“Plenty of time, yet.” Pitov was speaking German instead of Spanish, as they always did between themselves. “They’re still counting down from minus three hours. I just phoned the launching site for a jeep. Eugenio’s been there ever since dinner; they say he’s running around like a cat looking for a place to have her first litter of kittens.”
He chuckled. This would be something new for Eugenio Galvez—for which he could be thankful.
“I hope the generators don’t develop any last-second bugs,” he said. “We’ll only be a mile and a half away, and that’ll be too close to fifty kilos of negamatter if the field collapses.”
“It’ll be all right,” Pitov assured him. “The bugs have all been chased out years ago.”
“Not out of those generators in the rocket. They’re new.” He fumbled in his coat pocket for his pipe and tobacco. “I never thought I’d run another nuclear-bomb test, as long as I lived.”
“Lee!” Pitov was shocked. “You mustn’t call it that. It isn’t that, at all. It’s purely a scientific experiment.”
“Wasn’t that all any of them were? We made lots of experiments like this, back before 1969.” The memories of all those other tests, each ending in an Everest-high mushroom column, rose in his mind. And the end result—the United States and the Soviet Union blasted to rubble, a whole hemisphere pushed back into the Dark Ages, a quarter of a billion dead. Including a slim woman with graying blonde hair, and a little red dog, and a girl from Odessa whom Alexis Pitov had been going to marry. “Forgive me, Alexis. I just couldn’t help remembering. I suppose it’s this shot we’re going to make, tonight. It’s so much like the other ones, before—” He hesitated slightly. “Before the Auburn Bomb.”
There; he’d come out and said it. In all the years they’d worked together at the Instituto Argentino de Ciencia Fisica, that had been unmentioned between them. The families of hanged cutthroats avoid mention of ropes and knives. He thumbed the old-fashioned American lighter and held it to his pipe. Across the veranda, in the darkness, he knew that Pitov was looking intently at him.
“You’ve been thinking about that, lately, haven’t you?” the Russian asked, and then, timidly: “Was that what you were dreaming of?”
“Oh, no, thank heaven!”
“I think about it, too, always. I suppose—” He seemed relieved, now that it had been brought out into the open and could be discussed. “You saw it fall, didn’t you?”
“That’s right. From about thirty miles away. A little closer than we’ll be to this shot, tonight. I was in charge of the investigation at Auburn, until we had New York and Washington and Detroit and Mobile and San Francisco to worry about. Then what had happened to Auburn wasn’t important, any more. We were trying to get evidence to lay before the United Nations. We kept at it for about twelve hours after the United Nations had ceased to exist.”
“I could never understand about that, Lee. I don’t know what the truth is; I probably never shall. But I know that my government did not launch that missile. During the first days after yours began coming in, I talked to people who had been in the Kremlin at the time. One had been in the presence of Klyzenko himself when the news of your bombardment arrived. He said that Klyzenko was absolutely stunned. We always believed that your government decided upon a preventive surprise attack, and picked out a town, Auburn, New York, that had been hit by one of our first retaliation missiles, and claimed that it had been hit first.”
He shook his head. “Auburn was hit an hour before the first American missile was launched. I know that to be a fact. We could never understand why you launched just that one, and no more until after ours began landing on you; why you threw away the advantage of surprise and priority of attack—”
“Because we didn’t do it, Lee!” The Russian’s voice trembled with earnestness. “You believe me when I tell you that?”
“Yes, I believe you. After all that happened, and all that you, and I, and the people you worked with, and the people I worked with, and your government, and mine, have been guilty of, it would be a waste of breath for either of us to try to lie to the other about what happened fifteen years ago.” He drew slowly on his pipe. “But who launched it, then? It had to be launched by somebody.”
“Don’t you think I’ve been tormenting myself with that question for the last fifteen years?” Pitov demanded. “You know, there were people inside the Soviet Union—not many, and they kept themselves well hidden—who were dedicated to the overthrow of the Soviet regime. They, or some of them, might have thought that the devastation of both our countries, and the obliteration of civilization in the Northern Hemisphere, would be a cheap price to pay for ending the rule of the Communist Party.”
“Could they have built an ICBM with a thermonuclear warhead in secret?” he asked. “There were also fanatical nationalist groups in Europe, both sides of the Iron Curtain, who might have thought our mutual destruction would be worth the risks involved.”
“There was China, and India. If your country and mine wiped each other out, they could go back to the old ways and the old traditions. Or Japan, or the Moslem States. In the end, they all went down along with us, but what criminal ever expects to fall?”
“We have too many suspects, and the trail’s too cold, Alexis. That rocket wouldn’t have had to have been launched anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. For instance, our friends here in the Argentine have been doing very well by themselves since El Coloso del Norte went down.”
And there were the Australians, picking themselves up bargains in real-estate in the East Indies at gun-point, and there were the Boers, trekking north again, in tanks instead of ox-wagons. And Brazil, with a not-too-implausible pretender to the Braganza throne, calling itself the Portuguese Empire and looking eastward. And, to complete the picture, here were Professor Doctor Lee Richardson and Comrade Professor Alexis Petrovitch Pitov, getting ready to test a missile with a matter-annihilation warhead.
No. This thing just wasn’t a weapon.
A jeep came around the corner, lighting the dark roadway between the bungalows, its radio on and counting down—Twenty two minutes. Twenty one fifty nine, fifty eight, fifty seven—It came to a stop in front of their bungalow, at exactly Minus Two Hours, Twenty One Minutes, Fifty Four Seconds. The driver called out in Spanish:
“Doctor Richardson; Doctor Pitov! Are you ready?”
“Yes, ready. We’re coming.”
They both got to their feet, Richardson pulling himself up reluctantly. The older you get, the harder it is to leave a comfortable chair. He settled himself beside his colleague and former enemy, and the jeep started again, rolling between the buildings of the living-quarters area and out onto the long, straight road across the pampas toward the distant blaze of electric lights.
He wondered why he had been thinking so much, lately, about the Auburn Bomb. He’d questioned, at times, indignantly, of course, whether Russia had launched it—but it wasn’t until tonight, until he had heard what Pitov had had to say, that he seriously doubted it. Pitov wouldn’t lie about it, and Pitov would have been in a position to have known the truth, if the missile had been launched from Russia. Then he stopped thinking about what was water—or blood—a long time over the dam.
The special policeman at the entrance to the launching site reminded them that they were both smoking; when they extinguished, respectively, their cigarette and pipe,