"Well, John?" Ryan asked after the first round of bets.

"You do put a lot of faith in my powers of observation, Jack. We'll know for sure in a couple of months, but I'd say it looks all right." He dealt four more cards. "Possible straight - possible straight flush to the Air Force. Your bet, sir."

"Another quarter." The Air Force sergeant felt lucky. The Israeli security guys have mellowed out some, too."

"How so?"

"Dr Ryan, the Israelis really know about security. Every time we fly over here, they put a wall up around the bird, y'know? This time the wall wasn't so high. I talked to a couple of 'em, and they're more relaxed - not officially, but personal, y'know? Used to be they hardly talked at all. Looked like a big difference to me, anyway."

Ryan smiled as he decided to fold. His eight, queen, and deuce weren't going anywhere. It never failed. You always got better data from sergeants than generals.

"What we have here," Ghosn said, flipping his book to the right page, "is essentially an Israeli copy of an American Mark-1a fission bomb. It's a boosted-fission design."

"What does that mean?" Qati asked.

"It means that tritium is squirted into the core just as the act of firing begins. That generates more neutrons and greatly increases the efficiency of the reaction. As a result, you need only a small amount of fissionable material "

"But?" Qati heard the 'but' coming.

Ghosn leaned back and stared at the core of the device. "But the mechanism to insert the boost material was destroyed by the impact. The kryton switches for the conventional explosives are no longer reliable and must be replaced. We have enough intact explosive blocks to determine their proper configuration, but manufacturing new ones will be very difficult. Unfortunately, I cannot depend on simply reverse-engineering the entire weapon. I must duplicate the original design theoretically first, determine what it can and cannot do, then re-invent the processes for fabrication. Do you have any idea what the original cost for that was?"

"No," Qati admitted, sure that he was about to learn.

"More than what it cost to land people on the moon. The most brilliant minds in human history were part of this process: Einstein, Fermi, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Teller, Alvarez, von Neumann, Lawrence - a hundred others! The giants of physics in this century. Giants."

"You're telling me you cannot do it?"

Ghosn smiled. "No, Commander, I am telling you that I can. What is the work of genius the first time is the work of a tinsmith soon thereafter. It required genius the first time because it was the first time, and also because technology was so primitive. All the calculations had to be done manually at first, on big mechanical calculators. All the work on the first hydrogen bomb was done on the first primitive computers - Eniac, I think it was called. But today?" Ghosn laughed. It really was absurd. "A videogame has more computing power than Eniac ever did. I can run the calculations on a high-end personal computer in seconds and duplicate what took Einstein months. But the most important thing is that they did not really know if it was possible. It is, and I know that! Next, they made records of how they proceeded. Finally, I have a template, and though I cannot reverse-engineer it entirely, I can use this as a theoretical model.