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whiff of plutonium oxide, and you’re living on borrowed time. They visited four other rooms: a furnace room with another dry box, a hot cell, a computer room, and a machine room, all crammed with high-tech equipment that Applenu and Drafton explained to them.
    “If we had equipment like that on the Manhattan Project, we’d have finished the bomb a year-or-two sooner,” Surling said. The kid didn’t respond, and Surling wondered if he knew what the Manhattan Project was. He laughed. “I’ll make history twice: I was in on the first bomb in the forties of last century, and now I’ll be on the team that makes the first free-enterprise bomb in this century.” Surling shook his head. “Nuclear science, my life’s work, it’s a perilous panacea.”
    “We always knew that,” Reedan said, “the bomb versus the reactor. But with nuclear reactors, we’ve got a chance to get free of Middle Eastern oil. With nuclear energy, we’ve got a chance to beat the greenhouse effect and global warming.”
    “Only if we can get people to believe in the panacea. The environmental crazies refuse to believe, and their propaganda and lies make it hard for everyone else to believe, so we scientists are not only to blame for the perils, but we don’t get credit for the benefits.”
    “We’re not to blame.”
    If he was like most scientists these days, Surling thought, he never considered it; he didn’t think about anything beyond what his computer-generated thoughts registered. “You don’t believe scientists are to blame, huh, son? Scientists go around opening up one Pandora’s Box after another, looking for the panaceas, the magic cure-alls for the mess we’ve made of the world. As soon as a box is open, they’re off trying to wedge open a new box to get the jump on their colleagues. And while they’re off somewhere else, some asshole, who also calls himself a scientist, is turning their panaceas into the Love Canal. Or that town Bhopal in India, that got rained on by cyanide when Union Carbide’s technological panacea went haywire. And in the fifties, before you were born, those poor bastards out in Utah got showered by atomic fallout. Later, the Ukrainians got a similar dose from Chernobyl. A whole lot of panaceas have morphed into deadly perils.”
    Without his glasses, he couldn’t read the expression on young Reedan’s face, although it probably didn’t have much to say. “I’ll grant you that most times those assholes are bureaucrats, but they are scientist-type bureaucrats. Now the panacea turned peril we’ve got here is the most dangerous of all: dime store nuclear weapons for two-bit dictators.”
    “I don’t see how all scientists can be blamed.”
    He doesn’t see, Surling thought. He shrugged. “So another country gets an atom bomb and starts World War Three. We knew it could happen.”
    Reedan appeared ready to protest, but instead said, “What about us, you and me? Like, where are we, for instance?”
    Surling slipped on his wire-rimmed glasses and studied Reedan. The kid didn’t seem to know how to take the grouchy professor. “Where are we? That’s a good question for the world in general. Where are we mentally? Where are we historically? I’d say we’re pretty fucked up.” He faked a smile. “Where are you and I geographically? I’d say we’re east of the Mississippi River.”
    Reedan told about his capture and the flight from Miami in an eight-passenger plane, all windows shuttered. They landed at a small airport with no traffic that he could hear, and they blindfolded him and drove here, a fifteen-to-twenty-minute drive.
    Surling thought about his own “capture” in Philadelphia. An eighty-four-year-old professor should know better. Young blonde shows up at the hotel, says she’s a lawyer who works for Margine Nuclear Technology, says she’s there for Lormes, who couldn’t make it for dinner and would see him at the plant in the morning. She pays for drinks and a great dinner at