Chain Reaction

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  If Arlen Gatt hadn’t been testing a new type of mine detector early one fearful morning on the shores of Brittany, Angela would not have married Jack Seff, and Jack Seff wouldn’t have been a lost and unhappy man. If John Cartwright hadn’t kept his photographic materials so inappropriately in the kitchen cupboard, if there hadn’t been a group of mildly insane youngsters with radiation detecting equipment on board the Henry Star buck, a widespread crisis might have become a cataclysmic disaster.

  And if Dick Simmel had turned left instead of right when he vacated the main building of the Department at the end of the meeting, on the second day, he would not have met Sophie Tripling.

  Of course, in retrospect one could argue that Dick’s relationship with Kate had been too relaxed, too pat, too static. Perhaps what did happen was bound to happen sooner or later. On the other hand, sometimes it doesn’t. A boy may meet the girl next door and continue to be a boy. He may even marry her, and live in a state of congenial compatibility and rear children. In this event he never aspires to true adulthood and, paradoxically, becomes middle-aged before his time. The life-cycle has been suppressed at its roots, and therefore, unable to climb to its natural climax, it gradually ebbs away. A series of familiar, routine milestones are passed, one after another. The road is wide and straight enough, and even in the hardest winters it is still navigable. But it is essentially a by-pass, and the scenery is a little monotonous, unlike that of the more difficult, winding lanes. It has little personality, little individuality, this ribbon-developed way of life. Each part of the route can be predicted, because everything has been marked on the map in advance.

  Or the young man may meet his Sophie.

  Thus it happened that Dick Simmel walked down the stone steps, and turned the wrong way for Kate and the right way for Sophie.

  There was only one taxi and two people were hailing it. A short conference, an obliging driver — and the flag went down.

  The first thing that Dick noticed about Sophie was the way her hair fell in two lovely inward arcs about her face, framing it perfectly between them. The second thing he noticed was her voice. It was so exactly right for a girl who had hair like that.

  He did not pretend that he was unaffected by her presence. He could not have done so. And he would have been a fool to have tried. He said: ‘Would it be a bore if I broke the rules and talked to you?’

  She smiled sympathetically. She knew exactly what had happened. Not because she was conceited, but because he hadn’t tried to hide it. ‘What would you like to talk about?’

  Simmel could hardly keep his voice steady. But when he spoke the words were firm and determined. ‘I have a problem, you see. Because in about five minutes you’ll be getting out of this taxi, and if I’m not careful I shall never see you again.’

  He expected her to stop the taxi and to get out then and there. And he almost wished she would, because he knew he was going to fail in love, just as clearly and as vividly as he knew then that he wasn’t in love with Kate and never would be. And the thought of the agonised gyrations his emotions would be going through in the near future if she didn’t get out (and even if she did) was a very frightening one.

  The girl looked amused and gentle and taken-aback all at the same time. Eventually she said: ‘It must have taken a lot of courage to say that! ‘

  Dick was glad it was over. He smiled wryly. ‘It did!’ he said. ‘And now, of course, I must apologise.’

  ‘Naturally!’ she affirmed. ‘You have committed the unpardonable crime of being a human being.’ She looked at him with frank good humour. ‘I gather you find me attractive,’ she said, thinking ‘he’s a pleasant young man and it’s quite right for him to be nervous and he’s young for his age.’

  ‘That is putting it mildly.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice. I like to be found attractive.’

  ‘I should have thought it must be pretty monotonous!’

  ‘I’m not as horrible as that! And you must admit your way of going about things is hardly monotonous!’

  ‘I couldn’t think of any other way of doing it,’ he said with great honesty. And suddenly for one instant he thought of Kate, and felt sorry and embarrassed and wretched about her. Because he knew that whatever happened now things would never be the same again. When this girl, on reaching her destination, politely but firmly wished him a permanent good-bye — as he felt sure she would — he couldn’t just go back and pretend to himself or to Kate that he hadn’t learned, within a period of seconds, that another sense had been added to the ones he already possessed.

  The taxi stopped at some lights, and an illuminated shop window made it possible for him to see the girl’s face in more detail. She was lovely but not beautiful. There were some little wavy wrinkles across her brow that shouldn’t really have been there, and her nose was funny. It was her eyes and lips that stole the picture, and the neat, well-defined chin.

  She was watching him now, amused to find him studying her so intently and openly. He reddened at being caught at it, and started searching hastily for a cigarette.

  ‘No, thanks, I don’t,’ she said. ‘But you go ahead.’

  He lit it a little clumsily, and that made him feel even more self-conscious. ‘I’m like an idiotic school-boy,’ he thought, ‘who’s just seen a Girl for the first time.’ Aloud he said: ‘I’m not very suave, am I?’

  ‘No,’ she admitted frankly, ‘you’re not. It doesn’t matter very much, does it?’ The taxi had turned off the main road. ‘Look, I’m nearly home. Why don’t you come in and have a drink of something? Daddy won’t mind; though you mustn’t be offended if he doesn’t notice you. He sits behind The Times and pretends you aren’t there.’

  Dick, taken completely by surprise, managed to say something more or less coherent, and opened the door of the taxi for her. She insisted on paying half the fare. ‘You’d better tell me who you are.’ she said, as they went up the steps to the front door. Papa might get a bit of a surprise if I have to ask you your name when I introduce you — if I succeed, that is, in getting his attention at all!’

  ‘Simmel. Dick Simmel.’

  ‘And I’m Sophia Tripling. You call me Sophie.’ They entered the house and crossed the hail to the library, which was a big, panelled room heated by a large open fire. A newspaper, behind which a thin column of smoke rose to the ceiling, was held motionless by someone in a comfortable arm-chair. At the click of the door being shut, the paper was lowered and raised again, revealing in the short interval between the two movements a pleasant but austere figure smoking a pipe.

  ‘Good evening, m’dear,’ said the voice behind The Times, apparently non-committal and uninterested in tone. A page was turned over. ‘Y’mother’s gone to the theatre.’

  ‘This is Dick Simmel, Daddy.’

  ‘Good evening, sir!’ said Dick in his conference voice. This was greeted by a slight grunt, and Dick didn’t know quite what to do next. Sophie smiled at him as if to indicate that the formalities were now over. ‘I’ll fix you a drink,’ she said to Dick. ‘Come into the kitchen and help me get the ice.’ When they got there she said: ‘He likes you.’

  Dick wanted to ask her how she could possibly tell, but he couldn’t think how to ask the question without seeming rude. She set his curiosity at rest, however, as she opened the refrigerator (a very old one with the freezing unit outside on the top) and struggled with an ice-tray. ‘You can tell by the kind of grunt,’ she explained. ‘It’s a complete language in itself, really. That’s the approving grunt. You’ve passed.’

  ‘Frankly, I’m terrified.’

  She put the ice-tray under the tap. ‘I know. Everybody else is too. But you don’t have to be. You see, he’s a kind of general, and apparently they nearly all talk like that.’

  Dick cottoned-on. ‘General Sir Horace Tripling,’ he said. A statement, not a question.

  She looked up, surprised. ‘You’re well informed,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t have to be all that well-informed
to know the name of the Deputy Chief-of-Staff,’ he said, neither with awe nor with casualness. She didn’t say anything to this.

  ‘Now we go back,’ she explained, ‘and talk about whatever we like. He won’t listen. Any further grunts you may hear from time to time will be comments on the day’s news.’

  A sixth sense told Dick that there was some sort of inner purpose in her taking him back to the library when there so obviously must have been another room in which they could talk. It didn’t strike him particularly, however, that he was being paid a compliment thereby. It merely made him that much more nervous. He found that she was adept at keeping him at his ease as much as possible, which made up for some, at least, of the ordeal.

  He certainly didn’t realise that Sophie had, in fact, already decided that she liked him and wanted to get to like him better.

  She knew he would dry up the moment they got into the library, so she kept the conversation going for him. ‘Mummy’s gone to see My Fair Lady. She had dreadful trouble getting tickets. But she finally triumphed, and she’s taken some friends of ours along. Have you seen it?’

  Simmel was torn between considerations of tact and honesty; for in fact he had been to the opening night. His difficulty must have shown in his face, because she guessed or very nearly. ‘I can see I’ve got you worried, so that means you probably saw it in New York. Right?’

  He couldn’t help smiling. ‘The awful truth is that I went to the opening at Drury Lane.’

  The girl handed him his drink and they sat near the fire. She chose the foot-stool and made him sit in the chair.

  The smile she returned was a curious combination of mischief and reassurance. ‘You don’t have to be tactful with us!’ she said. ‘We always find that the things we regard as our most conspicuous successes are invariably capped by everybody else’s. We’re really terribly behind the times.’ The glow of the flickering fire illuminated her in a manner that no art photographer could have arranged deliberately. One part of her face was in deep shadow, cast by the even curve of her hair, throwing the rest of her features into highlight. The whole effect was one of gentle soft-focus, but etched and retouched here and there by the vitality of youngness, so that you were intensely aware that the woman in her was alert and alive without the fact being overstated in the set of her lips or the lie of her body. Here was not the English Rose, thought Dick Simmel, the frail creature of pedestal worship; but a woman to be won, who would become warm and strong in your hands — if yours were the hands in which she chose to be contained.

  And all the while, as they talked and as their minds made intercourse by dint of every pause, each smile and half-smile, each exchange of glances that added something to what was being said, he could feel that she knew he had found something that perhaps he had never expected to find, because he had not even known it existed. And somehow, by the metaphysical means that only people in this kind of situation can understand, she managed to convey the message: ‘I know, and I like you and I think it’s going to be all right.’ The same message had to contain the additional sentence: ‘But don’t forget we have only just discovered one another, and since you’re the man, you’re going to know your feelings quicker than I will know mine, and at the moment you obviously feel more strongly about me than I do about you.’ But again, so as not to depress him too much: ‘All the same, I can’t help wanting with all my heart that you are going to be the one, and you have honest eyes and you didn’t try to pretend anything.’ And finally, as a kind of metaphysical afterthought: ‘I know you won’t think me big-headed for thinking these things.’

  While both conversations were carried on simultaneously — the spoken one which touched on ordinary, everyday things, and the silent one which was the beginning of a mating — the fire flickered cheerfully and the smoke continued to rise from behind the newspaper, and the various kinds of grunts that were the general’s editorial comments maintained an atmosphere of warmth and friendliness that Dick Simmel would never forget.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘YOU’RE going over to Frank’s place tonight, aren’t you, Arlen?’ said Hargreaves. In the deft hands of his chauffeur the big car sped them down Whitehall. Gatt shifted his huge body in the seat in an effort to get comfortable.

  ‘He’s offered me a bite of dinner.’

  ‘Good. Do you mind having a quick one with me first? Then you could take the car on. I won’t keep you long.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘My wife’s down at Dorchester — just as well, really, poor dear. She never did like crises.’

  ‘What do you think, Robert?’

  ‘You mean, the way things have gone so far?’

  Gatt didn’t answer him directly. He said: ‘Jack seems to be pretty sure of himself. And Manson’s blustering. He’s pretty anxious to incriminate Seff if he can. I got some broad hints from him at last night’s party.’

  ‘Project 3?’

  ‘Just that. In a way, what he said was quite interesting. He said that, as designed, the pile should have been inert. The implication being that Seff did something pretty drastic to get the thing working. And then when he did get it going, he couldn’t stop it.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  ‘I find it hard to be sympathetic towards anything that Manson says, but I am prepared to consider it as a possible theory. After all, we do know that Jack had been drinking that night.’

  ‘Has anybody mentioned that?’

  ‘Yes; the man who keeps the pub at Glennaverley. I interviewed him the next day. The day after the accident.’

  The Director didn’t reply for a few moments. But when he lighted a cigarette the glow from the match showed the furrows of a deep frown. ‘Arlen, you aren’t going to like me for saying this, but I must all the same.’ He blew out the match and placed it in the ash-tray with a movement of precision. ‘There are those who think that you are fanatically opposed to Seff because he drinks.’ He anticipated the threatened interruption. ‘Wait a minute; let me finish. I’m not suggesting that you have got your knife into him, in the way Manson has. That’s quite different. But it is not everyone who checks on the recreational habits of senior scientists in the course of an enquiry. The fact that you took the trouble to go to the public-house the very next day shows how much weight you gave to this particular aspect of the case.’

  Gatt’s fists were dangerously clenched as he gripped the armrest. ‘Are you questioning the way I conducted the investigation?’

  Hargreaves was not going to rise to this bait. He deliberately delayed his answer by looking out of the window at the illuminated face of Big Ben and checking his watch by it. The car swung round towards Victoria. ‘Well, I suppose, if you put it like that, I am, yes. In that particular respect. In your efforts to discover a flaw in a human being, you could have missed one that existed in Project 3.’

  ‘You know damn well I tore the place apart to get at the facts, Sir Robert. You’re not suggesting, I trust, that it was my fault I happened to be at Calder when the accident happened? If so, please allow me to remind you that you sent me there.’

  Hargreaves fought to keep his temper. He had been through this kind of thing so often with Gatt that it should not, he told himself, be allowed to get under his skin again. He said: ‘Don’t be absurd, Arlen. That has nothing whatever to do with it. I’m simply saying that when you reached Marsdowne one of the first things you did during the investigation was to check up on one man — Seff. You didn’t query the man on the spot — Peter Selgate — or Alanson, or Ed Springle. Yet they could have been equally guilty in other ways. For all you know Selgate might have had a girl hanging around; Ed might have been guilty of negligence; Alanson might have been so busy throwing his weight about with some lab assistant that he slipped up on the job. All right: all these things are highly unlikely; but if you are considering the human element, you can’t just limit your enquiries to one individual only. Yet can you tell me truthfully that you did not?’

  The car drew up
at Hargreaves’ house before Gatt could answer, and it wasn’t until they had settled into the very tasteful Regency drawing-room that the conversation could be resumed.

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘Whisky and splash.’ Gatt took the glass rather ungraciously and sat on the piano-stool. The Director mixed himself a drink and stood over by the fireplace. He knew there was going to be an outburst, and he just waited for it.

  Arlen leafed through the second volume of the Beethoven sonatas. He was still flicking over the pages as he spoke. ‘Let’s take them in turn,’ he said. ‘Selgate. An efficient young man, very conscientious. Okay, we know he has a girl-friend up there — well, he’d go mad in that dump of a town if he didn’t. But is it likely he’d be playing around during the launching of anything as big as Project 3? In any case, we know he was working round the clock. And to take the thing ad absurdum, no girl could get past the guards, anyway. He doesn’t drink either; though I’ll check up as to whether he might have been chewing gum at the time. Next, Alanson. No attachments. Drinks beer at the pub and shoots his mouth off. He was ordered by Seff to empty the heat-exchanger system, and this we know he did, for the simple reason that when the system was inspected it was dry; and there was no steam escaping from the burst cylinder one hour after the pile became overheated even though the whole thing was still as hot as hell.’

  ‘Still,’ put in Hargreaves, quite unperturbed by Gatt’s caustic tongue, ‘since no one could enter the pumping-room the next day — due to the intense radiation — we don’t actually know that he turned the cock, do we?’

  ‘True; he could have done the whole thing with a bicycle pump. He might even have resorted to witchcraft. However, he was clearly told what to do, and as far as we know he did it. And don’t forget that the only thing he was responsible for — turning that cock — was after the event; it could not have contributed to the cause of the accident. Lastly, Ed Springle. Well, I admit he has a very lovely wife and that must be very distracting. After all, he hasn’t let her go to waste.’