The Fourth K Read Online Free Page A

bums, the sharp-eyed pimps, the whores who thronged the halls of the building. The two were prodigies, at age twenty assistant professors of physics and members of an advanced program at the university. The suitcase held a tiny atom bomb they had constructed using stolen lab materials and the necessary plutonium. It had taken them two years to steal these materials from their programs, bit by bit, falsifying their reports and experiments so that the theft would not be noticed.
    Adam Gresse and Henry Tibbot had been classified as geniuses since they were twelve. Their parents had brought them up to be aware of their responsibilities to humankind. They had no vices except knowledge. Their particular brilliance made them disdain those appetites that were lice on the hide of humanity, such as alcohol, gambling, women, gluttony and drugs.
    What they succumbed to was the powerful drug of clear thinking. They had a social conscience and saw the evil in the world. They knew that the making of atomic weaponswas wrong, that the fate of humanity hung in the balance, and they decided to do what they could to avert an infernal disaster. So after a year of boyish talk they decided to scare the government. They would show how easy it was for a crazed individual to inflict grave punishment on mankind. They built the tiny atom bomb, only half a kiloton in power, so that they could plant it and then warn the authorities of its existence. They thought of themselves and their contemplated deed as unique, as godlike. They did not know that this precise situation had been predicted by the psychological reports of a prestigious think tank funded by the government as one of the possible hazards of the atomic age of mankind.
    While they were still in New York, Adam Gresse and Henry Tibbot mailed their warning letter to
The New York Times
explaining their motives and asking that the letter be published before being sent to the authorities. The composing of the letter had been a long process, not only because it had to be worded precisely to show no malicious intent but because they used scissored printed words and letters lifted out of old newspapers that they pasted onto blank sheets of paper.
    The bomb would not go off till the following Thursday. By that time the letter would be in the hands of the authorities and the bomb surely found. It would be a warning to the rulers of the world.
    And in Rome on that Good Friday, Theresa Catherine Kennedy, daughter of the President of the United States, prepared to end her self-imposed European exile and return to live with her father in the White House.
    Her Secret Service security detail had already made all the travel arrangements. Obeying her instructions, they hadbooked passage on the Easter Sunday flight from Rome to New York.
    Theresa Kennedy was twenty-three years old and had been studying philosophy in Europe, first at the Sorbonne in Paris and then at the university in Rome, where she had just ended a serious affair with a radical Italian student, to their mutual relief.
    She loved her father but hated his being President because she was too loyal to publicly voice her own differing views. She had been a believer in socialism; now she was an advocate of the brotherhood of man, the sisterhood of women. She was a feminist in the American style; economic independence was the foundation of freedom, and so she had no guilt about the trust funds that guaranteed her freedom.
    With a curious yet very human morality she had rejected the idea of any privilege and rarely visited her father in the White House. And perhaps she unconsciously blamed her father for her mother’s death because he had struggled for political power while his wife was dying. Later she had wanted to lose herself in Europe, but by law she had to be protected by the Secret Service as a member of the immediate presidential family. She had tried to sign off on that security protection, but her father had begged her not to. Francis Kennedy