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Major Price scratched his face at the white border of the scar, and Katharine could see that he was still not satisfied. "They announced they had parity," he said. "How would they know? How would they know how many bombs we've got?"

"I don't think they know and I don't think it matters," Katharine said. Sometimes Major Price flew slowly. He would not proceed until everything on the navigation chart was clear in his head, even the most obvious landmarks. "Force, like space and time, is relative," she continued, trying not to talk like a school-marm. "If they have enough bombs to destroy us, they have maximum capability, which means parity, because we can't do anything worse than destroy them. Now I'll make an assumption. For every bomb they blow in tests, they have stockpiled thirty to fifty. They aren't quite as profligate as we are. Their resources aren't quite as large. They don't have tritium and deuterium to burn."

Raoul Walback, of Central Intelligence, said, "I'll buy that. As you know, all our reports from escapees show stepped-up production in the past eighteen months. Particularly in the Angara River area near Irkutsk, where their new hydroelectric plant is operating. There's another new plutonium complex on the Ob, near Novosibirsk. Big. Real big."