"Cancer," he said, "is when cells begin to divide out of control. In my wife's case it was too many white corpuscles being produced in her blood. It spreads, cancer does, with out-of-control cells affecting the neighboring cells and making them go crazy too.
"Nuclear fission is cancer on the level of the atom. Unstable elements are bombarded by free neutrons that cause the atoms to split into smaller atoms. The bonding energy of the original atom is released along with more free neutrons that make neighboring heavy atoms go crazy in a chain reaction. Out of control. So more energy is released. Seismic energy and heat energy and nuclear radiation. Buildings falling and fires and radiation sickness."
Derry sighed and closed her eyes.
"They gave her X-ray treatments. We can control it, they said, it kills off white corpuscles. She'd eat a sandwich and her gums would stain the bread pink. They took her female business out. There were hairs grew on her chest.
"We can control it, they say, we've harnessed the Dragon. Keep things.even with the other side and nobody will dare make the first move. Or if they do it'll be a limited war. Limited.
"We've got the cancer under control, they told me, and then her bone marrow went wrong from all the X-ray exposure and they tried to draw it all out and replace it but her heart just quit. Had to keep it under control, they told me, it was her only hope."
Ira Treat laid his fork down on an empty plate.
Brian didn't know what he was expected to say. He had his own problems. His attention was drifting, not so much on to other subjects as out into the room in a very physical way. It was as if his mind were matter and that matter was diffusing into the air like some trace element, some gas. He was losing his bonding energy. He squeezed his head with his hands to push it all back in but the effect was a distant pressure, as if a light truck had driven over the shelter on the land's surface. Brian was grateful for the lead lining, the steel-reinforced concrete that surrounded him, that kept him from mingling with soil and sky.
Derry asked could she finish his Whip and Chill if he wasn't interested.
They sat in the living-room section of the main chamber. The fewer walls there were, the easier for Treat to keep an ear on his instruments. Derry rinsed what dishes there were and put them in the washer, then sprawled on a couch across from them to read a fan magazine while her father talked. Brian took to reciting Hail Marys and Our Fathers to try to keep an anchor on his mind.
"Do you know what 'BM' stands for?"
"Huh?"
"Ballistic missile. A big bullet. Didn't have such things till the very end of the Big One, when Germany got their V-i's and V-2's mailing out. We had bombers. Fat Man and Little Boy were delivered by manned crews, Nips had had a few Zeros in the right place and it would have been a different story on Hiroshima. But it wasn't long before both the Reds and us had BM's and push-button war was upon us. We had the real goods in the payload department to ourselves for a couple years, but Mrs. Rosenberg helped bring a speedy end to that situation."
Brian had only a vague idea of what the man was talking about. It all made him think of mushrooms. Mushrooms were the last thing he wanted to think about.
"Now, a ballistic missile is a quick draw, greased lightning compared to one of the old B-52's or the Tupelev-2o Bears the other side had. And there's no pilot error, a BM is a mechanical kamikaze. But in the early fifties it ran on liquid fuel that had to be mixed just before firing, it had to be launched from the surface. What we in the trade call a soft zone. Made folks think their own hardware could be totaled by a strike and they wouldn't get a shot off. So it was itchytrigger-finger days, days of the Golfer and Dulles and brinksmanship. Everyone obsessed with getting their rockets into the air first, thought that would decide the whole ball game."
Liz & Diclat blared the cover of Derry's magazine. Sonny & Cher & Jackie & Burt & Dean & Frank & Elvis & Lucy & Liza & The Lennon Sisters. Derry lay on her stomach and slowly kicked her feet to the time of her loud gum-chewing. She munched and sucked and smacked and smiled over to Brian every now and then.
Our Father who art in Heaven, thought Brian, hallowed be Thy name -
"Then the boys in the lab come up with solid fuel. So all those missiles could be hardened, dug down into silos or onto submarines. Our Minuteman silos can take, oh, three hundred-pounds-per-square-inch overpressure. This place can handle four hundred. Need an awful good shot with some heavy yield to crack that.
"Anyhow, the name of the game turned into something called 'assured destruction.' Say they launch a first strike against our missile sites, a counterforce strike. Assured destruction means we still have enough throw power and warheads left to inflict what they call 'unacceptable damage.' Now this is with both sides playing by the rules — no spasm war, where its countervalue strikes against cities instead of missiles. We can control it, they say, like always."
… blessed art Thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary…
"Well, all this boiled down to the theory of mutual vulnerability. Neither group would fire first cause it was a sure thing both would be wiped out. That was supposed to be a comfort. Course it isn't the rocket boys down in their mountain bunkers who are mutually vulnerable, no, it's you and me and Ivan Doe over there on the other side. We're mutually vulnerable as you can get. Was about then, under the Harvard Man, that I planned this place."
There was a hole in the seat of Derry's too-tight gym shorts; a round, pink berry of flesh peeped through. Brian had started to smile back at her through the pu#plish fog that had come up in front of him. She would sigh and roll her eyes when her father started up again and Brian would answer with what he thought was a mildly sympathetic smile. He couldn't feel exactly what it was doing on his face though, it tended to get away from him.
"Nowadays things aren't so simple. You've got your antiballistic-missile system and your multiple warheads and better homing systems and you got computers speeding the whole thing up. There's still some conventional stuff, though. Our B-52's and F-i i i's shoot a missile called a Hounddog and the other side still has Bears and Mya Bisons that fire something called a Kangaroo and the yellow-peril folks there have even got a thing to deliver, an old TU-16 Badger, and the whole menagerie is there waiting to come down like a rain of toads."
Treat was up and pacing now, talking faster than ever, building for some kind of climax. The words were making less sense than ever to Brian; it sounded like a sin-blasting Bible sermon in some foreign but familiar language.
"Don't matter what delivers it, you set off your standard twenty-megaton payload and millions of people are going to feel it. That's a thousand times the force of the Fat Man we hit the Japs with. These days you got your thermonuclear reaction, fission-fusion-fission, where the fission generates the heat to set off the hydrogen isotope and deuterium fuses to form helium and enough destructive energy to parboil the state of Nebraska."
The fog was thicker now, it seemed to be falling down from the fluorescent lights, falling like snow in a paperweight. Treat was hoarse, his movements jerky. He was totally mind-fucked, thought Brian, but he seemed to know his stuff.
"And it's not just the two of us anymore. Britain and France, they got it and the yellow-peril folks are making great leaps forward. And the lab boys come up with a synthetic, plutonium. P-239, cheaper to make than U-235 and just about as effective. So we got the nuclear equivalent of the Saturday-night special and before you know it any youngpunk nation looking to build a reputation will have their own bomb. It spreads, it excites the neighboring cells and you can't control it. And us mere people are left out in the rain. People aren't but a fart in a fire storm to them. They'll jacket a warhead with U-238 or cobalt to make it extra dirty, to really set those gamma rays whizzing. They've done studies on how long it would take the country to recover to a certain level after a full-scale war. They've decided what acceptable damage is and I don't accept it."