Doctor Who_ Atom Bomb Blues Part 4

'I agree,' said Major Butcher. He stepped over and joined them, smiling. Ace wondered what the h.e.l.l the man was doing, suddenly being so friendly. But Butcher seemed sincere as he joined Ray in staring with contempt at Fuchs and the record player. 'That music ought to be banned.'24.

'That's right,' crooned Ray. 'Banned, baby, banned.'

'It shouldn't be played in here of all places. It's the music of the master race.

It's. .h.i.tler's favourite composer.'

'Actually,' said a familiar voice, 'Hitler's favourite composer was Franz Lehar.'

Ace looked up to see that the Doctor had also joined them. He smiled and tipped his hat at Kitty before turning to address Butcher again. 'Lehar is a composer of light operettas. Musical meringues, so to speak. Much more to the Fuhrer's taste than the highly spiced meats of Wagner. I believe Hitler's absolute favourite among Lehar's works was The Merry Widow The Merry Widow.'

'You seem to know a h.e.l.l of a lot about it,' said Butcher truculently, staring at the Doctor.

'Oh, I'm sure that's because he was a personal friend of the Fuhrer's,' said Kitty. 'They probably got together and had nut cutlets while listening to The The Merry Widow Merry Widow.' Butcher snorted with disgust and moved off. Kitty turned and smiled at the Doctor. 'Dr Smith, I believe. We haven't been properly introduced. A pleasure to meet a man who knows about music here on this barren rock.'

'Even if it's the music of the enemy?' said the Doctor, amus.e.m.e.nt dancing in his eyes.

'Well you never said you liked liked it, did you?' Kitty turned to Ace. 'So how did you two meet?' Before Ace could phrase an answer any one of a dozen facile lies and semi-truths that she had been forced to develop over the years they were interrupted by a gargantuan moan from Ray. The big drunken man was twitching, his face contorted with despair. it, did you?' Kitty turned to Ace. 'So how did you two meet?' Before Ace could phrase an answer any one of a dozen facile lies and semi-truths that she had been forced to develop over the years they were interrupted by a gargantuan moan from Ray. The big drunken man was twitching, his face contorted with despair.

'I just can't listen to this stuff any more,' he said, nodding at the record player from which the Wagner was still pouring. He turned abruptly away and lurched towards the door, people stumbling out of his path.

'Well that got rid of him,' said Ace. 'So I guess that rubbish is good for something.'

The Doctor smiled. 'I feel somebody ought to put the case for Wagner here.

I think the Liebestod is some of the most beautiful music ever written.'

'Oh G.o.d. Don't you start,' murmured Ace.

'So do I,' said Kitty Oppenheimer.

'However,' said the Doctor. 'I also recognise it's not the only only music.' music.'

Kitty smiled at him. 'So do I. Now would you excuse me? I think my husband is gesturing to me desperately.' Across the room Oppenheimer was indeed beckoning to her, and Kitty strolled over to join him, leaving the Doctor and Ace alone together for the first time since they had arrived at the party.

'So are you enjoying yourself, Ace?'

'Well, I like her. Kitty Oppenheimer. She's been nice to me.'

'Have you had the chance to make the acquaintance of anyone else?'25.

'Just that big drunk.'

'I'm afraid, given the state of the guests at this party, you need to be a little more specific.'

'That big bloke with the beret. Looks Chinese or Korean or something.'

'j.a.panese.'

'j.a.panese?'

'Yes. Ray Morita, a third-generation j.a.panese-American physicist of some considerable genius, who appears to be in the process of destroying himself with alcohol.'

'He certainly does. But listen Doctor, if he's j.a.panese I mean half j.a.panese or whatever shouldn't they have him locked up?'

The Doctor nodded grimly. 'Indeed, that is the government's current policy.

So perhaps it's not surprising he's drinking himself to death when you consider his entire family loyal Americans all have indeed been locked up in a detainment camp for the duration of the war.' He paused for a moment and gave Ace a curious look.

'What is it?' she said.

The Doctor smiled. 'Why Ace, you'd already heard about that, hadn't you?'

'Sure.'

'But how did you know about America's dubious policy of internment for its citizens of j.a.panese descent during World War Two?'

'There was a movie.'

'Ah, I see, excellent.'

'It had Dennis Quaid in it.'

'Good, good. Well in any case you're quite correct in a.s.suming that normally Ray would be behind bars. But because of his special abilities in science he is needed here. In short, he is allowed his freedom because he is helping Uncle Sam.'

Major Butcher, who had returned to the room, drifted close to them just in time to hear Ace say, 'Who the h.e.l.l is Uncle Sam?'

Before Butcher had a chance to consider Ace's anachronistic remark, there was the sound of angry voices from outside. Butcher immediately moved to the nearest open window of the house. Outside, on the lawn, Oppenheimer was standing talking to another man. Both men were gesticulating, hands waving and elbows jerking, their voices rising in growing fiery. It looked as if they might come to blows at any moment. Butcher recognised the man with Oppenheimer, and he just smiled and turned away from the window. He didn't notice who took his place as soon as he vacated it. Ace, with the Doctor at her side.26.

Ace peered out the window. The voices of the men arguing had grown so loud that they were clearly audible in the house, even above Wagner and the roar of party conversation. Yet all the party guests seemed oblivious to the quarrel blazing so close at hand. And they didn't seem to just be politely ignoring it, either. They seemed genuinely uninterested. Ace turned to the open window, listening and trying to catch the thread of the argument outside.

The words hydrogen and atmosphere kept coming up.

The man quarrelling with Oppenheimer was heavy set, with dark wavy hair.

He had a face dominated by thick black eyebrows, with a big nose, big ears and fat cheeks, all of which seemed strangely at odds with his narrow, tapering chin. Like Oppenheimer, his face was flushed with drink and rage.

'Who is that?' she said.

The Doctor smiled thinly. His eyes were cold. 'Edward Teller.'

'Don't tell me, let me guess. He's a physicist.'

The Doctor looked at Ace and his smile grew wider, his eyes less cold. 'Yes, one of many who escaped here to America fleeing from the rise of the n.a.z.is in Europe. You do know who the n.a.z.is are?'

'Sure, they're the guys that Indiana Jones hates.' Ace smiled. She felt drunkenly witty and loquacious. 'I'm just kidding. Of course I know about World War Two and the n.a.z.is. And the j.a.panese. Did I ever tell you about that movie they showed us in school about dropping the atom bomb on j.a.pan?'

'Yes,' said the Doctor impatiently. 'The takings at the local kebab shop dropped for a year.'

'OK, so I told you the story. Maybe I repeat myself sometimes. Bad Ace.'

'In any event, Teller was one of those fleeing the n.a.z.is. He was born in Bu-dapest so the country he fled from was Hungary, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Teller is Jewish and, of course, the n.a.z.is made things very unpleasant for the Jews even before their policy of ma.s.s extermination got under way.

Anyway, Teller wisely fled the noisome rising tide and came to America where he made a dramatic impact in the field of theoretical physics, especially with his work on crystal symmetry. The Jahn-Teller effect.'

'Oh, that.'

The Doctor smiled at her sarcasm. 'All you need to know is that it deals with the interactions between nuclei and electrons.'

'I don't even need to know that.'

'Such discoveries got him into the Manhattan Project and involved with Oppenheimer here at Los Alamos.'

'Involved is putting it mildly,' said Ace, staring out at the two men arguing.

Oppenheimer looked like he wanted to throttle Teller, who stared sullenly back at him with bitter, scornful reproach. 'It's handbags at ten paces out there. What are they on about?'27.

The Doctor pursed his lips and frowned. 'Well, it's all somewhat technical, but as you know the plan here is to detonate the world's first atomic weapon.'

'Yes, I haven't forgotten that.'

The Doctor nodded at the two men standing in the garden. 'Well, our friends Teller and Oppenheimer are having a small disagreement about the consequences of detonating that weapon.'

'You mean,' Ace summoned up all her drunken rhetorical eloquence, 'like the political, social and economical consequences?'

'No,' said the Doctor. 'Oppenheimer thinks that when the bomb goes off the consequences will be a very large explosion and some nasty residue of radiation.'

'Well it's hard to find fault with that. What does Teller think?'

'That the explosion will set up a chain reaction that will devour all the hydrogen in the atmosphere and elsewhere, igniting it, like striking a giant match. A giant match that lights a giant fuse.'

Ace felt a cold thrill as she imagined the pile of explosive at the other end of that fuse. As if reading her mind, the Doctor said, 'Yes. Effectively it would turn the planet into one giant bomb. And thereby obliterate it.'

'It?'

'The planet Earth. In other words, destroying the world.'

'Not that old chestnut,' said Ace dismissively. But despite her bravado, she felt a strange rising chill in her solar plexus. She had faced Armageddon in a number of forms. But something about being here, on her home world, in a time that was almost her own, with the all too familiar threat of nuclear weapons at the heart of things, made the Doctor's words uniquely unsettling.

'Do they really think there's a chance of that happening?'

'Teller does and he's a very clever man. One of the top minds in his field.'

'But Oppenheimer doesn't take him seriously?'

'On the contrary, Oppenheimer takes him very seriously indeed.'

Ace looked out at the two men standing in the garden. They had fallen silent now, but they stared at each other with obstinate combative hatred, like two weary boxers huddled in their corners between rounds. 'Oppenheimer takes the threat seriously but he's going to go ahead anyway?'

'Yes.'

'Whew.' Ace stared curiously at Oppenheimer. The lanky figure looked strangely isolated, a man utterly alone in the world even as he stood here on the lawn of his own home, his wife close by and his colleague and antagonist standing a mere few feet away. Ace felt sorry for him. She tried to imagine what it was like having the weight of such decisions on your shoulders, and her mind s.h.i.+ed away from the concept. She turned to the Doctor. 'But they didn't, did they?'28.

He was staring out the window. He didn't seem to hear her. 'They didn't, did they?' she repeated. He turned and looked at her quizzically.

'Didn't what?' he said.

'Set off a chain reaction that burned up all the hydrogen in the atmosphere.'

'And the oceans.'

'And the oceans. And blow up the whole world. They didn't do that, did they?'

She glanced around at the crowd of drunken people, merry or maudlin, talking loudly all around them. 'This lot managed to blow up an atom bomb all right, but it just went off in the middle of the desert and everything was all right except for any poor little blighters of desert animals who were in the blast zone, and they tootled off, I mean the scientists not the poor little blighters, and built another one and dropped it on j.a.pan. On Hiros.h.i.+ma and that other city that n.o.body can ever remember the name of.'

'Nagasaki.'

'Nagasaki, yeah. They burned up all those j.a.panese babies and women and men. But they didn't burn the whole world, did they?'

The Doctor gazed at her bleakly. Ace felt a small surge of panic. 'Oh come on,' she said. 'I don't know a lot of history, but I know that much.'

The Doctor was about to reply, but before he could do so a loud outraged yelp echoed from across the room. It came from Klaus Fuchs, who was staring at the large, swaying figure of Cosmic Ray Morita coming back through the door of the living room. Ray had a large yellow leather bag swinging by a strap off one shoulder. The bag was an odd, square shape and had the word 'Cosmic' embroidered on it in jagged red lightning-bolt lettering. Carrying the bag, Ray swayed inexorably towards the record player.

Ever since he'd left the room, Fuchs had been tending to the record player, which seemed to Ace to require the disc being changed or turned over every three minutes or so. She was accustomed to the seventy minutes plus of a CD, so these weird, small black records here seemed to end almost as soon as they started. As much as she loathed the cla.s.sical music and longed for it to be over, the constant interruptions made it worse.

Fuchs, however, seemed to enjoy the perpetual responsibility of feeding the music to the machine, and he'd been happily fussing over it, selecting discs from a large brown cardboard alb.u.m.

Now Fuchs was standing among the physicists chatting at the fireplace, one casual elbow on the mantelpiece between the martini gla.s.ses, a debonair cigarette clamped between his lips. The cigarette dropped from his lips and he looked hastily around him, like a cornered animal. Ace realised his predica-ment. He was on the other side of the room, far away from the record player, which stood beside the door.29.

Ray on the other hand reached the record player in a few unsteady steps.

Ace decided that although she didn't much like the big man, she liked his nickname. Cosmic suited him, with his s.p.a.ced-out, otherworldly demeanour.

The Liebestod was still thrilling and thrumming and surging from the record player as Ray reached down gently and with great care and lifted the playing arm off the record. The music stopped instantly. Ray delicately moved the playing arm back and lifted the record off the player with one big hand.

In sharp contrast to his treatment of the playing arm, Ray handled the record itself with brutal negligence. On the far side of the room Fuchs let out another scandalised yelp. He was still trying to force his way through the crowd towards Ray. Cosmic Ray just gave him a lazy smile and let the record go spinning out of his hand like a small, clumsy frisbee. Fuchs screamed as the black disc went spinning through the air towards the white wall of the room. It struck the wall and shattered with a brittle sound, showering to the floor in a number of ungainly angular pieces.

Cosmic Ray's grin widened. 'I hate to do that to a perfectly good piece of sh.e.l.lac. But the music that was pressed into those grooves deserved to die.

Now, hip cats and kitties, open your ears to some music that deserves to live live.'

He opened the yellow leather bag and Ace saw why it was shaped like a cube. Inside was a box of funny black records in their square cardboard covers. With great reverence and enormous care, Cosmic Ray extracted one such record and placed it on the turntable. Fuchs, who had stopped halfway across the room when the Wagner record had broken on the wall, was watching with frigid contempt. He muttered with disgust something that sounded like ' En-tarte En-tarte music,' and pointedly turned his back as Ray proceeded to fiddle with the tone arm of the record player. music,' and pointedly turned his back as Ray proceeded to fiddle with the tone arm of the record player.

Ray removed the needle from the arm and threw it aside with a look of cool contempt that matched Fuchs' own. 'Don't know what you're so cooked about, Klaus baby,' he said. 'That needle you were using was worn out anyway. It should have been replaced about ten records ago you dumb Deutsche clown.

It was destroying the record. Killing the very thing you loved. Very Very Wagner-ian.' Ray grinned as he bent over the record bag, fat thighs bulging from his shorts in a disgusting display of flab. He extracted a small yellow silk pouch, from which he took a new needle. He fastened the needle in the tone arm and set the arm on the record, standing back with a look of drunken rapture on his face. Wagner-ian.' Ray grinned as he bent over the record bag, fat thighs bulging from his shorts in a disgusting display of flab. He extracted a small yellow silk pouch, from which he took a new needle. He fastened the needle in the tone arm and set the arm on the record, standing back with a look of drunken rapture on his face.

'This is more like it,' he said as the needle rasped its way into the groove.