The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [216]
"You're not going to ask me to present this to the CO, are you, sir?" Claggett asked after a minute's reflection.
"No, Dutch you trying to tell me something?"
It was Claggett's turn to look unhappy. "Sir, he's my boss, and he's not a bad boss, but he is a little positive in his thinking."
That was artfully done, Jones thought not a bad boss a little positive. He just called his skipper an idiot in a way that no one could ever call disloyal. Ron wondered what sort of hyper-nuc-engineer this Ricks was. The good news was that this XO had his act together. And a smart skipper listened to his XO.
"Skipper, how's Mr Chambers doing?"
"Just took over Key West. Got a kid you trained as his leading sonarman. Billy Zerwinski, just made chief, I hear."
"Oh, yeah? Good for him. I figured Mr Chambers was going places, but Billy Z as a chief? What is my Navy coming to?"
"This is taking forever," Qati observed sourly. His skin was pasty white. The man was suffering again from his drug treatment.
"That is false," Fromm replied sternly. "I told you several months, and it will be several months. The first time this was done, it took three years and the resources of the world's richest nation. I will do it for you in an eighth of that time, and on a shoestring budget. In a few days we'll start to work on the rhodium. That will be much easier."
"And the plutonium?" Ghosn asked.
"That will be the last metal work - you know why, of course."
"Yes, Herr Fromm, and we must be extremely careful, since when you work with a critical mass you must be careful that it does not become critical while you are forming it," Ghosn replied, allowing his exacerbation to show for a change. He was tired. He'd been at work for eighteen hours now, supervising the workers. "And the tritium?"
"Last of all. Again, the obvious reason. It is relatively unstable, and we want the tritium we use to be as pure as possible."
"Quite so." Ghosn yawned, barely having heard the answer to his question, and not troubling himself to wonder why Fromm had answered as he had.
For his part, Fromm made a mental note. Palladium. He needed a small quantity of palladium. How had he forgotten that? He grunted to himself. Long hours, miserable climate, surly workers and associates. A small price to pay, of course, for this opportunity. He was doing what only a handful of men had ever done, and he was doing it in such a way as to equal the work of Fermi and the rest in 1944-5. It was not often that a man could measure himself against the giants and come off well in the comparison. He found himself wondering idly what the weapon would be used for, but admitted to himself that he didn't care, not really. Well, he had other work to do.
The German walked across the room to where the milling machines were. Here another team of technicians were at work. The beryllium piece now on the machine had the most intricate shape and had been the hardest to program, with concave, convex, and other complex curves. The machine was computer-controlled, of course, but was kept under constant observation through the Lexan panels that isolated the machining area from the outside world. The area was ventilated upwards into an electro-static air-cleaner. There was no sense in just dumping the metallic dust into the external air - in fact doing so constituted a major security hazard. Over the electro-static collection plates was a solid two meters of earth. Beryllium was not radioactive, but plutonium was, and plutonium would presently be worked on this very same machine. The beryllium was both necessary to the device and good practice for later tasks.
The milling machine was everything Fromm had hoped for when he'd ordered it several years before. The computer-driven tools were monitored by lasers, producing a degree of perfection that could not have been achieved so quickly as recently as five years ago. The surface of the beryllium was jeweled from the machining, already looking like the finish on a particularly fine rifle bolt,