Wartime Thriller

When it became clear that secrets of the occult bomb were being leaked to the Russians, Joebillbob Tussle, Head of security at Los Alamos, immediately took steps to thwart the Russian psychic. He called in security expert Madam Pomfret to close down the cosmic energy flows between New Mexico and Moscow. Researchers and staff were already required to wear spirit talismans and occluding sigils, but Pomfret denounced these as the work of her rival Tessa Moon and unlikely to be of the latest specifications for occult suppression. She immediately dispatched her three trained goblins to Moscow and set to work designing rabbit's foot based security helmets.

Yeehaw Stench, Tussle's second in command, had been brought up in the know-it-all faith which emphasised discovering what was really true. In a world where people believed as hard as they could in what they liked the sound of, in the expectation that their unwavering belief would make it so, he was very much out of place. One day he let slip to Tussle that he believed the leaks to be the work of a spy. Instead of reporting him, Tussle misguidedly took him aside and advised him to keep his unorthodox theories to himself. People just wouldn't understand. He, Tussle, liked Stench and would hate to see him labelled a crackpot and lose his job. Privately Stench could believe what he liked, but in public there was no such thing as spies, if he knew what was good for him. Why didn't he take up scientology or ouija boarding or some other healthy pursuit?

Stench was touched by Tussle's concern and made no further mention of his belief, although in private he kept close watch on those he thought capable of spying. Once he was convinced he saw Oppenheimer put a shard of totem pole into his briefcase. It turned out to be a harmless tube of enriched uranium. On another occasion he caught Richard Feynman secreting a chart of astrological symbols about his person. This turned out to be a paper on the slowing of neutrons. Still he clung to his belief in spies.

The first test of the occult bomb, codenamed 'Trinity' after a character in The Matrix, a film forseen by Madam Pomfret, took place in July 1945. Stench watched nervously as the bomb, loaded with the psychic equivalent of a hundred thousand tons of chicken blood, burst in the desert outside Alamogordo. Those closest to the blast were instantly turned to bats, but Stench was far enough from the drop site to suffer only mild and temporary numerology.

Albert Feinstein later discovered that Stench himself had been the unwitting conduit of psychic energies, allowing the Russians to duplicate the results shortly afterwards. He wrote about his wartime experiences on ABC, but nobody believed him.