Down in the valley far below, the Mocho glittered in the sun as it tumbled between its rocks. The grass on either side gave way to a mix of sagebrush and she-oak; high above, a pair of kites wheeled against the blue, and the road ran on, along the edge of Cedar Mountain Ridge into the wilderness.
He passed a single green farmhouse, but Lomax had told him to go to the end of the road. After another three miles he found the cabin, rough-hewn with a raw stone chimney and a plume of blue woodsmoke drifting up to the sky.
He stopped in the yard and got out. From a barn, a single Jersey cow surveyed him with velvet eyes. Rhythmic sounds came from the other side of the cabin, so he walked around to the front to find Daddy Lomax on a bluff looking out over the valley and the river far below.
He must have been seventy-five, but despite Sandy’s concern, he looked as if he beat up grizzly bears for a hobby. An inch over six feet, in soiled jeans and a plaid shirt, the old scientist was splitting logs with the ease of one slicing bread.
Snow-white hair hung to his shoulders, and a stubble of ivory whiskers rimmed his chin. More white curls spilled from the V of his shirt, and he seemed to feel no cold, although Terry Martin was glad for his quilted parka.
“Found it then? Heard you coming,” said Lomax, and split one last log with a single swing. Then he laid down the ax and came over to his visitor. They shook hands; Lomax gestured to a nearby log and sat down on one himself.
“Dr. Martin, is it?”
“Er, yes.”
“From England?”
“Yes.”
Lomax reached into his top pocket, withdrew a pouch of tobacco and some rice paper, and began to roll a cigarette.
“Not politically correct, are you?” Lomax asked.
“No, I don’t think so.”
Lomax grunted in apparent approval.
“Had a politically correct doctor. Always yellin’ at me to stop smoking.”
Martin noted the past tense.
“I suppose you left him?”
“Nope, he left me. Died last week. Fifty-six. Stress. What brings you up here?”
Martin fumbled in his attache case.
“I ought to apologize at the outset. It’s probably a waste of your time and mine. I just wondered if you’d glance at this.”
Lomax took the proffered photograph and stared at it.
“You really from England?”
“Yes.”
“Helluva long way to come to show me this.”
“You recognize it?”
“Ought to. Spent five years of my life working there.”
Martin’s mouth dropped open in shock.
“You’ve actually been there?”
“Lived there for five years.”
“At Tarmiya?”
“Where the hell’s that? This is Oak Ridge.”
Martin swallowed several times.
“Dr. Lomax. That photograph was taken six days ago by a U.S. Navy fighter overflying a bombed factory in Iraq.”
Lomax glanced up, bright blue eyes under shaggy white brows, then looked back at the photo.
“Sonofabitch,” he said at last. “I warned the bastards. Three years ago.
Wrote a paper warning that this was the sort of technology the Third World would be likely to use.”
“What happened to it?”
“Oh, they trashed it, I guess.”
“Who?”
“You know, the pointy-heads.”
“Those disks—the Frisbees inside the factory—you know what they are?”
“Sure. Calutrons. This is a replica of the old Oak Ridge facility.”
“Calu-what?”
Lomax glanced up again.
“You’re not a doctor of science? Not a physicist?”
“No. My subject is Arabic studies.”
Lomax grunted again, as if not being a physicist were a hard burden for a man to carry through life.
“Calutrons. California cyclotrons. Calutrons, for short.”
“What do they do?”
“EMIS. Electromagnetic isotope separation. In your language, they refine crude uranium-238 to filter out the bomb-grade uranium-235.
You say this place is in Iraq?”
“Yes. It was bombed by accident a week ago. This picture was taken the next day. No one seems to know what it means.”
Lomax gazed across the valley, sucked on his butt, and let a plume of azure smoke trickle away.
“Sonofabitch,” he said again. “Mister, I live up here because I want to.
Away from all that smog and traffic—had enough of that years ago.
Don’t have a TV, but I have a radio. This is about that man Saddam Hussein, ain’t it?”
“Yes, it is. Would you tell me about calutrons?”
The old man stubbed out his butt and stared now, not just across the valley but back across many years.
“Nineteen forty-three. Long time ago, eh? Nearly fifty years. Before you were born, before most people were born nowadays. There was a bunch of us then, trying to do the impossible. We were young, eager, and ingenious, and we didn’t know it was impossible. So we did it.
“There was Fermi from Italy, and Pontecorvo; Fuchs from Germany, Nils Bohr from Denmark, Nunn May from England, and others. And us Yankees: Urey and Oppie and Ernest. I was very junior. Just twenty-seven.
“Most of the time, we were feeling our way, doing things that had never been tried, testing out things they said couldn’t be done. We had a budget that nowadays wouldn’t buy squat, so we worked all day and all night and took shortcuts. Had to—the deadline was as tight as the money. And somehow we did it, in three years. We cracked the codes and made the bomb. Little Boy and Fat Man.
“Then the Air Force dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the world said we shouldn’t have done it after all. Trouble was, if we hadn’t, somebody else would. Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia—”
“Calutrons ...,” suggested Martin.
“Yeah. You’ve heard of the Manhattan Project?”
“Of course.”
“Well, we had many geniuses in Manhattan, two in particular. Robert J. Oppenheimer and Ernest O. Lawrence. Heard of them?”
“Yes.”
“Thought they were colleagues, partners, right?”
“I suppose so.”
“Wrong. They were rivals. See, we all knew the key was uranium, the world’s heaviest element. And we
