fibrosis within two weeks. I’d tried to tell Beatrice about this yesterday, but she acted like she didn’t believe me or…which was quite possible…she didn’t care.
The fuel rods slid out easily. We laid them down side by side, not too close together, of course. According to some papers Peter had found in the truck, each of the rods held forty little hundred-gram pellets: thirty low-enriched uranium oxide and ten of the heavy stuff, PuO 2 , plutonium oxide.
Peter got a cutting-torch and took off the metal cap at the end of a fuel rod. I tipped it up, and the pellets came sliding out like sooty checkers. Some dust flew up and I stopped breathing for a second…then went back to hissing the air in and out through my filters.
Peter nudged the pellets with his foot. “How do we tell which are plutonium?” His echoing voice was mixed with the buzz of his breathing system. He sounded like Darth Vader with a German accent.
Without stopping to think it over, I told him. “Use a Geiger counter. The plutonium gives off more alpha-radiation.”
It was funny. I knew I didn’t want the bomb to be a success. But yet, I’d spent so many years working around physics labs that I couldn’t stand not to do it right.
That’s not quite honest. On some deeper level I really did want to build a working atomic bomb. Build it and see it go off. Death wish? Maybe. Or think of a couple of bored twelve-year-old boys whiling away a long Sunday afternoon by setting off firecrackers. The thrill of the blast. The smell of the ozone, the roar of the cloud. I’ve heard that when an A-bomb goes off, the air around it catches fire. You see every color of the rainbow. Especially God’s colors: purple and gold. I wanted to see it for myself.
I got a Geiger counter and separated out the plutonium from the uranium. I used my gloved hands…there was no real danger from the actual radiation. You don’t get the neutrons and the hard gamma-rays until a nuclear reaction starts. The current issue was just to avoid breathing in any plutonium particles …and presumably the hazard suits were taking care of that. I planned to keep my suit on until I was well out of this place.
The next hour was filled with the simple, repetitive work of opening the twelve rods and separating out the PuO 2 pellets. It felt more and more unreal. My mind wandered back to my encounter with the sex sphere.
Had I imagined the whole thing? All the ingredients for a good hallucination had been present: physical injuries, mental stress, isolation to the point of sensory deprivation. Bullshit. It had really happened.
With the suit on I couldn’t get to my pants pocket, but I could feel the tiny pressure of the little ball in there. If I called her, would she come return? Of course she would. We were lovers .
This brought back the sick, ashamed feeling I’d woken up with. I was no better than some geek with a foam-rubber woman’s torso like they advertise in Hustler . What a pathetic, twisted vision of womanhood: all the “inessential” parts lopped off, nothing left but tits and ass and holes. Lifelike washable plastic skin. Greek and French features .
But yet, in a way, wasn’t the sex sphere what I’d always wanted? An ugly truth there. “Shut up and spread!” How many times had I said that to Sybil, if not in so many words? The memory of her weeping, televised face filled me with such anguish I could hardly…
“ Na? ” Peter said, interrupting my thoughts. “ Was nun? ”
What now. We had twelve little mounds of plutonium pellets, say one kilogram per mound. Critical mass of PuO 2 was, as far as I could recall, around ten.
“Put them all together and they all spell MOTHER!” I sang, my voice breaking. “The sound of one hand clapping.”
“What is the next step, Alwin?” Peter held the cutting torch near my suit. “We have no time for lighthearted games.”
“OK, OK. What we need to do is form the plutonium into two hemispheres. Separate the
The fuel rods slid out easily. We laid them down side by side, not too close together, of course. According to some papers Peter had found in the truck, each of the rods held forty little hundred-gram pellets: thirty low-enriched uranium oxide and ten of the heavy stuff, PuO 2 , plutonium oxide.
Peter got a cutting-torch and took off the metal cap at the end of a fuel rod. I tipped it up, and the pellets came sliding out like sooty checkers. Some dust flew up and I stopped breathing for a second…then went back to hissing the air in and out through my filters.
Peter nudged the pellets with his foot. “How do we tell which are plutonium?” His echoing voice was mixed with the buzz of his breathing system. He sounded like Darth Vader with a German accent.
Without stopping to think it over, I told him. “Use a Geiger counter. The plutonium gives off more alpha-radiation.”
It was funny. I knew I didn’t want the bomb to be a success. But yet, I’d spent so many years working around physics labs that I couldn’t stand not to do it right.
That’s not quite honest. On some deeper level I really did want to build a working atomic bomb. Build it and see it go off. Death wish? Maybe. Or think of a couple of bored twelve-year-old boys whiling away a long Sunday afternoon by setting off firecrackers. The thrill of the blast. The smell of the ozone, the roar of the cloud. I’ve heard that when an A-bomb goes off, the air around it catches fire. You see every color of the rainbow. Especially God’s colors: purple and gold. I wanted to see it for myself.
I got a Geiger counter and separated out the plutonium from the uranium. I used my gloved hands…there was no real danger from the actual radiation. You don’t get the neutrons and the hard gamma-rays until a nuclear reaction starts. The current issue was just to avoid breathing in any plutonium particles …and presumably the hazard suits were taking care of that. I planned to keep my suit on until I was well out of this place.
The next hour was filled with the simple, repetitive work of opening the twelve rods and separating out the PuO 2 pellets. It felt more and more unreal. My mind wandered back to my encounter with the sex sphere.
Had I imagined the whole thing? All the ingredients for a good hallucination had been present: physical injuries, mental stress, isolation to the point of sensory deprivation. Bullshit. It had really happened.
With the suit on I couldn’t get to my pants pocket, but I could feel the tiny pressure of the little ball in there. If I called her, would she come return? Of course she would. We were lovers .
This brought back the sick, ashamed feeling I’d woken up with. I was no better than some geek with a foam-rubber woman’s torso like they advertise in Hustler . What a pathetic, twisted vision of womanhood: all the “inessential” parts lopped off, nothing left but tits and ass and holes. Lifelike washable plastic skin. Greek and French features .
But yet, in a way, wasn’t the sex sphere what I’d always wanted? An ugly truth there. “Shut up and spread!” How many times had I said that to Sybil, if not in so many words? The memory of her weeping, televised face filled me with such anguish I could hardly…
“ Na? ” Peter said, interrupting my thoughts. “ Was nun? ”
What now. We had twelve little mounds of plutonium pellets, say one kilogram per mound. Critical mass of PuO 2 was, as far as I could recall, around ten.
“Put them all together and they all spell MOTHER!” I sang, my voice breaking. “The sound of one hand clapping.”
“What is the next step, Alwin?” Peter held the cutting torch near my suit. “We have no time for lighthearted games.”
“OK, OK. What we need to do is form the plutonium into two hemispheres. Separate the
Similar Books
