Findhorn gambled again. 'The process was supposed to be dangerous.'
This time White was ready. 'Your source is confused. There was a scare in 1942 that an atomic bomb explosion might ignite the atmosphere, create an uncontrolled runaway. Oppenheimer set up a task force to check it out. Their report was codenamed LA-602 as I recall. They found that the fireball couldn't quite pull it off. Petrosian was involved in these calculations.'
White was convincing, and seemed to be making sense. Hell, he thought, I'm getting into conspiracy theories myself. Findhorn closed his notebook and said, 'Okay, Frank, thank you for that.'
'I guess you've come a long way for nothing. Look, I could get you into X-2 if you like, I have Q-clearance —'
'X-2?'
'The design group for nukes. But it's just like any other office building. Apart from the guys with the AK-47s, of course.'
'I think you've just upset our surveillance,' Findhorn said, nodding towards the pony-tailed young man, who was staring at the menu with unnatural intensity.
White grinned. 'Anyway, I don't think anyone there could help you.'
'Post-SALT, do we need Los Alamos?' Findhorn asked, breathing air in gulps. He felt his lips beginning to blister with the hot chillies.
White leaned back in his chair, steepled his hands under his chin and looked over his spectacles. 'More than ever, pal. The world is more dangerous, not less, and it's getting worse. Iran will soon be stuffed with enough recycled nuclear fuel to start a significant nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein and his merry men had to be bombed to stop them developing nukes. India and Pakistan have already fought three wars with each other, and now they're squaring up with nukes. Nuclear smuggling out of Russia is a deadly serious worry — it's only a matter of time before the Ultimate Truth or the Martyrs of God or the Montana Ladies' Crochet Circle rigs up some device from instructions on the Internet.'
'Surely these are problems for the FBI or CIA.'
'But without guys who know about weapons, they wouldn't know what to look for. And what about our own stockpiles? Nuclear devices deteriorate. We need expertise to keep track of that too. It's a dangerous world out there, Ed, and a complex one.'
Rosa was serving the pony-tailed young man with a plate of little tortillas stuffed with pieces of fried fish, tomatoes, lettuce, sour cream and chillies.
'If it wasn't new science, what about new technology? Could Petrosian have thought of some way to make a bomb more effective? Say by miniaturization, or avoiding the need for plutonium?'
'Let me tell you about miniaturization, Ed. Ideas for it get developed all the time but we're no longer allowed to test them. These designs are as much art as science, which is why so many bomb designers in X-2 are women. They're more intuitive. But the complexity of a nuclear explosion stretches a Cray. No way could Petrosian have leapt fifty years ahead on that one either. As for by-passing uranium or plutonium, it's not an area I can talk about, or our surveillance, whose spectacles undoubtedly contain a microphone, would choke on his tortilla boats.' White leaned forward, lowering his voice. 'But there are some things you could work out from the public domain. Like, lithium is common in rocks on Earth, but astronomers don't detect much of it in stars. Why is that?'
'I don't know, Frank. Why is that?'
White leaned forward some more. 'Because it's easy to ignite, nuclear-wise. Hydrogen needs ten or twenty million degrees. Now lithium, that needs less than a million. If you could somehow reproduce stellar —'
'Could Petrosian have thought of some way to do that in 1953? By-pass plutonium, make a nuke from rocks?'
'As a concept, quite possibly. Now if you did that, if you found some way of extracting nuclear energy using just ordinary material, that would really open the lid. But as a hazard to civilization in 1953? Where would he get even a million degrees? Lasers weren't invented until 1960. Always assuming we needed high-energy lasers to attempt the trick,' White added hastily. His tired eyes held a gleam.
'Of course. Always assuming that.'
White looked as if he was about to drop with exhaustion. Findhorn waved at the waitress. He said, 'So he didn't have lasers but he had electricity. Maybe he thought of something crazy. Take the entire power supply for New York City on a cold night. Pulse all that electricity through a microscopically thin wire. Have the wire doped with lithium and anything else you need.'
White grinned. 'Ed, that wouldn't even get you to the foothills.'
Findhorn blew out his cheeks. 'So try one of Rosa's chillies.'
Findhorn thanked White and left him heading for the Western area of town and some badly needed sleep. He took a stroll, absorbing the sights and sounds of this strange town.
White's sermon was clear. Petrosian was a wild-goose chase, a piece of history with nothing to say of relevance to the new millennium.
There was, however, a problem with that thesis. Namely, the trail of mayhem which followed the diaries. Findhorn wondered whether White's sermon had been genuine, or an attempt to deflect further enquiry. And what, he wondered, if he kept digging?
He took a cab to the Los Alamos Community Reading Room and there asked a warm, curly-haired girl for information about the post-war activities of Lev Petrosian the atom spy. Without a blink she disappeared.
And Findhorn waited. For ten minutes, his speculations becoming increasingly wild.
He was beginning to wonder whether to get out of it when a library attendant, a squat, white-haired Navajo, approached and sat down heavily three desks away from Findhorn. At least, Findhorn assumed he was a library attendant. The man clasped his hands together and stared unblinkingly at Findhorn. And then, at last, the curly-haired girl was back at his desk with a sweet smile and a black binder.
How to Make a Hydrogen Bomb.
The binder was heavy. There were research papers and there were notebooks. Findhorn started on the papers. These were in triplicate, a top copy and two carbons. Each had a number circled at the top of it. They were abstrusely mathematical, with titles like Quantum Tunnelling Probabilities in a Polarized Vacuum, or A Markov Chain Treatment of Ulam/Teller Implosion. Findhorn could barely make sense of them, except in the broadest outline. He wrote down the titles but had the feeling that they were no more than the bread-and-butter elements of the hydrogen bomb project; the appliance of yesterday's science.
The workbooks were fatter and more interesting. There were a couple of dozen, lined and bound in blue, soft-backed covers. They too were numbered; perhaps, Findhorn speculated, to stop a potential spy smuggling his own secrets out. Findhorn started on them systematically, opening at number one, page one. The small, clear longhand writing of Petrosian was unmistakable. The notes were in English and written in ink. There was a prodigious amount of scoring out and reworking. There were lots of doodles; Petrosian seemed particularly fond of little flying saucers, reflecting the UFO-mania of the day, but there were also cows and galaxies. He did a particularly good pig, sometimes with wings. Often little cartoon bubbles would come from the mouths of the animals, and they would enclose equations, or technical terms, or cryptic comments.
With a lot of tedious effort, Findhorn found he could relate the development of Petrosian's notes to the contents of the typed papers. Here and there, in the margins, there were scribbles written in faded penciclass="underline" 'Kitty, orchestra 7 o'clock'; or 'Colloquium 2 p.m.'; or 'coffee, beans, oil, milk'; or 'proofs deadline NOW.
In the late afternoon, one doodle in particular caught his eye. It was a little cartoon showing Albert Einstein smoking a pipe. A long stream of smoke from the pipe connected three large puffs of smoke, like clouds, over Einstein's head.