Chain Reaction

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Seff said: ‘Certainly, we like to have fun and games.’ He permitted himself a dry smile. ‘That’s not to say I let it happen deliberately — it’s too expensive on plant. I’ve lost more metering equipment that way! But the phrase “partially out of control” needs defining. Usually it means simply that the intended result has not been obtained.’

  ‘What’s the worst you can get?’ asked Heatherfield. ‘An explosion?’

  Gatt smiled. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but that’s quite impossible! The sort of thing that can happen is what occurred at Windscale — due to an unexpected effect of Wigner Growth in that particular case — and of course they had some real bad luck there.’ He unscrewed the lid of a small bottle of white tablets, and downed two of them with a glass of water. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘like Gilbert Harding, I’m ‘never without ’em’. The Pile,’ he continued, ‘begins to get really hot; and like any other boiler, it starts sending ash up the chimney. The trouble is the ash is radioactive; and if your traps are designed for a certain maximum and can’t handle any more — well, the smoke’s got to come out somewhere. In any case, that sort of thing can only happen in an open-circuit pile — a different sort of set-up altogether from ours.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Not that we haven’t had our own little diversions.’

  Heatherfield persisted. ‘But supposing the mechanism working the rods got stuck, what then?’ He’d got them all smiling now. Except Gatt. He suddenly seemed to have got very interested in his blotter.

  Seff answered the question, his hollow cheeks relaxing into a wry grin. ‘You certainly are anticipating the worst, aren’t you? Well, you’d have to do something pretty drastic, or all hell would be let loose. Otherwise you’d have a bloody great fire on your hands and radioactive ash would be scattered all over the countryside. If that happened, you’d probably have to evacuate a pretty wide area. But it wouldn’t turn into a bomb, if that’s what you’re driving at! Have I answered your question?’

  Heatherfield grinned back at him. ‘You have. And I’m sorry if I seem to be wasting your time. But the fact is, I know absolutely nothing about this subject; and if I’m going to be an intelligent observer at this meeting, I should know a little about it.’

  ‘Of course you must,’ said Seff. ‘It’s certainly not a waste of time. Well, to get back to Gatt. When something starts happening that we hadn’t bargained for — even if there is no increase in radiation — I pick up a phone and ask Gatt to come up. When he gets there, he puts any safety precautions into force that he considers necessary. These might include such things as stepping up the cooling system, putting additional checks on local radiation, banning personnel from certain areas and, most important of all, I think, making sure that the readings we are getting from the various metering systems are the true ones and not falsified through damage. The worst part for me is he then writes a report on the whole business, and I get hit over the head for trying unofficial experiments or putting paid to a few hundred quids’ worth of equipment.’ There was no guile or malice in this remark, and he exchanged a friendly glance with Gatt across the table. ‘However, it doesn’t happen too often, and I’ve still got the job.’

  Manson added, slightly over-casually: ‘Actually it so happened that Gatt was on a visit to Calder Hall at the time of our only major accident. He didn’t get to Marsdowne till the following morning.’

  ‘But you were up there, weren’t you, Alec?’ Gatt spoke perfectly politely, as if he had been saying ‘you were at that party on New Years Eve’.

  ‘Yes,’ said Manson, ‘I was up there.’

  A short silence followed. Hargreaves cleared his throat. ‘So there you have it,’ he said. ‘You know what everybody does. Simmel, you’d better go and see about some coffee. In a few minutes we’ll have a break; then we’ll get down to it in earnest, and start the story from the beginning. What time is the Spigett man due?’

  ‘I expect: he’s in the building by now,, sir,’ said Dick, getting up.

  ‘Well, you’d better send him in when the coffee’s ready,’ he said. ‘Then he can get to know everybody before we resume.’

  Simmel left the room and found Kate in the outside office. He ran a pencil absent-mindedly through her ginger hair, watching the tight little curls spring up again behind it. She looked up at the pencil, raising her eyes as far as they would go as if she could watch what he was doing to her hair, but she did this somehow without altering her facial expression.

  ‘Is all quiet on the Western From?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, they’re as good as gold,’ said Dick. ‘I can’t understand it. All handing out compliments and being brothers-in-arms. Even Gatt and Seff eating out of each other’s hands. I call it ominous.’

  Kate raised her eyebrows thoughtfully. ‘Well, I hope it lasts,’ she said.

  Dick looked down at his script-board and crossed out ‘coffee’ with a vertical line. ‘That depends on what they dig up,’ he said. ‘But meanwhile let’s make our own vital contribution to the proceedings. They want their coffee.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  SYDNEY SPIGETT really had started life as a barrow-boy. He was excessively proud of the fact. As he slapped you a crippling blow on the back he would boom: ‘Used to have a pitch near the Elephant, y’know. Hard times they were, old man, hard times!’ Then you would get any one of a number of those highly coloured versions of his life-story. Contradictory though they were, most of them were probably true. For Sydney Spigett was just one big contradiction. His bright green tie contradicted his mauve socks. His pretensions at being a patron of the Arts contradicted his gaudy taste in furniture. But he sold a lot of beans. ‘The war,’ he would say, in that sandpaper Cockney voice of his, ‘was the Beginning of Beans. It became the staple diet of millions. Fish and chips’ — he gestured with mutton-chop hands — ‘nothing! Phhht! You can forget ’em. You can’t put chips in a tin. The world is tin-minded now. Look at the beer. Comes in cans these days. Smart. Slick. Give the world a can-opener and you’re in business.’

  At least he had made an effort, this morning, to dress in a manner suited to the occasion. For, apart from his tie and socks, his attire was modest — almost dignified. The total effect was rather incongruous, however, like a super-cinema that sprouted Doric columns in the midst of the chromium-plate. And to crown it all he wore a bowler hat that sat, exactly horizontally, upon crinkled, black-acetate hair.

  ‘I’m Sydney Spigett,’ he said unnecessarily.

  ‘I think they’re ready for you, sir,’ said Kate. ‘If you’d kindly take a seat, I’ll just go and see.’

  Spigett took his hat off and sat down. Then he stood up again, as if the compressed springs of the chair had shot him up in the air by their recoil action. His stocky figure certainly looked better when standing up than sitting down. ‘Too low,’ he explained. ‘Bad for the heart. Give you thrombosis.’

  Kate went in and announced him, and he walked briskly into the room and shook the Director’s hand with an iron grip. ‘Glad to meet you, Sir Robert,’ he said. ‘Coffee, eh? Thought the Civil Service always drank tea.’

  ‘Believe me,’ said the Director, ‘there’s very little difference between the two in our catering establishment.’ Spigett was looking round with high-pressure curiosity. ‘Hope I’m not late. Hate being late. Had a lot of press boys turn up at the flat this morning. Couldn’t get rid of them, so in the end I gave ’em breakfast. Never seen anything like it. Averaged three eggs each.’

  Sir Robert smiled. ‘You’d better meet my colleagues,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact, you have arrived at precisely the right time.’ He introduced him round. Manson and Mr Rupert had something in common at last: they both loathed Spigett on sight.

  After the formalities, they all sat round the table again, Spigett sitting between Manson and Simmel. There was an expectant air prevalent in the room now; they were all waiting to see what kind of a firework display Spigett could produce.

  Hargreaves said: ‘just before we paused for coffee I sugges
ted to the meeting that we started at the very beginning of the story, following through every detail to the limit. This way I think we will arrive at the truth.’

  ‘Fair enough. I want to sell beans. I’m losing thousands over this. Thousands. Don’t even get any insurance. “Act of God” clause. I want the truth all right.’

  Gresham puffed at his pipe and looked across the table, peering squintingly through the smoke. ‘I’m not sure about that, Mr Spigett. That is one way this meeting may help you. We will be able to discover whether what is legally known as an “act of God” applies. I dunno; it’s an interesting case. Supposing, for instance, it was found chat, for some reason, bean crops themselves were peculiarly sensitive to radioactive fail-out — particularly the strontium-90? That fall-out would not really be classed as a ‘natural phenomenon’, since it has been considerably increased by all the hydrogen-bomb tests and so on that have been made over the last twelve years or so. In that case, it would not be considered an “act of God”.’

  Sir Robert said: ‘I might accuse you of raising a purely side-issue, Frank — and we haven’t got time for that, as you know — but in so doing you’ve put your finger upon what might be termed the Sixty four thousand-dollar Question.’

  ‘You mean ‘is it the beans or is it the cans?’ said Gatt. There was silence for a few moments.

  ‘I go for the cans,’ said Seff suddenly. He stubbed out a cigarette. ‘Frank’s illustration — about the beans mysteriously sucking up all the fall-out — was, of course, a piece of sheer Alice in Wonderland to demonstrate a point. But it does, in fact, demonstrate another one. As most of you know, the usual way of transferring radioactivity from one substance to another is through bombardment by neutrons. Alpha, beta, gamma rays and so on can do damage by ionisation, but do not cause the substances they attack to become radioactive themselves. Now, where do those neutrons come from? Well, fissioned uranium gives off neutrons; and so do one or two other very rare metals. We know that during the Windscale business fission products originating from uranium got on the grass; and then the cows ate it and by chemical process it got in their milk. If you drank the milk you would be subject to contamination yourself, though in that case only to a fractional degree. If Mr Spigett’s entire supply of beans came from that area and if the crop happened to have been gathered at exactly the optimum moment, the amount of radio-iodine present in them would be virtually nil, since by now it would have lost its potency. In any case, such a close watch was kept on matters up there that there would have been no question of harvesting them under such circumstances.’

  ‘Apart from the fact that the beans are imported,’ put in Spigett.

  ‘Of course. Well, you could argue that they might have come from areas that were subject to fall-out due to thermo-nuclear tests; but it is extremely unlikely.’

  ‘Nevertheless, a check should be made,’ said the Director.

  ‘Quite!’ said Seff. ‘Bui let’s assume for the moment that I am right. Well, it’s obvious that the beans can’t have been subject to contamination by natural ores. And of course the third possible source of radiation — a reactor — is a ridiculous proposition; can’t you imagine people solemnly shovelling beans into a pile at Calder Hall, cooking them inside it, and then putting them in cans?

  ‘Then there’s another thing — quite a different thing altogether.’ At this point he was dividing his attention mostly between Heatherfield. and Spigett. ‘We assess the effective lifetime of any radioactive substance by referring to its half-life. That’s because it keeps reducing its level of radiation by half all the time. Well, if you tried to express its total life, it would be rather like the old-picture-on-the-biscuit-tin problem — you know; on the actual tin there is a picture of a biscuit tin; so on the picture of the biscuit tin there is a picture of a picture of a biscuit tin, and so on to infinity. Eventually, of course, the pictures get so small that you can neither see them nor print them, but theoretically they are there:

  Great fleas have little fleas

  Upon their backs to bite ’em,

  And little fleas have lesser fleas

  And so ad infinitum.

  ‘You get the idea? The half-life, then, of strontium-90 is in the region of thirty years. That means that after this time its radiation has been reduced to half of what it was at the beginning. Quite a long time, you see. That’s why fall-out from nuclear weapons is so dangerous — not only because it is particularly strong but because it is being shoved into the atmosphere a great deal quicker than it is wearing itself out.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘Well, what about the humble bean? It can only contain a tiny amount of metal oxide — not enough to hurt anyone if it should happen to become radioactive. And its half-life, I think, would probably be pretty short. Further, if something had been deposited on it before it reached the tin, surely it would be washed off in the processing.

  ‘But there are other things inside the can besides the beans. There’s usually some juice of some sort. Well, supposing something in that juice was capable of dissolving some component of the can so that some of it was transferred to the juice itself?’

  ‘You mean,’ put in Gatt, ‘the tin-plate on the inside of the tin?’

  ‘Yes, or some kind of coating. If that coating were radioactive, the food would now be contaminated. Do you agree so far?’

  Gatt smiled. ‘It’s vintage Seff,’ he said.

  ‘Very well,’ agreed the Director. ‘Tins it is. But just to make sure we’ll also check on the origin of the beans. Manson, have you started the tests on the sample consignment of the product?’

  ‘They’d doing it now.’

  ‘Good. Let me know as soon as you get results.’ He paused. ‘I must say,’ he added, ‘it seems strange that such mundane and insignificant little objects as baked beans could have been at the bottom of all this.’

  54

  ‘They may be mundane and insignificant,’ said Spigett indignantly, ‘but they’re big money.’

  The Director had made his first diplomatic blunder.

  *

  After the meeting had broken up for lunch, the Director cornered Seff privately. Seff was on the defensive: he knew something was coming.

  ‘You realise,’ said Hargreaves, ‘that you should never have handed over that capsule of cobalt-60 to Manson, up at Marsdowne? He said just now that he personally brought it here in the shielded truck.’

  ‘That’s right; he did.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have sent Selgate?’

  ‘I needed him at the plant.’

  ‘Did Manson sign for the cobalt?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘But you don’t know?’

  Seff was becoming irritable. ‘Manson and I work as a team, Sir Robert. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  The Director put a friendly hand on his arm. ‘Of course, Jack. But what I’m trying to show you is that you can’t take chances — even with Manson, or myself, or Gatt. It might conceivably look as if you were a little bit casual about such things.’

  Seff stiffened. He was angry now, and his next words came out like ice-cubes. ‘You didn’t say anything a few minutes ago, Sir Robert, when Manson brought it up at the meeting.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said the Director. ‘And, don’t forget; it was Manson who brought it up.’

  Seff stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘I don’t see ——’ His face tautened. ‘I would have been far more inclined to place a sinister interpretation on it if Gatt had said it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why!’ He turned away. ‘I can think of at least one good reason.’

  Hargreaves spoke gently. ‘Jack, don’t you think we should leave personal matters out of this?’

  ‘Can one leave personal matters out of it? Can the others?’

  Hargreaves moved over to the window, so that Seff was forced to look directly at him. ‘Well, if you mean what I think you mean I don’t agree with it, Seff. In any event, I can promise you one thing: so long as I am Dir
ector of the Commission, no personal issue is going to affect my judgment. So for heaven’s sake let’s try to be civilised about it. I only warned you with reference to Manson’s remark because you were technically at fault in failing to issue the radio-isotope officially, and you cannot afford to leave yourself open. None of us can. Am I right?’

  Seff permitted himself a grim little smile. ‘Let’s go to lunch, Sir Robert.’

  *

  The oddest friendship imaginable had sprung up between Gatt and Spigett. For by the time lunch was over they obviously enjoyed each other’s company hugely — one a Fellow of Trinity Cambridge and the other an ex-barrow-boy from the Elephant and Castle. Even Kate, who was used to practically anything, was a little startled as they stepped out of the lift together, both rocking with laughter.

  ‘So this bloke,’ Spigett was saying, ‘pays for the haddock — a real whopper, by the way! — and. asks the fishmonger if he wouldn’t mind keeping it on the counter with all the other fishes, until he gets back from the rest of his shopping, see. About an hour later the bloke comes back, suddenly snatches the haddock and runs like hell down the Old Kent Road. Pandemonium! Everybody starts chasing him and shouting “Stop, thief” and the police join in too — all except the wretched fishmonger. Well, eventually the coppers drag the man back to the fish-shop with a triumphant flourish, whereupon the fishmonger, in a still, small voice, says: “It’s his fish!” ’ Spigett laughed uproarously at his own story, and Gatt found himself laughing almost as much, partly because Spigett looked so incredibly funny. ‘Oh, we used to get up to some larks in those days, I can tell you!’ They had reached Hargreaves’ office now, the first to arrive; and there, rotating at a leisurely pace, was the celebrated fan. It was one of those big affairs that are more often seen in the East. It looked curiously out of place in the Director’s very modern office.