Chain Reaction

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  ‘Don’t be so damnably bitter.’

  ‘All right; I’ll concede you that. Anyway, his only contribution, important though it was, was to step up the cooling after the fun began.’

  ‘Yes, Gatt, I know. But don’t you see, what happened after the accident may have been just as significant as what went before.’

  Gatt propped up the volume of music and spontaneously played the opening bars of the Appassionata. The Director stood there by the fireplace, quietly smoking, his feet planted eighteen inches apart. The creases of his well-cut trousers were immaculate. Gatt played through the first page and then stopped.

  ‘Go on, Arlen. It’s my favourite sonata.’

  Gatt smiled, but shut the lid of the piano. ‘You’re a cunning devil, Robert!’ he said. ‘You knew I had something to work off so you provide me with a Stein way to do it on! May I have another Scotch?’

  ‘Help yourself.’ Gatt did so without hurrying, walked over and joined Hargreaves by the fireplace. ‘Well, if you want to know, I’m absolutely convinced that Mr Spigett’s blasted beans are in some way connected with Marsdowne.’

  ‘I know,’ said the Director quietly. ‘And, as a matter of fact, I am too, though I couldn’t tell you why.’ He lit another cigarette as soon as he had thrown away the last. ‘Perhaps it’s because I think that everything has got to have a reason and the present emergency doesn’t seem to have one.’ A thought struck him, but when he spoke his voice was studiedly casual. ‘I suppose it is quite impossible to get into the pumping-room?’

  Gatt looked at him expressionlessly for a few moments. Then he said: ‘I’m afraid so. If you remember, when the cartridge-scanning system jammed solid they had to open up a duct in the pumping-room to give access to the guts of the reactor — to take its temperature, so to speak. You know what happened after that. As soon as the men were safely out, the bulkhead doors were closed and sealed and the gas pressure was raised inside the pile again. Thus a lot of burning fission products must have been blown into the pumping-room. It will be years before it’s a proposition for anyone to go inside without taking one hell of a risk. Even then the job would take months.’

  ‘This was after Manson emptied the heat-exchangers?’

  ‘Yes. About two hours after. They weren’t able to reduce the gas pressure before that time; and of course they couldn’t open the duct until the pressure was down inside the pile.’

  The Director said: ‘What decided the moment when they could reduce the pressure?’

  ‘When Seff had discharged enough of the uranium cartridges to stop the chain reaction. Project 3 was designed in such a way that the cartridges could be removed even when the pile was fully active. And if that hadn’t been so, we would have had a fire that would have got totally out of control, contaminating the countryside dangerously for hundreds of square miles.’

  ‘Even with the control rods in?’

  Gatt looked at him squarely. ‘That was the point, Robert. Seff said he lowered the control rods as soon as the heat output level rose above normal — and it takes just seven seconds to do that. The trouble was they did not have the required effect.’

  ‘You don’t doubt he did lower them, do you?’

  ‘I don’t doubt he tried to lower them. But when? Did he leave it so late that the ‘X holes’ had warped out of alignment and the rods wouldn’t drop? If so, no one would be any the wiser, and there was no way of finding out afterwards, because, of course, eventually they did become warped and the whole mechanism got jammed. It was like that when I arrived.’

  ‘There was no way of knowing, then, whether they had dropped right in or not?’

  ‘That is the plain truth of the matter. Once you press the emergency button, the rods are released from their claws and drop down by gravity. When control is restored, you have to fish them out again with a special grab in order to restart the reactor. But if the rods don’t drop fully down in the first place, there’s no way of knowing.’ He finished his drink in one. ‘But one would suppose, Robert, that if one pressed the button and the reactor didn’t stop reacting that the rods hadn’t dropped at all.’

  Hargreaves looked at him sharply. ‘You didn’t mention this in your report.’

  ‘It’s pure surmise. But I always thought it was rather a pity that the time-recording clock was out of action and failed to record at what stage of the proceedings Seff did attempt to shut down the pile.’

  ‘I see. So what you are saying, virtually, is that the accident could have been caused by Seff pressing the shut-down button so late that although the control rods were released they could not fall to the bottom of the ‘X holes’ because by that time their alignment had been distorted by the excess heat. Is that about it?’ Hargreaves flicked half an inch of ash carefully into the fireplace. ‘That still doesn’t explain why the pile began to operate in the first place if Manson’s theory about it is right.’

  ‘You mean about it being of insufficient mass to operate at all? No, I admit it doesn’t.’

  ‘On the other hand, let’s suppose you’re right for a moment. Let’s say Jack did press the button too late. All right, I grant you that would have been a very serious piece of negligence. But it still doesn’t get us any nearer solving the problem of the tins, does it? The point is, what happened after the pile went wrong, if anything, that could account for widespread contamination? That is the missing link in the chain, Arlen.’ He relaxed a little. ‘Now do something for me, will you? Play the rest of that Movement before you go over to Frank’s.’

  *

  When Gatt arrived at the Greshams’, Frank was playing with the trains.

  True, his two sons were taking part, but they only had rather minor roles in the proceedings — operating the signals, for instance, and winding up the engines.

  ‘We’re not fully electrified, old boy,’ said Frank, neatly changing the points just in time to prevent a major rail disaster. Arlen was rather disappointed: he would have liked to have seen a good crash.

  Gatt said: ‘Can’t you make the electric one go a bit faster?’

  ‘Won’t take the curves.’

  ‘Couldn’t you bank them up with books?’

  ‘By Jove! That’s a good idea. Christopher, go and get a few novels out of the study.’ The boy ran off on his mission, and Gresham shouted after him: ‘Don’t take Mummy’s Book Society choice!’

  They all played with the train set for a while and they banked up the line, and there was a wonderful crash when Gatt was a little slow, for some reason, in switching the points. Then Mummy called that it was time the children were put to bed, and off they went.

  *

  Gresham got his pipe going, and the two men settled down in comfortable arm-chairs among the engines and the coaches and the maze of track, and talked about general things.

  Gatt brought the conversation round to the Newlands Steel business and asked Gresham what he thought. ‘I dunno. That man Spigett is evasive. And he likes to make an easy profit. If he could do that by getting some metal on the side that he didn’t have to ask too many questions about, I think he’d do it. Why don’t you go down to his factory and take a look round?’

  Arlen was gazing into space over Gresham’s shoulder, but Frank didn’t look round because he knew this mannerism. ‘I’m going to,’ said Gatt. He picked up a shunting engine and turned the wheels backwards and forwards, and examined the way the piston-rods went in and out of the toy cylinders. ‘I’m going first thing in the morning.’ There was silence for a while.

  Gresham broke it. ‘You know what’s worrying me? All this business about it being the metal that started everything off. Supposing we’re wrong? I’m no sort of scientist, but take the Newlands business. I’ve no doubt that Ganin was telling the truth about that piece of cobalt — he’s obviously a very good chap. But isn’t it asking a bit much to expect that fate should so conveniently provide us with the answer by means of such a happy series of coincidences?’

  Arlen struck a match on o
ne of the driving wheels and agreed it was. ‘And that isn’t the only thing that’s wrong with it,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working out the quantities. The theory is that something in the juice inside the tin might have dissolved a little of the metal (or the coating) of the tin itself. Well, in the first place that coating, whether just ordinary tin-plate or a special chemical, is there for the express purpose of not being dissolved, and in the second place the amount of radiation that could get into the food itself in this way would be infinitesimal — unless the concentration of radioactive matter in the metal were very high. Yet the original source of radiation is supposed to have come from one tiny piece of cobalt-60.’ He stood up and walked to the window, picking his way carefully between the rails. ‘It doesn’t make sense. I think when I go down tomorrow morning I shall look for something else.’

  ‘Any idea what?’

  ‘No. No idea at all. But I want to see every process those cans go through between the time the beans arrive and when they end up in the dispatch department.’ He stooped to replace the little engine carefully on the rails. ‘I think,’ he added, ‘that whatever it was that got into those tins must have got there somewhere along the production line.’

  ‘You mean, if it isn’t the metal?’

  Gatt suddenly looked directly at Gresham. ‘Yes, that’s right. If it isn’t the metal.’

  *

  As Dick Simmel rode home in the taxi he thought, That’s funny, I shall never be able to get into a taxi again without thinking of Sophie. And that was all right because thinking of Sophie made him feel wonderful. He thought about her all the way home, and went on thinking about her while he took a bath and right up to the time he turned on the TV for the late news.

  There was still no mention of radioactivity, since it had been agreed with the press that the full facts were not to be published until the green light was given. But when the announcer opened the bulletin with what news there was about the Tin Can Crisis, as he called it, Dick’s mind returned to the discovery he had made on his own in No. 2 Lab just before the press conference, and which he hadn’t mentioned to anybody.

  For the simple reason that he didn’t think he could be right and everyone else wrong.

  But it haunted him, and he remembered the Old Man’s ‘act first, tell me afterwards’ remark. Eventually Dick decided to phone up Manson in Birmingham.

  Manson wasn’t at the wholesalers’, and when they gave the number of the hotel he wasn’t there either. The porter said: ‘Mr Manson checked out, sir. He said to say that if there were any messages he had decided to return to London on the night train and would be at the office at the usual time.’ Dick thanked him, hung up and lit a cigarette.

  He smoked two cigarettes without doing anything, but after he had lit the third he phoned for a Radiocab and dressed rapidly into a pair of corduroys and a sweater, and told the driver to take him to Filbury House.

  The night-porter on duty examined his pass carefully, checked it with the list of authorized personnel and gave him the key to No. 2 Lab. Simmel asked him to inform the duty officer of his intentions, and went up in the lift to the fourth floor and along the dimly lit passage to the laboratory.

  Inside, the rows of tins with their brightly coloured labels looked gay and innocuous. Yet when Simmel switched on the detection equipment the meter showed a measurable reading even when the ‘microphone thing’ — in fact the detector head — was nowhere near the cans.

  There were two rows of cans; one labelled ‘contaminated’ and the other marked ‘clean’. Simmel took down one of the clean cans and held it near the detector head. The meter showed no increase in radiation. Next, he took a contaminated one and did the same thing. This time the meter swung over, as it had done upstairs when Manson conducted his demonstration. It also behaved as before when he emptied the contents on to a plate and checked the radiation from them.

  ‘So far, so good,’ said Dick aloud.

  It was at this point in Manson’s lecture that the machine had broken down the previous day.

  ‘Now for the bit that Manson left out.’

  First he reset the selector switch on the instrument, changing its position from ‘GAMMA’ to ‘ALL’. Then he took the clean can that had given no reading on the dial and opened it up, pouring the contents on to another plate. When he held the head near the shiny, brown mess of little ovals that were the ‘innocent’ beans, the needle shot across the dial again. There was no doubt about it. ‘They’re hot, all right!’ he exclaimed in spite of himself.

  After carefully noting which of the now empty cans was which, he took them over to the sink and washed them out thoroughly. Having dried them carefully, he checked them again.

  One of them still gave a reading from the outside, as before.

  Then Simmel phoned up the Director.

  IV. THE THIRD DAY

  CHAPTER TEN

  WHEN Dick Simmel arrived at the main building for the third day of the meeting, he was quiet and thoughtful. There were two things on his mind — the experiment … and Kate. Especially there was Kate. He hardly answered Sergeant Drake as he reached the main entrance, but walked straight to the lift and pressed the top button. And while the elevator hung poised in space, remaining there as the steel doors of each floor came down past it, he was wondering what to say to her. Whether to tell her now, without dragging things out, or to wait for an opportunity of doing it more gently. For he now knew intuitively — where he hadn’t known before — that she was going to care a great deal. By the time the lift had arrived at the executive floor, he hadn’t made up his mind.

  He was reluctant to leave the lift; and he waited there so long after the automatic gates had opened that they had begun to shut again before he stepped out.

  She was there, sitting at her desk behind the glass doors, just as if nothing had happened. It was evident that no one else had arrived, for the door leading to Hargreaves’ office was standing wide open.

  He thought that now, on the whole, might be the best time to tell her; she would be too busy during the day to think about it too much, and by the end of the day the first shock of it would be over. Soft lights and sweet music, he thought, would hardly be an appropriate setting for what he had to say.

  She hailed him cheerfully from the desk, cocking her head on one side. She looked very pretty, Dick thought.

  ‘Hallo, funny face!’ he said, trying to be cheerful.

  A tiny frown appeared just above her nose. He had never called her by this nickname before. ‘Any of them here yet?’

  ‘No. Had breakfast?’

  ‘I’m not hungry today.’

  ‘Dick; what is the matter?’ She studied him carefully. ‘You didn’t phone last night. It’s not like you to say you’ll do something, then not do it.’

  He hadn’t phoned because he couldn’t bring himself to do so. He pulled up one of the small chairs and sat down beside her, and Kate thought, My God, this is it. She simply said: ‘I’m not going to put you through the wringer. Who is she?’

  ‘Just a girl in a taxi. I took the wrong one.’

  ‘Or the right one.’ She lit a cigarette, and found that her hand was trembling a little. ‘I hope she’s nice.’

  ‘She is nice. Too bloody nice.’

  ‘Does she go for you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘But of course it doesn’t make much difference whether she does or not.’

  ‘You’re very perceptive.’

  ‘I know you pretty well, Dick. Don’t forget that.’ There was one of those awful pauses. Then she said: ‘I knew, of course, that you weren’t really in love with me. That’s why I played everything down. You know, madly gay. The bright conversation in the moonlight. Do you want to marry her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’ve really had it. And I knew well enough that you didn’t want to marry me.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  He looked
down at his hands, and wrestled with them. ‘You’re being so sweet about it, and I feel … I feel a complete and utter louse.’

  ‘You needn’t hate yourself. Nobody ever does this sort of thing on purpose. It might have happened too late.’

  ‘Too late?’ He didn’t think she meant after he’d married her.

  Kate said: ‘I wanted you a lot, you know. And when people you want don’t offer to marry you … You say “respectability” is a neurosis. I’d say it was a defence.’

  ‘Well, if it’s any consolation I’m probably going to burn my fingers over someone who is an infinitely more devastating proposition to me than I would ever be to you.’

  She looked at him with a funny expression and said ‘Nuts!’ very quietly. Then: ‘You know one is always reading, in books, about having a funny feeling inside — you know, as if your tummy just wasn’t there any more? Well, now I know what they mean. Books are funny things: they talk about a whole lot of things that don’t really register at all — until you experience them yourself.’

  He said: ‘God, but you’re being so nice about it!’

  The lift had arrived again and the doors began to open. Kate just had time to say: ‘Please be happy, Dick. Don’t be like poor old Seff and Angela. Don’t be mixed up about things. If she doesn’t want you like hell, get out, and get out quick!’

  He squeezed her hand so hard that it hurt. ‘I will, Kate. I promise.’

  Kate’s eyes were without tears. Consciously, she thought: ‘You can’t cry at nine-thirty in the morning!’ And then Manson came in through the swing-doors.

  *

  General Tripling was already down for breakfast when Sophie came in. She helped herself to mushrooms and bacon at the sideboard and took her place at the table. Lady Tripling never appeared for breakfast, her habit being to have a glass of orange juice only at this time of day.

  The general munched in silence for a while. Then he appeared to notice Sophie for the first time. He said: ‘Who’s this chap Simmett, or whatever his name is?’