There is still much hostility, arising from fear that we are
testing a nuclear weapon."
The press and telecast services were well represented; there were close
to a hundred correspondents, from all over South America, from South
Africa and Australia, even one from Ceylon. They had three trucks, with
mobile telecast pickups, and when they saw who was approaching, they
released the two rocketry experts they had been quizzing and pounced on
the new victims.
Was there any possibility that negative-proton matter might be used as a
weapon?
"Anything can be used as a weapon; you could stab a man to death with
that lead pencil you're using," Pitov replied. "But I doubt if
negamatter will ever be so used. We're certainly not working on weapons
design here. We started, six years ago, with the ability to produce
negative protons, reverse-spin neutrons, and positrons, and the
theoretical possibility of assembling them into negamatter. We have just
gotten a fifty kilogramme mass of nega-iron assembled. In those six
years, we had to invent all our techniques, and design all our
equipment. If we'd been insane enough to want to build a nuclear weapon,
after what we went through up North, we could have done so from memory,
and designed a better--which is to say a worse--one from memory in a few
days.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25