“Oh, well now,” he replied, turning to look down at her. “That was the name of a very famous scientist who died a long time ago—long before you were born.”
“Why do they give it his name? Did he invent it?”
“Not exactly, but he was the first man to discover how to make it work. He proved by what are called experiments that it was possible.”
“How dumb can you get?” her twelve-year-old brother asked scornfully from the next seat. “Everybody’s heard of Aubrey Philipsz. He was the friend of Bradley Clifford—the most famous scientist ever.”
“Of course I’ve heard of Clifford,” Tina retorted pertly. “He was the man who stopped everybody in the world from going crazy once. That’s right, isn’t it, Mommy?” She directed the last question at Maria Karenski, who was sitting on the far side of her brother.
“Yes, that’s right, dear. That’s enough questions for now. Look at your Sun on the screen there. You may not see it again for a long time.”
Tina considered the suggestion.
“Won’t there be any sun in Miranda then?” she asked as the awful implication dawned on her.
“Yes, of course there will, but it will be a different one.”
“She’s just dumb.”
“Don’t say things like that.”
Suddenly the view on the screen seemed to flicker, and then it had changed. The sun that dominated the scene had moved to one side; it was larger and more brilliant than the one that had been there an instant before. And the background of stars had altered subtly. A chorus of oohs and ahs came from all parts of the cabin of the mile-long ship.
“My head feels funny,” Tina said. “What happened?”
“It’s nothing to worry about, dear,” her mother replied. “Look there; that’s your new sun.”
Tina gazed for a while at the new image on the screen, eventually arriving, by the irrefutable logic of her years, at the undeniable conclusion that a sun was a sun was a sun. . . . Her mind turned to other things and she looked back again at her father.
“How did Bradley Clifford stop everybody from going crazy?” she asked.
Bornos sighed, smiled, and rubbed his brow.
“Oh, now, that’s a little difficult to explain. He set up what was probably the biggest hoax ever in history.”
“What’s a hoax?”
“You’ll learn all about it at your new school,” her mother interrupted. “I think your daddy would like a rest now. Look—the signs have gone out. They’ll be putting on more movies downstairs in a minute. How would you like to go and watch them?”
The two children squeezed out between the seats and disappeared along the aisle. Bornos was just settling back to resume his daydreams when his wife asked: “Was it all a hoax, I wonder?”
“Not all of it,” he told her. “The J-bomb was supposed to be able to fire only at places inside the territories of the Western allies of the time . . . to make it purely defensive. That was certainly true; they tried to fire it at tests targets in Siberia and places like that, but it wouldn’t work.”
“And the rest of it?”
“Well,” he said, rubbing his chin. “That’s the mystery. Everybody believed for over a century that if they allowed the machine to lose power it would destroy places in America, and if anybody else on Earth built a similar machine, then it would be destroyed too. But lots of people say that this was just bluff to stop the world from rearming. If it was, it certainly worked. . . .”
She thought to herself for a while. “I must say, it doesn’t really sound like the kind of person you imagine Clifford as being . . . I mean . . . setting up a gigantic booby trap that could have killed lots of people . . . innocent people probably. It just doesn’t sound like him at all.”
“That’s exactly why lots of people believe that part of it was a hoax,” Bornos answered. “There was something funny about the whole thing anyway. The people who were actually there at Brunnermont on the day that the machine deactivated would never talk about what they learned. I’m pretty sure, though, that they’d have known. I’m sure it would have printed out something just before it switched itself off after all those years. . . .”