Chain Reaction

Dr. Rothman warned that a nuclear test would trigger a chain reaction capable of annihilating the planet. His colleagues, a group of university professors, have gathered at the sanitarium where he's been committed not for treatment, but to see the man they once respected reduced to something they can dismiss. A poker game unfolds as a thin veneer over the most important conversation of their lives: is Rothman a prophet or a madman? His calculations say the test will ignite the atmosphere, the oceans, everything. Their careers say he's lost his mind. As zero hour approaches, the professors reveal themselves in fragments of cowardice, rationalization, and fragile denial. Then the test detonates. Nothing happens. Rothman's warnings appear unfounded, his sanity permanently broken. But here is the question that haunts: did his alarm somehow change the outcome, or was it all delusion? This is Cold War fiction at its most unnerving, a story about what happens when the people who understand the science most clearly are the ones society locks away.