Doctor Who_ Atom Bomb Blues - Andrew Cartmel [16]
‘Do they really think there’s a chance of that happening?’
‘Teller does and he’s a very clever man. One of the top minds in his field.’
‘But Oppenheimer doesn’t take him seriously?’
‘On the contrary, Oppenheimer takes him very seriously indeed.’
Ace looked out at the two men standing in the garden. They had fallen silent now, but they stared at each other with obstinate combative hatred, like two weary boxers huddled in their corners between rounds. ‘Oppenheimer takes the threat seriously but he’s going to go ahead anyway?’
‘Yes.’
‘Whew.’ Ace stared curiously at Oppenheimer. The lanky figure looked strangely isolated, a man utterly alone in the world even as he stood here on the lawn of his own home, his wife close by and his colleague and antagonist standing a mere few feet away. Ace felt sorry for him. She tried to imagine what it was like having the weight of such decisions on your shoulders, and her mind shied away from the concept. She turned to the Doctor. ‘But they didn’t, did they?’
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He was staring out the window. He didn’t seem to hear her. ‘They didn’t, did they?’ she repeated. He turned and looked at her quizzically.
‘Didn’t what?’ he said.
‘Set off a chain reaction that burned up all the hydrogen in the atmosphere.’
‘And the oceans.’
‘And the oceans. And blow up the whole world. They didn’t do that, did they?’
She glanced around at the crowd of drunken people, merry or maudlin, talking loudly all around them. ‘This lot managed to blow up an atom bomb all right, but it just went off in the middle of the desert and everything was all right except for any poor little blighters of desert animals who were in the blast zone, and they tootled off, I mean the scientists not the poor little blighters, and built another one and dropped it on Japan. On Hiroshima and that other city that nobody can ever remember the name of.’
‘Nagasaki.’
‘Nagasaki, yeah. They burned up all those Japanese babies and women and men. But they didn’t burn the whole world, did they?’
The Doctor gazed at her bleakly. Ace felt a small surge of panic. ‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘I don’t know a lot of history, but I know that much.’
The Doctor was about to reply, but before he could do so a loud outraged yelp echoed from across the room. It came from Klaus Fuchs, who was staring at the large, swaying figure of Cosmic Ray Morita coming back through the door of the living room. Ray had a large yellow leather bag swinging by a strap off one shoulder. The bag was an odd, square shape and had the word
‘Cosmic’ embroidered on it in jagged red lightning-bolt lettering. Carrying the bag, Ray swayed inexorably towards the record player.
Ever since he’d left the room, Fuchs had been tending to the record player, which seemed to Ace to require the disc being changed or turned over every three minutes or so. She was accustomed to the seventy minutes plus of a CD, so these weird, small black records here seemed to end almost as soon as they started. As much as she loathed the classical music and longed for it to be over, the constant interruptions made it worse.
Fuchs, however, seemed to enjoy the perpetual responsibility of feeding the music to the machine, and he’d been happily fussing over it, selecting discs from a large brown cardboard album.
Now Fuchs was standing among the physicists chatting at the fireplace, one casual elbow on the mantelpiece between the martini glasses, a debonair cigarette clamped between his lips. The cigarette dropped from his lips and he looked hastily around him, like a cornered animal. Ace realised his predica-ment. He was on the other side of the room, far away from the record player, which stood beside the door.
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Ray on the other hand reached the record player in a few unsteady steps.
Ace decided that although she didn’t much like the big man, she liked his nickname.