“Homemade atomic bombs in your back yard or basement lab,” said Mike the Angel.
Fitzhugh nodded emphatically. “Exactly. We can’t let that technique out until we’ve found a way to keep people from doing just that. The UN Government has inspection techniques that prevent anyone from building the conventional types of thermonuclear bombs, but not the pinch bomb.”
Mike the Angel thought over what Dr. Fitzhugh had said. Then he said: “That’s not all of it. Antarctica is isolated enough to keep that knowledge secret for a long time—at least until safeguards could be set up. Why take Snookums off Earth?”
“Snookums himself is dangerous,” Fitzhugh said. “He has a built-in ‘urge’ to experiment—to get data. We can keep him from making experiments that we know will be dangerous by giving him the data, so that the urge doesn’t operate. But if he’s on the track of something totally new....
“Well, you can see what we’re up against.” He thoughtfully blew a cloud of smoke. “We think he may be on the track of the total annihilation of matter.”
A dead silence hung in the air. The ultimate, the super-atomic bomb. Theoretically, the idea had been approached only in the assumption of contact between ordinary matter and anti-matter, with the two canceling each other completely to give nothing but energy. Such a bomb would be nearly fifty thousand times as powerful as the lithium-hydride pinch bomb. That much energy, released in a few millimicroseconds, would make the standard H-bomb look like a candle flame on a foggy night.
The LiH pinch bomb could be controlled. By using just a little of the stuff, it would be possible to limit the destruction to a neighborhood, or even a single block. A total-annihilation bomb would be much harder to control. The total annihilation of a single atom of hydrogen would yield over a thousandth of an erg, and matter just doesn’t come in much smaller packages than that.
“You see,” said Fitzhugh, “we had to get him off Earth.”
“Either that or stop him from experimenting,” Mike said. “And I assume that wouldn’t be good for Snookums.”
“To frustrate Snookums would be to destroy all the work we have put into him. His circuits would tend to exceed optimum randomity, and that would mean, in human terms, that he would be insane—and therefore worthless. As a machine, Snookums is worth eighteen billion dollars. The information we have given him, plus the deductions and computations he has made from that information, is worth....” He shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows? How can a price be put on knowledge?”