Free Infinite Dreams by Joe Haldeman

her alive would have cost some $25,000 yearly. Ramo materialized and made me a generous offer.
    Three weeks later, Dorothy and I were whisked incognito to Shark Key, our disappearance covered by a disastrous automobile accident. His artificial island was mostly unoccupied in 1970, but half of one floor was given over to medical facilities. There was a dialysis machine and two of the personnel were trained in its use. Ramo called it “benevolent blackmail” and outlined my duties for the next several years.
    6. 4 April 1970
    When Philip Vale came to Ramo’s island, all that showed above water was a golden geodesic dome supported by massive concrete pillars and armthick steel cables that sang basso in the wind. Inside the dome were living quarters for six people and a more-or-less legitimate research establishment called Gravitics, Inc. Ramo lived there with two technicians, a delivery boy and two specialists in gravity research. The establishment was very expensive but Ramo claimed to love pure science, hoped for eventual profit, and admitted that it made his tax situation easier. It also gave him the isolation that semi-billionaires traditionally prefer; because of the delicacy of the measurements necessary to his research, no airplanes were allowed to buzz overhead and the Coast Guard kept unauthorized ships from coming within a one-mile radius. All five employees did do research work in gravity; they published with expected frequency, took out occasional patents, and knew they were only a cover for the actual work about to begin downstairs.
    There were seven underwater floors beneath the golden dome, and Dr. Philip Vale’s assignment was to turn those seven floors into a factory for the construction of small atom bombs. 29 Nagasakisized fission bombs.
    7. August 1945
    Howard Knopf Ramo worked as a dollar-a-year man for several years, the government consulting him on organizational matters for various projects. The details of many of these projects were quite secret, but he gave as good advice as he could, without being told classified details.
    In August 1945 Ramo learned what that Manhattan Project had been all about.
    8. 5 April 1970—3 February 1972
    Dr. Philip Vale was absorbed for several weeks in initial planning: flow charts, lists of necessary equipment and personnel, timetables, floor plans. The hardest part of his job was figuring out a way to steal a lot of plutonium without being too obvious about it. Ramo had some ideas, on this and other things, that Vale expanded.
    By the middle of 1971 there were thirty people living under Gravitics, Inc., and plutonium had begun to trickle in, a few grams at a time, to be shielded with lead and cadmium and concrete and dropped into the Gulf of Mexico at carefully recorded spots within the one-mile limit. In July they quietly celebrated Ramo’s 75th birthday.
    On 3 February 1972, Colonel Ronald Day joined Vale and the rest. The two shared the directorship amicably, Day suggesting that they go ahead and make several mock-up bombs, both for time-and-motion studies within the plant and in order to check the efficiency of their basic delivery system: an Econoline-type van, specially modified.
    9. Technological Aside
    One need not gather a "critical mass" of plutonium inorder to make an atom bomb of it. It is sufficient to take a considerably smaller piece and subject it to a neutron density equivalent to that which prevails at standard temperature and pressure inside plutonium at critical mass. This can be done with judiciously shaped charges of high explosive.
    The whole apparatus can fit comfortably inside a Ford Econoline van.
    10. 9 September 1974
    Progress Report
    Delivery Implementation Section
    TO: Ramo, Vale, Day, Sections 2, 5, 8.
    As of this date we can safely terminate R & D on the following vehicles: Ford, Fiat, Austin, VW. Each has performed flawlessly on trial runs to Atlanta.
    On-the-spot vehicle checks assure us that we can use Econolines for Ghana, Bombay,