Doctor Who_ Atom Bomb Blues - Andrew Cartmel [15]
26
Ace peered out the window. The voices of the men arguing had grown so loud that they were clearly audible in the house, even above Wagner and the roar of party conversation. Yet all the party guests seemed oblivious to the quarrel blazing so close at hand. And they didn’t seem to just be politely ignoring it, either. They seemed genuinely uninterested. Ace turned to the open window, listening and trying to catch the thread of the argument outside.
The words hydrogen and atmosphere kept coming up.
The man quarrelling with Oppenheimer was heavy set, with dark wavy hair.
He had a face dominated by thick black eyebrows, with a big nose, big ears and fat cheeks, all of which seemed strangely at odds with his narrow, tapering chin. Like Oppenheimer, his face was flushed with drink and rage.
‘Who is that?’ she said.
The Doctor smiled thinly. His eyes were cold. ‘Edward Teller.’
‘Don’t tell me, let me guess. He’s a physicist.’
The Doctor looked at Ace and his smile grew wider, his eyes less cold. ‘Yes, one of many who escaped here to America fleeing from the rise of the Nazis in Europe. You do know who the Nazis are?’
‘Sure, they’re the guys that Indiana Jones hates.’ Ace smiled. She felt drunkenly witty and loquacious. ‘I’m just kidding. Of course I know about World War Two and the Nazis. And the Japanese. Did I ever tell you about that movie they showed us in school about dropping the atom bomb on Japan?’
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor impatiently. ‘The takings at the local kebab shop dropped for a year.’
‘OK, so I told you the story. Maybe I repeat myself sometimes. Bad Ace.’
‘In any event, Teller was one of those fleeing the Nazis. He was born in Bu-dapest so the country he fled from was Hungary, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Teller is Jewish and, of course, the Nazis made things very unpleasant for the Jews even before their policy of mass extermination got under way.
Anyway, Teller wisely fled the noisome rising tide and came to America where he made a dramatic impact in the field of theoretical physics, especially with his work on crystal symmetry. The Jahn-Teller effect.’
‘Oh, that.’
The Doctor smiled at her sarcasm. ‘All you need to know is that it deals with the interactions between nuclei and electrons.’
‘I don’t even need to know that.’
‘Such discoveries got him into the Manhattan Project and involved with Oppenheimer here at Los Alamos.’
‘Involved is putting it mildly,’ said Ace, staring out at the two men arguing.
Oppenheimer looked like he wanted to throttle Teller, who stared sullenly back at him with bitter, scornful reproach. ‘It’s handbags at ten paces out there. What are they on about?’
27
The Doctor pursed his lips and frowned. ‘Well, it’s all somewhat technical, but as you know the plan here is to detonate the world’s first atomic weapon.’
‘Yes, I haven’t forgotten that.’
The Doctor nodded at the two men standing in the garden. ‘Well, our friends Teller and Oppenheimer are having a small disagreement about the consequences of detonating that weapon.’
‘You mean,’ Ace summoned up all her drunken rhetorical eloquence, ‘like the political, social and economical consequences?’
‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘Oppenheimer thinks that when the bomb goes off the consequences will be a very large explosion and some nasty residue of radiation.’
‘Well it’s hard to find fault with that. What does Teller think?’
‘That the explosion will set up a chain reaction that will devour all the hydrogen in the atmosphere and elsewhere, igniting it, like striking a giant match. A giant match that lights a giant fuse.’
Ace felt a cold thrill as she imagined the pile of explosive at the other end of that fuse. As if reading her mind, the Doctor said, ‘Yes. Effectively it would turn the planet into one giant bomb. And thereby obliterate it.’
‘It?’
‘The planet Earth. In other words, destroying the world.’
‘Not that old chestnut,’ said Ace dismissively. But despite her bravado, she felt a strange rising chill in her solar plexus. She had faced