Part 4 (2/2)

'In any event, Teller was one of those fleeing the n.a.z.is. He was born in Bu-dapest so the country he fled from was Hungary, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Teller is Jewish and, of course, the n.a.z.is made things very unpleasant for the Jews even before their policy of ma.s.s extermination got under way.

Anyway, Teller wisely fled the noisome rising tide and came to America where he made a dramatic impact in the field of theoretical physics, especially with his work on crystal symmetry. The Jahn-Teller effect.'

'Oh, that.'

The Doctor smiled at her sarcasm. 'All you need to know is that it deals with the interactions between nuclei and electrons.'

'I don't even need to know that.'

'Such discoveries got him into the Manhattan Project and involved with Oppenheimer here at Los Alamos.'

'Involved is putting it mildly,' said Ace, staring out at the two men arguing.

Oppenheimer looked like he wanted to throttle Teller, who stared sullenly back at him with bitter, scornful reproach. 'It's handbags at ten paces out there. What are they on about?'27.

The Doctor pursed his lips and frowned. 'Well, it's all somewhat technical, but as you know the plan here is to detonate the world's first atomic weapon.'

'Yes, I haven't forgotten that.'

The Doctor nodded at the two men standing in the garden. 'Well, our friends Teller and Oppenheimer are having a small disagreement about the consequences of detonating that weapon.'

'You mean,' Ace summoned up all her drunken rhetorical eloquence, 'like the political, social and economical consequences?'

'No,' said the Doctor. 'Oppenheimer thinks that when the bomb goes off the consequences will be a very large explosion and some nasty residue of radiation.'

'Well it's hard to find fault with that. What does Teller think?'

'That the explosion will set up a chain reaction that will devour all the hydrogen in the atmosphere and elsewhere, igniting it, like striking a giant match. A giant match that lights a giant fuse.'

Ace felt a cold thrill as she imagined the pile of explosive at the other end of that fuse. As if reading her mind, the Doctor said, 'Yes. Effectively it would turn the planet into one giant bomb. And thereby obliterate it.'

'It?'

'The planet Earth. In other words, destroying the world.'

'Not that old chestnut,' said Ace dismissively. But despite her bravado, she felt a strange rising chill in her solar plexus. She had faced Armageddon in a number of forms. But something about being here, on her home world, in a time that was almost her own, with the all too familiar threat of nuclear weapons at the heart of things, made the Doctor's words uniquely unsettling.

'Do they really think there's a chance of that happening?'

'Teller does and he's a very clever man. One of the top minds in his field.'

'But Oppenheimer doesn't take him seriously?'

'On the contrary, Oppenheimer takes him very seriously indeed.'

Ace looked out at the two men standing in the garden. They had fallen silent now, but they stared at each other with obstinate combative hatred, like two weary boxers huddled in their corners between rounds. 'Oppenheimer takes the threat seriously but he's going to go ahead anyway?'

'Yes.'

'Whew.' Ace stared curiously at Oppenheimer. The lanky figure looked strangely isolated, a man utterly alone in the world even as he stood here on the lawn of his own home, his wife close by and his colleague and antagonist standing a mere few feet away. Ace felt sorry for him. She tried to imagine what it was like having the weight of such decisions on your shoulders, and her mind s.h.i.+ed away from the concept. She turned to the Doctor. 'But they didn't, did they?'28.

He was staring out the window. He didn't seem to hear her. 'They didn't, did they?' she repeated. He turned and looked at her quizzically.

'Didn't what?' he said.

'Set off a chain reaction that burned up all the hydrogen in the atmosphere.'

'And the oceans.'

'And the oceans. And blow up the whole world. They didn't do that, did they?'

She glanced around at the crowd of drunken people, merry or maudlin, talking loudly all around them. 'This lot managed to blow up an atom bomb all right, but it just went off in the middle of the desert and everything was all right except for any poor little blighters of desert animals who were in the blast zone, and they tootled off, I mean the scientists not the poor little blighters, and built another one and dropped it on j.a.pan. On Hiros.h.i.+ma and that other city that n.o.body can ever remember the name of.'

'Nagasaki.'

'Nagasaki, yeah. They burned up all those j.a.panese babies and women and men. But they didn't burn the whole world, did they?'

The Doctor gazed at her bleakly. Ace felt a small surge of panic. 'Oh come on,' she said. 'I don't know a lot of history, but I know that much.'

The Doctor was about to reply, but before he could do so a loud outraged yelp echoed from across the room. It came from Klaus Fuchs, who was staring at the large, swaying figure of Cosmic Ray Morita coming back through the door of the living room. Ray had a large yellow leather bag swinging by a strap off one shoulder. The bag was an odd, square shape and had the word 'Cosmic' embroidered on it in jagged red lightning-bolt lettering. Carrying the bag, Ray swayed inexorably towards the record player.

Ever since he'd left the room, Fuchs had been tending to the record player, which seemed to Ace to require the disc being changed or turned over every three minutes or so. She was accustomed to the seventy minutes plus of a CD, so these weird, small black records here seemed to end almost as soon as they started. As much as she loathed the cla.s.sical music and longed for it to be over, the constant interruptions made it worse.

Fuchs, however, seemed to enjoy the perpetual responsibility of feeding the music to the machine, and he'd been happily fussing over it, selecting discs from a large brown cardboard alb.u.m.

Now Fuchs was standing among the physicists chatting at the fireplace, one casual elbow on the mantelpiece between the martini gla.s.ses, a debonair cigarette clamped between his lips. The cigarette dropped from his lips and he looked hastily around him, like a cornered animal. Ace realised his predica-ment. He was on the other side of the room, far away from the record player, which stood beside the door.29.

Ray on the other hand reached the record player in a few unsteady steps.

Ace decided that although she didn't much like the big man, she liked his nickname. Cosmic suited him, with his s.p.a.ced-out, otherworldly demeanour.

The Liebestod was still thrilling and thrumming and surging from the record player as Ray reached down gently and with great care and lifted the playing arm off the record. The music stopped instantly. Ray delicately moved the playing arm back and lifted the record off the player with one big hand.

In sharp contrast to his treatment of the playing arm, Ray handled the record itself with brutal negligence. On the far side of the room Fuchs let out another scandalised yelp. He was still trying to force his way through the crowd towards Ray. Cosmic Ray just gave him a lazy smile and let the record go spinning out of his hand like a small, clumsy frisbee. Fuchs screamed as the black disc went spinning through the air towards the white wall of the room. It struck the wall and shattered with a brittle sound, showering to the floor in a number of ungainly angular pieces.

Cosmic Ray's grin widened. 'I hate to do that to a perfectly good piece of sh.e.l.lac. But the music that was pressed into those grooves deserved to die.

Now, hip cats and kitties, open your ears to some music that deserves to live live.'

He opened the yellow leather bag and Ace saw why it was shaped like a cube. Inside was a box of funny black records in their square cardboard covers. With great reverence and enormous care, Cosmic Ray extracted one such record and placed it on the turntable. Fuchs, who had stopped halfway across the room when the Wagner record had broken on the wall, was watching with frigid contempt. He muttered with disgust something that sounded like ' En-tarte En-tarte music,' and pointedly turned his back as Ray proceeded to fiddle with the tone arm of the record player. music,' and pointedly turned his back as Ray proceeded to fiddle with the tone arm of the record player.

Ray removed the needle from the arm and threw it aside with a look of cool contempt that matched Fuchs' own. 'Don't know what you're so cooked about, Klaus baby,' he said. 'That needle you were using was worn out anyway. It should have been replaced about ten records ago you dumb Deutsche clown.

It was destroying the record. Killing the very thing you loved. Very Very Wagner-ian.' Ray grinned as he bent over the record bag, fat thighs bulging from his shorts in a disgusting display of flab. He extracted a small yellow silk pouch, from which he took a new needle. He fastened the needle in the tone arm and set the arm on the record, standing back with a look of drunken rapture on his face. Wagner-ian.' Ray grinned as he bent over the record bag, fat thighs bulging from his shorts in a disgusting display of flab. He extracted a small yellow silk pouch, from which he took a new needle. He fastened the needle in the tone arm and set the arm on the record, standing back with a look of drunken rapture on his face.

'This is more like it,' he said as the needle rasped its way into the groove.

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