No. Cathy set the paper down and sipped at her coffee. Not possible. Not her Jack.

It was the last hour of the last leg in the manufacturing process. Ghosn and Fromm watched the lathe with what looked like detachment, but was in both cases barely controlled excitement. The Freon liquid being sprayed on the rotating metal prevented their seeing the product whose final manufacture was underway. That didn't help, even though both knew that seeing would not have helped in the least. The part of the plutonium mass being machined was hidden from their sight by other metal, and even if that had been otherwise, they both knew that their eyes were too coarse an instrument to detect imperfections. Both watched the machine read-out of the computer systems. Tolerances indicated by the machine were well within the twelve angstroms specified by Herr Doktor Fromm. They had to believe the computer, didn't they?

"Just a few more centimeters," Ghosn said, as Bock and Qati joined them.

"You've never explained the Secondary part of the unit," the Commander said. He'd taken to calling the bomb 'the unit'.

Fromm turned, not really grateful for the distraction, though he knew he should be. "What do you wish to know?"

"I understand how the Primary works, but not the Secondary," Qati said, simply and reasonably.

"Very well. The theoretical side of this is quite straightforward, once you understand the principle. That was the difficult part, you see, discovering the principle. It was thought at first that making the Secondary work was simply a matter of temperature - that is what distinguishes the center of a star, Ja? Actually it is not, the first theoreticians overlooked the matter of pressure. That is rather strange in retrospect, but pioneering work is often that way. The key to making the Secondary work is managing the energy in such a way as to convert energy into pressure at the same time as you use its vast heat, and also to change its direction by ninety degrees. That is no small task when you are talking about redirecting seventy kilotons of energy," Fromm said smugly. "However, the belief that to make Secondary function is a matter of great theoretical difficulty, that is a fiction. The real insight Ulam and Teller had was a simple one, as most great insights are. Pressure is temperature. What they discovered - the secret - is that there is no secret. Once you understand the principles involved, what remains is just a question of engineering. Making the bomb work is computationally, not technically, demanding. The difficult part is to make the weapon portable. That is pure engineering," Fromm said again.

"Soda straws?" Bock asked, knowing that his countryman wanted to be asked about that. He was a smug bastard.

"I cannot know for sure, but I believe this to be my personal innovation. The material is perfect. It is light, it is hollow, and it is easily twisted into the proper configuration." Fromm walked over to the assembly table and returned with one. "The base material is polyethylene, and as you see, we have coated the outside with copper and the inside with rhodium. The length of the "straw" is sixty centimeters, and the inside diameter is just under three millimeters. Many thousands of them surround the Secondary, in bundles twisted one hundred eighty degrees into a geometric shape called a helix. A helix is a useful shape. It can direct energy while retaining its ability to radiate heat in all directions."