The original garden had not been long enough to accommodate a hundred-yard green, so he had bought an extra piece of ground and removed part of the old hedge. With the target in place, he began the soothing near-Zen ritual of the shooting — placing the silver studs in the turf to mark the positions of his feet, stringing and adjusting the bow, checking the six arrows for straightness, arranging them in the ground quiver. The first arrow he fired ascended cleanly, flashed sunlight once at the top of its trajectory, and dwindled from sight. A moment later he heard it strike with a firm note which told him it was close to center. His binoculars confirmed that the shaft was in the blue at about seven o’clock.

Pleased at having judged the effect of the humidity on the bow’s cast so closely, he fired two more sighting-in arrows, making fine adjustments on the windage and elevation screws of the bowsight. He retrieved the arrows and settled in to shoot a York Round, meticulously filling in the points scored in his record book. As the round progressed one part of his mind became utterly absorbed in the struggle for perfection, and another turned to the question of how well qualified Lucas Hutchman was to play the role of God.

On the technical level the situation was diamond-sharp, uncomplicated. He was in a position to translate the figures scribbled on his charred sheet into physical reality. Doing so would necessitate several weeks’ work on thousands of pounds’ worth of electrical and electronic components, and the result would be a small, rather unimpressive machine.

But it would be a machine which, if switched on, would almost instantaneously detonate every nuclear device on Earth.

It would be an antibomb machine.

An antiwar machine.

An instrument for converting megadeaths into megalives.

The realization that a neutron resonator could be built had come to Hutchman one calm Sunday morning almost a year earlier.