Critical Mass

by Frederik Pohl

  Yes, there was explosion enough for any man.

  That whippersnapper Wells! Suppose, I put it to you, that some such “radium bomb” should be made. Conceive the captains of Kaiser Will’s dirigible fleet possessed of a few nuggets apiece such as those Herr Faesch owned half a century ago. Imagine them cruising above the city of London, sowing their dragon’s-teeth

  pellets in certain predetermined places, until in time a sufficient accumulation was reached to set the whole thing off. Can you think what horror it might set free upon the world?

  And so I have never told this story, nor ever would if it were not for those same Zeppelin dirigible balloons. Even now I think it best to withhold it until this war is over, a year or two perhaps. (And that will probably make it posthumous-if only to accommodate Shaw-but no matter.)

  I have seen a great deal. I know what I know, and I feel what I feel; and I tell you, this marvelous decade that stretches ahead of us after this present war will open new windows on freedom for the human race. Can it be doubted? Poor Bagley’s letters from the trenqhes tell me that the very poilus and Tommies are determined to build a new world on the ruins of the old.

  Well, perhaps Herr Faesch’s nuggets will help them, these wiser, nobler children of the dawn who are to follow us. They will know what to make of them. One thing is sure: Count Zeppelin has made it impossible for Herr Faesch’s metal ever to be used for war. Fighting on the ground itself was terrible enough; this new dimension of warfare will end it. Imagine sending dirigibles across the skies to sow such horrors! Imagine what monstrous brains might plan such an assault! Merciful heaven. They wouldn’t dare.

  CRITICAL MASS

  After Cyril’s death, his widow turned up a bale of paper and delivered it to me: incomplete manuscripts, notes, one or two projects that he had completed and, for one reason or another, not published. Most of the fragments I ultimately completed, over a period of fifteen years, and they appear in this volume. “Critical Mass” wasn’t exactly one of them, it was three of them -four, if you count some notes of my own, made for a story of that title I started and abandoned in 1954.

  THE NEUTRON was a plump young man named Walter Chase, though what he thought he was was a brand-new Engineering graduate, sitting mummified and content with the other 3,876 in Eastern’s class of ‘98, waiting for his sheepskin.

  The university glee club sang the ancient scholastic song Gaudeamus Igitur with mournful respect and creamy phrasing, for they and most of the graduates, faculty members, parents, relatives and friends present in the field house thought it was a hymn instead of the rowdy drinking song it was. It was a warm June day, conducive to reverence. Of Eastern’s 3,877 graduating men and women only three had majored in classical languages. What those three would do for a living from July on was problematical. But in June they had at least the pleasure of an internal chuckle .over the many bowed heads.

  Walter Chase’s was bowed with the rest. He was

  of the Civil Engineering breed, and he had learned more about concrete in the four years just ended than you would think possible. Something called The Cement Research and Development Institute, whose vague but inspirational commercials were regularly on the TV screens, had located Walter as a promising high-school graduate. He was then considering the glamorous and expensive field of nuclear physics. A plausible C.R.D.I. field man had signed him up and set him straight. It took twelve years to make a nuclear physicist. Now, wasn’t that a hell of a long time to wait for the good things of life? Now, here was something he ought to consider: Four years. In four years he could walk right into a job with automatic pay raises, protected seniority, stock participation and Blue Everything, paid by the company. Concrete was the big industry of tomorrow. The C.R.D.I. was deeply concerned over the lack of interest in concrete engineering, and it was prepared to do something about it: Full four-year scholarship, tuition, living costs and pocket money. Well?

  Walter signed. He was a level-headed eighteen-year-old. He had been living with a pinch-penny aunt and uncle, his parents dead; the chance of the aunt and uncle financing twelve years of nuclear studies for him he estimated to lie midway between the incredible and the impossible.

  Two solid hours dwindled past hi addresses by the Chancellor, the Governor of the State and a couple of other politicos receiving honorary degrees. Walter Chase allowed the words to slip past him as though they were dreams, although many of them concerned his own specialty: shelters. You knew what politician talk was. He and the 3,876 others were coldly realistic enough to know that C.S.B. was a long way from being enacted into law, much less concrete-and-steel Civilian Shelters in fact. Otherwise why would the Institute have to keep begging for students to give scholarships

  to? He drowsed. Then, as if with an absent-minded start, the program ended.

  Everybody flocked away onto the campus.

  In the hubbub was all the talk of the time: “Nice weather, but, Kee-rist! those speeches!” “Who d’ya like, in the All-Star?” “Nothing wrong with C.S.B. if it’s handled right, but you take and throw a couple thousand warheads over the Pole and-” “My, feet hurt.” Chase heard without listening. He was in a hurry.

  There was no one he wanted to meet, no special friend or family. The aunt and uncle were not present at his graduation. When it had become clear from their letters that they expected him to pay back what they had spent to care for him as soon as he began earning money, he telephoned them. Collect. He suggested that they sue him for the money or, alternatively, take a flying jump for themselves. It effectively closed out a relationship he loathed.

  Chase saw, approaching him across the crowded campus, another relationship it was time to close out. The relationship’s name was Douglasina MacArthur Baggett, a brand-new graduate in journalism. She was pretty and she had in tow two older persons who Chase perceived to be her parents. “Walter,” she bubbled, “I don’t believe you were even looking for me! Meet Daddy and Mom.”

  Walter Chase allowed his hand to be shaken. Baggett pere was something in Health, Education and Welfare that had awakened Walter’s interest at one time; but as Douglasina had let it slip that Daddy had been passed over for promotion three years running, Walter’s interest had run out. The old fool now began babbling about how young fellows like Walter would, through the Civilian Shelters Bill, really give the country the top-dog Summit bargaining position that would pull old Zhdetchnikov’s cork for him. The mother simpered: “So you’re the young man! We’ve

  heard so much about you in Douglasina’s letters. I tell you, why don’t you come and spend the All-Star weekend with us in Chevy Chase?”

  Walter asked blankly: “Why?”

  “Why?” said Mrs. Baggett in a faint voice, after a perceptible pause. Walter smiled warmly.

  “After all,” he said, shrugging, “boy-girl college friendships… . She’s a fine girl, Mrs. Baggett. Delighted to have met you, Mr. Baggett. Doug, maybe we’ll run into each other again, eh?” He clapped her on the shoulder and slipped away.

  Once screened from the sight of their faces, he sighed. In some ways he would miss her, he thought. Well. On to the future!

  In the dormitory he snapped the locks on his luggage, already packed, carried them down to be stowed in the luggage compartment of the airport bus and then circulated gently through the halls. He had in four years at Eastern made eleven Good Contacts and thirty-six Possibles, and he had an hour or two before his plane to joke with, shake the hand of, or congratulate the nine of those on the list who shared his dorm. He fooled the fools and flattered the flatterable, but hi his wake a few of his classmates grimly said: “That young son of a bitch is going to go far, unless he runs out of faces to step on.”

  Having attended to his nine he charitably spread some of his remaining tune among the couple dozen Outside Chances he ran into. To a sincere, but confused, servo-mech specialist he said, man-to-man, “Well, Frankie, what’s the big decision? Made up your mind about the job yet?”

  The servo-mech man cl
utched him and told him his tale of woe. “God no, Walt. I don’t know which way to turn. Missile R and D’s offering me a commission right away, captain inside of two years. But who wants to be a soldier all his life? And there’s nothing in private industry for inertial guidance, you know.

  Damn it, Walt, if only they let you resign from the service after a couple years!” Chase said something more or less comforting and moved on. He was careful not to chuckle until he was out of sight.

  Poor Frankie! Got himself educated in what amounted to a military speciality-who else could afford servo-mechanisms?-and discovered he hated the Army.

  Still, Chase meditated while nodding, smiling and handshaking, thirty years as an Engineering Officer might not be so bad. As it was one of the alternatives open to himself-that was what C.S.B. was all about -he allowed his mind to drift over the prospects. It wasn’t like the bad old days of fighting. A flat and rigid policy of atomic retaliation had been U. S. military doctrine for fifty-three years, and backing it up was a large, well-trained U. S. military establishment of career men. And the regulations said career. The only way out short of thirty-year retirement was with a can tied to your tail and a taint to your name. He dismissed that thirty-year dead end with light contempt, as he had before.

  The air-raid warning sirens began to howl their undulating hysteria.

  Chase sighed and glanced at his watch. Not too bad. He should still be able to make his plane. Everyone around him was saying things like, “Ah, damn it!” or “Oh, dear,” or “Jeez!” But they were all dutifully following the arrows and the “S” signs that dotted the campus.

  Chase trailed along. He was kind of annoyed, but nothing could really spoil his day. The first shelter he came to was full up. The freshman raid warden stood at the door-Chase had been a raid warden himself three years before-chanting: “Basement filled to capacity, folks. Please proceed to Chemistry building. Don’t block the exit, folks. Basement here filled-“

  Because of the extra crowd caused by the graduation the Chemistry building basement was filled, too,

  but Chase got into the Administration building and sat down to wait. Like everybody else. Women fussed about their dresses-they always had, in every air raid drill he had taken part in, say, four a week for fifty-two weeks of each year for the nearly twenty years since he had been old enough to toddle alongside his late mother and father. Men grumbled about missing appointments. They always had. But for the most part the battery-fed air-raid lights gleamed equably on them all, the warden fussed with the air conditioner and the younger folk smooched in the corners.

  It wasn’t a bad shelter, Walter Chase thought. The Law School basement was a mess-too high a pH in the mortar mix, and the aggregate showing hygroscopic tendencies” because of some clown not watching his rock crusher, so the walls were cracked and damp. Chemistry’s had been poured in a freeze. Well, naturally it began to sinter and flake. This was better; trust the Chancellor to make sure his own nest was downy! Of course, in a raid none of them would be worth a hoot; but there weren’t to be any real raids. Ever.

  A jet plane’s ripping path sounded overhead.

  Evidently this was going to be a full-dress affair, at least regional hi scope. They didn’t throw simulated manned-bomber attacks for a purely local do. Walter frowned. It had suddenly occurred to him that with the air-transport flight lanes screwed up by military fighters on simulated missions everything within a thousand miles might be rerouted into stack patterns. What the devil would that do to his plane’s departure time?

  Then he smiled forebearingly. He was, hi a way, pleased to be annoyed. It meant he was entering into the adult world of appointments and passages. They said that when a raid drill began to be a damn interruption instead of a welcome break from classes and a chance to smooch, then, brother, you were growing up. He guessed he was growing up.

  “Goddam foolishness,” growled the man who sat next to Chase on the bench, as though it were a personal attack. More jets shredded sound overhead and he glared at Chase. Walter inventoried his English shoes, seal ring and pale cigar and at once engaged him in conversation. The man was some graduate’s father; they had got separated in the raid drill, and Pop was sore as a tramped bunion. The whole drill thing was damned childishness, didn’t Walter see that? And vindictive damned childishness when they chose to throw one on graduation day of a major university. If only Crockhouse had been elected in ‘96 instead of Braden, with his packed ballots in Indiana and. Puerto Rico!

  Here Walter Chase’s interest cooled, because Pop sounded like a politician, revealed himself to be a Nationalist and thus was out of power. But there was no escaping the bench. What Pop objected bitterly to was the multiple levels of expense. Here the drill was knocking men out of production, but the damn Middle-Road Congress said they had to be paid anyhow. And if the Defense Department was making it a full-scale simulated raid, did Walter know what that meant? That meant that there went thirty or forty Nineveh Abies at a hundred and fifty thousand dollars apiece, and was that enough? No. Then they sent up four or five Tyres at ninety thousand apiece to knock down the Ninevehs. Did that make sense? He paused to glare at Walter Chase.

  Walter said, “Well, that’s the Cold War for you. Say, who d’you like in the All-Star-” He didn’t get to finish the sentence.

  “L.A.” snapped Pop, without losing a beat. “Get the damn monkey-business over with, that’s what I say. I’m a sneak-puncher and I’m proud of it. If we’d put our man in the White House instead of that psalm-singing Braden there wouldn’t be any Moscow or Peking or Calcutta by now and we wouldn’t be sitting here on our butts!”

  Somebody clawed through from the bench in front;

  with horror, Chase recognized old man Baggett. But Douglasina’s Daddy did not recognize him. Flushed with rage and politics he had eyes only for the sneak-punch advocate. “You’re right it’s monkey-business, fat-mouth!” he snarled. “No thanks to you and your Crockhouse we aren’t dead in this cellar instead of safe and secure! President Braden is a hundred percent pledged to the C.S.B., God bless it, and-“

  The rest of his sentence and Sneak-Punch’s angry reply were drowned out by a further flight of jets overhead, and then the wham-wham-wham of interceptor missiles blowing simulated attackers out of the sky.

  Somehow, heaven knew how, Walter Chase managed to sneak away, inching through the packed rows of benches. As soon as the All Clear siren toots began he was up and out, ignoring the freshman warden’s puppy-like yaps that they should remain in their seats until the front benches had been emptied-Routine. It was all strictly routine.

  Out on the campus, Chase headed for the airport in earnest, and was delighted to find that his flight was still on time. How lucky he was, he thought, with more pride than gratitude. “What are you, sir?” asked the robot baggage-checker, and he said, “Washington,” with pleasure. He was on his way. He was headed for Washington, where Dr. Hujes of The Cement Research and Development Institute would assign him to his job, doubtless the first rung of a dizzying climb to wealth and fame. He was a young man on his way. Or so he thought. He did not know that he was only a neutron ambling toward events.

  ii

  Arturo Denzer, in the same sense, was a nucleus. He knew no more about it than Walter Chase.

  Denzer woke to the rays of a rising sun and the snarl of his wake-up clock. He took a vitamin capsule,

  an aspirin tablet, a thyroid injection; a mildly euphoric jolt of racemic amphetamine sulphate; caffeine via three cups of black coffee with sucaryl; and nicotine via a chain of nonfiltering filter-tip cigarettes. He then left his apartment for the offices of Nature’s Way Magazine, which he edited.

  June’s blossom was in the air, and so was the tingle of the All-Star Game Number One. The elevator operator said to him respectfully, “Who d’ya like in the All-Star game, Mr. Denzer?” Denzer turned the operator’s conversation circuit off with a handwave. He didn’t feel like talking to a robot at least until the aspirin began to work.
>
  Absent-mindedly he waved a cab to him and climbed in. Only after it took off did he notice, to his dismay, that he had picked a Black-and-White fleet hack. They were salty and picturesque-and couldn’t be turned off. The damned thing would probably call him “Mac.”

  “Who ya like inna All-Star, Mac?” the cab asked genially, and Denzer winched. Trapped, he drummed his ringers on the armrest and stared at the Jefferson Memorial in its sea of amusement rides and hot-dog stands. “Who ya like inna All-Star, Mac?” it asked again, genially and relentlessly. It would go on asking until he answered.

  “Yanks,” Denzer grunted. Next time he’d watch what he was doing and get a sleek, black Rippington Livery with a respectful BBC accent.

  “Them bums?” groaned the cab derisively. “Watcha think Craffany’s up to?”

  Craffany was the Yankee manager. Denzer knew that he had benched three of his star players over the last weekend-indeed, it was impossible to avoid knowing it. Denzer struck out wildly: “Saving them for the All-Star, I guess.”

  The cab grunted and said: “Maybe. My guess, Fliederwick’s in a slump so Craffany benched him and pulled Hockins and Waller so it’d look like he

  was saving ‘em for the All-Star. Ya notice Fliederwick was 0 for 11 in the first game with Navy?”

  Denzer gritted his teeth and slumped down in the seat. After a moment the cab grunted and said: “Maybe. My guess is Fliederwick’s in a slump so Craffany benched him and pulled… .” It went through it twice more before Denzer and his hangover could stand no more.

  “I hate baseball,” he said distinctly.

  The cab said at once, “Well, it’s a free country. Say, ya see Braden’s speech on the C.S.B. last night?”

  “I did.”

  “He really gave it to them, right? You got to watch those traitors. Course, like Crockhouse says, where we going to get the money?”