CONDITION BLACK by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online

core of tritium/deuterium of one hundred million degrees Centigrade.
    So, yes, it was somewhat restricted.
    . . Sadly, it has been our experience in the past that the most specialised work carried out at the Atomic Weapons Establishment leads scientists into a cul-de-sac of research that has little, or no, relevance to science as practised in civilian life . . .
    The science that was relevant to Frederick Bissett was the moment, too fast for any but the most powerful computer to register, when chemical explosive was driven by uniform spherical detonation against the fissionable material of highly enriched uranium and plutonium creating some millions of pounds overpressure per square inch . . . His head dropped. In front of him the page blurred.
    . . . With regret, therefore, I have to inform you that we are not in a position to offer you employment in any research division of the company.
    Yours sincerely
    Arnold R. Dobson, Personnel Director.
    (dictated, and signed in his absence)
    He felt sick. He took the letter and the envelope out of his office and down to the abandoned area at the end of the corridor. He fed the sheet of paper and the envelope into the shredding machine beside Carol's desk.
    He went back to his room.
    Later he would hear Carol's laughter, and Wayne's giggle, and the clumping tread of Basil's iron-tipped shoes, and the coarse grate of Reuben Boll's voice. And later he would hear the dull punch of explosive detonations. He would work until it was time to go home, on the new warhead design that would replace the free-fall W E - 1 7 7 bomb with an air-launched cruise system. He would work on the mathematics of implosion until, in the late afternoon, he cleared his desk, and took his briefcase, with empty sandwich box and empty coffee flask, to his car, and drove home.
    In crisp early morning sunshine the Air Force plane touched down at Andrews Air Base.

    Nothing hurried, none of the subterfuge of moving a body quietly and in the dead of night out of Athens. The networks were there, penned behind a steel barrier. The high-level officials from State Department stamped their feet on the tarmac and waited for the aircraft doors to open. There was a bearer party, old friends and colleagues of Harry's. The Director of the Agency and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were there.
    The F . B . I . Director said, " M y first man into Athens, a young man but a good friend of Lawrence's, has promised the widow that we'd go for the jugular on this one."
    The Agency Director mused, "But, whose jugular?"
    "Whichever."
    "Something tells me you may bump into a little politics on the w a y . "
    The F . B . I . Director said, "Just this once, fuck the politics."
    The Agency Director said, "I didn't hear that . . . but I wish you luck."
    They had brought Agency men back to Andrews, in caskets, from Europe, from Lockerbie, from Lebanon, from Central America. It was a regular run for the Agency Director, down the Capital Beltway from Langley to Andrews. He was used to shaking the hand, gravely, of a young widow. He was accustomed to dropping his arm round the shoulders of young and fatherless children.
    The aircraft door was open, and the cargo hatch.
    They saw, at the top of the steps, the small, intimidated figure of Elsa Lawrence, her children behind her. They saw the casket taken from the cargo hatch, and draped in their flag, and lifted onto the shoulders of Harry Lawrence's work friends.
    The Agency Director said, " Y o u know what? Half the C . B . S .
    story on Lawrence last night was time taken explaining where Athens is."
    When it came to their turn, both men shook Elsa Lawrence's hand, felt her limp grasp in theirs. And both men put their arms round the children, and felt them flinch from the touch of strangers.
    Dr Tariq, frail and looking as though the gentle zephyr that came in off the Tigris might flatten him, could muster a savage temper when attacked.
    He had been badly damaged when the