She shook her head. "And even now, I think, perhaps you heard wrong, perhaps there was a mistake." I stood up and leaned over her. "Rena, listen to me. There was no mistake. They're working on that casing. Tell me what you know!" She shook her head, weeping freely. I raged: "This is asinine! What can there be that you will not tell? The Company supply base that Slovetski hopes to raid to get a bomb? The officers he plans to bribe, to divert some other nation's quota of plutonium?" She took a deep breath. "Not that, Tom." "Then what? You don't mean to say that he has a complete underground separator plant--that he is making his own plutonium!" She was silent for a long time, looking at me. Then she sighed. "I will tell you, Tom. No, he does not have a plant. He doesn't need one, you see. He already has a bomb." * * * * * I straightened. "That's impossible." She was shaking her head. I protested, "But the--the _quotas_, Rena. The Company tracks every milligram of fissionable material from the moment it leaves the reactor! The inspections! Expediters with Geiger counters cover every city in the world!" "Not here, Tom. You remember that the Sicilians bombed Vesuvius? There is a high level of radioactivity all up and down the mountain. Not enough to be dangerous, but enough to mask a buried bomb." She closed her eyes. "And--well, you are right, Tom. I might as well tell you. In that same war, you see, there was a bomb that did not explode. You recall?" "Yes, but--" "But it couldn't explode, Tom. It was a dummy. Slovetski is a brilliant man. Before that bomb left the ground, he had diverted it. What went up was a hollow shell. What is left--the heart of the bomb--is buried forty feet beneath us." I stared at her, the room reeling. I was clutching at straws. I whispered, "But that was only a fission bomb, Rena. Slovetski--I heard him--he said a Thousand-kiloton bomb. That means hydrogen, don't you see? Surely he hasn't tucked one of those away." Rena's face was an agony of regret. "I do not understand all these things, so you must bear with me. I know this; there has been secret talk about the Milanese generators, and I know that the talk has to do with heavy water. And I am not stupid altogether, I know that from heavy water one can get what is used in a hydrogen bomb. And there is more, of course--lithium, perhaps? But he has that. You have seen it, I think. It is on a pedestal in this building." I sat down hard. It was impossible. But it all fell into place. Given the fissionable core of the bomb--plus the deuterium, plus the lithium-bearing shell--it was no great feat to put the parts together and make a Hell-bomb. The mind rejected it; it was too fantastic. It was frightful and terrifying, and worst of all was that something lurking at the threshold of memory, something about that bomb on display in the museum.... And, of course, I remembered.