She was shaking her head. I protested, "But the--the _quotas_, Rena.
The Company tracks every milligram of fissionable material from the
moment it leaves the reactor! The inspections! Expediters with Geiger
counters cover every city in the world!"
"Not here, Tom. You remember that the Sicilians bombed Vesuvius? There
is a high level of radioactivity all up and down the mountain. Not
enough to be dangerous, but enough to mask a buried bomb." She closed
her eyes. "And--well, you are right, Tom. I might as well tell you.
In that same war, you see, there was a bomb that did not explode. You
recall?"
"Yes, but--"
"But it couldn't explode, Tom. It was a dummy. Slovetski is a brilliant
man. Before that bomb left the ground, he had diverted it. What went
up was a hollow shell. What is left--the heart of the bomb--is buried
forty feet beneath us."
I stared at her, the room reeling. I was clutching at straws. I
whispered, "But that was only a fission bomb, Rena. Slovetski--I heard
him--he said a Thousand-kiloton bomb. That means hydrogen, don't you
see? Surely he hasn't tucked one of those away."
Rena's face was an agony of regret. "I do not understand all these
things, so you must bear with me. I know this; there has been secret
talk about the Milanese generators, and I know that the talk has to
do with heavy water. And I am not stupid altogether, I know that from
heavy water one can get what is used in a hydrogen bomb. And there is
more, of course--lithium, perhaps? But he has that. You have seen it, I
think. It is on a pedestal in this building."
I sat down hard. It was impossible. But it all fell into place.
Given the fissionable core of the bomb--plus the deuterium, plus the
lithium-bearing shell--it was no great feat to put the parts together
and make a Hell-bomb.
The mind rejected it; it was too fantastic. It was frightful and
terrifying, and worst of all was that something lurking at the
threshold of memory, something about that bomb on display in the
museum....
And, of course, I remembered.
"Rena!" I said, struggling for breath. I nearly could not go on, it was
too dreadful to say. "Rena! Have you ever looked at that bomb? Have you
read the placard on it? _That bomb is cobalt!_"