those are in the vaults of the Atomic Energy Commission. You must know that they are still there, so I could have obtained those plans from only two men in America. They are both with me now. Do you understand?’
Burnett was still having difficulty with his breathing. ‘I know Professor Aachen. I know him better than anyone. No one could have made him work for you. No one! No one!’
Lopez broadened his ever-genial smile. ‘Perhaps, Senor Morro, if I had a friendly little chat in my room with Professor Burnett here. Ten minutes would suffice, I think.’
‘I agree. That should be sufficient to convince him that anyone on earth would work for me.’
‘Don’t, don’t, don’t!’ Aachen was close to hysteria. ‘For God’s sake, Andy, you’ve got to believe Morro.’ He looked in loathing at Lopez. ‘This monster knows more awful, more fiendish tortures than any sane man can conceive of. In the name of heaven, Andy, don’t be mad: this creature will break you as he broke me.’
‘I’m convinced.’ Healey had stepped forward and taken Burnett by the arm just as Dubois released his grip. He looked at Schmidt and Bramwell, then turned back to Burnett. ‘The three of us are convinced. Absolutely. What’s the point of being broken on the modern equivalent of the rack if it’s going to prove nothing? We
‘Well, well.’ Morro smiled. ‘This time you have not been just superficially obtuse. You are correct, of course. Follow me, gentlemen.’
He led the way to the small booth from which he had telephoned. Its inner wall held yet another steel door. There was no press button to open this: instead, alongside the door was a small brass panel, highly polished, measuring about ten inches by six. Morro placed his flat palm and fingers against it. The door slid smoothly open.
Inside was a tiny room, not more than six feet by six. On the wall opposite the door was a metal table which supported a simple radio transmitter, smaller than an attache case, with calibrated dials and tuning knobs. On top of the case was a perspex-covered red button. Clamped to one side of the table was an eight-inch cylinder with a diameter about half that. At one end of the cylinder was a cranking handle: at the other end an insulated lead to a socket in one side of the transmitter. There were two other sockets close by that one. From one, a lead reached down to a lead-acid battery on the floor: the third socket was connected to a wall socket.
‘An almost childishly simple device, gentlemen,’ Morro said. ‘A perfectly ordinary radio transmitter, but one serving a most extraordinary purpose. It is programmed with a specific code on a pre-set wave-length. The chances of anyone duplicating both the wave-length and the code are so astronomically remote they can be said to be non- existent. We have, as you see, guarded against any chance of a power failure: we have mains, battery and the hand-cranked generator.’ He touched the perspex-covered red button on top. ‘To operate, one simply unscrews the plastic dome, turns the button through ninety degrees and presses.’ He ushered them out, laid his hand against the brass panel and watched the door slide close. ‘One cannot very well have buttons for this purpose. Some careless person might accidentally lean against them.’
Healey said: ‘Only your handprint can open that door?’
‘You didn’t imagine that plate was simply an elaborate press-button? Well, gentlemen, the recording.’
‘One last thing,’ Burnett said. He nodded towards the row of Aunt Sallies. ‘There are two empty sets of clamps there. Why?’
‘Well, now.’ Morro smiled his empty smile. ‘I thought you might ask me that.’
The four physicists sat round the table in Burnett’s room, contemplating both their brandies and the future with an understandably profound gloom.
‘Well, I said it, didn’t I?’ Burnett said heavily. ‘“Mark my words”, I said. Didn’t I say that?’
No one said whether he’d said it or not. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.
‘Even that control room could have been part of a massive hoax.’ Schmidt was grasping at nonexistent straws.
No one said anything to that either, and for the same reason.
‘And to think that we said he wasn’t amoral as a madman should be,’ Burnett said. ‘That if he were really mad he’d set off his atomic bomb in the Wilshire Boulevard.’
No one had anything to say to that either. Burnett rose and said: ‘Back shortly, gentlemen.’
Peggy was still in bed but looked considerably better than she had done on her arrival at the Adlerheim. Her mother sat in an armchair to one side. Burnett had a brandy glass in his hand. He hadn’t brought his own with him; he’d gone straight behind Susan’s wet bar the moment he had arrived. He was still behind it, his elbows on the counter, bending an apocalyptic gaze upon his audience and addressing them in apocalyptic tones. Armageddon, it was clear, was at hand, and the dark angel was there to announce the fact.
‘You will not, ladies, doubt our unanimous conclusion that we are sitting atop enough nuclear explosive power to blast the biggest man-made crater of all time, enough to send us all into orbit — in a vaporized state, that is? The equivalent of thirty-five million tons of conventional explosive. It should cause quite a bang, don’t you think?’
It was a night for silences, for unanswered questions. Burnett’s doom-laden gaze homed in on Susan.
‘“Kindly, gentle, humane, considerate” — that’s what you said Morro was. He may very well go down in history as the most cold-blooded, calculating monster ever. Seven broken men down in the vaults there whom he has tortured — or has had tortured — beyond the breaking point of screaming agony. “Humane, considerate.”
‘And this kindly gentleman — where has he put the missing hydrogen bomb? It’s a rather scaled-down version of the Aunt Sally — a trifling one-and-a-half megatons, about seventy-five times as powerful as the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Released at a height of between ten and twenty thousand feet it could destroy half the population of Southern California. Those whom the blast didn’t get radiation and fire-storms would. But as this bomb is already in position it must be on or below ground level. The results will still be unimaginably dreadful. So, tell me, where do you think this gentle Christ-like figure placed this hydrogen device so that no harm will come to any of God’s children?’
He was still looking fixedly at Susan but she wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t avoiding his gaze; her mind, like those of the others, was numbed with shock and incomprehension: she just wasn’t seeing anything.
‘So must I tell you?’
It was still a night for silences.
‘Los Angeles.’
CHAPTER NINE
On the following morning the absenteeism rate at work was the highest in the history of the State. The same almost certainly applied to the other States in the Union, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, through many of the civilized countries throughout the world, for the TV coverage of the projected — or threatened — atomic explosion in the Yucca Flat was being transmitted by satellite. Europe was hardly affected — though nonetheless concerned — for there the day’s work was all over and most Europeans were home for the evening.
But in California the absenteeism was almost total. Even the corporations running the public and utilities services, the transport system and police forces, had to operate with skeleton staffs. It could have been a great day for the criminals, particularly the robbers and burglars of California, were it not for the fact that they, too, had also stayed at home.
For reasons whether of prudence, sloth, the knowledge of the inaccessibility of the Yucca Flat or the at-hand convenience of their TV sets, not one Californian in ten thousand made his way to the explosion site that morning. Those who did make their way there — and there couldn’t have been over two thousand of them — were outnumbered by members of the military, the National Guard and police who found their task to keeping civilians at
