It was cobalt. I bent to read the legend: This is the casing of the actual cobalt bomb that would have been used on Washington if the Short War had lasted one more day. It is calculated that, loaded with a Mark XII hydrogen-lithium bomb, sufficient radioactive Cobalt-60 would have been transmuted to end all life on Earth within thirty days.
I looked at it again, shuddering.
Oh, it was safe enough now. Until the hydrogen reaction could turn the ordinary cobalt sheathing into the deadly isotope-60, it was just such stuff as was used to alloy magnets and make cobalt glass. It was even more valuable as a museum piece than as the highly purified metal.
Score one for the Company. They'd put a stop to that danger. Nobody would have a chance to arm it and send it off now. No small war would find it more useful than the bomb it would need—and no principality would risk the Company's wrath in using it. And while the conspiracy might have planes and helicopters, the fissionable material was too rigidly under Company control for them to have a chance. The Super Hell-bomb would never go off. And that was something that might mean more to the Company's credit than anything else.
Maybe it was possible that in this controversy both sides were right. And, of course, there was the obvious corollary.
I continued my wandering, looking at the exhibits, the rubble of the museum's previous history. The cast of the Pompeiian gladiator, caught by the cinder-fall in full flight, his straining body reproduced to every contorted line by the incandescent ashes that had encased him. The carefully chipped and labeled samples from the lava flows of the past two centuries. The awe-inspiring photographs of Vesuvius in eruption.
But something about the bomb casing kept bothering me. I wandered around a bit longer and then turned back to the main exhibit. The big casing stretched upward and downward, with narrow stairs leading down to the lower level at its base. It was on the staircase I'd noticed something before. Now I hesitated, trying to spot whatever it was. There was a hint of something down there. Finally, I shrugged and went down to inspect it more closely.
Lying at the base was a heavy radiation glove. A used, workman's glove, dirty with grease. And as my eyes darted up, I could see that the bolts on the lower servicing hatches were half-unscrewed.