Doctor Who_ Atom Bomb Blues - Andrew Cartmel [102]
‘So,’ said Butcher, cursing himself for even falling into discussion of this nonsense, as if any of it was real, ‘is the threat over?’
‘As over as it ever is,’ said the Doctor.
178
Epilogue
Trinity
Ace said, ‘So how did you know that the atom bomb would be detonated a day later in this universe?’
‘I didn’t,’ said the Doctor. ‘In fact, it wasn’t. It was originally scheduled to take place on exactly the same day, at exactly the same time, as in your universe.’
‘What happened to change it, then?’
The Doctor just smiled and said nothing. After a moment, Ace said, ‘You mean it was you?’
The Doctor shrugged modestly. ‘Through rather clever manipulation of my calculations I managed to cast some doubt on the exact geometry chosen for Kistiakowsky’s explosive lenses, which are used to detonate the fissionable material.’
‘Just enough doubt to delay them by one day?’
‘Exactly. Kistiakowsky was very annoyed.’
Ray Morita came up behind them. ‘Hey cats, Zorg says we’re in position now.’ The Doctor and Ace turned and followed him down the winding transparent corridor to the spherical chamber that was the control room of the ship. Here the obscene crablike form of Zorg crouched over the transparent hemisphere of the cockpit. Below, Ace could see the tiny toy-geometry form of the hundred-foot tower with the ‘gadget’ suspended on it on the desert floor below.
‘Is it safe here?’ said Ace.
‘We are hovering in dense cloud cover,’ said Zorg. ‘With just our cockpit protruding at the cloud base. They cannot see us, and their instruments can’t detect us.’
‘No,’ said Ace. ‘I meant, are we safe when that thing goes off?’
‘Fear not, Zace,’ said Zorg. ‘We are sufficiently distant to be unaffected by the physical impact of the blast, and our radiation screens will cut in at the exact instant of detonation.’
The Doctor took out his pocket watch and scrutinised it. ‘Which is. . . well, more or less now,’ he said. They all gathered around the cockpit and stared 179
down. There was a blast of white light. To Ace it looked like the flashbulb on God’s camera going off.
The transparent dimple of the cockpit suddenly darkened, like those sunglasses that change in bright daylight. Ace looked at the Doctor. Was that it?’
she said. The Doctor nodded. Ace kept staring down, as the painfully brilliant light faded and the mushroom cloud built itself in tiers in the sky. After a few minutes she became bored even with the Luciferian majesty of this terrifying spectacle and turned away. The Doctor followed her as she wandered from the cockpit, leaving Zorg and Ray staring down through it.
‘So, no chain reaction, then,’ she said to the Doctor. ‘Teller was wrong.’
‘Unfortunately, yes,’ said the Doctor. Ace stared at him, appalled, and the Doctor chuckled. ‘Honestly, the expression on your face,’ he said. ‘You should see yourself. Obviously I didn’t mean that it was unfortunate that this world wasn’t destroyed by the bomb. What I did mean was that it was unfortunate that Teller clung tenaciously to his wrongheaded view, right up until the very end.’
‘You never managed to get him to change his mind, then?’
‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘Not for all my arguing and reasoning. I made no impression at all.’
Ace shrugged. ‘But what difference does it make? He was wrong, and the Earth survived, and that’s all that matters.’
‘Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that. Because being wrong will have a profound effect on Teller. He will feel humiliated that he was wrong, that he argued against detonating the bomb. And, as a result, he will undergo a one hundred and eighty degree turn in his ideology. Effectively, Trinity was his experience on the road to Damascus.’
‘Road to where?’
‘It means a complete change of heart. From being anti-bomb to pro-bomb.
He will become America’s most influential advocate for nuclear weapons. He will stifle and discredit Oppenheimer. Teller will become the “father of the hydrogen bomb”, building ever