Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (20 page)

He stopped abruptly and relaxed, leaning against the wall and gazing out
over the trees and artificial sunlight of the Plaza. Bach could hear
songbirds. They had always made her feel good before. Now all she could
think of was incinerated corpses. Birkson ticked off points on his
fingers.

She listened to him carefully. Some of it was strange, but no worse than
she had already witnessed. And he really did have a plan. He really did.
The sense of relief was so tremendous that it threatened to create a mood
of euphoria in her, one not yet justified by the circumstances. She nodded
curtly to each of his suggestions, then again to the officer who stood
beside her, confirming what Birkson had said and turning it into orders.
The young man rushed off to carry them out, and Birkson started to return
to the bomb. Bach grabbed him.

"Why wouldn't you let Hans answer my question about who did the surgical
work on him? Was that part of your plan?" The question was
half-belligerent.

"Oh. Yeah, it was, in a way. I just grabbed the opportunity to make him
feel closer to me. But it wouldn't have done you any good. He'll have a
block against telling that, for sure. It could even be set to explode the
bomb if he tries to answer that question. Hans is a maniac, but don't
underestimate the people who helped him get where he is now. They'll be
protected."

"Who are they?"

Birkson shrugged. It was such a casual, uncaring gesture that Bach was
annoyed again.

"I have no idea. I'm not political, Ann. I don't know the Antiabortion
Movement from the Freedom for Mauretania League. They build 'em, I take
'em apart. It's as simple as that.
Your
job is to find out how it
happened. I guess you ought to get started on that."

"We already have," she conceded. "I just thought that … well,
coming from Earth, where this sort of thing happens all the time, that you
might know … damn it, Birkson.
Why?
Why is this happening?"

He laughed, while Bach turned red and went into a slow boil. Any of her
officers, seeing her expression, would have headed for the nearest blast
shelter. But Birkson laughed on. Didn't he give a damn about anything?

"Sorry," he forced out. "I've heard that question before, from other
police chiefs. It's a good question." He waited, a half smile on his face.
When she didn't say anything, he went on.

"You don't have the right perspective on this, Ann."

"That's Chief Bach to you, damn you."

"Okay," he said, easily. "What you don't see is that this thing is no
different from a hand grenade tossed into a crowd or a bomb sent through
the mail. It's a form of communication. It's just that today, with so many
people, you have to shout a little louder to get any attention."

"But … who? They haven't even identified themselves. You're saying
that Hans is a tool of these people. He's been wired into the bomb, with
his own motives for exploding. Obviously he didn't have the resources to
do this himself, I can see that."

"Oh, you'll hear from them. I don't think they expect him to be
successful. He's a warning. If they were
really
serious, they could
find the sort of person they want, one who's politically committed and
will die for the cause. Of course, they don't
care
if the bomb goes
off; they'll be pleasantly surprised if it does. Then they can stand up
and pound their chests for a while. They'll be famous."

"But where did they get the uranium? The security is …"

For the first time, Birkson showed a trace of annoyance.

"Don't be silly. The path leading to today was irrevocably set in 1945.
There was never any way to avoid it. The presence of a tool implies that
it will be used. You can try your best to keep it in the hands of what you
think of as responsible people, but it'll never work. And it's
no
different,
that's what I'm saying. This bomb is just another weapon.
It's a cherry bomb in an anthill. It's gonna cause one hill of ants a hell
of a lot of trouble, but it's no threat to the race of ants."

Bach could not see it that way. She tried, but it was still a nightmare of
entirely new proportions to her. How could he equate the killing of
millions of people with a random act of violence where three or four might
be hurt? She was familiar with that. Bombs went off every day in her city,
as in every human city. People were always dissatisfied.

"I could walk down … no, it's up here, isn't it?" Birkson mused for
a moment on cultural differences. "Anyway, give me enough money, and I'll
bet I could go up to your slum neighborhoods right this minute and buy you
as many kilos of uranium or plutonium as you want. Which is something you
ought to be doing, by the way. Anything can be bought.
Anything.
For the right price, you could have bought weapons-grade material on the
black market as early as 1960 or so. It would have been very expensive;
there wasn't much of it. You'd have had to buy a
lot
of people. But
now … well, you think it out." He stopped, and seemed embarrassed
by his outburst.

"I've read a little about this," he apologized.

She did think it out as she followed him back to the cordon. What he said
was true. When controlled fusion proved too costly for wide-scale use,
humanity had opted for fast breeder reactors. There had been no other
choice. And from that moment, nuclear bombs in the hands of terrorists had
been the price humanity accepted. And the price they would continue to
pay.

"I wanted to ask you one more question," she said. He stopped and turned
to face her. His smile was dazzling.

"Ask away. But are you going to take me up on that bet?"

She was momentarily unsure of what he meant.

"Oh. Are you saying you'd help us locate the underground uranium ring? I'd
be grateful …"

"No, no. Oh, I'll help you. I'm sure I can make a contact. I used to do
that before I got into this game. What I meant was, are you going to bet I
can't find some? We could bet … say, a dinner together as soon as
I've found it. Time limit of seven days. How about it?"

She thought she had only two alternatives: walk away from him, or kill
him. But she found a third.

"You're a betting man. I guess I can see why. But that's what I wanted to
ask you. How can you stay so calm? Why doesn't this get to you like it
does to me and my people. You can't tell me it's simply that you're used
to it."

He thought about it. "And why not? You can get used to anything, you know.
Now, what about that bet?"

"If you don't stop talking about that," she said, quietly, "I'm going to
break your arm."

"All right." He said nothing further, and she asked no further questions.

The fireball grew in milliseconds into an inferno that could scarcely be
described in terms comprehensible to humans. Everything in a
half-kilometer radius simply vanished into super-heated gases and plasma:
buttresses, plate-glass windows, floors and ceilings, pipes, wires, tanks,
machines, gewgaws and trinkets by the million, books, tapes, apartments,
furniture, household pets, men, women, and children. They were the lucky
ones. The force of the expanding blast compressed two hundred levels below
it like a giant sitting on a Dagwood sandwich, making holes through plate
steel turned to putty by the heat as easily as a punch press through
tinfoil. Upward, the surface bulged into the soundless Lunar night and
split to reveal a white hell beneath. Chunks flew away, chunks as large as
city sectors, before the center collapsed back on itself to leave a crater
whose walls were a maze of compartments and ant tunnels that dripped and
flowed like warm gelatin. No trace was left of human bodies within two
kilometers of the explosion. They had died after only the shortest period
of suffering, their bodies consumed or spread into an invisible layer of
organic film by the combination of heat and pressure that passed through
walls, entered rooms where the doors were firmly shut. Further away, the
sound was enough to congeal the bodies of a million people before the heat
roasted them, the blast stripped flesh from bones to leave shrunken stick
figures. Still the effects attenuated as the blast was channeled into
corridors that were structurally strong enough to remain intact, and that
very strength was the downfall of the inhabitants of the maze. Twenty
kilometers from the epicenter, pressure doors popped through steel flanges
like squeezed watermelon seeds.

What was left was five million burnt, blasted corpses and ten million
injured so hideously that they would die in hours or days. But Bach had
been miraculously thrown clear by some freak of the explosion. She hurtled
through the void with fifteen million ghosts following her, and each
carried a birthday cake. They were singing. She joined in.

"
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday …
"

"Chief Bach."

"Huh?" She felt a cold chill pass over her body. For a moment she could
only stare down into the face of Roger Birkson.

"You all right now?" he asked. He looked concerned.

"I'm … what happened?"

He patted her on both arms, then shook her heartily.

"Nothing. You drifted off for a moment." He narrowed his eyes. "I think
you were daydreaming. I want to be diplomatic about this … ah, what
I mean … I've seen it happen before. I think you were trying to get
away from us."

She rubbed her hands over her face.

"I think I was. But I sure went in the wrong direction. I'm all right
now." She could remember it now, and knew she had not passed out or become
totally detached from what was going on. She had watched it all. Her
memories of the explosion, so raw and real a moment before, were already
the stuff of nightmares.

Too bad she hadn't come awake into a better world. It was so damn unfair.
That was the reward at the end of a nightmare, wasn't it? You woke up to
find everything was all right.

Instead, here was a long line of uniformed officers bearing birthday cakes
to a fifty-kiloton atomic bomb.

Birkson had ordered the lights turned off in the Leystrasse. When his
order had not been carried out, he broke out the lights with his putter.
Soon, he had some of the officers helping him.

Now the beautiful Leystrasse, the pride of New Dresden, was a flickering
tunnel through hell. The light of a thousand tiny birthday candles on five
hundred cakes turned everything red-orange and made people into shadowed
demons. Officers kept arriving with hastily wrapped presents, flowers,
balloons. Hans, the little man who was now nothing but a brain and nerve
network floating in a lead container; Hans, the cause of all this, the
birthday boy himself, watched it all in unconcealed delight from his
battery of roving television cameras. He sang loudly.

"I am a bomb! I am a bomb!" he yelled. He had never had so much fun.

Bach and Birkson retreated from the scene into the darkened recess of the
Bagatelle Flower Shoppe. There, a stereo viewing tank had been set up.

The X-ray picture had been taken with a moving plate technique that
allowed a computer to generate a three dimensional model. They leaned over
the tank now and studied it. They had been joined by Sergeant McCoy,
Bach's resident bomb expert, and another man from the Lunar Radiation
Laboratory.

"This is Hans," said Birkson, moving a red dot in the tank by means of a
dial on the side. It flicked over and around a vague gray shape that
trailed dozens of wires. Bach wondered again at the pressures that would
allow a man to like having his body stripped from him. There was nothing
in that lead flask but the core of the man, the brain and central nervous
system.

"Here's the body of the bomb. The two subcritical masses. The H.E. charge,
the timer, the arming barrier, which is now withdrawn. It's an old design,
ladies and gentlemen. Old, but reliable. As basic as the bow and arrow.
It's very much like the first one dropped on the Nippon Empire at
Hiroshima."

"You're sure it'll go off, then?" Bach put in.

"Sure as taxes. Hell, a kid could build one of these in the bathroom,
given only the uranium and some shielding equipment. Now let me see." He
pored over the phantom in the tank, tracing out wiring paths with the
experts. They debated possibilities, lines of attack, drawbacks. At last
they seemed to reach a consensus.

"As I see it, we have only one option," Birkson said. "We have to go for
his volitional control over the bomb. I'm pretty sure we've isolated the
main cable that goes from him to the detonator. Knock that out, and he
can't do a thing. We can pry that tin can open by conventional means and
disarm that way. McCoy?"

"I agree," said McCoy. "We'd have a full hour, and I'm sure we can get in
there with no trouble. When they cyborged this one, they put all their
cards on the human operator. They didn't bother with entry blocks, since
Hans could presumably blow it up before we could get close enough to do
anything. With his control out, we only have to open it up with a torch
and drop the damper into place."

The LRL man nodded his agreement. "Though I'm not quite as convinced as
Mr. Birkson that he's got the right cable in mind for what he wants to do.
If we had more time …"

"We've wasted enough time already," Bach said, decisively. She had swung
rapidly from near terror of Roger Birkson to total trust. It was her only
defense. She knew she could do nothing at all about the bomb and had to
trust someone.

"Then we go for it. Is your crew in place? Do they know what to do? And
above all, are they
good?
Really good? There won't be a second
chance."

"Yes, yes, and yes," Bach said. "They'll do it. We know how to cut rock on
Luna."

"Then give them the coordinates, and go." Birkson seemed to relax a bit.
Bach saw that he had been under some form of tension, even if it was only
excitement at the challenge. He had just given his last order. It was no
longer in his hands. His fatalistic gambler's instinct came into play, and
the restless, churning energy he had brought to the enterprise vanished.
There was nothing to do about it but wait. Birkson was good at waiting. He
had lived through twenty-one of these final countdowns.