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plutonium than there is in all the nuclear bombs in the world.’
    Ryder lit a Gauloise while he assimilated this. ‘You did say what I thought you did say?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What are they going to do with this stuff?’
    ‘That’s what the private companies would like to know. The half-life of this plutonium is about twenty-six thousand years. Radioactively, it’ll still be lethal in a hundred thousand years. Quite a legacy we’re leaving to the unborn. If mankind is still around in a hundred thousand years, which no scientist, economist, environmentalist or philosopher seriously believes, can’t you just see them cursing their ancestors some three thousand generations removed?’
    ‘They’ll have to handle that problem without me. It’s this generation I’m concerned with. Is this the first time nuclear fuel has been stolen from a plant?’
    ‘God, no. The first forced entry I know of, but others may have been hushed up. We’re touchy about those things, much more touchy than the Europeans who admit to several terrorist attacks on their reactor stations.’
    ‘Tell the man straight out.’ Ferguson sounded weary. ‘Theft of plutonium goes on all the time. I know it, Dr Jablonsky knows it. The Office of Nuclear Safeguards–that’s the watchdog of theAEC–knows about it best of all, but comes over all coy when questioned, even although their director did admit to a Congressional House energy sub-committee that perhaps one half of one per cent of fuel was unaccounted for. He didn’t seem very worried about it. After all, what’s one half of one per cent, especially when you say it quickly? Just enough to make enough bombs to wipe out the United States, that’s all. The great trusting American public know nothing about it–what they don’t know can’t frighten them. Do I sound rather bitter to you, Sergeant?’
    ‘You do a bit. You have reason to?’
    ‘I have. One of the reasons I resented your security report. There’s not a security chief in the country that doesn’t feel bitter about it. We spend billions every year preventing nuclear war, hundreds of millions from preventing accidents at the reactor plants but only about eight millions on security. The probability of those occurrences are in the reverse order. The AEC say they have up to ten thousand people keeping track of material. I would laugh if I didn’t feel like crying. The fact of the matter is they only know where it is about once a year. They come around, balance books, count cans, take samples and feed the figures into some luckless computer that usually comes up with the wrong answers. Not the computer’s fault–not the inspector’s. There’s far too few of them and the system is ungovernable anyway.
    ‘The AEC, for instance, say that theft by employees, because of the elaborate built-in protection and detection systems, is impossible. They say this in a loud voice for public consumption. It’s rubbish. Sample pipes lead off from the plutonium run-off spigot from the canyon–for testing strength, purity and so forth. Nothing easier than to run off a little plutonium into a small flask. If you’re not greedy and take only a small amount occasionally the chances are that you can get off with it almost indefinitely. If you can suborn two of the security guards–the one who monitors the TV screens of the cameras in the sensitive areas and the person who controls the metal detector beam you pass through on leaving–you can get off with it for ever.’
    ‘This has been done?’
    ‘The government doesn’t believe in paying high salaries for what is basically an unskilled job. Why do you think there are so many corrupt and crooked cops? If you don’t mind me saying so.’
    ‘I don’t mind. This is the only way? Stealing the stuff in dribs and drabs. Hasn’t been done on a large scale?’
    ‘Sure it has. Again, nobody’s talking. As far back as nineteen-sixty-four, when the Chinese exploded their first nuclear bomb, it was