"Plenty of time, yet." Pitov was speaking German instead of Spanish, as
they always did between themselves. "They're still counting down from
minus three hours. I just phoned the launching site for a jeep.
Eugenio's been there ever since dinner; they say he's running around
like a cat looking for a place to have her first litter of kittens."

He chuckled. This would be something new for Eugenio Galvez--for which
he could be thankful.

"I hope the generators don't develop any last-second bugs," he said.
"We'll only be a mile and a half away, and that'll be too close to fifty
kilos of negamatter if the field collapses."

"It'll be all right," Pitov assured him. "The bugs have all been chased
out years ago."

"Not out of those generators in the rocket. They're new." He fumbled in
his coat pocket for his pipe and tobacco. "I never thought I'd run
another nuclear-bomb test, as long as I lived."

"Lee!" Pitov was shocked. "You mustn't call it that. It isn't that, at
all. It's purely a scientific experiment."

"Wasn't that all any of them were? We made lots of experiments like
this, back before 1969." The memories of all those other tests, each
ending in an Everest-high mushroom column, rose in his mind. And the end
result--the United States and the Soviet Union blasted to rubble, a
whole hemisphere pushed back into the Dark Ages, a quarter of a billion
dead. Including a slim woman with graying blonde hair, and a little red
dog, and a girl from Odessa whom Alexis Pitov had been going to marry.