Preferred Risk

by Lester Del Rey

  He said, “Wills, you shouldn’t be here. We don’t know you. We can’t trust you.” He held up a hand. “I know that you rescued dell’Angela. But that could all be an involved scheme of the Company. You could be a Company spy. You wouldn’t be the first, Wills. And this particular installation is, shall I say, important. You may even find why, though I hope not. If we hadn’t had to move so rapidly, you would never have been brought here. Now you’re here, though, and we’ll make the best of it.” He looked at me carefully, then, and the glinting spark in the back of his eyes flared wickedly for a moment. “Don’t try to leave. And don’t go anywhere in this building where Rena or dell’Angela or I don’t take you.”

  And that was that. I found myself assigned to the usual sort of sleeping accommodations I had come to expect in this group. Underground—cramped—and a bed harder than the Class-C Blue Heaven minimum.

  * * * *

  The next morning, Rena breakfasted with me, just the two of us in a tower room looking down over the round slope of Vesuvius and the Bay beneath. She said: “The museum has been closed since the bomb landed near, so you can roam around the exhibits if you wish. There are a couple of caretakers, but they’re with us. The rest of us will be in conference. I’ll try to see you for lunch.”

  And she conducted me to an upper level of the Observatory and left me by myself. I had my orders—stay in the public area of the museum. I didn’t like them. I wasn’t used to being treated like a small boy, left by his mother in a Company day nursery while she busied herself with the important and incomprehensible affairs of adults.

  Still, the museum was interesting enough, in a way. It had been taken over by the Company, it appeared, and although the legend frescoed around the main gallery indicated that it was supposed to be a historical museum of the Principality of Naples, it appeared by examination of the exhibits that the “history” involved was that of Naples vis-a-vis the Company.

  Not, of course, that such an approach was entirely unfair. If it had not been for the intervention of the Company, after the Short War, it is more than possible that Naples as an independent state would never have existed.

  It was the Company’s insistence on the dismantling of power centers (as Millen Carmody himself had described it) that had created Naples and Sicily and Prague and Quebec and Baja California and all the others.

  Only the United States had been left alone—and that, I think, only because nobody dared to operate on a wounded tiger. In the temper of the nation after the Short War, the Company would have survived less than a minute if it had proposed severing any of the fifty-one states…

  The museum was interesting enough, for anyone with a taste for horrors. It showed the changes in Neapolitan life over the past century or so. There was a reconstruction of a typical Neapolitan home of the early Nineteen-forties: a squalid hovel, packed ten persons to the room, with an American G.I., precursor of the Company expediters, spraying DDT into the bedding. There was, by comparison, a typical Class-B Blue Heaven modern allotment—with a certain amount of poetic license; few Class-B homes really had polyscent showers and autocooks.

  It was the section on warfare, however, that was most impressive. It was in the far back of the building, in a large chamber anchored to bedrock. It held a frightening display of weapons, from a Tiger Tank to a gas-gun. Bulking over everything else in the room, even the tank, was the thirty-foot height of a Hell-bomb in a four-story display. I looked at it a second time, vaguely disturbed by something I hadn’t quite placed—an indigo gleam to the metal of the warhead, with a hint of evil under its lacquered sheen…

  It was cobalt. I bent to read the legend: This is the casing of the actual cobalt bomb that would have been used on Washington if the Short War had lasted one more day. It is calculated that, loaded with a Mark XII hydrogen-lithium bomb, sufficient radioactive Cobalt-60 would have been transmuted to end all life on Earth within thirty days.

  I looked at it again, shuddering.

  Oh, it was safe enough now. Until the hydrogen reaction could turn the ordinary cobalt sheathing into the deadly isotope-60, it was just such stuff as was used to alloy magnets and make cobalt glass. It was even more valuable as a museum piece than as the highly purified metal.

  Score one for the Company. They’d put a stop to that danger. Nobody would have a chance to arm it and send it off now. No small war would find it more useful than the bomb it would need—and no principality would risk the Company’s wrath in using it. And while the conspiracy might have planes and helicopters, the fissionable material was too rigidly under Company control for them to have a chance. The Super Hell-bomb would never go off. And that was something that might mean more to the Company’s credit than anything else.

  Maybe it was possible that in this controversy both sides were right. And, of course, there was the obvious corollary.

  I continued my wandering, looking at the exhibits, the rubble of the museum’s previous history. The cast of the Pompeiian gladiator, caught by the cinder-fall in full flight, his straining body reproduced to every contorted line by the incandescent ashes that had encased him. The carefully chipped and labeled samples from the lava flows of the past two centuries. The awe-inspiring photographs of Vesuvius in eruption.

  But something about the bomb casing kept bothering me. I wandered around a bit longer and then turned back to the main exhibit. The big casing stretched upward and downward, with narrow stairs leading down to the lower level at its base. It was on the staircase I’d noticed something before. Now I hesitated, trying to spot whatever it was. There was a hint of something down there. Finally, I shrugged and went down to inspect it more closely.

  Lying at the base was a heavy radiation glove. A workman’s glove, used and dirty with grease. And as my eyes darted up, I could see that the bolts on the lower servicing hatches were half-unscrewed.

  Radiation gloves and tampering with the casing!

  There were two doors to the pit for the bomb casing, but either one was better than risking the stairs again where someone might see me. Or so I figured. If they found I’d learned anything…

  I grabbed for the nearer door, threw it open. I knew it was a mistake when the voice reached my ears.

  “—after hitting the Home office with a Thousand-kiloton bomb. It’s going to take fast work. Now the schedule I’ve figured out so far—God’s damnation! How did you get in here, Wills?”

  It was Slovetski, leaning across a table, staring at me. Around the table were Benedetto and four or five others I did not recognize. All of them looked at me as though I were the Antichrist, popped out of the marble at St. Peter’s Basilica on Easter Sunday.

  The spark was a raging flame in Slovetski’s eyes. Benedetto dell’Angela said sharply, “Wait!” He strode over to me, half shielding me from Slovetski. “Explain this, Thomas,” he demanded.

  “I thought this was the hall door,” I stammered, spilling the first words I could while I tried to find any excuse…

  “Wills! I tell you, answer me!”

  I said, “Look, did you expect me to carry a bell and cry unclean? I didn’t mean to break in. I’ll go at once…”

  In a voice that shook, Slovetski said: “Wait one moment.” He pressed a bell-button on the wall; we all stood there silent, the five of them staring at me, me wishing I was dead.

  There was a patter of feet outside, and Rena peered in. She saw me and her hand went to her heart.

  “Tom! But—”

  Slovetski said commandingly, “Why did you permit him his liberty?”

  Rena looked at him wide-eyed. “But, please, I asked you. You suggested letting him study the exhibits.”

  Benedetto nodded. “True, Slovetski,” he said gravely. “You ordered her to attend until our—conference was over.”

  The flame surged wildly in Slovetski’s eyes—not at me. But he got it under control. He said, “Take him away.” He did not do me the courtesy of looking my way again. Rena took me by the hand and led me off, closing the d
oor behind us.

  As soon as we were outside, I heard a sharp babble of argument, but I could make out no words through the door. I didn’t need to; I knew exactly what they were saying.

  This was the proposition: Resolved, that the easiest thing to do is put Wills out of the way permanently. And with Slovetski’s fiery eyes urging the positive, what eager debater would say him nay?

  * * * *

  Rena said: “I can’t tell you, Tom. Please don’t ask me!”

  I said, “This is no kid’s game, Rena! They’re talking about bombing the Home Office!”

  She shook her head. “Tom, Tom. You must have misunderstood.”

  “I heard them!”

  “Tom, please don’t ask me any more questions.”

  I slammed my hand down on the table and swore. It didn’t do any good. She didn’t even look up from the remains of her dinner.

  It had been like that all afternoon. The Great Ones brooded in secret. Rena and I waited in her room, until the museum’s public visiting hours were over and we could go up into the freer atmosphere of the reception lounge. And then we waited there.

  I said mulishly: “Ever since I met you, Rena, I’ve been doing nothing but wait. I’m not built that way!”

  No answer.

  I said, with all of my patience: “Rena, I heard them talking about bombing the Home Office. Do you think I am going to forget that?”

  Leadenly: “No, Tom.”

  “So what does it matter if you tell me more? If I cannot be trusted, I already know too much. If I can be trusted, what does it matter if I know the rest?”

  Again tears. “Please don’t ask me!”

  I yelled: “At least you can tell me what we’re waiting for!”

  She dabbed at her eyes. “Please, Tom, I don’t know much more than you do. Slovetski, he is like this sometimes. He gets, I suppose you would say, thoughtful. He concentrates so very much on one thing, you see, that he forgets everything around him. It is possible that he has forgotten that we are waiting. I don’t know.”

  I snarled, “I’m tired of this. Go in and remind him!”

  “No, Tom!” There was fright in her voice; and I found that she had told me one of the things I wanted to know. If it was not wise to remind Slovetski that I was waiting his pleasure, the probability was that it would not be pleasant for me when he remembered.

  I said, “But you must know something, Rena. Don’t you see that it could do no harm to tell me?”

  She said miserably, “Tom, I know very little. I did not—did not know as much as you found out.” I stared at her. She nodded. “I had perhaps a suspicion, it is true. Yes, I suspected. But I did not really think, Tom, that there was a question of bombing. It is not how we were taught. It is not what Slovetski promised, when we began.”

  “You mean you didn’t know Slovetski was planning violence?”

  She shook her head. “And even now, I think, perhaps you heard wrong, perhaps there was a mistake.”

  I stood up and leaned over her. “Rena, listen to me. There was no mistake. They’re working on that casing. Tell me what you know!”

  She shook her head, weeping freely.

  I raged: “This is asinine! What can there be that you will not tell? The Company supply base that Slovetski hopes to raid to get a bomb? The officers he plans to bribe, to divert some other nation’s quota of plutonium?”

  She took a deep breath. “Not that, Tom.”

  “Then what? You don’t mean to say that he has a complete underground separator plant—that he is making his own plutonium!”

  She was silent for a long time, looking at me. Then she sighed. “I will tell you, Tom. No, he does not have a plant. He doesn’t need one, you see. He already has a bomb.”

  I straightened. “That’s impossible.”

  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!”

  CHAPTER XII

  From the moment I had heard those piercing words from Slovetski’s mouth, I had been obsessed with a vision. A Hell-bomb on the Home Office. America’s eastern seaboard split open. New York a hole in the ocean, from Kingston to Sandy Hook; orange flames spreading across Connecticut and the Pennsylvania corner.

  That was gone—and in its place was something worse.

  Radiocobalt bombing wouldn’t simply kill locally by a gout of flaring radiation. It would leave the atmosphere filled with colloidal particles of deadly, radioactive Cobalt-60. A little of that could be used to cure cancers and perform miracles. The amount released from the sheathing of cobalt—normal, “safe” cobalt—around a fissioning hydrogen bomb could kill a world. A single bomb of that kind could wipe out all life on Earth, as I remembered my schooling.

  I’m no physicist; I didn’t know what the quantities involved might mean, once the equations came off the drafting paper and settled like a ravening storm on the human race. But I had a glimpse of radioactive dust in every breeze, in every corner of every land. Perhaps a handful of persons in Cambodia or Vladivostok or Melbourne might live through it. But there was no question in my mind: If that bomb went off, it was the end of our civilization.

  I saw it clearly.

  And so, having betrayed the Company to Slovetski’s gang, I came full circle.

  Even Judas betrayed only One.

  * * * *

  Getting away from the Observatory was simple enough, with Rena shocked and confused enough to look the other way. Finding a telephone near Mount Vesuvius was much harder.

  I was two miles from the mountain before I found what I was looking for—a Blue Wing fully-automatic filling station. The electronic scanners clucked worriedly, as they searched for the car I should have been driving, and the policy-punching slot glowed red and receptive, waiting for my order. I ignored them.

  What I wanted was inside the little unlocked building—a hushaphone-booth with vision attachment. The important
thing was to talk direct to Defoe and only to Defoe. In the vision screen, impedance mismatch would make the picture waver if there was anyone uninvited listening in.

  But I left the screen off while I put through my call. The office servo-operator (it was well after business hours) answered blandly, and I said: “Connect me with Defoe, crash priority.”

  It was set to handle priority matters on a priority basis; there was neither fuss nor argument, though a persistent buzzing in the innards of the phone showed that, even while the robot was locating Defoe for me, it was double-checking the connection to find out why there was no vision on the screen.

  It said briskly, “Stand by, sir,” and I was connected with Defoe’s line—on a remote hookup with the hotel where he was staying, I guessed. I flicked the screen open.

  But it wasn’t Defoe on the other end of the line. It was Susan Manchester, with that uncharacteristic, oddly efficient look she had shown at the vaults.

  She said crisply, and not at all surprised: “Tom Wills.”

  “That’s right,” I said, thinking quickly. Well, it didn’t much matter. I should have realized that Defoe’s secretary, howsoever temporary, would be taking his calls. I said rapidly: “Susan, I can’t talk to you. It has to be Defoe. Take my word for it, it’s important. Please put him on.”

  She gave me no more of an argument than the robot had.

  In a second, Defoe was on the screen, and I put Susan out of my mind. She must have said something to him, because the big, handsome face was unsurprised, though the eyes were contracted. “Wills!” he snapped. “You fool! Where are you?”

  I said, “Mr. Defoe, I have to talk to you. It’s a very urgent matter.”

  “Come in and do it, Wills! Not over the telephone.”

  I shook my head. “No, sir. I can’t. It’s too, well, risky.”

  “Risky for you, you mean!” The words were icily disgusted. “Wills, you have betrayed me. No man ever got away with that. You’re imposing on me, playing on my family loyalty to your dead wife, and I want to tell you that you won’t get away with it. There’s a murder charge against you, Wills! Come in and talk to me—or else the police will pick you up before noon.”