Chain Reaction

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  ‘Simmel. Daddy, do try to keep your cuffs out of your breakfast.’

  ‘Simmel, then. D’you like him?’

  ‘I only met him last night.’

  He raised his eyebrows slightly and raided the toast-rack. ‘I didn’t ask you when you met him; I asked you whether you liked him!’ Thick wad of butter on the toast. Large dab of marmalade on the butter. ‘I’ve never seen anyone look at you the way he did.’

  ‘I thought you were reading The Times!’ She knew this trick though. ‘What did you think of him?’

  The general munched thoughtfully. ‘Much the same as you did, m’dear. Good manners — presentable — and falling for you like a ton of bricks. He was also frightened of me, and I always enjoy that. Mark of respect. Shows a proper humility. Can’t bear these cocksure blokes. Always turn out to be soft in the head, anyway. Pass the coffee-pot, please.’ She did so, and he poured out with care, dispensing the milk at the same time. ‘Damned awful coffee, this! Must tell Peterson. What’s his line, this chap Simmel? Does he work? People never do these days, far as I can see.’

  Those little crinkles on her forehead puckered up as she thought about it. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘except that he was coming out of our building when I saw him. He knew who you were. Perhaps he works upstairs, in the Atomic Development place.’

  ‘How’d he manage to meet you so neatly? Pick you up?’

  ‘Not exactly! But he did manage it rather well. He was really rather sweet.’

  He looked at her closely for a second; then returned his attention to the toast. ‘Want me to give him a leg up?’

  She regarded him humorously, a smile in her eyes. ‘You’re jumping to conclusions, Daddy.’

  He wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘Course I am. How silly of me.’ He got up, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘Well, I must get to the office.’ He walked the length of the dining-room and opened the door.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, pausing there, ‘I take it that you brought him in the library to get some sort of reaction from me?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Daddy!’ she said. ‘I’m quite capable of weighing people up myself.’

  ‘Yes, of course you are.’ Dismissing it.

  Sophie helped herself to sugar rather casually. ‘Still, supposing I had. What would you say?’

  ‘In the unlikely event?’

  ‘In the remotely possible event.’

  The general blew a few times through his pipe, then began to unwrap a tobacco-pouch. ‘Sophie,’ he said at length, ‘if you’re half the young woman I think you are, you’d marry him anyway, whether I liked him or not. If you wanted to.’ He started to fill the pipe, and went on talking without looking at her. ‘It’s a funny thing; you’ve only known him for about two minutes and I know perfectly well you’re going to marry him, even if you don’t. I don’t suppose he’s got any money, and that doesn’t matter so long as he isn’t stupid and proud about the fact that you’ve got a bit. But he obviously worships you, so I’d put him out of his agony if I were you. I wouldn’t exactly throw you out of the house if you told me he was the one.’ He struck a match, and gave her a warning look through the flame. ‘Just be sure of one thing’ — he sucked through the pipe, and the match-flame leapt up and down in a regular rhythm, until the tobacco glowed in the pipe-bowl and the match was out — ‘make sure he’s the boss. Give him confidence — otherwise he’ll be afraid of you. Then you’ll both be miserable. I’m just a stupid old general, but I think you could turn this boy into something. Give him a big pair of boots, until he grows into them naturally — he won’t get too big for them. And don’t let him ever have to lick yours. If you start him off in the right way, he’ll rapidly become what you’ve made him think he is — the Man of the House.’

  Sophie pushed back a lock of hair, smiled at him. ‘As you say,’ she said, ‘you’re just a stupid old general!’

  His mood reverted to the monosyllabic. ‘Want a lift?’

  ‘No, thanks, Daddy. I don’t have to be there till ten.’

  ‘What an army!’ he exclaimed. ‘The generals have to be there one hour before the secretaries!’

  ‘I’m not your secretary,’ she pointed out. ‘You’d better speak to Miss Day about it.’ She kissed him on the forehead. ‘If you dare,’ she added.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EVEN someone who didn’t know Alec Manson at all would have noticed that he looked confused. His full face was redder than usual. His clearly etched blue eyes, which usually emitted a beam of self-importance and high-pressure urgency, seemed to be tinged with red. Now he tried to hold the Director’s eyes with his, but he had to avert them. The ray of guilt that his eyes propagated scanned the walls and the fan and the faces of Heatherfield and Ganin. He avoided Gresham’s cool gaze. That left only Mr Rupert, who looked through him rather than at him with an expression of smug insolence that quite clearly said: ‘You’ve flunked, and I hope you like it.’

  The Director rapped his questions in a manner that did not disguise his feelings. ‘Did Simmel show you the experiment he carried out last night?’

  ‘Yes, Sir Robert …’

  ‘Didn’t it occur to you to try the same thing?’

  ‘I would have if it hadn’t been decided on the first day that we were to work on the theory that it was the tins which were contaminated.’

  There was a long silence this time. It was, after all, undeniable that so long as it was assumed that the metal was the prime cause of the trouble, there would be no reason to suppose that the beans inside the allegedly ‘dead’ cans could be ‘hot’. And yet a man of flair — or even somebody more thorough — might well have checked this possibility.

  Gresham deliberately concentrated on a ridiculous little game of tiddlywinks he was playing with a few of the children’s coloured discs he had found in his pocket. Hargreaves was noticeably irritated by this, but made no comment because he knew that Frank — who was practically the only friend Manson had got — was embarrassed at seeing the man so compromised. Mr Rupert was rather fascinated by the tiddlywinks and would have liked to join in.

  The Director knocked some ash carefully from the end of his cigarette. He smiled one of those smiles. ‘Surely, Alec, in the course of all those tests you made, you must have noticed — if only by accident — that some of the beans which should have been inert were in fact radioactive?’

  Manson seemed reluctant to comment on this. He picked up one of the discs that had shot across the table and examined it, needing something to do with his hands. Eventually he put it down again and admitted: ‘As a matter of fact, it did happen once, yes. But I thought the equipment was faulty. We’ve been having trouble with it, you know. You saw it go wrong yesterday, when the red light came on.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said the Director impatiently, ‘but surely it isn’t the only detection equipment in the place?’

  ‘All the others are out on loan. And even the Home Office couldn’t supply us — all their instruments have been sent out to various depots for the checking of cans stored in bulk.’

  ‘Yes, yes! As usual, Manson, you seem to have an answer to everything. Well, tell me this: what do you deduce from the facts that have now emerged?’

  Manson wiped his brow. ‘In the first place, I still think there is something wrong with the machine. If you remember, I explained yesterday that the particular instrument I was using was set to register gamma rays.’

  ‘And?’

  Manson permitted himself a slightly patronising smile. ‘Well, obviously, it must have been faulty. Some of the tins are radioactive inside but are dead on the outside. But we know gamma rays would penetrate the metal, whereas beta rays wouldn’t. Therefore it is clear that what the machine ‘thought’ were gamma rays were really beta rays all the time.’

  Ganin interrupted. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think that is quite right.’

  Manson was belligerent. ‘Oh? And why?’

  Ganin’s face broke into the s
mile that so infuriated him. ‘Well, surely,’ he said, ‘if there are beta rays only, and if they are — as Simmel’s experiment suggests — coming from the food and not the metal, how did you ever get any radiation from the outside of the tins at all?’

  Manson said ‘Well …’ and stopped there. There was a moment’s silence.

  Hargreaves stood up and walked over to his favourite place by the window. ‘Quite right,’ he said thoughtfully, with his back to them. ‘That means that some radiation is going through and some isn’t.’ Then he swung round abruptly, snapping his fingers as he did so. ‘We’ve all been blithering idiots!’ he exclaimed ‘All of us …!’

  *

  The tall young man in the white overalls, which blazoned the word ‘Spigett’s’ in large red letters, looked bored. He hated having to shout above the unspeakable din of the automatic guillotine. And while he shouted the stock explanation of its working principles he did not even look at Gatt properly — like the dragoman showing the tourists round the Pyramids for the four-hundredth time he spoke like a guide-book.

  ‘As you see,’ he said, ‘the sheets arrive cut in squares, tinplated on both sides. Then they’re fed to this machine which cuts them into strips. Over there is another machine that stamps out the lids.’ They moved over and watched that for a while.

  To Gatt, not the least fascinating part of the proceedings was the extraordinary blank expression on the face of each woman operator. It was as if they had been able to switch off their minds at will, allowing their subconscious to do the simple, rhythmic operations that the machines demanded — feeding in the sheets of metal, or helping them on their way if the suction mechanism didn’t grip them quite as it should. Above, endless lines of tins moving with a characteristic rattling sound along conveyors, weaving in and out of each other like motor-cars negotiating the fly-overs of an American highway. If you looked at them for long you became almost mesmerised, so relentless was their march. Gatt looked up while his guide continued with the stock patter, and tried to trace the progress of one can as it left the pounding, viciously brutal machine that rammed and clamped the bottom of each can to the cylinder that was the main body of the tin. He watched it travel forward a little, then round a loop and up to the roof of the shed. There the highway joined forces with three others, all running parallel to each other. Sometimes the traffic in one lane would overtake that of the others, and then, as all four tracks suddenly took a sharp left-hand turn, the faster cans would find themselves on the outside of the curve and the other ones would catch up again. Gatt’s tin rapidly lost its identity among the many; and by the time the four lanes reached a hole in the wall and passed to the next shed, he had no idea which one it was. But to the uncurious faces of the operators — young girls and middle-aged women of every shape and size — each can was just another operation, just another fleeting movement of the hands. Probably it would never occur to them to wonder about it all — to guess at what kind of shop any one tin might end up in, whether a big store in a capital city, a little grocer’s shop smelling of paraffin and candle-wax, or a native duka that constituted the heart of some remote township in Africa. Never would they conjecture upon the final destination of any one of these identical cans, as it was placed on someone’s kitchen table in readiness for the tin-opener and saucepan, its contents to be consumed hungrily by noisy children or a tired dockhand or a country parson taking a snack after visiting a delinquent parishioner.

  ‘Now we’ll go into the next department,’ shouted the bored young man in the white coat, ‘and you can see how the cans are filled and so on.’ They walked out into the sun and breathed fresh air. A contrast to the smell of hot solder.

  Outside the silence was almost a shock, though even here, in the narrow channel between the two buildings, the metallic rattle of the tins on the march could be heard faintly against the muffled pounding of the other machinery. They entered the next building just underneath the conveyors, so that Gatt got a sense of continuity — here, then, was the next part of the film. This shed was very much less noisy than the first one, so that the guide could talk in his normal voice.

  ‘We’ve got a run of baked beans going at the moment,’ he explained, ‘so you can see the actual process — though in fact the handling or processed peas is almost identical. Here you see the dried beans in their original sacks, just as they are packed at the farms. Mostly they come from the Argentine. The sacks are taken up to the floor above, in the lift over there. Then they are tipped in a hopper filled with water — you see it? The beans will float, but any impurities (stones, earth and so on) sink to the bottom. The beans are scooped out of there and passed over magnets in this big apparatus.’

  ‘Why the magnets?’

  ‘To remove any metal that might be present. There’s never much of that, but you can’t be too careful. Here,’ he continued, ‘the beans are shaken through a kind of sieve and are sorted. It’s essential that they are all about the same size — otherwise the small ones would overcook and the big ones wouldn’t be cooked enough. Nothing is wasted, though. The big rejects are used in the soups and the small ones are sold for pig-food.

  ‘Now we come to a process that will probably interest you a good deal, Mr Gatt. Over here.’ He escorted him over to a row of steel cabinets that looked more like radio transmitters than anything else. But in the front of each was a glass panel, through which could be seen a continuous line of beans, falling in single file into troughs affixed below. ‘Any discoloured beans are thrown out by these machines They work like this every single bean passes through a “magic eye” apparatus — photo-electric cell to you! If it’s too dark in colour an impulse is sent to a high-voltage static charger which immediately puts a charge on the particular bean in question. Now, you see this deflector plate just above one of the troughs? That has a permanent charge on it, of opposite polarity to the one on the defective bean. The discoloured bean is attracted towards the plate and separated from the good beans, which having no charge, drop straight down into the other trough.’

  Gatt was impressed. ‘I must say, you people certainly take some trouble about this. Mr Spigett is too modest.’

  ‘Mr Spigett,’ said the young man dryly, ‘bought this entire plant long after the equipment was installed.’ They walked over to the next gadget without saying anything further on the subject. More girls standing around in white coats.

  ‘Here the beans are immersed in water and partially cooked. Actually, it isn’t so much the cooking we’re concerned with at this stage, but the blanching — that is, putting the correct amount of moisture back into the bean that was taken out when it was originally dried. Otherwise it would soak up all the tomato sauce, and also the residual air in the bean would spoil the vacuum in the tin. Anyway, here you see the beans coming out at the other end on to a conveyor belt for the actual canning process. See? As each tin comes round, gripped in these chucks, the beans are shot into them through a nozzle. They don’t quite fill the tin because there must be room for the sauce which is put in’ — they moved round to the other side of the machine — ‘through another nozzle here.’

  ‘Where does the sauce actually come from?’

  ‘It’s cooked upstairs, and comes down though those pipes in the ceiling. Follow? Good. Now you see the lids being put on the cans, in exactly the same way as the bottoms were put on in the can-making room — except here a number is stamped on at the same time. This number tells us exactly what date the can was filled and what’s inside it.’

  They walked along by the side of the conveyor, till again the can disappeared through a slit in the wall. The young man led the way through some double doors.

  Gatt said: ‘This is a completely continuous process, then?’

  ‘That’s right. The cans and the dried beans go in at one end, and the labelled product comes out the other. But we haven’t finished yet. Here they are, coming out of the room we’ve just been in, on the same conveyor. These big cylinders they are being fed into are sort of gi
ant sterilisers. Inside the beans are cooked, and then cooled, you see, while in the airtight tin. And while the cans pass through the machine they are shaken about so that all the beans cook evenly. This process sterilises them as well. And at the other end the cooled tin emerges ready for labelling. You want to see that?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Well, it’s quite straightforward, anyway. The labels are put on automatically, the boxes are filled and sealed, and everything is ready for delivery. Actually, we are supposed to hold them here for a few days while some tests are made on samples from each batch; but that doesn’t seem to happen nowadays.’

  Gatt shot him a curious look. But all he said was: ‘I must say the smell is pretty appetising. If I were working here I’d want to snatch the beans off the line and guzzle myself sick.’

  The young man smiled slightly. ‘That’s funny,’ he said, because I can’t even smell them now. I suppose I must have done once, though.’ They were walking back towards the offices, and the young man added: ‘Actually, there are times when I can smell the cooking, now I come to think of it. Especially when they try something new. Like the tomato sauce we had once.’ He took off his white coat, and hung it up outside a door marked Executive Canteen. ‘Come in and have a cup of tea.’

  The only other occupant of the canteen at the time was a gloomy, squat little man wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses with powerful magnifying lenses. He had not bothered to remove his white overalls. ‘Morning, Richards!’ he greeted dismally. His mobile, plasticine face simulated a smile. ‘I see we have a visitor.’

  ‘Yes, this is Mr Gatt. He’s come down to have a look at our factory. Mr Gatt, this is our chief scientist, Mr Mobels.’

  ‘I’m afraid “chief scientist” is just a high-sounding phrase.’ Richards brought over a pot of tea. ‘Mr Sydney S. Spigett is not greatly taken with scientific matters.’

  Gatt sat down, stirred his tea slowly. ‘May I ask you a few questions about the company?’