Gascoigne laughed harshly and waved at the controls. "Tell that to the counter in the bomb hold. Go ahead. There's a meter you can read, right there on the bombardier board." "Sure," I said. "The bombs are radioactive, all right. Have you ever checked their half-life?" It was a long shot. Gascoigne was a weapons man; if it were possible to check half-life on board the SV-1, he would have checked it. But I didn't think it was possible. "What would I do that for?" "You wouldn't, being a loyal airman. You believe what your superiors tell you. But I'm a civilian, Colonel. There's no element in those bombs that will either fuse or fission. The half-life is too long for tritium or for lithium6, and it's too short for uranium235 or radio-thorium. The stuff is probably strontium90—in short, nothing but a bluff." "By the time I finished checking that," Gascoigne said, "the bomb would be launched anyhow. And you haven't checked it, either. Try another tack." "I don't need to. You don't have to believe me. We'll just sit here and wait for the bomb drop, and then the point will prove itself. After that, of course, you'll be court-martialed for firing a wild shot without orders. But since you're prepared to wipe out your own family, you won't mind a little thing like twenty years in the guardhouse." Gascoigne looked at the silently rolling tape. "Sure," he said. "I've got the orders, anyhow. The same thing would happen if I didn't obey them. If nobody gets hurt, so much the better." A sudden spasm of emotion—I took it to be grief, but I could have been wrong—shook his whole frame for a moment. Again, he did not seem to notice it. I said: "That's right. Not even your family. Of course the whole world will know the station's a bluff, but if those are the orders—" "I don't know," Gascoigne said harshly. "I don't know whether I even got any orders. I don't remember where I put them. Maybe they're not real." He looked at me confusedly, and his expression was frighteningly like that of a small boy making a confession. "You know something?" he said. "I don't know what's real any more. I haven't been able to tell, ever since yesterday. I don't even know if you are real, or your ID card either. What do you think of that?"
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