The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  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 door 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 tha
t 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.”

  I said with an effort, “I don’t mean to impose on any loyalty, but, in common decency, you ought to hear—”

  “Decency!” His face was cold. “You talk about decency! You and that dell’Angela traitor you joined. Decency! Wills, you’re a disgrace to the memory of a decent and honest woman like Marianna. I can only say that I am glad—glad, do you hear me?—that she’s dead and rid of you.”

  I said, “Wait a minute, Defoe! Leave Marianna out of this. I only—”

  “Don’t interrupt me! God, to think a man I trusted should turn out to be Judas himself! You animal, the Company has protected you from the day you were born, and you try to destroy it. Why, you pitiful idiot, you aren’t fit to associate with the dogs in the kennel of a decent human being!”

  There was more. Much, much more. It was a flow of abuse that paralyzed me, less because of what he said than because of who was saying it. Suave, competent Defoe, ranting at me like a wounded Gogarty! I couldn’t have been more astonished if the portrait of Millen Carmody had whispered a bawdy joke from the frontispiece of the Handbook.

  I stood there, too amazed to be furious, listening to the tirade from the midget image in the viewplate. It must have lasted for three or four minutes; then, almost in mid-breath, Defoe glanced at something outside my range of vision, and stopped his stream of abuse. I started to cut in while I could, but he held up one hand quickly.

  He smiled gently. Very calmly, as though he had not been damning me a moment before, he said: “I shall be very interested to hear what you have to say.”

  That floored me. It took me a second to shake the cobwebs out of my brain before I said waspishly, “If you hadn’t gone through all that jabber, you would have heard it long ago.”

  The midget in the scanner shrugged urbanely. “True,” he conceded. “But then, Thomas, I wouldn’t have had you.”

  And he reached forward and clicked off the phone. Tricked! Tricked and trapped! I cursed myself for stupidity. While he kept me on the line, the call was being traced—there was no other explanation. And I had fallen for it!

  I slapped the door of the booth open and leaped out.

  I got perhaps ten feet from the booth.

  Then a rope dropped over my shoulders. Its noose yanked tight around my arms, and I was being dragged up, kicking futilely. I caught a glimpse of the broad Latin faces gaping at me from below, then two men on a rope ladder had me.

  I was dragged in through the bottom hatch of a big helicopter with no markings. The hatch closed. Facing me was a lieutenant of expediters.

  The two men tumbled in after me and reeled in the rope ladder, as the copter dipped and swerved away. I let myself go limp as the rope was loosened around me; when my hands were free I made my bid.

  I leaped for the lieutenant; my fist caught him glancingly on the throat, sending him reeling and choking backward. I grabbed for the hard-pellet gun at his hip—he was pawing at it—and we tumbled across the floor.

  It was, for one brief moment, a chance. I was no copter pilot, but the gun was all the pilot I’d need—if only I got it out.

  But the expediters behind me were no amateurs. I ducked as the knotted end of the rope whipped savagely toward me. Then one of the other expediters was on my back; the gun came out, and flew free. And that was the end of that.

  I had, I knew, been a fool to try it. But I wasn’t sorry. They had too much rough-and-tumble training for me to handle. But that one blow had felt good.
>
  It didn’t seem as worthwhile a few moments later. I was fastened to a seat, while the wheezing lieutenant gave orders in a strangled voice. “Not too many marks on him,” he was saying. “Try it over the kidneys again…”

  I never even thought of maintaining a heroic silence. They had had plenty of experience with the padded club, too, and I started to black out twice before finally I went all the way down.

  * * * *

  I came to with a light shining in my eyes.

  There was a doctor putting his equipment away. “He’ll be all right, Mr. Defoe,” he said, and snapped his bag shut and left the circle of light.

  I felt terrible, but my head was clearing.

  I managed to focus my eyes. Defoe was there, and a couple of other men. I recognized Gogarty, looking sick and dejected, and another face I knew—it was out of my Home Office training—an officer whose name I didn’t recall, wearing the uniform of a lieutenant-general of expediters. That meant at least an expediter corps in Naples!

  I said weakly, “Hi.”

  Defoe stood over me. He said, “I’m very glad to see you, Thomas. Coffee?”

  He steadied my hands as I gulped it. When I had managed a few swallows, he took the cup away.

  “I did not think you would resist arrest, Thomas,” he said in a parental tone.

  I said, “Damn it, you didn’t have to arrest me! I came down here of my own free will!”

  “Down?” His eyebrows rose. “Down from where do you mean, Thomas?”

  “Down from Mount—” I hesitated, then finished. “All right. Down from Mount Vesuvius. The museum, where I was hiding out with the ringleaders of the anti-Company movement. Is that what you want to know?”

  Defoe crackled: “Manning!” The lieutenant-general saluted and left the room. Defoe said, “That was the first thing I wanted, yes. But now I want much more. Please begin talking, Thomas. I will listen.”

  I talked. There was nothing to stop me. Even with my body a mass of aches and pains from the tender care of the Company’s expediters, I still had to side with the Company in this. For the Cobalt-bomb ended all loyalties.