Temple

Seconds later, the three of them arrived at the rim of the gigantic mine and looked out over it.

'It's Ehrhardt and Weber, Uli said. 'They're taking the idol to the Supernova!'

'What do we do?' Race asked.

Uli said, 'The Supernova is inside the control booth hanging over the mine. There are only two bridges that lead out to it that one from the north, and the other one from the south, Somehow-we have to get to that cabin and disarm the Supernova'

'But how do we do that?

'To disarm the device,' Uli said, you have to enter a Code into the arming computer'

'What's the code?'

'I don't know,' Uli said sadly. 'No-one knows. No-one except Fritz Weber; He designed the device, so he's the only one who knows the disarming code.'

'Great;' Race said

Uli continued: 'Okay now, listen this is how I see it, I am the only one of g who can get to the control booth, If they see either of you coming down one of the cable bridges, they'll drop them immediately and isolate the booth. Then, if they don't get their money, they'll blow the Supernova.

But they're expecting me back soon believing that I have killed the two of you. When I get back, I will try to get to the control booth. Then I will try to... persuade Weber to disarm the device...'

What do we do in the meantime?' Race asked;

'For this to work,' Uli said, I must be able to deal with Weber alone. I need you two to take out Anistaze and the remaining men n the boat-house.

Exactly seven hundred feet above the floor of the mine, Dr Fritz Weber was punching buttons on a computer console.

Beside him, a laser cutting device was carefully going to work on the thyrium idol inside a vacuum-sealed chamber.

Behind Weber stood Ehrhardt. And behind Ehrhardt, standing in the exact centre of the control booth, stood a very imposing, six-foot-tall silver-and-glass device.

Two thermonuclear warheads—each approximately three feet in height and roughly conical in shape—were positioned inside a clear glass cylinder. They were arranged in what was known as an 'hourglass formation'—the upper warhead pointing downwards, the lower one pointing upwards—so that the whole device looked like an enormous egg-timer. In between the two warheads, at the throat of the hourglass, sat a skeletal frame made of titanium into which a subcritical mass of thyrium would be placed.

It was the Supernova.

A pair of cylindrical lead-lined containers each the size of an ordinary garbage bin sat beside the device. They were warhead capsules—monumentally strong, radiation-proof containers that were used to transport nuclear warheads in safety.

Now, as Weber knew, a conventional nuclear weapon required about 4.5 pounds of plutonium. The Supernova, on the other hand, according to his calculations, would require much less than that, only a quarter of a pound of thyrium.

Which was why now, with the aid of two Cray YMP supercomputers and a high-powered laser beam that could cut to within a thousandth of a millimetre, he was extracting a small cylindrical section of thyrium out of the idol.

Nuclear science had come a long way since J. Robert Oppenheimer's masterwork at Los Alamos in the 1940s.

With the aid of multi-tasking supercomputers like the two Crays, complex mathematical equations regarding the size, mass and force ratios of the radioactive core could be done in minutes. Inert gas purification proton enrichment and alpha-wave augmentation could all be done simultaneously.

And the mathematics of it all the crucial part, the part that had taken Oppenheimer and his band of masterminds six whole years to master with the aid of the most primitive computers-could be done by the YMPs in seconds.

In truth, the hardest part for Weber had been the actual construction of the device itself, Even with the aid of the supercomputers, it had still taken him more than two years to build.

While the laser cut through the stone in accordance with a preset weight-for-volume ratio based on the atomic weight of thyrium, Weber entered complex mathematical formulae on one of the nearby supercomputers.

Moments later, the laser cut the idol's head loudly and reverted to stand-by mode.

It was done.

Weber came over, flicked off the laser Cutter. Then, using a robotic arm—human arms being too inexact for such a task—he extracted the small cylindrical Section of thyrium from the base of the idol,

The section of thyrium was then placed inside a vacuum-sealed chamber and bombarded with uranium atoms and alpha waves, turning the tiny section of thyrium into a subcritical mass of the most potent substance ever to have existed on earth.

Moments later, the robotic arm carried the entire chamber over to the Supernova where with the utmost precision it slid the chamber—with the subcritical mass of thyrium inside it—into the titanium frame that was suspended in between the two thermonuclear warheads.

The Supernova was complete.