Sleet Sue

	I stared at the nothingness flowing past the crystal window.  
The emptiness was everything.  It was the essence of the 
microscopic atom; the power of the Universe; the ascent of the 
human intellect; the Fall; the pettiness and the overwhelming 
significance of the human condition.  Five billion years of 
evolution led to this: the capability to destroy everything time had 
bought; and it was completely invisible.
	I was vividly aware that I was one of the few human beings 
who had seen, who would ever see, this invisibility.  It was liquid 
deuterium and completely transparent. Nothing marked its passage 
through the quartz window in front of my face.  Yet I knew it was 
there, a racing fluid, not fluid by nature, but gas.  It had been 
cooled and compressed by pure will and clever thermo-mechanical 
design.  
	Deuterium is heavy hydrogen, the stuff of the Big Bang 
with an extra neutron.  Deuterium has a nucleus bound by the 
skimpiest act of nature.  If the nuclear force had been so, not thus, I 
would not be in the middle of the South Pacific on this God-
forsaken atoll, an island scarcely able to lift its bulk above the level 
of a steady sea.  I would not be part of the effort to unleash the 
energy of the Sun to scorch an uninhabitable piece of coral.  There 
it was, though, the flow of invisibility racing imperceptibly past 
my face, ready to evaporate this lump of dead sea creatures.  
	The deuterium flowed from the dewar I had wed, a 
technological bride: my wife, my lover, my child, my machine.  
My young son had named her Sleet Sue when we wanted to 
personalize the beasts we were constructing.  She was a huge, 
specially made refrigerator, designed to hold the reservoir of liquid 
deuterium and pump it to its destiny.
	I recognized that I was a willing pawn in this enterprise, 
manipulated by the huge currents of the times.  One, known to all, 
was driven by human conflict.  It arose from a war that consumed 
the world less than a decade ago.  From an ally we had plucked a 
new and worthy enemy.  Mankind continued to seek the means to 
live together, no longer in small family groups beset by saber tooth 
tigers, but in the billions, trapped on an isolated planet too small to 
handle us all.  We beseeched the powers for a social system that 
would allow us to live in peace.  Instead, the two great systems of 
the mid-Twentieth century were locked in a headlong battle, ram 
against butting ram, the pure capitalism of unfettered free 
enterprise versus communism, the power of the people encaptured 
by the Nomenclatura.  
	The other current was less known, less widely 
comprehended, but no less potent: the raw power of understanding, 
the sublime intellectual insights, the very notion that we could do 
this thing, control these forces.  The technology was irresistible in 
the sweetness of its allure.  We were going to do it because we 
knew how.
	I turned and looked at the towering bulk of Ivy Mike.  
Project Ivy.  Who dreamed that up?  I knew why it was "Mike."  
Mike stood for the letter M, M for megaton.  The cylindrical 
device was as tall as the grain silos my Daddy and his brothers had 
planted all over central Oklahoma.  The super cooled deuterium 
surged quietly through long insulated pipes, past the small crystal 
window behind me, and into the casing of the device.  I lifted my 
pith helmet and slicked my hair back with the sweat of my 
forehead.  The huge metal temporary building roasted everything 
in the daytime heat, filling the stifling atmosphere with the aroma 
of a unique casserole: tin, aluminum, steel, bakelite, carbon arcs, 
lubricants, and overworked bodies.  I looked at the top of the 
cylinder.  The hemispherical bulge contained an atom bomb, a 
fission device.  The instrument that leveled Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki was reduced to a mere trigger for Ivy Mike.  Its 
stupendous flood of radiation, temporarily held in check by the 
inch-thick steel casing, would channel down the inner lead and 
polyethylene-lined walls and crush an inner shell of heavy 
uranium.  The resulting immense compression would heat my 
deuterium, triggering thermonuclear alchemy, nuclear fusion.  The 
deuterium would be forged to a heavier element, helium.  The 
power of the Sun would be tapped on the Earth for the first time.  
At the heart of the device was another rod of fission material.  That 
would be compressed by the deuterium explosion and add to the 
yield.  I thought the idea spoiled the technological purity of Ivy 
Mike, but no one likes a dud.
	I left the cavernous building to check on Sleet Sue.  It was 
hot outside, but cool by comparison.  A breeze came freshly from 
the ocean, smelling of dried coral, a faint fishy tang.  I tried to 
clean the perspiration streaks from my wire-framed glasses on the 
damp khaki of my shirt and looped them back over my ears.  Sleet 
Sue sat there quietly in the late afternoon glare.  She was the size 
of a half-ton truck, all silvered container vessels and piping, motors 
and pumps, valves and switches.  I had helped to design, build, and 
transport the lady from Boulder, Colorado to this tiny atoll.  She 
had performed wonderfully, with not a leak of the precious fluid.  
By tomorrow she would be a magnificent suicide, all vapor wafting 
over the ocean.  Right now we were venting excess deuterium gas.  
Chemically, it worked like hydrogen, burning with the oxygen in 
the air in an intensely hot but invisible flame to form heavy water.  
Occasionally a gull would fly into the rising column of hot gas and 
plummet to the ground, cooked.
	I walked across the causeway to the adjacent island where 
the local barracks and mess hall were, my flip-flops smacking on 
the painted wooden slats.  It took only ten minutes and I was a little 
early for dinner.  With some quiet time before the final rush, I 
walked on past the headquarters building and conference rooms 
and turned right, down to the old pier, a remnant of the war with 
the Japanese.  It was a little rickety, but beloved by all who had 
worked here the past few months.  I lowered my gaze to the sea-
rotted wood beneath my feet.  We had spent idle moments jumping 
off the pier into the clear warm waters, snorkeling amid the 
brilliant coral.  I looked down into the water.  The giant clam was 
easy to spot.  It must have been four feet across.  It had never 
bothered anyone.  Tomorrow it would be vapor, too.  I wished they 
had moved it.
	I turned to look back the way I had come.  I could just 
make out the hot wavering air above Sleet Sue as the venting 
continued, the ghost of things to come.  The low expanse of the 
island itself, a small fragment of the Eniwetok Atoll, was barely 
visible above the flat sea.  That was shot island, Elugelab.  It was 
not a very pretty name.  I had never learned what it meant in the 
local dialect.  Never mind, it wouldn't be there tomorrow.
	I looked along the length of the pier and traveled mentally 
onward in that direction to the southern extent of the atoll, 
Eniwetok island itself, twenty miles away.  There was a little 
civilization on Eniwetok, some stores where you could buy 
souvenir Hawaiian shirts.  Next to Eniwetok was Parry island, the 
main base with more barracks, a larger mess hall, permanent 
equipment, other dewars like Sleet Sue.  They had tried to serve 
good meals there, to keep up morale.  I'd swiped one of the menus.  
They were always decorated with a semi-clad native girl on the 
frontispiece.  I thought my wife would understand that little bit of 
innocent erotica.  I pictured the arc of small coral bumps between 
Elugelab and Eniwetok, many of them blasted by previous fission 
tests.  An exception was Japtan island, next to Parry.  We had 
taken a landing craft over there one day and I'd climbed one of the 
palm trees to cut loose a coconut.  I was going to try to take that 
home as a souvenir, too.  I gave the clam a last look and headed to 
the mess.  I could smell supper; sizzling steak fat in a place where 
a cow had never lived.
	After dinner, those of us on the arming team worked late 
into the night on the final preparations.  One last portable dewar of 
deuterium came over from Parry at 9:30 and we topped off Sleet 
Sue.  I watched my team as they did the last checks on her.  I 
stared at the pressure gauges until my eyes started to play tricks, 
imagining tiny flicks of motion of the needles, but they were rock 
solid.  There were no fluctuations, no bubbles, nothing to upset the 
yield.  Sleet Sue was performing perfectly.  I gave a solid push to 
the red button that put her into fully automatic mode.  Inside the 
metal building Ivy Mike was sealed up.  That was it, no turning 
back.  
	The arming team finished the whole checklist just after 
midnight.  We headed for the landing craft.  I counted heads in my 
group.  I counted heads again.  And again.  This was my 
assignment, but it went far deeper than that.  I didn't want anyone 
left with Sleet Sue, with that clam.
	The landing craft took us to the waiting destroyer, the USS 
Estes.  It was nearly three in the morning when we pulled up 
anchor and headed south.  No one slept.  Sailors and technical 
people crammed the ship.  We assembled on the deck with our 
dark glasses just after the Sun broke over the eastern horizon.  The 
Estes was ten miles south of Eniwetok island, thirty miles from 
Elugelab.  It was seven in the morning, local time, November 1, 
1952.  Back home in Boulder it was Halloween, just about time for 
the kids to be setting out for trick-or-treat.  I wondered what sorts 
of costumes they were wearing.  I wondered if it had snowed yet.
	Then Ivy Mike went off.  The flash of light was like a 
palpable force even through the darkened welder's glass.  I took 
the goggles off.  An incredible white hemisphere, wondrous in its 
geometrical purity, grew on the horizon.  And grew.  And grew.  It 
got  terrifyingly large and still it grew, looming ever higher, filling 
the sky, and growing more.  I found myself silently screaming 
"Stop!  That's enough!" but there was no stopping it.  I had to crane 
my neck back to see the top, impossibly high.  It threatened to eat 
the world.  Then it paused.  The hemisphere dimmed a bit, and 
from its crest a column emerged capped by the familiar roiling 
mushroom head, surging ever higher toward the stratosphere.  A 
roiling angry cloud of radioactive vapor, atoms of Mike, of Sleet 
Sue, of that clam, of Elugelab, boiled into the sky.
	I watched the immense turmoil and recognized that  it 
closed a chapter on my life.  There would never be another Ivy 
Mike, huge, ungainly behemoth that it was.  The techniques we 
had worked so hard to perfect were outmoded.  There were already 
rumors of a technology based on a powder, lithium deuteride.  A 
mere palm full, properly ignited, would do what Mike had just 
done, but in a compact size, suitable for airplanes, missiles.  
	There would never again be a need to invoke that terrible 
cold, primordial flow of liquid deuterium.  That was history.