“Dr. Lomax. That photograph was taken six days ago by a U.S. Navy fighter overflying a bombed factory in Iraq.”
Lomax glanced up, bright blue eyes under shaggy white brows, then looked back at the photo.
“Sonofabitch,” he said at last. “I warned the bastards. Three years ago. Wrote a paper warning that this was the sort of technology the Third World would be likely to use.”
“What happened to it?”
“Oh, they trashed it, I guess.”
“Who?”
“You know, the pointy-heads.”
“Those disks—the Frisbees inside the factory—you know what they are?”
“Sure. Calutrons. This is a replica of the old Oak Ridge facility.”
“Calu-what?”
Lomax glanced up again.
“You’re not a doctor of science? Not a physicist?”
“No. My subject is Arabic studies.”
Lomax grunted again, as if not being a physicist were a hard burden for a man to carry through life.
“Calutrons. California cyclotrons. Calutrons, for short.”
“What do they do?”
“EMIS. Electromagnetic isotope separation. In your language, they refine crude uranium-238 to filter out the bomb-grade uranium-235. You say this place is in Iraq?”
“Yes. It was bombed by accident a week ago. This picture was taken the next day. No one seems to know what it means.”
Lomax gazed across the valley, sucked on his butt, and let a plume of azure smoke trickle away.
“Sonofabitch,” he said again. “Mister, I live up here because I want to. Away from all that smog and traffic—had enough of that years ago. Don’t have a TV, but I have a radio. This is about that man Saddam Hussein, ain’t it?”
“Yes, it is. Would you tell me about calutrons?”
The old man stubbed out his butt and stared now, not just across the valley but back across many years.
“Nineteen forty-three. Long time ago, eh? Nearly fifty years. Before you were born, before most people were born nowadays. There was a bunch of us then, trying to do the impossible. We were young, eager, and ingenious, and we didn’t know it was impossible. So we did it.
“There was Fermi from Italy, and Pontecorvo; Fuchs from Germany, Nils Bohr from Denmark, Nunn May from England, and others. And us Yankees: Urey and Oppie and Ernest. I was very junior. Just twenty-seven.
“Most of the time, we were feeling our way, doing things that had never been tried, testing out things they said couldn’t be done. We had a budget that nowadays wouldn’t buy squat, so we worked all day and all night and took shortcuts. Had to—the deadline was as tight as the money. And somehow we did it, in three years. We cracked the codes and made the bomb. Little Boy and Fat Man.
“Then the Air Force dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the world said we shouldn’t have done it after all. Trouble was, if we hadn’t, somebody else would. Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia—”
“Calutrons ...,” suggested Martin.
“Yeah. You’ve heard of the Manhattan Project?”
“Of course.”
“Well, we had many geniuses in Manhattan, two in particular. Robert J. Oppenheimer and Ernest O.