VI
Side by side, Korin and Adamov looked like characters from a Russian folktale. Adamov was the pale wizard Koshchey the Deathless, Korin the thickset knight of old Rus. But despite the difference in their appearance—Korin shaggy but lithe with the craggy brows and faraway eyes of an explorer, Adamov desiccated and angular as a skeleton—the two men seemed to have been hewn from the same block of ancient stone. Age has made them twins, thought Vasin. The past was their common womb. Their four hands lay on the table, as lined as maps.
“You got the story, Comrade.” Korin’s voice had the arrogance of a man who can no longer be bothered to lie. “Good work.”
Korin and Adamov faced him like poker players. Vasin’s cards were on the table. Now he waited to see what the old men were holding.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Vasin said. “You’re going to tell me that my talents are wasted at the kontora. My mother does, all the time. She would have preferred me to be Yury Gagarin.”
Each of them, in his different way, smiled, though Adamov’s was more a grimace of suppressed pain.
“Korin.” Adamov addressed his companion. “We need to tell him.”
“He wouldn’t listen. Stubborn little terrier.” Korin pointed an accusing finger at Vasin. “Hand it to him. Even flew up to see me in Olenya. Got to the bottom of things fucking quickly. So what’s the clever Chekist been saying to you? Confess everything and things will go easier for you? Haven’t we heard that one before?”
Adamov shrugged.
“Vasin has discovered your work with the registry. His little bird Vladimir Axelrod in the Citadel believes I have sabotaged the tamper and am a traitor. Even ran a simulation of the new yield on the computer. He plans to present his case and denounce me to the authorities tomorrow.”
“That bastard. We should have acted.”
Korin stared straight at Vasin.
“We should have acted,” he repeated.
Vasin met Korin’s eye and leaned forward.
“You mean, you should have had your thug smack Axelrod over the head with a wrench? And maybe me too? So that was your guy? The ape you had hanging around Axelrod? He nearly pushed me under a train. Said his bosses were ‘grown-ups.’ That would be you.”
Korin grunted and folded his arms.
“He saved you from falling under a train, I heard.”
“It’s too late for all that now, old friend.” Adamov had turned to Korin, his voice hissing and urgent. “But perhaps if Vasin understands what is going on, he will help us. Or else it’s all over.”
The two old men exchanged a long, meaningful glance.
Adamov sighed, leaned forward into the light, and began to speak.
“Vasin, I commit the sin of science every day. I turn plowshares into swords. And yes, I mislead our masters because it is necessary to mislead them. Because they do not understand what we are dealing with. Look at the language they have invented. ‘Deceptive basing modes.’ ‘Baseline terminal defense.’ ‘Dense pack groupings.’ Our military planners make up words in order to pretend that we are in command of the forces we unleash. We used to have whole workshops full of people estimating explosive yields with slide rules. Now they are tabulated on our new computers, and we make neat graphs to report to our superiors in the Kremlin. These men understand quotas, but our numbers conceal a terrible truth. We are not in control of these forces. With every major bomb test, we please the Politburo by increasing our yields. Our bombs are bigger than the capitalist enemy’s, therefore the Motherland is greater. Then, this spring, the order came down from the top of the Party. They wanted a hundred-megaton bomb. A good, round number. One hundred. Thunderous applause at the Party Plenum. Five thousand times bigger than the bomb that Oppenheimer made. These are just numbers to the apparatchiks. But it was insanity.”
The authority of Adamov’s clear, measured voice was awesome. Korin and Vasin had become mere listeners and smokers.
“You must understand that the energy yielded by our discovery of atomic physics exceeds the energy yielded by that of the terrestrial, or planetary, physics of the nineteenth century as the cosmos exceeds the earth. When our grandfathers discovered steam, then dynamite, they considered themselves masters of awesome power. Now we have cracked atoms. We have forced atoms to fuse, as in the heart of the sun. Yet it is within the earth’s comparatively tiny, frail ecosphere that mankind is proposing to release this newly tapped cosmic energy. So far, we have been lucky. The Americans, less so. Did Korin mention Castle Bravo?”
Vasin shook his head.
“Colonel Korin told me about Gatling. And he told me what happened at Totskoye. Forty-five thousand Soviet soldiers sent into a radiation zone. But he didn’t mention any castles.”
“Seven years ago, the Americans planned to test a series of new thermonuclear devices on an island called Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. The aim was to try out a new combination of nuclear fuels. More important, for the generals at least, was that this was the first time they were able to build a payload of deliverable size. The device weighed about ten tons.
“The Bikini tests of ’fifty-four were code-named Operation Castle. The first bomb was named Castle Bravo. There was no Castle Alpha. Our colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory, our enemies as we are supposed to call them, did all the calculations they could. They already had a fast electronic computer, back when we were just experimenting with our first. They estimated that the yield would be six megatons. The designers placed their cameras, their ships, their monitors, and the bunker that sheltered the detonating party accordingly. A distance of about five kilometers from ground zero.”
Adamov had a good teacher’s flair for narrative. He paused now, measuring the effect of his words on Vasin.
“The device detonated perfectly. The fireball spread over seven kilometers wide in less than a single second. But according to their precise calculations, they had only expected the blast to maximize at two point five kilometers. Your spies tell us that the explosion was visible four hundred kilometers away. In less than ten minutes the mushroom cloud had reached an altitude of forty thousand meters and a width of over one hundred kilometers. The fallout was spreading at around one hundred meters per second. The firing party had to evacuate their bunker to avoid being fatally irradiated, which meant running across open ground to a helicopter and flying to a nearby battleship. They barely escaped with their lives. God knows what shape those men are in now. They say the fallout fell like gray ash, and the Pacific islanders ate it thinking it was the snow they had seen on television sets the Americans had bribed them with. Perhaps it is true. When the Yankees flew over the site a few days later, they saw that Castle Bravo had blown a crater two hundred fifty meters deep and two kilometers across. And the yield? Fifteen megatons, not six.”
“How did the Americans get their numbers so wrong?” Vasin’s mind was reeling from the incredible scale of the destruction that Adamov was describing.
“No, Major. Their calculations were as accurate as our own. Their mistake was making assumptions. And their assumptions were wrong. They used lithium, the lightest of all metals, as their source of tritium, a kind of heavy hydrogen. They assumed the lithium 7 isotope they used in the second-stage bomb would be inert, that it would react harmlessly and turn into bromine. It didn’t. Their new lithium-deuteride fuel produced much more tritium than they expected. The point is that despite all the previous real-world tests they had done, all the calculations they had run on their new computers, all the efforts of those Golden Brains in the New Mexico desert, Castle Bravo was three times more powerful than intended. Three times, all because of a single wrong assumption. What happens if a device is one hundred times more powerful than expected? Fifteen years after Hiroshima, and we have already achieved a five-thousandfold increase in the power of our bombs. Why not fifty thousand? Five million?”
Adamov looked at Vasin as though he were expecting an answer. Vasin had none.
“How could our calculations be one hundred times off? Or one thousand? Here we come to the most terrible secret of all. Most of the nuclear material in any device does not detonate. This has been the case since the very earliest tests. Dr. Oppenheimer’s first gadget, Trinity, was the world’s first nuclear explosion, back in ’forty-five. They used more than six kilograms of plutonium-gallium alloy as the bomb core. Oppenheimer himself predicted it would yield less than half a kiloton of explosive force. Enrico Fermi offered to take bets among the top physicists and military present on whether the atmosphere would ignite, if it would destroy the state, or if it would incinerate the entire planet. Trinity surprised them all and generated twenty kilotons of explosive force.
“But that’s not my point. Out of six kilograms of plutonium, only around one gram—one single gram—actually reacted during the explosion. The weight of a kopeck. Almost six kilograms of plutonium, puff, blown to smithereens, wasted, expelled into the atmosphere. Most of what we call nuclear fallout is merely unexploded bomb fuel. And so it has been ever since. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the plutonium and uranium we put into our devices is not detonated. The energy released by the nuclear reaction destroys the metal tamper that is built to contain it within milliseconds, and therefore destroys the conditions under which the reaction can continue. So we tried to build a tamper than contains the reaction for twice as long. Longer. What happens if not one six-thousandth of the fuel explodes, but one sixth? Can we contain the explosion long enough for all of it to detonate?”
“You’re talking about Petrov’s solid uranium tamper.” Vasin could not hide the tremor in his voice.
Adamov pursed his lips.
“Petrov designed the strongest tamper ever made. And one that was itself made of potentially fissile material. RDS-220 was meant to be a hundred megatons, seven times more powerful than Castle Bravo. At that level, the chain reaction may not stop with the hydrogen inside the device. What if it continues to the hydrogen in the air? There is a chance that this thermonuclear chain reaction could ignite the hydrogen in earth’s atmosphere. Set the world on fire, Vasin, just like Fermi joked. And that, I repeat, is a danger we have been considering even without any unpredictable effects from the uranium tamper. Even without more of the fuel reacting than in previous tests.”
Korin took over the narrative, looming into the circle of light on the table as he began to speak.
“Petrov’s uranium casing would become a bomb in itself. The ambitious little cunt. He wanted to ride RDS-220 all the way to the Academy to join his father. Then on to the Politburo. Wouldn’t listen to our objections. ‘In this game you never know until you try. Old man Oppenheimer, when he detonated the first atom bomb in America back in ’forty-five, wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to blow up the world.’ That’s what Petrov said. Then he laughed.”
“Professor—why did you not just overrule Petrov?”
“Petrov threatened to take it to his father and the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences.” Adamov’s voice rose in indignation. “Useless bunch of careerists. He saw the calutron readings and he knew the danger. But ‘the risk is acceptable if we are to show our capitalist enemies that the USSR commands the heights of nuclear supremacy.’ Fool. If RDS-220 sets off an uncontrollable chain reaction, the only heights he would be commanding would be a smoking pile of ash where the Kremlin used to stand. Petrov threatened to denounce me for subverting the project. Said that I was no longer suitable to lead the nation’s weapons program. That I was an enemy of the people. That when he was in charge, there would be two- and three-hundred megaton devices! He said that I could choose to read about his triumphs in a retirement dacha outside Moscow or…or from a newspaper in a shitter in the Gulag. He said…he dared to say…that I was used to prison life, so I had nothing to fear.”
Adamov went silent. His thin hands had found each other on the table and seemed to be strangling the life out of each other, though his face remained expressionless.
“So you decided to kill Petrov.”
“I killed him.” Korin’s voice was as heavy as a cudgel. “Adamov came to me wringing his hands. Just like he is now. Petrov had to be stopped and I promised Adamov that I’d stop him.”
“And save the world?” Vasin had meant the words flippantly. But as he spoke them it occurred to him that they might literally be true. “You invited him to tea to discuss the tamper. Maybe you even promised to see his vision through. And then you poisoned him.”
“Adamov knew nothing. I got the thallium through my own channels.”
“I saw Petrov’s body. How did you handle it and not get poisoned yourself?”
“Thallium emits a radiation that is too weak to penetrate human skin. It’s harmless, unless it is ingested. Two grams is just dust in a piece of paper. I slipped the cup Petrov had used into my pocket so Masha wouldn’t accidentally poison herself.”
“Then you altered the laboratory records to make it look like Petrov had signed for the thallium himself.”
Korin merely raised a shaggy eyebrow in answer. Adamov’s face had tightened into a grimace of pain.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Adamov and Korin exchanged a glance. The Professor, as the senior man, replied for both of them.
“We need to talk to Axelrod, tonight, and tell him the same things we’ve just told you. He’s a man of science. He must see reason.”
“So order him to come over.”
“He won’t come for me. He loved Petrov, we all knew. But he’s your stool pigeon. You can make him come. Tomorrow Axelrod will be at the Party headquarters dictating a complaint to the Ministry. The next stop will be your kontora. It’s only in our hands for a few hours more. They will halt the test and rebuild the tamper with uranium. And we cannot predict what will happen then. As for us, who knows what the Party will decide.”
“That’s obvious enough. The Party will decide that you’re murderers, gentlemen. The altered lab inventory, with your signature on it, Colonel, is your death sentence.”
The two old men held Vasin with their stares, waiting on his word. Vasin had heard a lot of lies in his time. But told in Adamov’s measured whisper, this story sounded very true. For a delirious moment, Vasin thought, I have witnessed the beginning of the world’s end. If I do nothing, the bomb will pass to other hands. And it will be uncontrollable. Armageddon will have started here, with these men, at this table, with my inaction. Images from the film of RDS-100 played in his head. The furious tidal wave of wind, the blinding light, the titanic pulse of the cosmos’s energy unleashed on the fragile earth. Destroying everything. And everything he hated. Vera, turned into a pillar of ash. The kontora and Orlov and Zaitsev, the whole rotten edifice of lies that he served incinerated, burned clean away. And his own worthless self, of course. Annihilated. It would be a kind of answer. An end to everything, forever. Except maybe the kontora’s files, in their deep bunkers.
But then he thought of Nikita at school, with the windows exploding and the air turning to fire. The split second of alarm in his childish face. A bubble of nausea like an air pocket filled Vasin’s lower chest. It seemed that something had gone wrong with time. The past and the future huddled in the present, their impossible weight pressing in around the three men at the table.
Adamov was convinced that he could talk Axelrod into silence, that he was a rational man. But Korin had murdered the love of the young scientist’s life. Fedya, the boy with the sun in him, Axelrod’s sin, his soul. Axelrod had been willing to risk everything with his desperate act of blackmail to keep Petrov by his side. Vasin knew from his old cases just how terrible the cold fury of a bereaved lover could be. What could Adamov possibly say to Axelrod that would make up for the violation they had inflicted on his life? Petrov had believed
that his uranium tamper design was safe. Therefore Axelrod did. With Petrov dead, that belief might become a way of keeping faith with his murdered lover. Perhaps Axelrod had become convinced that Petrov’s idea should live, now that he did not. Vasin had seen flashes of a fanatic light in Axelrod’s eyes. Would Adamov’s authority be able to extinguish it? Was Adamov capable of understanding love and loss in another after he had cauterized feeling so thoroughly in himself? And if Adamov failed to persuade Axelrod into silence, then, clearly, Korin would have to take action.
They were asking Vasin to lead Axelrod to his death. Somewhere in this sleeping city, Korin’s sailor was slumbering on some stinking cot, ready to answer the call of a ringing telephone. If Vasin refused, or failed, to bring Axelrod to their agreed rendezvous at the registry of the Institute, Korin’s man would come for him. The only way that Axelrod would live to see another day was if he spoke to Adamov, and agreed with him. According to the new logical web that Adamov and Korin had suddenly thrown over his life, the path was clear. Vasin was fetching Axelrod not to his death but perhaps to his only chance of life.
Perhaps it was not too late.
Vasin made his decision. A plan that might save Axelrod began to hatch in his mind. And Masha was the key to it. He stood.
“I know how to get Axelrod. But we do it my way.”
Korin lumbered to his feet to face Vasin, both their faces in the darkness cast by the lampshade.
“Bring him to the Institute. We meet at the registry.”
Vasin could find no obvious flaw in Korin’s logic. And the Citadel, even at night, was at least a semipublic place, safer for Axelrod.
“Very well. The registry. But you must bring Masha. I insist that she be there. No arguments.”
Reluctantly, Adamov and Korin nodded.
“One final condition. No one dies tonight. No one.”
Black Sun Page 27
