Revelation

15 The Super

'Don't stop,' Stefi ordered.

The Chinese take-away had grown cold in the kitchen, and Romella's voice was becoming strained with the translation. Stefi had found a long, silk dressing gown with a dragon motif in one of Doug's wardrobes and was wearing it over yellow pyjamas. She was sitting on the floor with her legs folded underneath her. A black marble clock, all Victorian angels and curlicues, was about to strike one a.m.

'All this red scare stuff,' Romella asked. 'Was there any substance to it?' The swollen flesh around her right eye had developed a yellowish-green hue.

'It was before my time,' Findhorn said. 'I think the hysteria peaked in the 1950s. You know, it was a sort of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers thing. Your neighbour may look just like you but his mind may be under alien control.'

'Or her mind,' Stefi said. She was resting her head wearily on her hands.

'But surely it wasn't all hysteria, Fred. The communists wanted a world ruled by Moscow. And there were spies. Hell, we've just been reading about Klaus Fuchs.'

'Sure there were spies, but the witch-hunters didn't find them. Their success rate was practically zero. Imagine shooting your neighbours at random on the off-chance that one of them might be a spy. With all that misdirected effort, I suspect the McCarthy era was a golden age for the KGB.'

'What about Petrosian?' Stefi asked. 'Was he really a spy? And why are people fighting to get their hands on the diaries? Why do they want to kill you and what's in the diaries worth millions and —'

'Okay. Stefi wants her ten per cent. Read on, Romella.'

Petrosian's habits were those of a quiet and studious bachelor. In the evening he would take something easy out of the icebox and stick it in a frying pan. While it was frying he would pour himself a Martini. He would eat whatever it was, and watch whatever was on his small black-and-white television set, without paying much attention to either. The rest of the evening would be spent reading, writing or marking student exercises. On Fridays, however, he let his hair down: he ate in Mary's kitchen, and played five-stud with Max and friends until the early hours, generally winning enough to pay for the beers he brought along.

But that was before the loyalty trials. Now a barrier, invisible and yet almost tangible, had come between Petrosian and his acquaintances.

This Friday evening, having had a last supper in the Sweet and Tart, he was sipping a cold beer on his porch, a light sweat on his brow and arms. It was a sultry thirty-two degrees. Down the road, through an open window, Ella Fitzgerald was 'Eating Baloney on Coney', but she was having problems being heard over the insect night life and a distant yelping dog.

Tonight, Lev had put his normally restless mind on hold; mentally drained, he was finding simple pleasure in watching a near-full moon drift behind the willow tree in his neighbour's garden. Satchmo took it through the branches and into a starry sky. The dog was still yelping.

Around ten o'clock a big car, all whitewall tyres and tail fins and with an out-of-town number, gurgled slowly past Lev's house. Two men inside, clearly unfamiliar with the area, were scanning the street. A couple of minutes later the car returned, turned into Lev's driveway, and disgorged the two. One had short, neat hair and was incongruously dressed in a dark suit and tie. The other could hardly have been a greater contrast: he was unkempt and casually dressed, with a creased open-necked shirt and a jacket draped over his arm.

'Doctor Petrosian?'

'You look like FBI,' Petrosian said.

'Lieutenant Mercier, sir, Army Intelligence.' A badge was briefly flashed in the half-dark. 'And this is Mister Smith. Can we talk?'

'Sure.'

In the living room, hospitality was politely declined. The three men sat round a small circular table. The longhaired Mister Smith gave Petrosian a calculated smile. His affiliation, Lev noticed, was going unannounced.

Petrosian tried a shot in the dark. 'You look like an academic,' he said to Smith.

Smith kept smiling.

Petrosian finished his beer and leaned back, puzzled. 'Okay, I give up. Who are you?'

The army man said, 'This meeting is not taking place. We're not here.'

'Okay,' Petrosian said cautiously.

'And nothing said here is to be repeated outside this room.'

'There's a problem with that. I'm a card-carrying communist. Anything you say to me goes straight to Moscow.'

Mercier looked as if he was taking the comment seriously. 'We know all about the College enquiry, and we know exactly what was said at it today.'

Petrosian shook his head, mystified. 'I'll be out of work and on a blacklist within a week. What could the army possibly want with me?'

Mercier said, 'The army wouldn't touch you with a barge pole.'

'So why are you here?' Petrosian asked, baffled.

The army man reached down for his briefcase and pulled out an envelope. Petrosian's visitors watched him closely as he put down his empty beer glass and tore it open. He read the letter twice, and looked at his guests with surprise.

'Look at it from this point of view, Doctor Petrosian,' said Smith. 'As you say, you'll be out of a job within days. And once you're on that blacklist you'll never work in America again, except maybe emptying trash cans. Try to leave America and you'll find that the State Department denies you a passport.'

'And you turn up waving this letter under my nose. Your timing is supernatural.'

Smith still had the calculated grin. 'All you need worry about are the address and the signature.' The sharp, crabbed scrawl of Norris Bradbury — Oppenheimer's successor at Los Alamos — had leapt out at Petrosian the instant he had unfolded the letter.

'And my loyalty?'

Petrosian's visitors didn't react. Lev assessed their blank stares. Then he continued, 'I think I can guess what you people are up to.'

Now Mercier raised a finger to his lips, shaking his head urgently. He mouthed the word: Bugs.

Petrosian looked astonished. 'Are you serious?'

'Why not? You're a suspected commie.'

'They surely have no legal right.'

The army man finally grinned. 'Oh my. You really do come from Saturn,' he said, and Petrosian wondered how on earth they had managed to bug the Sweet and Tart's busy kitchen.

Smith sat with Petrosian in the back of the car, the better to brief him as they drove through the hot night. 'By the way, my name is Griggs. Ken Griggs.'

Mercier, at the wheel of the car, glanced back. 'And I'm Mercier.'

'So we're going for the Super?'

In the half-dark, Petrosian saw Griggs give a nod. 'We're in a race, Lev.'

'I don't know if a hydrogen bomb is even feasible.'

'If the Soviets get one before us…'

'Somewhere in Russia there are guys talking exactly the same way.'

Mercier said, 'Pravda regularly accuse us of planning an atomic war.'

'Are we?'

'The President doesn't confide in me. Still, if we built a couple of dozen H-bombs we could rule the world.'

'Or end it in an hour,' Griggs added playfully.

'Hey, maybe I'd rather empty trash cans,' Petrosian said.

Mercier was slowing to avoid a pothole. 'What gives with the angst? It's a simple matter of national security. The Russians are doing it, so we have to.'

Griggs said, 'The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, if you want peace prepare for war, and those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. That'll be fifteen bucks. I charge five dollars a cliche.'

'Hey, watch your tone,' complained Mercier.

'I asked you about my loyalty,' Petrosian said.

Mercier spoke over his shoulder, 'If it was up to me you wouldn't get within a hundred miles of Los Alamos.'

Griggs said, 'The AEC operates a security clearance procedure.'

'In which case I'm back to trash cans.'

'If somebody, say like Mercier here, queries your loyalty you've had it. Doubt is all it takes and the onus is on you to dispel that doubt. You can forget about questioning evidence, the right to cross-examine witnesses and stuff like that. The procedure stands Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence on its head.'

'I don't understand.'

'But at least we have due process. You could, for example, appeal to the Personnel Security Review Board. The real purpose of the procedure is to keep HUAC at bay. Now if these monsters got their claws into you…'

Mercier's tone was jarring. 'These monsters just happen to be our best line of defence against internal subversion. Everyone knows the reds take their orders from Moscow. We're rooting out traitors.'

'You see what you're up against, Lev.'

Petrosian said, 'From what you guys are telling me I haven't a hope of getting into the project.'

'I'm lost.' Mercier was peering along a tunnel of light which showed only an endless, ruler-straight road. Moonlight revealed them to be insects crawling over an infinite, flat, desolate surface.

'Turn left two miles ahead. That'll take us back into town.'

'The fancy footwork is this,' Griggs said. 'The final decision on security is made by the AEC commissioners themselves. They don't have to take anyone's advice. But it's not a trick they dare to pull off more than once. I guess Bradbury sees your talents as vital to the project.'

'I'm flattered. But I might start giving secrets away to the Russians.' Sweat was trickling down Petrosian's back and his thighs were wet against the plastic upholstery.

Griggs said, 'I have to say that Bradbury wants you over the dead bodies of some of the others, Strauss especially. Still, it's like this, Lev. Our success in this project depends on our ability to attract men of talent and vision into it. These men will have all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of viewpoints. Paranoia is a luxury we can't afford.'

'Army Intelligence are against you,' Mercier said. It wasn't clear whether he was talking to Griggs or Petrosian.

'Listen to the man, Lev, and be aware. You have no guarantee of protection. All this soft-headed liberal thinking the scientists do, exchanging information with colleagues abroad and stuff like that. It's disloyal, and it proves we're under communist influence. Therefore HUAC wants the army to take over the hydrogen bomb project. So does the army.'

'So where do I stand in this?'

'In this struggle, Lev, you're a very small fish. Take my advice and stay that way. Stick to science and keep your mouth shut on policy matters. The guy they're really after, the big whale, is Oppenheimer.'

Four weeks later Petrosian turned up at Los Alamos, having effectively vanished from Greers Ferry. After an absence of seven years, the diaries revealed no sentiment, no sense of homecoming, of loss or gain. Rather, they gave the impression of a man who had been away for a long weekend. Kitty Cronin's name was painfully absent. The pages were filled with the hydrogen bomb. Over the course of the year they became increasingly technical and Findhorn could scarcely understand the entries. Romella began to stumble over many of the technical words. Some of them had been written in English, probably, she thought, because there was no precise equivalent in the Armenian.

Near the end of 1953, however, Petrosian's prose style suddenly changed. The entries became longer, the text became both enthusiastic and ferociously technical, and the handwriting was that of a man who could hardly write fast enough to get the words down.

By now they could hardly understand a word. But the crabbed writing, the cryptic style and the air of enthusiasm told the same story to Romella and Findhorn. The Armenian physicist was onto something.

The first such entry was on 29 November. Stefi had appeared with hot chocolate and biscuits, and Romella's voice was now slurred with tiredness.

Findhorn was suddenly on his feet. He paced up and down excitedly, muttering and shaking his head. Momentarily, he looked at the women wildly with bloodshot eyes. Then he carried on pacing.

'Fred!' Romella pleaded.

He paused to look at her. 'I can't tell you.'

'We're shareholders, damn you,' Stefi pointed out.

'It's too bizarre, too way out. I must be wrong.'

Stefi blocked his path. 'Try us.'

Findhorn shook his head energetically. 'You wouldn't understand. You're only a linguist.' He looked at the clock: it showed two thirty a.m. 'Stefi, I want you to get me on the next available flight to America. Not from Edinburgh airport. I'll give you my credit card number.'

'I'm only a linguist, I can't do things like that. Where in America?'

'Los Alamos. I want to nose around.'

Romella was shaking her head. 'Fred, the people you met in Fat Sam's…'

'… are almost certainly acting for the American Government.'

'And you want to put your head in the lion's mouth?'

'America is the last place they'd expect me to go. I'm gambling that my name won't be on their Immigration Department computers.'

'I'll come,' Romella said. 'The FBI must have old files on Petrosian.'

Findhorn blinked with surprise. 'You intend to just walk into the FBI offices in Washington and ask about Petrosian? You're mad.'

'As you say, Fred, it's the last thing they'd expect. They're looking for us in Edinburgh. I'm betting their right hand doesn't know what their left is doing. It's the same gamble.'

Stefi said, 'You're both mad.'

Romella said, 'You'll have to pay my fare, Fred. I'm skint.'

'Don't do it,' Stefi said.

'Give me an account number and I'll feed money into it.'

'Please can I come too?' Stefi asked. 'I've never been to America.'

Findhorn shook his head. 'You're needed here. See what you can find out about green Mercs registered in Switzerland.'

Stefi attempted a pout.

Romella picked up the photocopies and tapped them into a neat pile. 'At least tell us this, Fred. What's ZPE?'

'It stands for zero point energy. It's the lowest possible energy state any system can have.'

'I know the feeling.'