A thousand miles north and east of Mirgorod, at six in the morning Vayarmalond Eastern Time, Professor Yakov Khyrbysk hurried across the floor of an underground cavern deep inside a mountain. The cavern was as wide as a football field and bright as day: a hundred brilliant fluorescent tubes burned overhead in the ceiling of raw black rock. Their light splashed off the concrete floor, a grey-white dazzle. The cavern was empty except for one flat-roofed building, little more than a large shed, sitting right out in the centre of the echoing space: a crude temporary construction of boards screwed to a steel frame, a cubic carton with sixty-foot edges. Thick rubber-sleeved cables trailed hundreds of feet across the ground towards it. Around the shed the concrete floor was smudged and dirtied with feathered spills of black, as if dark ashes had been scattered there.
Khyrbysk pushed open the door and entered. A dozen men and women were working inside, standing at workbenches. Control panel arrays. Dials and gauges. They all looked up when he came in. They had the pale drawn faces of people who have been working all night. Spotlights on tripods cast harsh shadows.
‘Good morning,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Please. Carry on.’
Every surface in the room was covered with a layer of fine graphite dust: the technicians’ white coats were smeared graphite grey; permanent graphite shadows collected in every crease and fold. Khyrbysk could taste the graphite in the air on his tongue. It made his skin dry and silk-smooth. The interior of the shed was covered with a skin of slate, ceiling, walls and floor. Khyrbysk picked his way with care: graphite dust made the floor treacherously slippery.
Hektor Shulmin was in a huddle in the far corner with Leon Ferenc. Shulmin saw Khyrbysk come in and waved to him cheerily.
‘Yakov!’ he called. ‘Come to see your baby waking up?’
Khyrbysk ignored him.
In the centre of the room, standing on a rubber sheet on a low platform, was another cube–a cube inside the cube–gleaming coal-black under the spotlights. It was a stack of blocks of pure graphite, sixty layers of blocks, rising twenty-five feet high and weighing almost three hundred tons. Half the blocks were solid bricks, but the other half had been carefully and precisely hollowed out. The hollowed graphite blocks formed a three-dimensional cellular lattice within the cube, and each cell in the lattice contained a small, neat gobbet of uranium.
From a rubber-sheeted scaffold over the stack, rods of cadmium plunged down through the black cube. Three men on the scaffold operated the mechanism, withdrawing the cadmium rods one by one with painful slowness. They had barrels of cadmium salt solution ready, to flood the cube if anything went wrong. They called themselves the suicide squad.
Khyrbysk went across to the desk from where Ambroz Teleki was supervising the operation. The neutron counters made their quiet trickling clicking noise.
‘One more rod will do it,’ said Teleki. ‘The reaction will become self-sustaining. It will not level off. We were waiting for you.’
Khyrbysk studied the dials.
‘Then do it,’ he said. ‘Do it, Ambroz. Do it.’
Teleki made a sign to the suicide squad. One of them turned a bakelite knob on a panel one notch forward. Then another.
The noise of the counters went faster and faster, the clicks tumbling over one another, a clattering rattle that turned into a steady hiss, a white waterfall of sound. The needles on the dials swung fully round to the right, hit their limit and stopped. But the pen on the chart recorder continued to rise, higher and higher, tracing a beautiful exponential curve.
A ripple of applause went round the room. The technicians broke into quiet chatter.
Khyrbysk watched the curve on the chart climb higher. Still higher.
‘Say the word, Yakov,’ said Teleki, ‘and we’ll drop the Shinn Rod in to close it off.’
Khyrbysk said nothing. His eyes were fixed on the rising graph. His mouth was dry. His hands were trembling. He let the reaction run on, faster and faster, hotter and hotter. The flow of neutrons becoming a roar. A flood.
He was Yakov Khyrbysk, father of stars.
‘Yakov?’ said Teleki anxiously, touching his arm. ‘Yakov. When you are ready, please.’
Khyrbysk paid him no attention. The technicians’ chatter fell quiet.
Seconds passed. Long seconds.
‘Yakov!’ said Teleki again.
Then at last Khyrbysk raised his arm.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let it stop now.’
He watched the curve drop off and fall away.
Hektor Shulmin hustled over, drawing the ponderous Ferenc in his wake. He clapped Teleki on the shoulder.
‘Congratulations, Ambroz! A triumph! She works, man! She works! It’s beautiful.’ Shulmin produced a bottle of aquavit from his pocket and started handing it round. ‘So when are we going to go operational? Why not now? Everything is in place. How many tests do you need, after all? Ready is ready.’
Teleki looked tired.
‘Soon, Hektor,’ he said. ‘Soon.’
Khyrbysk took Shulmin by the elbow and drew him aside.
‘A word, please, Hektor,’ he said.
‘Of course, Yakov. Of course. I hear you were out on the Chaika the other night. A fishing trip, eh?’
‘You might say so, Hektor.’
‘A successful catch, I hope.’
‘The best.’
‘So friend Blegvad brought another package from our mysterious uncle in Mirgorod? How much? How much this time? Another hundred thousand? Tell me Yakov. I am agog. Our anonymous donor intrigues me. Our mystery philanthropist.’
‘A hundred thousand? No. More than that. Much more.’
‘How much Yakov? This time, how much?’
‘Thirty million.’
‘Thirty million? Thirty million?’ Shulmin looked suddenly serious. ‘Fuck, Yakov. We should be careful. We should go cautiously here. What are we getting into? Dukhonin himself never came up with such a sum, not all in one go. Thirty million! This is not a donation. This is a purchase. Who is this faceless, nameless man with thirty million roubles? What is he after? What did Blegvad say?’
‘Blegvad? Blegvad deals only with intermediaries. He has never met the man, never even spoken to him. But I have.’
‘Have you, by fuck!’
‘He telephoned me. In the middle of the night. And you are right, of course: he has made a request, a most courteous request. Not a purchase, he didn’t put it in those terms, not at all. He was most careful not to do that. He is a supporter of our cause, he says. An admirer of our ambition. He shares our common purpose. We are visionaries, doing great work, and he has just a small favour to ask of me.’
‘What does he want?’
‘Artillery shells. A hundred artillery shells.’
‘Is that it? The man’s an idiot. He could pick up a hundred shells anywhere.’
‘No. He wants the yellow shells.’
‘The yellow? He knows about them? How can he know about them?’
‘He does, Hektor. He was most specific. A hundred yellow shells. They are to be on a train to Mirgorod tonight. Leaving this very night. This can be done, Hektor? There is no problem? I don’t want to hear there is a problem. I agreed. Of course I agreed. I gave him an undertaking.’
‘Tonight? Yes, it can be done. No problem, Yakov. But—’
‘Then arrange it, Hektor. I want you to go with them. Travel with them to Mirgorod yourself and make sure they are delivered safely. There is to be no fuck-up, Hektor. No delay. It is a matter of extreme urgency. Our benefactor was absolutely explicit on that point.’