"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it's lightning that does the work."
—MARK TWAIN to Nikola Tesla
"The only part I still don't understand," Arethusa said fifteen minutes later, when order had been restored and we'd agreed to postpone our engagement celebration and Lady Sally and I had filled her in on the parts she'd slept through, "is how come the existence of secret atom bombs scattered around the US and Russia is supposed to alter history—so as to prevent nuclear holocaust from happening—when nobody is ever going to find out about them. I mean, if they get discovered, they surely go into history in a big way . . . and if they just sit there and never go off, they have no effect at all on history . . . and if they go off, there is no history. I don't see how any of those three alternatives prevents the US and Russia from lobbing missiles at each other on schedule. Or how we can make it come out that way."
I looked toward Lady Sally as if I didn't know the answer myself. She had just put the phone down after checking in with Mary, this room's surveillance from the Snoop Room being presently disconnected.
"The details will have to be worked out," she told us, "but the broad outlines are clear to me. We are going to locate each and every one of those devices, learn how they are triggered and protected, and disarm them—leaving them just where they are. At the same time we will hunt down every one of the lice who built and planted them, and kill them—preserving one of them long enough to talk into a tape recorder if feasible. Then we need only see that two copies of that tape, two maps of all the mines in both countries, and a short, anonymous letter, go to just the right addresses in Washington and Moscow."
I nodded. "We'll scare the living shit out of the people who control the big red buttons. It's demoralizing to wake up and find you just walked a tightrope over the abyss in your sleep. And they'll have to compare notes, to make sure each side got the same information. It'll be a long time before they're quite so ready to push their buttons again."
"Long enough for the Soviet Union to collapse of its own weight," Lady Sally agreed, "ending the Cold War. And demonstrating conclusively, thereafter, that the United States never did want to conquer the world, which eventually will . . . well, there's no point going off into second- and third-order resultants at this juncture."
"For God's sake, let's make sure we've really got the right addresses in both countries, though," I said. "If the President and Premier ever find out about this, they're liable to get in the way and make things worse than ever."
"No responsible person would trust them with information of this caliber," Lady Sally assured me.
"The Soviet Union is truly on the verge of collapse?" Arethusa asked.
Lady Sally nodded firmly. "I know it must be hard to believe now, halfway through the Eighties . . . but just wait a few years. The cancer is inoperable. If it hadn't been for the US and Canada, they'd all have starved long ago. That's precisely why they're so dangerous at the moment: they're paranoids, and they depend on their enemy to live, and they know that, and it's driving them crazy."
"Huh!" I said, struck by an idea. "How about this? Suppose it was someone in the CIA—not the Director, of course, but someone known to the Soviets as sane and reliable—who quietly slipped that tape and map to his opposite number in Moscow?"
Lady Sally smiled. "Lovely. I can think of no better way to win a Russian's trust than to bring him the head of an enemy he didn't know he had."
"You have CIA contacts?"
"CIA is wrong for this job, I think—even if the Director did not have a brain tumor. Their mandate is extranational. The DIA would be better: the Defense Intelligence Agency. Much larger, much quieter, less well known—and I have better contacts there. Excellent ones. And the FBI would have an interest; I have friends there, too. You know, you show a talent for this sort of work, Joe."
"Thank you, Your Ladyship," I said soberly, "but I wish I could do as well with the real problem: how to find the goddam bombs and terrorists. If we find either one we can get the other . . . but where do we start? I don't mind admitting it's got me stumped so far. And I seem to hear the sound of a clock ticking."
"Loudly," she agreed. "The moment the very last mine is installed according to their plan, the bastards will break cover and try to blackmail the world into disarmament. It would be irrational—even by the standards of a pacifist terrorist—to hesitate a single day. And if that day comes, history will have been radically, fatally altered . . . even if no bomb ever actually goes off."
"And all we know about them," I said gloomily, "is that they're so good neither CIA nor KGB has gotten even a whiff of them."
"We have certain advantages in counterespionage over both those agencies," Lady Sally said.
"I don't see it," I persisted. "Even if I credit you with all the sci-fi gizmos I can think of, this is the kind of problem they don't work on very well. I mean, what's the plan? Deep-radar the entire continent—both continents—and personally inspect everything that reads like it might be a lead box? A man could get old doing that. A battalion could. It might take years to stumble across the first bomb . . . and how much good would that do us? I'm sure you could find the damn things, Lady. But can you do it fast?"
"Fortunately, I don't think I'll need to. I have a friend who should be able to deal with that aspect of the matter. He should be here any minute; I just called Mary a few moments ago, and asked her to send him up from his shop in the basement."
"Your maintenance man is going to find the nukes," I said, trying for a little comic relief.
"I think so," she agreed. "Ah, here he is now—come in, Nikky!"
Into the room stepped a tall thin handsome man in his thirties with a mane of dark hair, a proud nose and a sanitary-looking mustache. I could see these things clearly because the room lights brightened all by themselves as he came in. I recognized him instantly from photos. And all at once I understood why in Sally McGee's clean, extremely well-lit place I had not been able to find a single light source, nor a single appliance with a power cord. By this point perhaps you can imagine what it means to say that he was the most astonishing thing I had yet seen in Lady Sally's extraordinary House.
I turned to look at her, and sure enough, she had removed the pearl necklace she'd been wearing. That tore it. I was looking at the one man in all history who might be able to help us.
"Holy—" I began, and remembered that he disliked both obscenity and blasphemy. "—cow," I finished, keeping my voice down to spare his hyperacute hearing.
"Nikola Tesla," Lady Sally said, "allow me to present my very dear friend Kenneth Taggart."
"Honored to meet you, my dear sir," Tesla said, and bowed.
Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan, Croatia in 1856, precisely on the stroke of midnight between the ninth and tenth of July, and came to America during the Panic of 1884. He had invented the bladeless turbine at the start of the American Civil War, when he was five years old—by which time he could speak five languages fluently. Then he'd discovered the love of his life.
The Fire of the Gods . . .
He could do anything that can be done with electricity. Anything.
In fact, he did just about all the things that can be done with electricity, often decades before others "discovered" them. He conceived alternating current, and damned near ruined himself proving it was superior to Edison's direct current. He made the first induction motor, and had to sign away the rights. He built the first robot, and the first Remote Piloted Vehicle—the first remote-controlled anything—in the 1890s, and couldn't interest any government. Guglielmo Marconi stole the idea for radio from him, and got all the credit, even though the US Supreme Court later ruled that Tesla had patented the basic technology in 1897. He invented and patented the "AND gate"—a logic circuit crucial to all computers—in 1903, along with the principles of the transistor; neither could be built at that era's state of the art. He could make lightning—real sky-filling, tree-shattering lightning—do any damn thing he wanted it to, including climb up on the palm of his hand for the amusement of friends of his, like Mark Twain and Paderewski. At one point he conceived a scheme that would have turned the entire planet Earth into something like a stupendous storage battery, so that anywhere on its surface you could draw all the power you wanted just by sinking a rod into the soil—and was forced to abandon it when he admitted to his backer, J. P. Morgan, that there would be no conceivable way to charge customers for the power.
I'd gotten interested in him in the first place because you can't study esoteric weapons for very long without hearing about the Wardenclyffe death-ray he said could score the surface of Mars . . . which of course he never got to build. Trying to read a little about Tesla is like trying to eat one peanut.
I had always felt a terrible affinity with him. Like me, he was an intuitive genius . . . with the worst luck in the history of the world.
But I had never expected to meet him. He died alone and broke in the Hotel New Yorker in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-six, in 1943. I'd seen a photo once of his death mask, commissioned by some guy named Hugo Gernsback the day after his body was discovered.
So it was disorienting, even to a man who had spent days in Lady Sally's House, to find Nikola Tesla standing before me, alive and healthy-looking and in his late twenties . . . let alone to hear him say he was honored to meet me. Never had a conversational politeness been more absurd. You could make an excellent case for the proposition that he was the greatest man in history.
Even before returning from the dead.
I was glad I had read about him. I had sense enough not to offer him my hand.
You see, Tesla was also probably the most eccentric man that ever lived. Wouldn't shake hands with anyone—not even J. P. Morgan, from whom he was trying to borrow a million dollars when they met. He was terrified of spherical objects, like oranges or Lady Sally's pearls. When he sat down to a meal, he had to polish all the silverware and china with eighteen linen napkins first (he had an inexplicable preference for numbers divisible by three). Then he had to calculate the cubic contents of the food on his plate before he could eat a bite. He never ordered anything that was on the menu, and the specially prepared meal had to be served by the maitre d' and no one else. He could not bear to touch human hair, and in consequence is believed by all of his biographers to have died a virgin.
No, I'll tell you how weird he was: he liked pigeons. Fed the little feathered rats lavishly even when he was broke (often); cared for sick ones with his own hands even when he was a millionaire (equally often). If he walked through a park, they swarmed him like he was St. Francis of Assisi, perching on his shoulders.
I suppose in retrospect I should have at least briefly doubted the evidence of my own eyes. But it never occurred to me to think he was a hallucination. I've got a pretty good imagination—but even on drugs, it isn't that good.
So you tell me: what do you say to Nikola Tesla?
What I said was, "Mr. Tesla, I."
He was neither surprised nor disturbed by someone gawping at him like that. The self-assurance looked out of place on features so young. Then again, I didn't know for sure if he was really as young as he looked. Maybe Lady Sally had edited out a portion of the real youth of the real, historical Tesla, and I was meeting a man who had not yet experienced world fame. But it seemed just as likely that she had picked him up at the instant of his death, and simply revived and rejuvenated him. For all I knew, she'd cloned this Tesla from a tissue sample of the old one. These didn't seem like polite questions to ask.
In any case, he graciously ignored my awe, and responded conversationally. "I see that you are Irish, Mr. Taggart. Would I be correct in guessing that you are some sort of policeman?"
Just what I needed: a tough question to start. "Well, Mr. Tesla . . . with all due respect, sir, suppose I didn't know who you were, and I hazarded the guess that you were an inventor."
He blinked, cocked his head like a bird, and then nodded. "I think I see. As I pride myself on being a discoverer, and not a mere inventor like Edison—" That settled that: this Tesla was older than he looked. "—so too you practice a profession which the common man often confuses with that of policeman. A distinction which he considers trivial and which to you is paramount. Might you then be a private inquiries agent, like Mr. Sherlock Holmes?"
Impressive guess. Put me in the company of a mind like that and I get a little giddy. That's the only way I can explain it. What was meant to be a simple agreement came out, "Be he never so humble, there's no police like Holmes."
Lady Sally turned pale and shuddered visibly. Arethusa grimaced and hugged herself. Nikola Tesla merely smiled broadly. "Oh, splendid! I must tell that one to my good friend Sam."
Has anyone ever intimated that one of your puns was worthy to be told to Mark Twain? "It's not mine," I said hastily. "Mystery writer named Tony Boucher."
"Your honesty does you credit, Mr. Taggart," he said. "You are indeed no Edison." How weird, to be praised for my honesty under an assumed name! "But I am fascinated to know of your occupation. I have always imagined it to be somewhat similar to my own, in its essentials. As with my work, it consists mainly in collecting information and then phrasing the proper questions: the answers themselves, as I understand it from my reading, then appear in a burst of white light. Is it thus with you?"
"Well . . ." I started to say that detective work in real life was nothing like that. Then I thought about it. "More or less, yeah. The tricky part is, when that light starts to shine . . . don't squint."
He nodded vigorously. "That is indeed the trick. May I ask you to tell me some tales of your work?"
I glanced at Lady Sally. Shouldn't we maybe be getting on with averting thermonuclear holocaust? But she was settling back in her chair and finishing off the last of my peach juice. I could see both Arethusas: one of them moved her chin up slightly, the other down. She was nodding, about as discreetly as it can be done. Okay, I would tell Nikola Tesla war stories until it was time to take my narcotics.
(Which reminded me: I was in next to no pain at all from my wound now. Distraction is almost as good an analgesic as laughter. Next time you're in pain, try to get a famous dead guy to drop by, and see for yourself.)
"If you will trade me for some of your own, sir," I said.
"I do have one anecdote you may enjoy, concerning a policeman . . ."
It seems that one day back in 1898, Tesla was experimenting with electromechanical vibration. He attached an oscillator he'd built to an iron pillar that ran down the center of a loft building he owned on East Houston Street, and sat down in an armchair to play. As he varied the frequency, different objects in his lab began to shimmy around. He became engrossed in trying to determine what he called the "dancing frequency" for every object in the room.
Meanwhile, all around the neighborhood, for blocks around, windows shattered, buildings shook, and terrified people began pouring into the street, screaming in Chinese and Italian . . .
"I had forgotten a basic principle of seismology," he admitted. "Earthquakes are most severe at a distance from their epicenter."
The cops down at Mulberry Street Station had long been darkly suspicious of the notorious wizard in the neighborhood: the sergeant sent two buttons over to Tesla's place to see if it was his earthquake. They got there about ten seconds after Tesla, belatedly realizing something was wrong, had destroyed the oscillator with a sledge hammer. The buttons became impolite in discussing this with him. One of them went so far as to suggest that Tesla had no business playing around with things he didn't understand.
This much of the story had appeared in a couple of Tesla's biographies, but I pretended not to know it out of politeness. It was worth it to hear the part that hadn't made it into his memoirs.
"I told him that on the contrary, I understood what I was doing so well that, if he would care to return later that evening, I would treat him to an experience which Mr. Mark Twain had once pronounced to be the most fun in the world."
The cop fell for it. When he returned that night, Tesla had rigged a smaller oscillator, fixed to a free-standing platform. The cop climbed up onto the platform, and when Tesla threw power to the oscillator, the cop did indeed have the experience Sam Clemens had once called the most fun in the world. The platform vibrated so strongly the cop's whole body blurred. He enjoyed it even more than Twain had, hopping around and yelling obscene suggestions for potential uses of the gadget.
"But exhilaration was only the first effect," Tesla went on. "As I had with Sam, I exhorted him to come down after a short time; just as Sam had, he refused. And within less than a minute, the policeman experienced the second effect." And there he paused, like a good storyteller.
I already sensed where this was going, but I was not about to spoil an anecdote for Nikola Tesla. "And what was that, sir?"
"Acute diarrhea," he said gravely.
Laughter is even better analgesic than distraction.
"Regrettably, when I attempted to shut down the oscillator so he could race to the toilet, I accidentally dialed it as far as it would go in the opposite direction, where it jammed. The vibration reached such an intensity that even the policeman could sense it would be dangerous to try to jump clear. By the time I could repair the control, I'm afraid the poor man had become one of New York's Foulest . . ."
Maybe analgesic is the wrong word. If you laugh that hard when you're post-op, you hurt like hell. You just don't give a damn. Hard to understand how a painful experience can leave you feeling better, but there it is.
Sharing the laughter made it even better. It was the first time I had ever seen Arethusa laugh out loud, flat out, and the sight confirmed my already firm intention to marry her. You can learn as much about someone from watching them belly-laugh as you can from making love with them.
"Your turn, Mr. Taggart," Tesla said when our laughter had wound down.
So I told him a few stories. Not disasters, like the Favila Affair or the Prison Break-in. Ones from which I had emerged relatively unscathed. The Robin Hood Bomber, for instance.
There was this mall going up out on the Island back in the Sixties, a year after I got back from Nam. Nobody wanted one there, experts testified it would ruin the community, but the developer had the fix in.
One night at three A.M. the site blew up. Six separate explosions within half a minute, five of them scattered around the central part of the site, where the buildings were. Had been. There were no casualties among the watchmen, which cost their agency that contract and a fat lawsuit: the head of the agency asked me to look into it. Enough money was involved that the cops were pushing it, but what do Long Island cops know about bombers? I was an exotic-weapons buff.
What little evidence they had was baffling. The blasts were clearly high-quality high explosive—but how had it been planted in sufficient quantity without detection? During the day the site crawled with construction workers, and once they left, you had to cross acres of open, lighted asphalt to approach the place. And how had it been set off? No traces of timing devices or radio triggers were found in the ruins. Most confusing of all, why had one of the six bombs been planted uselessly in an open parking lot, three hundred yards from the rest? Even with that anomaly, the job was just too sophisticated for the local community-action leaders the cops were leaning on—librarians and small business types. So I looked at the site, and thought a lot. The five contiguous bombs seemed to have been almost randomly placed. But something about the distribution was familiar . . . and then I had it.
I consulted a computer. The search parameters I specified gave me twelve possibles; I pulled their files and eliminated seven. The moment I parked in front of the third address on my list, where two of my suspects lived together, I knew I had found my men.
The mailbox was not just knocked down, but flattened, with tire marks on it. The front lawn contained abundant crabgrass, beer cans, dog turds, three Harley-Davidson 650 motorcycles, and a pair of dirty red panties. The house itself shook with R&B bass, was very close to being a two-story woofer. The first thing I saw as I went in the wide-open door was a fourth Harley. Or rather, half a Harley, protruding from the living room floor. The back half was in the basement. I later learned that one of the inhabitants had recently tried to ride his bike upstairs while drunk, and blown it. Drying filthy socks hung from the handlebars. Clearly this was the home of serious social architects.
Sure enough, four Hell's Angels lived there, trying to save enough to get the hell back to the West Coast. Two of them had just been discharged after a tour in Viet Nam, like me. Their names were Larry and Teeth. (Apparently he liked to extract them for sport.) It turned out we knew some of the same people. They told me the story.
Many GIs bring souvenirs home. I'd smuggled out my service .45, myself. Larry had brought home a mortar . . . and just before his own discharge, Teeth had shipped him six rounds.
At this point in the story, Tesla, Lady Sally and Arethusa began to giggle, sensing where I was going.
"One night a few months later," I went on, "a little old widow knocked at their door with a petition against the contested mall. She must have had guts to follow through when she realized what she was dealing with, and they were impressed."
Louder giggles as everyone visualized her situation.
"They were also colossally stoned, and bored. So they signed her petition—'Larry' and 'Teeth'—and let her go, and then got out a good map and a pair of dividers. Later that night Larry went out in the backyard and obliterated the mall."
Whoops of laughter.
"I'd figured out the spacing of the rounds," I told them. "Teeth was spotting for Larry from a pay phone near the site. The first one missed; Teeth fed Larry the correction, and the next five were a textbook example of how much scatter you can get with 'identically' aimed mortar fire. It was the Veterans' Admimstration computers that helped me track down recent dischargees in that area."
Tesla had a pretty good laugh on him for a skinny guy. "What did you do?" he said when he could manage it.
I shrugged. "What could I do? There was no evidence: you can't do a ballistics match on an expended mortar round. They still had the mortar, but there was no way to prove they'd ever had ammo for it. And however plausible the story sounded in that living room, with the sweatsocks hanging from the handlebars, I knew it'd be a hard sell in a courtroom with Larry and Teeth cleaned up and shaved, in suits. Besides, who wants a couple of Hell's Angels pissed off at you?"
"You left those lunatics loose with a mortar?" Arethusa asked.
"Hell, no. I bought it from them. For two airfares to the Coast. Even without any ammo, it was enough to get the security firm off the hook." I didn't mention that the ungrateful sons of bitches had stiffed me on my expenses: I'd eaten those plane tickets, and they'd cost more than the two hundred I got paid for one day's work. But why spoil a good story? "And it got the two Angels out of my neighborhood." Tesla had that eager that-reminds-me expression. "Professor Tesla, you've got a story?"
He nodded. "One of my favorite stories," he said, "It also involves a man who did something novel with a bomb."
Lady Sally and the Arethusas and I exchanged a glance. It was pretty ragged by the time we were through with it.
"This is a true story," Tesla said, "about a man named Theodore Taylor, and a Pall Mall cigarette. Taylor designed atom bombs—"
Another glance was passed around like a basketball.
"—for the United States government after the Second World War. Among other distinctions, he designed both the physically smallest and the most powerful fission bombs ever fired."
My eye muscles were tired; I just kept looking at him.
"Taylor had what I would call a unique mind. One day, as he was waiting with his colleagues for a bomb known as Scorpion to be detonated, he noticed a discarded parabolic reflector lying on the ground. An idea came to him. He set it up facing Ground Zero, and used some stiff wire to hold a Pall Mall cigarette at its focal point. A few minutes later, Scorpion exploded. The Sun came down to Earth; there was a blast of searing heat; the air split with thunder; the terrible toadstool climbed to the heavens; scientists drew in their breath in awe. And Ted Taylor reached down, plucked the Pall Mall from the reflector, and took a puff.
"He had become the first man in history to light a cigarette with an atom bomb."
I couldn't help howling with laughter. What breathtaking audacity! But as I roared, I wondered if this Taylor could be one of the peace terrorists Lady Sally and I were stalking.
It seemed too improbable a coincidence. We consult Nikola Tesla to help us pick a handful of men out of billions—and it turns out he knows a funny story about one of them, and tells it without prompting? Even for Lady Sally's House, this was stretching plausibility. Yet Taylor was on the very short list of men who can make atom bombs, and he certainly seemed to have a loose rivet or two. An atom bomb designer, afflicted with late-life remorse, might make a fine candidate for a nuclear peace terrorist.
So ask him, "Mr. Taggart." You'll never get a better segué . . .
"Dr. Tesla," I said, when the laughter had tapered off, "do you know this Taylor fellow personally?"
"I have met him once or twice," he said. "A most special man." He smiled. "He commented on my resemblance to Nikola Tesla. When I professed not to know the name, he told me some flattering things about myself. Why do you ask?"
I looked to Lady Sally. "Your Ladyship? I may safely assume that Professor Tesla knows at least as much about . . . you and your work as I do?"
She nodded. "Of course."
"Ah," Tesla said. "You are a member of the Inner Circle, Mr. Taggart. In that case, you must call me Nikola." (Accent on the first syllable.)
"If you'll call me Ken," I agreed, a little dizzily. "Then you know why Lady Sally is here—or rather, 'is now'?"
"To learn why World War Three has not happened."
I nodded. "Well, now we think we know, Nikola. Because we're going to stop it."
His turn to nod. "A worthwhile project. Where does Dr. Taylor come in?"
So I told him my theory.
As Lady Sally had, he grasped it at once . . . and liked it. "A most remarkable hypothesis, Ken. Its logical structure is somewhat fragile, but intuitively it is most compelling. May I ask: did you arrive at it logically, or intuitively?"
I had to think. "Both. No, wait, I'm wrong. First intuitively. Then the logic happened to it, and kind of patted it into shape."
He nodded vigorously, his eyes shining. "Yes, yes! It is the same with me! An astonishing sensation, is it not?"
"Well . . . kind of like being hit between the eyes with a hammer. Except it doesn't hurt."
"Exactly!"
Tesla was famous for rarely using drawings or models or notes or experiments. A device would appear in his imagination, complete. He would build it. It would work. The Mark I was the finished product. To have my mental processes compared to his—by him!—was . . . well, a unique experience. Arethusa was looking at me. What wound? I was ready to kick-box a kangaroo . . .
"And you wish Dr. Taylor's advice on the precise nature of the nuclear mines?" he went on.
"Well, I'll tell you, Nikola," I said, "I was more wondering whether he might be . . . uh, one of the major miners."
He broke up. "I laugh at the idea, more than at the pun, Ken. Dr. Taylor would be the last man on earth to belong to such a terrorist group. He gave up building bombs when he saw that even hydrogen bombs could not scare the world into peace, as he had first hoped. His personal nightmare is nuclear weapons in private hands. In recent years he has campaigned vigorously for stricter controls on weapons-grade material, specifically to prevent terrorist groups from building their own nuclear weapons. The great John McPhee wrote an entire book, The Curve of Binding Energy, about Taylor's efforts. That is where I learned the story of the Pall Mall. Believe me, Ken: Taylor cannot possibly be involved with your terrorists."
Lady Sally said, "Nikky is an excellent judge of character, Ken. Especially with regard to scientists."
"Okay," I said, "Taylor isn't one of the terrorists."
Tesla looked thoughtful. "But he might be the best possible source of advice on how to deal with them."
Lady Sally held up a hand. "Nikky, I'm sorry. I must issue a nolle prosequi. This conspiracy is too large as it is, and I don't know this Taylor bird. If we can possibly do without his advice, we will. If we can't, we'll try anyway."
Tesla chewed briefly at his mustache. "Your point is well taken, Your Ladyship. Let us see how far we can go on our own. Let me see, I remember McPhee's book fairly well." I'd heard that Nikola Tesla never read anything twice. Polaroid eyes. "Taylor spoke at length on the practical considerations of building a nuclear mine, such as you envision, in order to refute the common belief that a Manhattan Project would be required. He demonstrated that one would need only public domain documents, a small machine shop, and access to weapons-grade radioactives. He even designed such a mine, hypothetically. As I recall, his design criterion was to produce the physically smallest and lightest bomb which would still be capable of knocking down the World Trade Center."
"What did it look like?" I asked. "How much did it weigh? I'm trying to get a mental picture of the damned things, and I keep picturing big evil eggs."
He shook his head. "I do not think an implosion bomb is likely. It would be very hard for a terrorist to get usable plutonium. The current 'street price' is on the order of a hundred dollars a gram: each bomb would cost millions of dollars just for the plutonium. Any that he could steal from the nuclear fuel cycle or from medical sources would be 'hot,' poisoned with enough plutonium-240 to make a bomb go supercritical too soon. I envision rather a uranium bomb, most likely a gun-type. A cylinder lying on its side. It could theoretically be as small as a bazooka. It's difficult to say with any certainty: it depends on what you want the bomb to do, and what design choices you make along the way."
"For instance?"
"Oh, many things . . . your choice of damping material, for instance."
"Damping material?" Arethusa asked.
"Neutron reflector. A nuclear explosion occurs when you bring two barely subcritical masses of fissionable material together, very rapidly. If you are to make your bomb as small and inconspicuous as possible, the two masses of fissionable material must be quite close to each other—so close that there is danger their combined radioactivity will cause them to go critical before you wish them to."
"What happens then?"
"It is called a 'fizzle yield.' Heat; much radioactivity; but no explosion. To prevent this, you encase both masses in a damping material, to inhibit their radioactivity. When the masses are slapped together, the damping material then helps contain their neutrons long enough for supercriticality to occur. The better a damping substance you use, the more powerful a bomb you can tuck into a small space. The problem is, the best damping agents are often heavy. This is why the 'suitcase nukes' one finds in fiction are rather improbable. You could build an atom bomb that would fit into a suitcase—but you could not lift the suitcase."
I was hanging on by my fingernails. But I really wanted to try and get as good an image as I could of what I was looking for. I had a dim but intimidating grasp of the size of the haystack; I could only hope it might be useful to know what a needle looked like. "What are good damping materials?" I asked.
"Lithium is one of the classic choices. But there are many others. Natural uranium, steel, copper, lead, aluminum. Solder will do nicely, and can be purchased in large quantities without notice. Even water will serve, actually—ordinary tap water. Damp damping, if you will. Or a few inches of wax. Whatever you select will affect the physical shape and dimensions of the bomb. So will other factors: where it is to be placed, and its desired effect. It is possible, for instance, to shape or direct a nuclear explosion. Taylor created the Orion Project, which tried to build a spaceship propelled by shaped hydrogen bombs."
Orion! My God—I had read about that mad scheme. Freeman Dyson had been involved in it. They'd actually built a model, with conventional high explosive, that worked like a charm: dropped bombs out its anus and goosed itself gently into the sky on a series of bangs. It must have sounded a little like an old one-lung gasoline motor. Then, as they were gearing up to build a real one—a spaceship powerful enough to lift a small town into orbit!—the US and USSR signed a treaty banning nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, and the project died. So Taylor had been behind that . . .
I opened my mouth to say something . . . and somehow as I saw Tesla I found myself thinking of his mechanical oscillator story, and the Hell's Angels with their mortar, and what he had just said about bomb design and the problem of selecting a damper substance—where in New York would you get a lot of copper, lead, solder, even water, without attracting attention?—and the practical placement problem facing a terrorist who wanted to produce maximum destruction with the least detectible bomb . . . and all of a sudden, a hammer hit me, painlessly but quite hard, between the eyes.
Lady Sally sat bolt upright. "Mark his face, Nikky!" she said. "That's the look you get when you have one of your white light visions. Ken's got something; I've seen him do this before." Tesla looked at me with great interest.
My voice came from far away. "I think I know where the mines are," I said.
"What'd I tell you?" she said, and then her jaw dropped.
"In general terms, anyway," I went on. "I can't pinpoint them, but I can tell you where we'll find them. If we do. When we do." I could actually feel blood draining out of my head. "Oh dear Jesus, we better find them."
Arethusa took my hand in both of hers and squeezed it tightly. "Where, Ken?"
"Water pipes. They're inside municipal water pipes."
Five seconds of horrid silence. Then everyone's eyes widened at once as they began to understand.
"What you said earlier, Nikola," I went on, "about seismic shock being worst further from the epicenter. A terrorist wants the gaudiest effect he can get. Everybody in a city lives near a water pipe. Neutron reflector provided for you, free: all the water and lead and tin and solder you want. And all cities keep their water pipes underground—so when it goes boom you get seismic shock and hydrostatic shock at the same time. Maximum bang for your buck. As a bonus you poison the city water supply—for decades to come." I was beginning to babble, from sheer horror. "Not to mention the comedy value! Faucets and hoses spraying live steam, hot both ways; fire hydrants flying like champagne corks, geysers of neutrons; water coolers going off like flashbulbs; thousands of bare asses instantly steam-cooked by boiling toilets—" Arethusa's fingernails were trying to meet through my hand. I shut up and pulled her up to sit beside me on the bed, freed my hand, and put my arm around her. As we clutched at each other, she sat down on my other side and I put my other arm around her. All three of us rocked together. It helped.
Tesla was pale, but nodding vigorously. "I think you are right, Ken. That is where I would put nuclear mines. The pipes would be fairly similar from city to city. Here in New York, I would probably choose a site somewhere in Tunnel One or Tunnel Two, which convey all the city's water from upstate. Possibly both."
"That narrows the search area," Lady Sally said grimly.
"Not enough," I said. "Those are two damn big damn long tunnels. You could fit a submarine into either one of them with no trouble, and they go on for miles. Not to mention any of several dozen tributaries that'd serve almost as well. And that's just this city. We still need another conceptual breakthrough."
"I do not think so," Tesla said quietly. "I believe I can locate them."
We all stared at him.
"Nikola," I said, "I yield to no one in my respect for you. But how the he . . ." He hated profanity. "Excuse me. How on earth can you do it? The da . . . the things have to be shielded. Sure, they've got water outside them and maybe damping water inside, but the two won't mix: there'll be no radioactivity to trace. Wait a minute: they'll be warm, won't they? Heat-warm, I mean. Lady Sally, have you got infrared gear good enough to pick up small hot spots in the city water system?"
"Yes," she said. "But Ken—there are millions of them."
"True."
Tesla spoke. "You overlook the obvious, friend Ken."
"A specialty of mine," I agreed bitterly. "It's only the obscure I see at once. Okay, what did I miss?"
"Assume you are one of these terrorists. You have nuclear mines set up all over the country. What do you plan to do with them?"
"Threaten to set them off."
"And for this threat to be credible, you must in fact be able to set them off. How will you do so?"
"Why, by—"
If I hadn't had both arms around Arethusas, I'd have smacked myself in the forehead.
"—by radio," he finished. "You will perhaps recall that, a little less than ninety years ago—"
"—you invented radio, of course. Stupid of me. You mean you . . . what do you mean?"
"It would be a simple matter, for me at any rate, to build a device which would register the existence and location of every radio receiver in the metropolitan New York area, whether they happen to be functioning at the time or not."
I did not point out that this would yield quite a few more targets than the total population of the city. I just said, "And?"
"And I would be able to distinguish those which are located underwater."
Had I been holding my breath? There seemed to be a lot of air in my chest to exhale. I felt myself smiling. Arethusa was hugging me tightly on both sides. "Could you tell what frequency they're tuned to receive?"
"Or pattern of frequencies, yes, I believe so." He frowned. "Given enough time, I could even learn the precise code which, transmitted over that frequency, would arm and trigger the mines. Unfortunately, the only way I could do that would be to stumble across it—triggering the mines."
"Never mind that, Nikola," I assured him. "You find me a mine, even one of them, and I'll get the code."
"Attaboy!" Arethusa said, in stereo.
"Your Ladyship?" I said.
"Yes, Ken?"
"I need to put together a task force. I want the names of everyone cleared to be on it."
She didn't hesitate. "All of us in this room. Michael. Priscilla. Willard and Sherry. Tim, Doctor Kate, Father Newman. Ralph Von Wau Wau. Robin. And Mistress Cynthia, of course: Robin has no secrets at all from her. Mary, if you really need her. I have taken one or two others into my confidence who are not presently in this area; I could probably round most of them up if you need them. And there are others in my employ who may have figured out things about me, and kept it to themselves. I can provide perhaps another twenty effectives who will fight for me without asking questions."
"My Lady," Arethusa said, "any artist in this House will fight for you without asking questions. And at least half the clients."
"Thank you, dear. How big a task force do you envision, Ken?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "I'm making this up as I go along. I just wanted to know how many troops I could call on. Let me make sure I've got it right. Fifteen who can be told everything, and twenty or more who can be given limited objectives, but not the whole picture?"
"If you find it necessary," she said, "you may tell anything you wish to any member of my staff. I don't employ anyone I don't trust that much. I've done my best not to burden any of them with my secrets . . . but over the years, one thing and another have forced me to break cover to some fifteen of them, yes."
"And you say you've got good contacts in the DIA and FBI?"
She looked briefly nostalgic; her nipples came up. "And in the Komitet Gosudarstvenno Bezopasnosti as well."
"Not for more troops; we hand them a fait accompli or nothing. I just mean, you can get information to the right people once we have it?"
"You may always leave the little things to me," she said. "As the bishop said to the actress."
"Well, hell," I said dizzily, "these guys are candy!"
"You think so, Ken?" Lady Sally asked.
I quoted her friend Lord Buckley. "'Take it off your mind, Nazz: it's covered.' We're gonna tangle these murkies, make it from tea."
Lady Sally blinked. "Beg pardon?"
"We'll nick 'em in the cuts."
Arethusa stood up on my right. "I'll get Kate," she said.
"It was bound to happen Spooner or later," Lady Sally agreed.
Things got fuzzy after that. Doctor Kate arrived, and did something wonderful; after that everyone melted away like the Wicked Witch. Except for Arethusa.
You know how, when you're sleeping with someone you love, and making a spoon, it's hard sometimes to decide whether you'd rather be on the inside or the outside of the spoon? Boy, is it nice not to have to make a choice . .