Hutchman put the past aside with an effort. In the coolness of the kitchen he hesitated for a moment then decided he could do without eating. He went into the bedroom, changed his business clothes for slacks and a close-fitting shirt, and took his archery equipment from a closet. The lustrous laminated woods of the bow were glass-smooth to his touch. He carried the gear out to the back of the house, wrestled the heavy target of coiled-straw rope out of the toolshed and set it on its tripod. The original garden had not been long enough to accommodate a hundred-yard green, so he had bought an extra piece of ground and removed part of the old hedge. With the target in place, he began the soothing near-Zen ritual of the shooting — placing the silver studs in the turf to mark the positions of his feet, stringing and adjusting the bow, checking the six arrows for straightness, arranging them in the ground quiver. The first arrow he fired ascended cleanly, flashed sunlight once at the top of its trajectory, and dwindled from sight. A moment later he heard it strike with a firm note which told him it was close to center. His binoculars confirmed that the shaft was in the blue at about seven o’clock.

Pleased at having judged the effect of the humidity on the bow’s cast so closely, he fired two more sighting-in arrows, making fine adjustments on the windage and elevation screws of the bowsight. He retrieved the arrows and settled in to shoot a York Round, meticulously filling in the points scored in his record book. As the round progressed one part of his mind became utterly absorbed in the struggle for perfection, and another turned to the question of how well qualified Lucas Hutchman was to play the role of God.

On the technical level the situation was diamond-sharp, uncomplicated. He was in a position to translate the figures scribbled on his charred sheet into physical reality. Doing so would necessitate several weeks’ work on thousands of pounds’ worth of electrical and electronic components, and the result would be a small, rather unimpressive machine.

But it would be a machine which, if switched on, would almost instantaneously detonate every nuclear device on Earth.

It would be an antibomb machine.

An antiwar machine.

An instrument for converting megadeaths into megalives.

The realization that a neutron resonator could be built had come to Hutchman one calm Sunday morning almost a year earlier. He had been testing some ideas concerned with the solution of the many-particle time-independent Schrodinger equation when — quite suddenly, by a trick of conceptual parallax — he saw deeper than ever before into the mathematical forest which screens reality from reason. A tree lane seemed to open in the thickets of Hermite polynomials, eigenvectors, and Legendre functions; and shimmering at its farthest end, for a brief second, was the antibomb machine. The path closed again almost at once, but Hutchman’s flying pencil was recording enough of the landmarks, the philosophical map references, to enable him to find his way back again at a later date.

Accompanying the flash of inspiration was a semimystical feeling that he had been chosen, that he was the vehicle for another’s ideas. He had read about the phenomenon of the sense of givenness which often accompanies breakthroughs in human thought, but the feeling was soon obscured considerations of the social and professional implications. Like the minor poet who produced a single, never-to-be-repeated classic, like a forgotten artist who has created one deathless canvas — Lucas Hutchman, an unimportant mathematician, could make an indelible mark on history. If he dared.

The year had not been one of steady progress. There was one period when it seemed that the energy levels involved in producing self-propagating neutron resonance would demand several times the planet’s electrical power output, but the obstacle had proved illusory. The machine would, in fact, be adequately supplied by a portable powerpack, its signals relaying themselves endlessly from neutron to neutron, harmlessly and imperceptibly except where they encountered concentrations close to critical mass. Then there had come a point where he dreamed that the necessary energy levels were so low that a circuit diagram might become the actual machine, powered by minute electrical currents induced in the pencil lines by stray magnetic fields. Or could it be, he wondered in the vision, that merely visualizing the completed circuitry would build an effective analog of the machine in my brain cells? Then would mind find its true ascendancy over matter — one dispassionate intellectual thrust and every nuclear stockpile in the world would consume its masters…

But that danger faded too; the maths was complete, and now Hutchman was face-to-face with the realization that he wanted nothing to do with his own creation.

Voice from another dimension, intruding: You’ve fired six dozen arrows at a hundred yards for a total of 402 points. The neutron resonator is the ultimate defense. That’s your highest score ever for the range. And in the context of nuclear warfare the ultimate defense can be regarded as the ultimate weapon. Keep this up and you’ll top the thousand for the round. If I breathe a word of this to the Ministry of Defence I’ll sink without a trace, into one of those discreet establishments in the heart of “The Avengers” country. You’ve been chasing that thousand a long time, Hutch — four years or more. And what about Vicky? She’d go mad. And David? Pull up the studs, and ground quiver, and move down to eighty yards — and keep cool. The balance of nuclear power does exist, after all — who could shoulder the responsibility of disrupting it? It’s been forty-three years since World War Two, and it’s becoming obvious that nobody’s actually going to use the bomb. In any case, didn ‘t the Japanese who were incinerated by napalm outnumber those unfortunates at H and N? Raise the sight to the eighty-yard mark, nock the arrow, relax and breathe, draw easily, keep your left elbow out, kiss the string, watch your draw length, bowlimb vertical, ring sight centred on the gold, hold it, hold it, hold it…

“Why aren’t you at the office, Luke?” Vicky’s voice sounded only inches behind him.

Hutchman watched his arrow go wide, hit the target close to the rim, and almost pass clear through the less tightly packed straw.

“I didn’t hear you arrive,” he said evenly. He turned and examined her face, aware she had startled him deliberately but wanting to find out if she was issuing a forthright challenge or was simulating innocence. Her rust-coloured eyes met his at once, like electrical contacts finding sockets, an interface of hostility.

All right, he thought. “Why did you sneak up on me like that? You ruined a shot.”

She shrugged, wide clavicles seen with da Vincian clarity in the tawny skin of her shoulders. “You can play archery all evening.”

“One doesn’t play archery — how many times have I… ?”

He steadied his temper. Misuse of the word was one of her oldest tricks. “What do you want, Vicky?”

“I want to know why you’re not at the office this afternoon.” She examined the skin of her upper arms critically as she spoke, frowning at the summer’s fading tan which even yet was deeper than the amber of her sleeveless dress, face darkened with shadows of the introspective and secret alarms that beautiful women sometimes appear to feel when looking at their own bodies. “I suppose I’m entitled to hear.”

“I couldn’t take it this afternoon.” I can make neutrons dance to a new tune. “All right?”

“How nice for you.” Disapproval registered briefly on the smooth-planed face, like smoke passing across the sun. “I wish I could stop work when I feel like it.”

“You’re in a better position — you only start when you feel like it.”