“We have your call to the White House,” his deputy announced. The scientist sighed and picked up the phone.
The incoming call was switched to the small white squawk box in the center of the oval table so that everyone in the National Security Council conference room could hear and address the scientist at Los Alamos.
“Mr. Agnew,” Jack Eastman declared, “have your people completed their appraisal of the atomic bomb on those blueprints?”
The voice filtering into the room through the white plastic holes in reply seemed strangely hesitant.
“Mr. Eastman, the drawing on the blueprint which you submitted to us is not for an atomic bomb.”
The men in the White House emitted what seemed an almost collective sigh of relief. The distant scientist did not hear them. He continued. “It’s my very sad duty to inform you that the design on the blueprint is for something a hundred times worse.”
A quick, nervous gasp in the distant scientist’s voice was audible to each of the men and women in the White House basement. “The blueprint is for a thermonuclear device, Mr. President, a three-megaton hydrogen bomb.”
Every time his bare fingertips touched the metal of the television antenna, the passenger of the Dionysos felt a numbing flash of pain spurt down his fingers to his wrists. Beneath him his feet, unaccustomed to snow and ice, slipped and skidded on the balf-frozen mounds left on the exposed rooftop by Friday’s snowstorm.
Warily, he glanced at the buildings around him. There was no light burning in any window from which someone could see what he was doing.
Off to his right was the river. With a compass, he fixed his television antenna at a very precise angle pointing toward its black expanse. She had followed her instructions perfectly in picking the building. There were no rooftops higher than his along the antenna’s carefully calculated line of vision, nothing that could block an incoming radio signal.
He took the six-foot needle of phosphorated bronze, smaller than an automobile aerial but capable of discerning the weakest burst of electronic noise, and fitted it carefully into the socket prepared for it in the television antenna. Every few seconds he had to stop to blow on his numbed fingertips, to give them the sense of precision they needed to make the connection he had practiced a hundred times between the aerial and the antenna.
When he had finished, he straightened up, stiff with cold, rubbing the aching scar on his neck as he did. Suddenly, from the street below, the clatter of voices drifted up to his rooftop. He peered down. Half a dozen people spilled out of the artist’s loft across the street. Impassively, he watched them glide off through the shadows, his ears following the crystalline ripple of the girls’ laughter as it faded in the night.
The President was the first person in the National Security Council conference room to break the shocked silence that had followed Harold Agnew’s revelation.
“My God!” he gasped. “Is this really possible? That Qaddafi could have done this without our finding out what he was up to?”
This time it was Agnew who hesitated. The hydrogen bomb represented the ultimate refinement in man’s search for the means of self-destruction.
Unlike the atomic bomb, which depended on converting to reality a widely understood scientific theory, it depended on the most potent secret unlocked by man’s brain since the cavemen of antiquity had harnessed fire.
It involved the one precisely perfect interweaving of the bomb’s key elements. There was only one. There was no “almost.” There was no margin whatsoever for error. That relationship was probably the most ferociously guarded secret on earth. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, of qualified physicists understood the theory of the atomic bomb. Barely three hundred people, perhaps fewer, were privy to the secret of the hydrogen bomb.
“I admit it strains credibility, sir,” Agnew replied “but the blunt fact is that this is a viable weapons design. Whether it’s from Qaddafi or someone else, someone, somewhere out there, has gotten hold of the secret of the hydrogen bomb.”
Exploding a hydrogen bomb was a task so complex it was often compared to setting a wet log ablaze with a single match. It required putting three competing processes into perfect balance under conditions of temperature and pressure so extreme they rivaled those at the core of the sun.
Essentially what was involved were two atomic “triggers” on either side of a mass of thermonuclear fuel enclosed in a liquid membrane of tritium.
Their explosion allowed for the perfectly symmetrical compression of the fuel which the tritium helped to drive up to the incredible temperatures needed for ignition. The entire assembly was wrapped in a cylinder of uranium 238 which turned some of the neutrons fleeing the atomic explosion back into the device, delaying its disintegration for the microsecond required to allow the whole process to take place.
“The device is meant to be contained in a cylinder roughly the size of an ordinary oil drum,” Agnew continued. “The length is about half again as long as a drum. We calculate it would weigh almost fifteen hundred pounds.
There are connecting wires meant, I presume, to be hitched up to some kind of separate control panel, probably a device that could receive an incoming radio burst and release an electrical impulse into the highexplosive charge.”
For several seconds there was not a sound in the conference room. The President cleared his throat.
“Where in God’s name would someone like Qaddafi have gotten the information to build something like this? Could he have gotten it from those articles that were published in Wisconsin in 1979?”
“No.” This time Agnew did not hesitate. “Those articles set out the theory behind the H bomb very completely. But they didn’t come to grips with the precise formula behind it, which is that absolutely perfect quantitive and qualitative interrelationship between its three competing elements. Without that, you’ve got no explosion.”
“And this design has that?”
“Yes, Mr. President, I’m sorry to have to tell you the configuration here is exact.”
Jack Eastman leaned forward toward the squawk box. “Mr. Agnew, I want to be very precise. What we’re dealing with here is a design, a blueprint, not a device in being. Are there still imponderables in here we haven’t talked about that could prevent this from going off?”
“Of course there are,” Agnew replied. “Everything depends, for example, on those atomic triggers exploding with perfect synchronization, and that in turn depends on detonating with absolute precision the high explosives that set them off. It’s a very, very complicated process.”
The President Coughed. “Mr. Agnew,” he asked, “assuming for the moment this device really existed and really was in New York and really was exploded, what would its effect be?”
For a long moment, the little squawk box in the center of the table was silent. Then, almost as though they came from some disembodied voice speaking from another world, Agnew’s words again filled the room.
“It would mean, sir, that, for all practical purposes, New York City would be wiped off the face of the earth.”
“Hey, lady, got room in there for me?”
The woman couldn’t help smiling at the speaker. He was a young Marine waiting to board the Eastern Airlines nine-o’clock shuttle from New York to Washington. Lasciviously, he eyed her figure swathed in her ankle-length red fox fur coat as she swept past him. Laila Dajani was used to men’s passes. With her long auburn hair, her black prominent eyes, the slight sensual pout of her wellffeshed lips, she had been attracting them since she was eighteen. She gave a casual toss to her hair and continued on to the shuttle terminal from the plane that had just flown her into the city from the nation’s capital. Her beauty, the way she invariably stood out in a crowd, was, she knew, a risk. To deliver her letter to the White House, she had worn the blond wig and an old polo coat which she had left in the second locker she had opened at National Airport.