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House,” his deputy announced. The scientist sighed and picked up the phone.
* * *
    The incoming call was switched to the small white squawk box in the center of the oval table so that everyone in the National Security Council conference room could hear and address the scientist at Los Alamos.
    “Mr. Agnew,” Jack Eastman declared, “have your people completed their appraisal of the atomic bomb on those blueprints?”
    The voice filtering into the room through the white plastic holes in reply seemed strangely hesitant.
    “Mr. Eastman, the drawing on the blueprint which you submitted to us is not for an atomic bomb.”
    The men in the White House emitted what seemed an almost collective sigh of relief. The distant scientist did not hear them. He continued. “It’s my very sad duty to inform you that the design on the blueprint is for something a hundred times worse.”
    A quick, nervous gasp in the distant scientist’s voice was audible to each of the men and women in the White House basement. “The blueprint is for a thermonuclear device, Mr. President, a three-megaton hydrogen bomb.”
* * *
    Every time his bare fingertips touched the metal of the television antenna, the passenger of the Dionysos felt a numbing flash of pain spurt down his fingers to his wrists. Beneath him his feet, unaccustomed to snow and ice, slipped and skidded on the balf-frozen mounds left on the exposed rooftop by Friday’s snowstorm.
    Warily, he glanced at the buildings around him. There was no light burning in any window from which someone could see what he was doing.
    Off to his right was the river. With a compass, he fixed his television antenna at a very precise angle pointing toward its black expanse. She had followed her instructions perfectly in picking the building. There were no rooftops higher than his along the antenna’s carefully calculated line of vision, nothing that could block an incoming radio signal.
    He took the six-foot needle of phosphorated bronze, smaller than an automobile aerial but capable of discerning the weakest burst of electronic noise, and fitted it carefully into the socket prepared for it in the television antenna. Every few seconds he had to stop to blow on his numbed fingertips, to give them the sense of precision they needed to make the connection he had practiced a hundred times between the aerial and the antenna.
    When he had finished, he straightened up, stiff with cold, rubbing the aching scar on his neck as he did. Suddenly, from the street below, the clatter of voices drifted up to his rooftop. He peered down. Half a dozen people spilled out of the artist’s loft across the street. Impassively, he watched them glide off through the shadows, his ears following the crystalline ripple of the girls’ laughter as it faded in the night.
* * *
    The President was the first person in the National Security Council conference room to break the shocked silence that had followed Harold Agnew’s revelation.
    “My God!” he gasped. “Is this really possible? That Qaddafi could have done this without our finding out what he was up to?”
    This time it was Agnew who hesitated. The hydrogen bomb represented the ultimate refinement in man’s search for the means of self-destruction.
    Unlike the atomic bomb, which depended on converting to reality a widely understood scientific theory, it depended on the most potent secret unlocked by man’s brain since the cavemen of antiquity had harnessed fire.
    It involved the one precisely perfect interweaving of the bomb’s key elements. There was only one. There was no “almost.” There was no margin whatsoever for error. That relationship was probably the most ferociously guarded secret on earth. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, of qualified physicists understood the theory of the atomic bomb. Barely three hundred people, perhaps fewer, were privy to the secret of the hydrogen bomb.
    “I admit it strains credibility, sir,” Agnew replied “but the blunt fact