Griffin's Egg

"Will the one device be enough?" Sakai asked.  "To clean up the crater, I mean."

The woman's attention was fixed on Siegfried's progress.  In a distracted tone she said, "Mr. Sakai, putting a chain across the access road would be enough to clean up this site.  The crater walls would shield anyone working nearby from the gamma radiation, and it would take no effort at all to reroute hopper overflights so their passengers would not be exposed.  Most of the biological danger of a reactor meltdown comes from alpha radiation emitted by particulate radioisotopes in the air or water.  When concentrated in the body, alpha-emitters can do considerable damage; elsewhere, no.  Alpha particles can be stopped by a sheet of paper.  So long as you keep a reactor out of your ecosystem, it's as safe as any other large machine.  Burying a destroyed reactor just because it is radioactive is u

"Is this the shaft you're looking for?" Gunther asked.

"Yes.  Walk it down to the bottom.  It's not far."

Gunther switched on Siegfried's chestlight, and sank a roller relay so the cable wouldn't snag.  They went down.  Finally Izmailova said, "Stop.  That's far enough."  He gently set the device down and then, at her direction, flicked the arming toggle.  "That's done," Izmailova said.  "Bring your unit back.  I've given you an hour to put some distance between the crater and yourself."  Gunther noticed that the remotes, on automatic, had already begun walking away.

"Um ... I've still got fuel rods to load."

"Not today you don't.  The new reactor has been taken back apart and hauled out of the blasting zone."

Gunther thought now of all the machinery being disassembled and removed from the industrial park, and was struck for the first time by the operation's sheer extravagance of scale.  Normally only the most sensitive devices were removed from a blasting area.  "Wait a minute.  Just what kind  of monster explosive are you pla

There was a self-conscious cockiness to Izmailova's stance.  "Nothing I don't know how to handle.  This is a diplomat-class device, the same design as saw action five years ago.  Nearly one hundred individual applications without a single mechanical failure.  That makes it the most reliable weapon in the history of warfare.  You should feel privileged having the chance to work with one."

Gunther felt his flesh turn to ice.  "Jesus Mother of God," he said.  "You had me handling a briefcase nuke."

"Better get used to it.  Westinghouse Lunar is putting these little babies into mass production.  We'll be cracking open mountains with them, blasting roads through the highlands, smashing apart the rille walls to see what's inside."  Her voice took on a visionary tone.  "And that's just the begi

His dismay must have shown in his stance, for Izmailova laughed.  "Think of it as weapons for peace."

"You should've been there!" Gunther said.  "It was unfuckabelievable.  The one side of the crater just disappeared.  It dissolved into nothing.  Smashed to dust.  And for a real long time everything glowed!  Craters, machines, everything.  My visor was so close to overload it started flickering.  I thought it was going to burn out.  It was nuts."  He picked up his cards.  "Who dealt this mess?"

Krishna gri

Hiro scowled down at his cards.  "I've just died and gone to Hell."

"Trade you," Anya said.

"No, I deserve to suffer."

They were in Noguchi park by the edge of the central lake, seated on artfully scattered boulders that had been carved to look water-eroded.  A kneehigh forest of baby birches grew to one side, and somebody's toy sailboat floated near the impact cone at the center of the lake.  Honeybees mazily browsed the clover.

"And then, just as the wall was crumbling, this crazy Russian bitch--"

Anya ditched a trey.  "Watch what you say about crazy Russian bitches."

"--goes zooming up on her hopper ..."

"I saw it on television," Hiro said.  "We all did.  It was news.  This guy who works for Nissan told me the BBC gave it thirty seconds."  He'd broken his nose in karate practice, when he'd flinched into his instructor's punch, and the contrast of square white bandage with shaggy black eyebrows gave him a surly, piratical appearance.

Gunther discarded one.  "Hit me.  Man, you didn't see anything.  You didn't feel the ground shake afterwards."

"Just what was Izmailova's co

Gunther shrugged.

"You do remember the Briefcase War?" Hiro said sarcastically.  "Half of Earth's military elites taken out in a single day?  The world pulled back from the brink of war by bold action?  Suspected terrorists revealed as global heroes?"

Gunther remembered the Briefcase War quite well.  He had been nineteen  at the time, working on a Finlandia Geothermal project when the whole world had gone into spasm and very nearly destroyed itself.  It had been a major factor in his decision to ship off the planet.  "Can't we ever talk about anything but politics?  I'm sick and tired of hearing about Armageddon."

"Hey, aren't you supposed to be meeting with Hamilton?" Anya asked suddenly.

He glanced up at the Earth.  The east coast of South America was just crossing the dusk terminator.  "Oh, hell, there's enough time to play out the hand."

Krishna won with three queens.  The deal passed to Hiro.  He shuffled quickly, and slapped the cards down with angry little punches of his arm.  "Okay," Anya said, "what's eating you?"

He looked up angrily, then down again and in a muffled voice, as if he had abruptly gone bashful as Krishna, said, "I'm shipping home."

"Home?"

"You mean to Earth?"

"Are you crazy?  With everything about to go up in flames? Why?"

"Because I am so fucking tired of the Moon.  It has to be the ugliest place in the universe."

"Ugly?"  Anya looked elaborately about at the terraced gardens, the streams that began at the top level and fell in eight misty waterfalls before reaching the central pond to be recirculated again, the gracefully winding pathways.  People strolled through great looping rosebushes and past towers of forsythia with the dreamlike skimming stride that made moonwalking so like motion underwater.   Others popped in and out of the office tu

"It looks like a shopping mall, but that's not what I'm talking about.  It's--"  He groped for words.  "It's like--it's what we're doing to this world that bothers me.  I mean, we're digging it up, scattering garbage about, ripping the mountains apart, and for what?"

"Money," Anya said.  "Consumer goods, raw materials, a future for our children.  What's wrong with that?"

"We're not building a future, we're building weapons."

"There's not so much as a handgun on the Moon.  It's an intercorporate development zone.  Weapons are illegal here."

"You know what I mean.  All those bomber fuselages, detonation systems, and missile casings that get built here, and shipped to low earth orbit.  Let's not pretend we don't know what they're for."