Since portability was not a consideration, I also provided for coolant circulation in the bomb itself, in case conditions in here became excessive. Of course, in this location, with the ship shaded by a roof, the system may be redundant.”

I said chattily, “Hell, I once carted some kind of blasting powder up to a mine in the mountains, in my rucksack, on a hot summer day. It scared the shit out of me when it started to weep; little droplets all over the inside of the plastic bags. I thought it was pure nitro oozing out and would go off if I stumbled or sneezed. It turned out that the stuff was slightly hygroscopic and some of the moisture it had picked up was evaporating in the heat and condensing on the plastic.” I laughed at my own funny story and glanced at him. “So you’re using the Hiroshima model.”

“That’s right. It’s the less efficient system, but it’s considerably simpler to construct; and plutonium is hard to handle without elaborate facilities. It’s relatively unstable and very poisonous. To be sure, it’s more readily available in general, since it can be produced in any reactor, while U235 can only be separated from U238 by very demanding techniques; but this does not concern us. As it happens, two of the members of the PNP are financially involved in a certain experimental laboratory that made a large investment in the centrifuge process some years ago, so we had no real trouble getting our hands on sufficient Uranium 235. It was largely, I was told, a matter of bookkeeping; and somebody at that lab will be in serious trouble eventually, when the shortage is discovered. However, that is not my problem.”

“As I recall, the Hiroshima bomb used about sixty pounds. That’s a lot of refined uranium.”

“We’re using about seven kilos, considerably less than a third of what was used in that first fission-type bomb, which was really a rather crude and inefficient device. We expect a yield of around twenty kilotons. A little more than Hiroshima, but nothing, of course, compared to what is produced by one of the fusion-type devices, which would use a bomb like this as a mere trigger. However, I wasn’t employed to demolish all of the Bahama Islands, Mr. Helm, just a few of them.”

He said it quite casually, and I caught a hint of regret in his voice. He was very proud of his current work, he’d reached the peak of his explosive profession, but there was a higher summit beyond still reserved for the eggheads. He would love to try it, he would love to show them what a working pro could produce in the way of a
real
explosion, without the need for all their fancy degrees and facilities.

Well, there’s nothing like a man who takes pride in his work; and considering my own job I was in no position to criticize his. But I had reached the end of the long trail and the quarry I’d been hunting was within reach… And the waiting silence warned me that he’d been put within my reach deliberately. If I started the killing blow that would complete my mission, I would never finish it. Alfred Minister was laughing at me behind his horn-rimmed glasses, waiting for me to commit myself. He knew that if I struck, I would be striking not only for official reasons but for personal ones: the girl named Amy whose loyalties were so terribly torn between us. That was why he’d mentioned her so possessively, hoping it would cause me to lose my head and betray myself…

I turned casually to Gina. “Well, Mr. Pope seems to have done you proud; but I’m surprised that you didn’t pick a different kind of specialist for the job.”

“An atomic specialist, you mean?” She laughed. “If we’d got a man with an advanced degree in nuclear physics, how long would it have been before somebody like you guessed what we were up to? Instead, you spent your time of merely wondering just where we were having Mr. Pope plant his old-fashioned dynamite, and why.”

I looked around easily. They weren’t hard to spot, the two guards who’d moved into positions from which, if I made a threatening move toward Minister, they could blow me down instantly without damaging people or equipment—although even in this larger space, I wouldn’t have wanted to predict the behavior of the ricochets if the bullets missed me or drilled clear through me. They were the men who’d escorted me from the cell, Homer Allwyn’s right-and left-hand men. They looked slack and disappointed now, as the tension drained out of them. So did Allwyn himself, watching from the engine room doorway. There was also another man standing beside Gina. The fact that I hadn’t noticed his entrance indicated how totally involved I’d been with the crazy doomsday machine and the man who’d made it.

The newcomer was a tall and distinguished figure with a full head of smoothly combed dark hair streaked with gray. He would have looked well in a pinstripe suit; he didn’t look too bad in jeans. I think there’s a special grade of denim that’s only released for sale after the customer has been thoroughly checked out in
Who’s Who
and Dunn & Bradstreet. He wore a superior polo shirt above and very expensive yachting shoes below.

“Matt, this is Mr. Paul, Mr. Harrison Paul,” Gina said. “He’s the chairman of our board at PNP.”

I shook Mr. Harrison Paul’s manicured hand and said to Gina, “I thought
you
were chairman of the board, Mrs. W.”

“Mrs. Williston is our president,” Paul said smoothly. “Our president and guiding spirit.”

“But you don’t always like where I guide you, do you, Harrison?”

Paul looked at me briefly, then returned his attention to her. “To put it bluntly, I see no reason why we should all be put at risk for the sake of your amours, Gina. This government agent has already been allowed to learn too much; to bring him in here and let him chat with Pope is total madness!”

“If he already knows too much, what difference does it make if he learns a little more? Anyway, there’s a way to insure his silence.”

“Yes, a bullet in the brain!”

“Correct, but I’m not referring to his brain. Two bullets in two brains. He’s indicated that he might be willing to join us for a consideration. Let him prove it by taking care of a certain disposal job for us.” She looked at me hard. “You told me what should be done about the two prisoners up forward we’ve been to softhearted to kill. Well, do it.”

I studied her for a moment; then I laughed. “What are you waiting for, a shocked protest, Gina? Do you think I’d lay down my life nobly rather than wipe out a grubby young widow and a beat-up kid? To hell with that, baby; that’s not how I’ve survived so long in a short-survival business. Do I get a gun?”

“No guns, no bullets,” she said. “That was just a figure of speech. You know how to do without.”

I shrugged. “As you wish.”

“You realize that after you’ve killed them…”

I said, “Gina, for God’s sake, I’ve seen all the movies! Yes, I realize that after I’ve killed a couple of Coast Guard people for you, you’ll be able to blackmail me with it quite efficiently; you’ll have me under your thumb, as the saying goes. Any other corny remarks you wish to cast onto the balmy Bahamas air? No? Well, how about answering a couple of questions before I go about my deadly work?”

She said sharply, “Matt, killing is not a joke!”

I said, “No, but I’ve always felt better treating it as if it were. And you do want me to feel good, don’t you?”

She said, “Ask your questions.”

“That cannon-cracker there—”

“It’s not dangerous as it stands, if that’s what’s worrying you,” she said tartly. “There’s no stray radiation, to amount to anything. You don’t have to worry about your virility.”

“It’s not my virility that’s worrying me, it’s your good sense. What the hell are you hoping to accomplish with that thing? Whom are you planning to blackmail, all the nations of the world? Are you going to sneak this ship into Nassau harbor and threaten to blow up the whole town, and the nuclear control conference with it, if all the delegates don’t promise to straighten up and fly right? I’m giving you credit; I’m assuming that your motives are still basically peaceful, even though you don’t seem to mind a little murder on the side. But nations are even less meticulous than people about honoring forced promises. Even if you convince them that you really have the bomb, which will take some doing, do you think any country will abide by a commitment it’s been coerced into making by a bluff like that?”

“What makes you think it’s a bluff, Matt?”

There was a little silence. I stared at her, remembering her medical history and the screaming nightmare she’d had on board the boat. But Mr. Harrison Paul had no screws loose, as far as I knew; and it seemed unlikely that the rest of the PNP membership list was composed entirely of maniac millionaires.

‘It was, I decided, a question of attitude. I’ve long since faced the fact that, in the business I’ve chosen for myself, I’m probably going to die a little earlier than I otherwise might. I’ll fight as hard and as dirty as I have to to keep it from happening, but I’m not about to waste a lot of effort trying to change the whole world to make it totally safe for Helms; and whether by knife or bullet or atomic holocaust, it’s bound to get this Helm sooner or later. Rest in peace. But there was no such resignation in these people. If the world wouldn’t leave them alone to live out their beautiful, wealthy lives unmolested… well, it was just too damn bad about the world, and they’d have to remodel it slightly. It was a more positive attitude than mine, I had to admit, and I didn’t condemn it. I merely felt that the method they’d chosen was somewhat questionable.

I said, “You’re actually going to
fire
that thing?”

She nodded. “But we’re not moving this ship to Nassau or anywhere else. I told you, we picked our spot very carefully; we were just lucky that this installation happened to be here. Otherwise we’d have had to use Aravella Cay, which belongs to one of our members; but that would have involved constructing suitable facilities ashore, which might have stimulated some unhealthy curiosity. This was ideal, readymade, the right distance from Nassau, even though it meant that Mr. Pope had to do his work in a rusty ship’s hold instead of a nice new air-conditioned laboratory.”