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– if the Russians have learned how your bus scatters its goodies over the earth?’ He glared at the scientist with the icy stare he had perfected during years of withering interrogation of civil servants.
    â€˜No, I’m not saying that, Home Secretary,’ Peter Joyce replied. ‘It’s not that easy. The problem is this. Suppose one of our missiles is fired at Moscow; the observers manning the Soviet defences round the city would see four objects falling very rapidly out of the sky towards them. Only there wouldn’t be four objects, in fact. There would be six, but two would be invisible, do you follow? So the Russians would most probably attack those four “warheads” and destroy them; but seconds later the two real bombs would have detonated and flattened most of Moscow.’
    The Home Secretary’s brow knitted in a frown.
    â€˜So,’ Joyce continued, ‘if the Russians know how many objects they should be seeing, and know the exact pattern in which they started their journey downwards from space, they might just be able to do some very clever calculations. With a high-powered computer they could feed in the positions and the trajectories of the objects they
can
see, and calculate the exact positions of the ones they
can’t
.’
    He could sense that his message had struck home painfully.
    â€˜And if they can calculate where the bombs are, they can shoot them down even if they can’t actually see them?’ the Prime Minister asked incredulously.
    Peter Joyce nodded uncomfortably. ‘It
is
possible, Prime Minister,’ he conceded.
    â€˜Good God!’ the First Sea Lord muttered under his breath. Admiral Barker had a sudden vision of his prized new weapon, designed to keep the Royal Navy’s proudly-held nuclear deterrent viable, being humiliatingly still-born.
    â€˜And if the Russians believe they can defeat our nuclear deterrent,’ the Prime Minister continued, still thinking through the implications of what he had been told, ‘then it won’t be a deterrent any more. It won’t stop them launching a nuclear attack on us if they feel like it.’
    â€˜And it’ll be a complete waste of hundreds of millions of pounds of tax-payers’ money,’ the Home Secretary grunted. The political implications of that would not be lost on the Prime Minister.
    â€˜Now, look here,’ intervened Field-Marshal Buxton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, annoyed at the panic around the table and the paranoia of his naval subordinate, who appeared to fear most the loss of a role and the consequent diminution of his own service. ‘You’re assuming one hell of a lot from the Russians, Mr Joyce. If they did decide to develop a counter to Skydancer, it would cost them a packet, wouldn’t it?’
    â€˜Well, it wouldn’t be cheap,’ Peter conceded.
    â€˜And they’re already up to their eyes in financial problems, building the BMD system to defend against the older missiles, so they’d have to be pretty certain they could beat our new warheads before they decided to spend the money on it.’
    â€˜You could be right,’ the scientist nodded.
    â€˜So, what are you saying, Field-Marshal?’ the Prime Minister interjected. ‘You think we should forget all about it?’
    â€˜Certainly not, Prime Minister. What I’m saying isthat the Russians would need to be convinced that the Skydancer plans they have, if they have them at all, are the right ones. Before they pour money into new computer systems, they’d need to be certain that the problem the computer is intended to solve is the right problem, if you get me.’
    â€˜In other words,’ Peter Joyce chipped in, ‘if we could persuade them that they’ve been sold a pup, that the plans are fakes, then they wouldn’t be prepared to waste their money.’
    â€˜Precisely. Ivan’s so short of the readies at the moment,