Radiance Read Online Free

a good idea, but Dean said no. He doesn’t want the press here tonight—all that’s to start after the first operation. Still, one must admire the man’s tenacity.”
    They peered below, and the man glanced up, freckle-faced and rosy-cheeked. He beamed when he saw them, and seemedabout to wave, or call up even, but Irene pulled Daisy back and shut the window. “He’s wasting his time tonight. Still, she’ll be good with the press. Her English is wonderful, isn’t it? So there won’t be a language barrier.” They were facing the room again. Irene lowered her voice still further. “Of course, her story is harrowing, Daisy.”
    Daisy felt her heart beat faster. “I’m sure it must be.”
    “When Raymond and Dean interviewed her in Hiroshima, Dean wept, that’s what I heard.”
    “I can’t imagine.”
    Irene shook her head. “Neither can I. Neither can anyone. That’s why we need to hear her tell it, in her own words.”
    Daisy nodded. They stood for a moment in silence, listening to the hubbub around them, the girl at the centre—so poised—eye of the storm. Daisy remembered the feel of her palm, dry and papery, when they shook hands at the airport.
    “So the first press conference is scheduled for a week today,” Irene continued, “the day she gets out of the hospital. I’d like her to share the stage with Oppenheimer—you must know that he’s come out against the Superbomb?”
    “Yes, I’ve heard.”
    “But even he, with all his connections, doesn’t know when they’ll test the thing. Though he suspects it’s nearly ready—they really are a set of bastards.”
    It was hard to tell exactly to whom she was referring, but Daisy knew it was the bastards in the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the ones secretly advocating the development of the hydrogen bomb, refusing to respond to public calls for a ban on the weapon. A ban on
testing
—that was what the Hiroshima Project advocated, a wise distinction that Dean Atchity had written about at length. For it was not conceivable that the nation, at this dangerous juncture, could or even should stopdevelopment of a fusion bomb, not with the Soviet Union at work on one. But if there were a complete ban on testing, the Project suggested, then neither side could successfully develop new bombs. So a ban on testing was really just as good as a ban on creation. As for the Superbomb itself, it was rumoured to be terrible. Daisy got confused by kilotonnage and megatonnage, but the Superbomb was supposed to be a hundred, or two hundred, or even three hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
    “Of course, I’m keen to get moving, the support for a test ban is growing like mad. But I think that Dean is right. One step at a time.” At that moment, Atchity beckoned to Irene, and with a kiss on Daisy’s cheek she rushed away.
    Daisy let herself take in the strangeness of the situation. There was Dean Atchity, senior editor of the
Sunday Review,
waving Keiko’s empty punch glass at Irene, while Irene fairly blew across the room to take it from him. All of this for a girl who seven years before had been their sworn enemy. Seven years was not such a long time, and yet in other ways it was an eon. At that time, in that other world, the newspapers had been full of horrifying stories about the Japanese. They had killed American boys in horrid, fetid jungles. They had imprisoned and tortured them, then sent them back, after the war was over, scrawny and malnourished, ravaged by yellow fever and malaria. They had broken every article of the Geneva Convention. And in retaliation they had been bombed into defeat and submission. Yet here everyone was, gathered in Irene’s apartment, attempting with all the goodwill in the world to atone for what had happened.
    She could hear more polite questions being put to Keiko, while she sat looking picturesque and almost varnished, ankles crossed, gloved hands holding her glass. Daisy heard the girl’s