Four Stars For Danger

by Burke, John

“You’d better get out of here.”

  Fiona stubbed out her cigarette. “Maybe he’s right. All set, Ellie?”

  “I’d still like to know how he knew...”

  “Don’t push it. You never get a straight answer out of him when he’s steamed up like that. I’m the only one who’s learnt the technique. It takes years of training.”

  David accompanied them to the front door. With an effort Ellen thanked him for dinner. He stared, his bloodless lips set tight.

  Fiona drove down to the gates. The side-lights of a car glowed outside.

  “Could I just have a peek at wonder-boy?”

  Mark came towards them. Ellen felt a flutter of relief inside her. Fiona freed the padlock, and Mark opened the gate enough to let Ellen out.

  “Mm,” said Fiona. “Can’t say I blame you.”

  “Mr Nicholson,” said Ellen. “Mrs Parr.”

  “Mrs Parr?”

  “That’s right. But don’t let it put you off.” Fiona put an arm round Ellen’s shoulders and gave her a companionable hug. “We’ll be in touch.”

  “But the job. Alec...”

  “Oh, stuff Alec. I’ll ring him. Tell him you’re doing wonderfully. But wonderfully. And if he wants to fire me – well, that’s his misfortune, isn’t it? After all, it looks like I’ve got a rich husband. Prosperous, anyway.”

  She went back to the Sprite and swung it round on the gravel, bumped it on the grass, and raced off up the drive again.

  David would be waiting for her, his face drawn, his lips tight. They would have to thrash it out on their own. No buffer, no intermediary. No Ellen as sounding-board.

  Ellen shivered. She was hardly aware of Mark drawing her closer to him until he had tilted her face upwards, one finger gentle but commanding beneath her chin. He kissed her. She tensed, then heard herself make an odd little murmur in her throat, and let his mouth take possession of hers.

  “Mark.”

  “I like the way you said that,” he whispered. “I like it very much.”

  Chapter Eight

  “No car? Looks as if it’s my turn to play chauffeur, then.”

  They were back in the Pride of the Valley, in the snug. And snug was how Ellen felt. She was warm, safe, somehow at home. It was just on closing time but Mr Owen had gladly produced two large brandies. He hovered paternally over them, divining the shy omens of a sentimental tale which he could tell his regulars in months to come. He was happy to offer Ellen a room. “Only for two nights, though. Sorry. Got a large party coming Thursday.”

  Half closing her eyes against drifting tobacco smoke, Ellen took up where she had left off that first night here. She laughed to herself. A large party? She had a mocking vision of a huge woman blocking the doorway, swelling until she filled the saloon bar and leaked over into the snug.

  “Wake up.” Mark was nudging her.

  “What were you doing up there? How did the Bluebeard of Bryncroeso lure you back to his stately home?”

  Ellen summed up as crisply as possible. Her precis was punctuated by Mark’s occasional whistles. She concluded: “In the morning perhaps you’d drive me to the station.”

  “They don’t go in for that sort of thing. Not in what you’d call a big way. One single-track branch line...”

  “As long as there’s a train.”

  “There isn’t. The station’s still there and the track’s still there, but the line was officially closed last year.”

  “I’ve got to get back to London.”

  “All in good time.”

  “To pick up my car.”

  “I’ve told you, you’ve got yourself a chauffeur. Fair return, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It’d be much simpler if I...”

  “Have you covered all the nosh joints around Worcester?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Like to make a trip there tomorrow?”

  “Why there, specially?”

  “It’s open day at the Biocide Research Centre. Letting the public see how healthy and decent it all is, really. Result of that newspaper scare about germ warfare and atmospheric pollution a few weeks ago.”

  “Why should we want to go to a Research Centre?” Ellen rubbed her eyes. Somebody beyond the partition was smoking a pipe which had apparently been filled from a compost heap. “It’s not,” she said, “that I’m not in favour of smokeless zones, unpolluted atmospheres and so on...”

  “I’ve had a lead,” said Mark. “Checked up on this gold-mining business in the papers, when the Foundation announced its intentions. And I’ve been in touch with an old pal in the Land Registry. So the next stop is the Centre.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t quite know yet. But we’ll find out, won’t we?”

  The Centre was a complex of long singlestorey sectional buildings containing a great deal of glass. There were long, deep glass windows, interior glass panels, and arrays of test tubes, bottles and glass display cases.

  Visitors were marshalled into groups of about twenty and conducted round by men in white coats. Other aseptic employees, many with spectacles and many bald although young, stood to attention at the ends of laboratory benches or in small offices and one large conference room decorated like a primary school with diagrams and blown-up photographs.

  Smooth, thought Ellen dispassionately. She had attended plenty of these public relations exercises at one time and another. New plastics, new cars, a new encyclopaedia, a new line in packaged fishcakes: there wasn’t much to choose.

  Brightly painted charts plugged the idea of the peaceful, constructive uses of bacteria. Diagrams with arrows going confidently this way and that showed how A fertilised B which reacted on C to produce tons or gallons of nutritious D for the starving nations of the world. “Provided,” said Mark in an undertone, “the starving nations have either convertible currency or a few oilfields which both East and West covet at the same time.”

  The guide led them into a room where a lecturer stood beside a glass tank.

  Inside the tank was a mound of earth honeycombed with small passages. The side of the mound had been sliced away and stiffened so that the cross-section would convey its meaning to the public, shuffling attentively past it.

  “We don’t want you to think,” said the lecturer with a strained, ingratiating smile, “that this establishment exists only to devise unpleasant methods of waging war. The earth owes its life to micro-organisms. When we encourage micro-organisms here, we’re not spending our whole time shouting ‘Up bugs and at ’em’.” There were a few awkward laughs. He went on: “In this department we have been experimenting with the organic revivification of soil. Instead of using artificial fertilisers, we’ve been trying to establish a cycle of what one might call natural feedback. Radio experts among you will appreciate my use of the term ‘feedback’.” He smiled. There were no answering smiles. Probably no radio experts present. “Let’s look at it this way. We’re finding that a large number of plants, including essential vegetables, react not to synthetic fertilisers but to the natural breakdown of elements in the soil by fungi and bacteria. Rather than spreading chemicals to destroy supposed pests, we are concentrating on ways of encouraging and, as it were, disciplining these micro-organisms. Killing bacteria may cripple a plant rather than save it.”

  “Don’t see what this has got to do with nuclear disarmament,” a middle-aged woman whispered to a long-haired young man beside her. He peered sullenly into the glass case.

  “If we move on to the next test area...” The lecturer sidled towards the door, but did not go through it. He nodded and smiled as his audience filtered through, and then went back to await the next reverent group.

  An older man in a similar white coat was waiting in the room beyond.

  “Here,” he said with the faintest purr of a Scottish r, “we subject colonies of microorganisms to cobalt radiation. Subjected to such irradiation, certain cultures will speed up their generative processes and give us the equivalent of a hundred generations in a matt
er of days instead of centuries. I’m afraid there’s not very much to see.”

  There was in fact almost nothing to see. A large grey vessel rose from the floor, surrounded by a mesh of metal. There were two flaps in its side, both secured by bolts and what looked like a combination lock.

  “The whole process is shielded by a lead casing,” explained the lecturer. “Our sample colonies are lowered in and exposed to varying degrees of radiation. Tested at specific intervals, of course. You will understand that with bacteria and radiation, we have to take the most stringent precautions.”

  “Yes,” said a voice from the back of the audience. “Yes, well, that’s it, isn’t it? Precautions, you say. All very well. But suppose something breaks loose?”

  “Through solid lead?” said the lecturer with a tolerant smile.

  “It’s happened, hasn’t it?”

  “Has it? I don’t know of a case yet.”

  “It could happen. Lots of things we’ve been told couldn’t happen have happened.”

  “All those radioactive bugs,” said a woman, “swarming all over our food.” The tolerant smile sagged into weariness.

  Mark said in a sober, earnest tone: “Haven’t I read somewhere that it’s possible for these irradiated bacteria to speed up the extraction of oil?”

  The lecturer gladly took his cue. “I don’t know that we’re especially anxious to make instant petroleum.” He grinned, and this time got some answering grins. His audience had heard of petroleum. “As we all know, oil is the long-term product of marine organisms which have sunk to the bottom of primeval seas and been crushed by thick accumulations of mud. The generation of heat and the action of bacteria – and, to an extent we are only just realising, the effect of radioactivity – transform the organisms into oil and gas. Under pressure, the oil and gas are squeezed out of their source rock into sedimentary basins, where they are accessible to oil drills. But often there are vast deposits left in the rock. If we could speed up the interaction of radioactivity and bacteria – enough to soften the rock, or at the very least to control the viscosity of the oil and direct its flow – we might be able to drill the oil out more swiftly than we do at present.”

  “And the same with gold?” said Mark.

  People turned to gape at him. A young woman snickered for no apparent reason.

  “If irradiated bacteria could work thousands of times faster than they’ve done before,” said Mark, “couldn’t they conceivably soften the ore so that it could be drilled and pumped instead of being mined in the cumbersome way we’ve been used to?”

  “Quite so.” The lecturer was not sure whether to be pleased or disconcerted by this apt pupil.

  “Isn’t that the current method of tackling hitherto unworkable goldfields?”

  “Considerable experimental work is being undertaken,” said the lecturer cautiously. “Our Dr van Lynden is the expert in that particular field. I’m afraid he’s not on our little welcoming committee, however. And it’s rather specialised. Not a thing we could ask him to explain in a few sentences. No such thing as an encapsulated explanation of that.”

  Several listeners looked relieved. They had come for a browse round, not for tough scientific exposition.

  They were shepherded on past the grey metal hummock.

  Ellen touched Mark’s arm. “Lead,” she murmured.

  “You’ll get your A level in the exams at this rate.”

  “Lead weighs heavy.”

  “Very heavy.” Mark’s hand brushed hers. “Top marks all right. I know what you mean.”

  The next laboratory had a glass and plasterboard partition, revealing a vista of further cubicles like a tightly integrated block of newspaper offices. Faces far off were distorted or sliced into segments by refracted light.

  Some four or five offices away, a face swam across the glass, bulged, and resolved into its true outlines for just a second.

  Ellen gasped.

  The face blurred again, with a triple echo like the picture on a badly adjusted television set. It disappeared quickly as the man sat down.

  She was sure it had been the face of the truck driver. And fairly sure that he had seen her, too.

  When they were out in the open again, drifting away from the crowd towards Mark’s hired Viva, she told him. He showed no surprise. He did not even ask if she was quite sure, but simply said: “Obviously there had to be someone inside. Someone with access to...well, whatever it is.”

  “And what is it? Have you any idea? I still don’t know what you’re after. None of that rigmarole made any sense to me.”

  “It’s all beginning to fit.”

  They got into the car and turned westwards.

  “Could we start,” asked Ellen humbly, “with a – what was it – an encapsulated explanation?”

  “Millions of years ago,” Mark began in a pseudo-pompous tone which soon faded as he became engrossed in the subject, “most of Wales lay under a huge ocean. The world was shaken by continual turbulence. Debris was swept into the seas, great stresses fractured the earth’s crust, and there was colossal volcanic action. Some volcanoes rose above the sea in this area and formed what was known as the Ring of Fire. What’s left of them today exists as the Rhobell, Cader Idris, the Arenigs and the Snowdonian lava.”

  Ellen slid down in her seat and put her head restfully back. She would have liked some coloured diagrams, or a nice illustrative cartoon film; but she had to try to visualise it all for herself. She was tempted to ask Mark if he needed to go quite so far back in history and prehistory, but thought it safer to let him tell it his own way.

  Eventually, he explained, the sea receded, the upthrusting sediments were shattered and faulted, and these faults were impregnated with magma injections which gradually formed veins of gold. These veins could be found only in particular geological conditions. Below the strata known as the Clogau Shales, gold was never found. “The shales,” said Mark, “are a black pyritic mudstone with a high carbon content. As the solutions rose, so the minerals were precipitated on contact with reducing chemicals in the shales.”

  “Really?” said Ellen.

  “According to my homework.”

  “How long before we get to the twentieth century?”

  “Don’t interrupt,” said Mark, and went on pontifically.

  There had always been gold and rumours of gold in Merioneth. Legend told of three Welsh chieftains possessing gold chariots. In the twelfth century, monks of Cymer Abbey had the right to dig up and keep all metals and treasures which they found. At the Dissolution all such rights reverted to the Crown, but troublesome Lords of the Manor often took the law into their own hands and indulged in surreptitious exploration.

  “A lot of work was carried out in secrecy, over the centuries,” Mark commented. “The locals were never very friendly towards officials from over the border.”

  “Times haven’t changed much.”

  “Probably not.”

  In the late eighteenth century, leases were granted to various miners, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century substantial traces of gold were found.

  By the end of the century, miners and financiers and would-be exploiters of every kind were swarming over the hills. Over two hundred miners were employed at one mine alone, near Dolgellau.

  “It was a sharepusher’s dream,” said Mark. “But the foundations weren’t substantial enough. The fields were in awkward places. It was difficult to get machinery there – and difficult to devise the right machinery anyway. Crude tunnels were bashed into the hillside. Vast quantities of ore had to be manhandled out, to produce only a few ounces of gold. Labour costs began to frighten the investors away. And bad weather, rotten living conditions and rotten working conditions frightened the workers themselves away. They began to drift off to the coalfields. The managers urged new methods, and new machines. Sometimes they got their machines, only to find they didn’t work. One juggernaut was made in Cornwall for the Dolfrwynog Mine, and then they couldn’t figure out
how to get it from Cornwall. It got so badly damaged in transit that new parts had to be rushed to the field, and even then the machine didn’t do the job it had been designed for.”

  The Viva ate up the miles. They stopped for tea in the garden of a crumbling but recently painted watermill. Symbolic, thought Ellen, of all the ambitious contrivances of men’s hands which had once worked and now had no practical use.

  “The epitaph to gold working all over the county,” said Mark, “was...I say, these scones are rather good, aren’t they? Give the place a boost. You don’t have to say I was with you, fluttering my eyelashes at the miller’s daughter.”

  “You were saying – about the epitaph.”

  Mark chewed happily for a moment, and wiped a buttery crumb from the corner of his mouth. “Yes. The final summing-up was that horizontal tunnelling into mountainsides, or shallow sub-surface excavations, would never work. To get the gold you needed to work in depth. All the indications were that the richer lodes were a long way down. Even in 1958, when a survey was carried out, the main conclusion was an echo of that theory: it was pointless to resume operations unless deeper shafts were sunk. Or...” He contemplated the square of tablecloth, its edges lifting in the faint breeze.

  “Or?” Ellen prompted.

  “Are you going to have that last scone?”

  “It’s all yours.”

  When they were on the road again, Mark continued: “The Cadwallader Foundation was backing different ideas. Go deep, all right; but not with expensive shafts, pit props, cumbersome winding gear. They wanted to try out these new bacteriological methods. If the lodestuff could be converted into a mulch, it could be pumped like oil. And in a viscous state it would be easier to refine out the impurities.”

  “So that truck brings in loads of bacteria,” said Ellen jubilantly, “in hefty great lead sheaths.”

  “Could be. But why the secrecy? The Foundation was openly supporting that particular technique...”

  “And the project’s top technician got himself killed. That’s it! He found some of his pals were extracting the gold for themselves, pumping it up, selling it illegally...”