"
"It'll be all right," Pitov assured him. "The bugs have all been chased
out years ago."
"Not out of those generators in the rocket. They're new." He fumbled in
his coat pocket for his pipe and tobacco. "I never thought I'd run
another nuclear-bomb test, as long as I lived."
"Lee!" Pitov was shocked. "You mustn't call it that. It isn't that, at
all. It's purely a scientific experiment."
"Wasn't that all any of them were? We made lots of experiments like
this, back before 1969." The memories of all those other tests, each
ending in an Everest-high mushroom column, rose in his mind. And the end
result--the United States and the Soviet Union blasted to rubble, a
whole hemisphere pushed back into the Dark Ages, a quarter of a billion
dead. Including a slim woman with graying blonde hair, and a little red
dog, and a girl from Odessa whom Alexis Pitov had been going to marry.
"Forgive me, Alexis. I just couldn't help remembering. I suppose it's
this shot we're going to make, tonight. It's so much like the other
ones, before--" He hesitated slightly. "Before the Auburn Bomb."
There; he'd come out and said it. In all the years they'd worked
together at the _Instituto Argentino de Ciencia Fisica_, that had been
unmentioned between them.
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