The Apothecary Page 0,82
the air, and the sinister grey machine appeared. It hovered near the bomb shed like a giant angry insect. The sentry clutched his white cap tightly to his head against the rotors’ churning wind. Then the helicopter settled down, blowing snow into the cold air.
Two Soviet officers climbed out, one wearing a pilot’s helmet and goggles, followed by two men in civilian clothes. One of the civilians was tall and elegant, even in heavy winter clothes, and I recognised him with a start.
It was Danby, and with him was the German with the scar.
The fifth and last man was young and thin, in a long nubbly fur coat and a grey wool hat. He had a restless, distracted manner, and longish hair sticking out from the hat. From the albatross’s excitement beside me, I guessed this was Andrei Sakharov, the Russian genius Count Vili had wanted to see. In his gloved hands, the young physicist held a small metal box.
The helicopter pilot had brought a thermos of something, and the sentry sat down happily on a little three-legged stool and turned his attention to it. The older military officer, whose face was tanned and tightened like the leather on an old pair of boots, unlocked the door to the shed with several different keys and a combination lock, and the men from the helicopter all went into the shed and closed the door behind them.
I looked to the owl, and he nodded his snowy head. This was my moment to try to find out how much time we had. I flew around the shed looking for a way in, and Benjamin followed me. Luckily the sentry was too preoccupied with his soup to notice us fluttering by. Finally I found a narrow gap between the wall and the roof and squeezed my body through with some difficulty, finding a spot to rest in the eaves. Benjamin’s skylark body was too big to get through, but I could see him perched outside. I was glad he was there.
I couldn’t see well inside the shed. It was dim, and one of the officers held a flashlight. On the floor in the centre of the room was a long, horizontal cylinder with a coffinlike box lying alongside it. The box was about eight feet long, and dull grey. I had expected it to have a round nose and tail fins, like the bombs we had dropped on Japan, but they weren’t dropping this one from a plane. It didn’t even need to be mobile. It made no noise and had no markings, but it had an ominous, deadly aura. I didn’t like being in the close space with it.
Sakharov placed his small metal box at one end of the bomb. The young helicopter pilot opened a toolbox for him reverently, as if assisting a famous surgeon. Sakharov chose a wrench.
Danby walked around the bomb, looking it over. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s the design I provided?” I could tell he was looking for praise, and he seemed as pathetic as someone in one of his Latin classes, bragging about having done extra credit. Sakharov said something in rapid Russian, under his breath.
“Don’t call me a traitor!” Danby complained.
“I believe you fit the very definition of a traitor,” Sakharov said, attaching a fitting on the little metal box to the bomb. “And if you understand Russian, why must we use English?”
“I’m a little rusty,” Danby said. “I understand more than I speak.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“Please, comrades,” the senior officer said. “We have important work here.”
Sakharov tightened a small bolt, then straightened and stood. “The design is this,” he said, with clear contempt for the traitor who wasn’t a physicist and didn’t speak Russian. “In the atomic bomb, we split the atom. This is called fission. In this new bomb, the hydrogen bomb, we also split the atom, and use the energy produced to combine the nuclei of two atoms. This is called fusion. Then we use the energy released to make a second fission reaction, which will be twenty times the size of the explosion that destroyed Hiroshima. So yes, my idea is similar to what the Americans have given to the English military. But it is not the design you stole from them—which was flawed, at any rate, in ways I don’t believe you understood. It was not necessary for you to be here, as I have said. The Americans and I have come to similar conclusions. This is because there is only