< previous page page_12 next page >

Page 12
sail, muscled into a horizontal position, and allowed to settle in the black water. It sinks into the bottom mud of the bay until only half its girth can be seen in the dim light at sixty feet.
A deep-sea researcher by profession, Karmann finds the shallow, barren waters of Hudson Bay unappealing. He floats in the frigid water, head haloed by the helmet-mounted halogen lamp through whose beam the disturbed silt roils like thunderclouds. The navy divers are careless with their tethers. Karmann, a GKNT scientist well aware of how dangerous the shabbily designed Device really is, has tried to warn them that the attachments to the Device were all powered by a plutonium reactor.
Not once, but many times since the Pravda entered this Canadian inland sea he has told the deployment crew: "Plutonium kills people." But fascists seem oblivious to danger.
Krasny calls the Device Soyuz"Union." Vainglorious bastard that he is. Vainglorious and safe. Krasny is aboard the Pravda.
Chilled despite the centimeter-thick wet suit he wears, Karmann swims slowly down toward the Device. The engineering must have been done by Orgonev or one of his students. No one else in Russia is still working on high-yield nuclear weapons design.
There is no point in such thoughts, Karmann reminds himself I no longer matter. It is Soyuz that matters to Russiaor so they tell us. Soyuz transcends all our little problems.
Actually, it is a remarkable piece of work. The old fascist, Karmann thinks, has taken an obsolete warhead and turned it into a political world-shaker. If the numbers he crunched while Pravda crept from Kola, slipped under the polar ice, emerged into the Davis Strait, and finally crept into Hudson Bay are correct (and they area physicist of Orgonev's stature did not make mistakes), then the Device's yield is eighty megatons.
The United States has stopped hardening its weapons and

 
< previous page page_12 next page >