Chain Reaction

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Spigett was perfectly calm and businesslike. ‘I bought it from Gould’s. And Gould himself is in the outer office now, so you’d better speak to him.’

  Gould was a fussy, dapper little man who spoke so fast and so quietly that he even had Mr Rupert confused.

  ‘Good gracious gracious!’ he said. ‘What a terrible thing. I’ve never had anything like this happen before. I hope it isn’t due to any carelessness at my refinery. Oh, I do hope so. Impurities in my sugar? Radioactive impurities. Most extraordinary.’

  ‘Well, we don’t know for certain yet,’ said the Director, ‘but it rather looks as if something did get into the sugar. Perhaps it got there after it was refined. How is the sugar stored?’

  ‘Dear me. Well, it is stored in a big shed, you know. The granulated sugar, that is. In bins.’

  ‘Open bins?’

  ‘Dear me. And what exactly do you mean by an open bin?’

  ‘I mean a bin with no lid.’

  ‘Ah. Well, of course, they don’t have lids because the sugar is poured into the top down chutes, you see. So of course they couldn’t have lids, could they?’

  Gatt said: ‘How long does the sugar remain in the bins before it is packed?’

  ‘Ah. That’s quite a conundrum, isn’t it? The new sugar is put in at the top, and the old sugar comes out of the bottom and is packed in cartons. So the bins are never empty — except when they are cleaned.’

  ‘Let us think of layers of sugar then,’ persisted Gatt. ‘How long do you think it might take for a layer of sugar to go through the bin, top to bottom?’

  ‘Well, that depends how quickly you take it out, doesn’t it?’ said Gould with a sudden smile of triumph.

  Seff tried this time. ‘I take it you have several of these bins?’

  ‘That’s right. Six. Or is it seven? Gracious, I’m not sure. Perhaps it is six.’

  ‘You’d agree with me, then, that the more bins you have, the longer it takes for the sugar level to go down in each of them. I mean,’ he added, seeing Mr Gould’s face suddenly fogging over with confusion, ‘I mean that if you only had one bin, the sugar would go down six times as fast as it would if you were using all six of them?’

  Gould expressed agreement because it sounded logical, not because he understood.

  Seff continued: ‘Also, the chances of an impurity getting in would be greatly increased by using six bins instead of one, owing to the greater surface area of sugar exposed at the top.’

  ‘Good gracious gracious,’ said Gould. ‘But what could get in?’

  ‘Is the shed fully enclosed?’ said Gatt.

  Gould thought this funny and tittered slightly. ‘Heavens, do you suppose I let my sugar get exposed to wind and weather? “Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”!’ he quoted, somewhat obscurely. ‘It wouldn’t do at all. Besides, we get a lot of wind in that part of Scotland. The sugar would be blown about for miles!’ An indulgent beam.

  ‘I didn’t know your refinery was in Scotland,’ said the Director casually.

  ‘Good heavens, yes! In the Highlands. We’ve always been there, you know. Why, as Bobby Burns said —’

  ‘What part of Scotland?’

  ‘You know Scotland, then? You know the Highlands? Well, I’m not really a Scot myself, although on my mother’s side —’

  The Director managed to repeat the question without rising his voice, but it took all the control he could muster. All the same, he managed to instil into the question a tone which brought the threatened travelogue to a dead stop. Mr Rupert shifted in his chair and waited, his delicate hands poised above the keyboard of the Stenotype machine.

  ‘Glennaverly,’ said Gould. ‘It’s near Loch Logie.’ The fan made fifteen leisurely revolutions before anyone spoke again. And with each revolution a slight but maddening little squeak. Only nobody was listening to it.

  Seff knocked some ash off his cigarette and said, very calmly: ‘Quod Erat Demonstrandum.’

  Hargreaves continued with the questions just as people continued to play chess during an air-raid when the motor of a flying-bomb suddenly cut out. ‘You say your shed is fully enclosed. How, then, is it ventilated? It must presumably have windows?’

  ‘No. Not windows. Air-conditioning!’ He said it as if it were a brand-new invention. ‘We had it installed a couple of years ago. Gracious, what an expense! And what a trouble!’

  Gatt said: ‘Why do you say “trouble”?’

  ‘Well, it’s no trouble now. Fully automatic, you know.’

  ‘But you had trouble?’

  ‘At first we did. Good gracious, I should say so! The filters, you see. They used to get clogged up. As I said, it’s a windy part of the world. So we used to get bracken and heather and old newspapers and every kind of fiddelly-diddelly mixed up in it.’

  ‘So what did you do about it?’ asked Gatt.

  ‘We had them redesigned.’

  ‘And how did you get on in the meanwhile?’

  Mr Gould giggled. ‘Why, we did the only thing we could do! We ran the air-conditioning without them. It worked just as well. In fact, it worked better.’

  ‘And how long did you run them like that?’

  ‘Goodness gracious gracious! Now you’re asking me! Well, off-hand I’d say about six months.’

  Then suddenly it hit him. Nobody had to say anything more. Indeed, he had said it all. He thought of the six open-topped bins — or was it seven? — and the unfiltered air being pumped in from outside and the high winds blowing down the valley from Loch Logie and the strange, unbelievable fact that impurities had been found in a lot of tin cans, and he saw. Nothing could alter his dapper appearance, however, and the change in him was neither obvious nor dramatic. Everybody does something with their hands under duress; and all he could think of doing was to straighten his very conservative tie which was already quite straight.

  *

  They got rid of Gould and Spigett when Manson returned from the laboratory.

  ‘I tried scraping the coating from the inside of the tin,’ said Manson. ‘And I was right; I got no reading from the metal afterwards!’

  Nobody seemed very interested in his rather tardy triumph, however. The Director just nodded assent and Manson shut up and sat down. Gatt brought him up-to-date on the facts.

  ‘I see,’ said Manson, and looked across at Seff.

  ‘I tell you one thing,’ said jack (he was addressing the Director specifically), ‘there was a design fault in Project 3.’

  Hargreaves said heatedly: ‘Well, why in hell didn’t you say so before?’

  ‘Because I didn’t know before. I found out last night. I fed all the data to the computer and got a very rude answer.’

  ‘To the effect that the thing shouldn’t have operated at all,’ added Gatt, completing the confessional.

  Seff gave him a sideways look. ‘How did you know? I didn’t mention it to anybody.’

  Gatt said: ‘It was Alec’s theory. He told me at the party the other night.’

  Seff turned to Manson with that perplexed little laugh of his. ‘Why in God’s name didn’t you mention it to me?’ Not so much censure as amazement.

  Gatt (to Alec): ‘Didn’t you? You said you did.’

  Manson stared into space. ‘I thought I did.’

  Seff said: ‘How long have you known this?’

  ‘Ever since it was built.’

  Hargreaves said, ‘Good God!’

  ‘Did someone say,’ observed Seff with an angostura-like smile, ‘that we worked as a team? Just one big, happy family, I’d say. Well, since you’re such a mine of information, Alec, perhaps you’d tell me this: why in hell did it go haywire the night I started it up? And what, if anything, did it have to do with the contamination of the sugar? Nothing went up through the chimneys.’

  Gatt looked directly at Manson. ‘You know something, don’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t have cornered me at the party.’

  ‘If Jack doesn’t know, I don’t know.’

  �
��Come on, Manson,’ said Seff. ‘What am I supposed to have done?’

  ‘You tell us.’

  ‘All right; let’s put it like this: what would you have done, in the event of getting no reaction?’

  ‘That would depend,’ said Manson carefully, ‘upon my state of mind.’

  Seff’s voice sounded very dangerous. ‘What would you have done if you had been drunk?’

  ‘I didn’t say you were drunk.’

  ‘Never mind. Pretend you did. What would you have done if you weren’t in full possession of your senses, my dear Alec?’ Manson looked around the table, from one face to another. But he said nothing. ‘Very well,’ said Seff, ‘I’ll tell you what I might have done if I had been drunk. Shall I? Good. Well, I might have worked it out this way, in the blurred confusion of the moment. I might have thought to myself: “It still doesn’t operate, even with the control rods right out. My artificial neutron source is working all right, but still there’s no chain reaction. So I’ll stick some more uranium in. That’s sure to get things going.” ’

  Gatt was smoking quite calmly. ‘But where would you get it from? All the uranium is accounted for.’

  Manson leaned forward. ‘All except the stuff inside the main reactor,’ he said. The accusation was unmistakable.

  ‘Which was shut down,’ he added, ‘and has been ever since. On your specific instructions, Seff!’

  Gatt said quite calmly: ‘But that would be enriched uranium. Could one man operate the discharging equipment safely, without getting a packet from it himself? Then load it into Project 3?’

  ‘Don’t forget,’ Seff reminded him, ‘I’m supposed to be drunk! And, for that matter, you think I was drunk too, don’t you, Gatt? Oh yes, one might attempt it — even get away with it. And as Manson so rightly says, it wouldn’t be missed because the main reactor has never been discharged. And it would probably do the trick. It might put the total mass so high that the control rods wouldn’t be able to keep it in check. And the control rods didn’t keep it in check for, as you no doubt remember, we had to whip out as much of the uranium as we could, and we managed to get enough out, before the mechanism seized, to stop the reaction. But only just. And luckily Manson was there to pump the water out of the heat exchangers into the underground tanks. But none of this explains how a sugar refinery, just six miles away, became so richly and plentifully infected with radioactive dust.’

  Gatt said: ‘There’s a hole in this theory, anyway. You wouldn’t have had time to do it. And there were too many people around.’

  Self’s smile was off-centre. It amused him to theorise at his own expense. ‘Not then, I agree. But supposing I had found out about my miscalculation before we came to start the pile? There were occasions when I could have stuffed some more slugs in the thing without anyone being any the wiser.’

  ‘That still wouldn’t explain the reactor being so reluctant to start though, would it?’

  ‘No, but a hundred things could explain that. After all, we didn’t know much about that new moderator at the time.’

  ‘Can you tell us, in simple terms,’ pursued Arlen, ‘what your basic design mistake was?’ That familiar trick of his again, of looking over Self’s shoulder. ‘Was it, in fact, the moderator?’

  ‘Quite right. We thought it behaved exactly like pure graphite. It certainly did in our initial experiments. However, during my friendly chat with the electronic computer last night, I included some data which we hadn’t known at the time. It seems that under some conditions it undergoes a chemical change.’

  Gatt jerked his eyes on to him. ‘I wonder … I mean, supposing that chemical change occurred again — in reverse, so to speak — when those rods were out, substantially changing the conditions so that the whole works was well over critical mass?’

  Seff matched his gaze. ‘Yes, I’d thought of that, too. We’ll have to do some research on the moderator material. We dropped it after the Project 3 episode; so we still don’t know very much about it.’

  ‘Well, it’s very funny,’ said Manson, ‘that there should suddenly be all this interest in the moderator. It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘What’s so funny about it?’ said Gatt coldly.

  ‘Well, it’s got such odd characteristics, hasn’t it? I mean, first you say it underwent some chemical change so as to reduce the mass below critical; then you say it had second thoughts and increased it again.’

  Seff remarked, without emotion: ‘Well, no one knew the true effects of Wigner growth until after the piles at Windscale had been assembled. Their moderators were made of plain, ordinary graphite; yet people still got quite a shock when Number One Pile got all steamed up.’

  ‘I see,’ said Manson. ‘If in doubt, blame the moderator!’ He banged his fist angrily down on to the table, and when he spoke his voice had lost its banter. ‘Let’s face it, Seff. Your “moderator theory” smacks of third-rate science fiction. It’s unsubstantiated and, to say the least, extremely unlikely.’ Manson’s accusing eyes were unblinking, and somehow looked abnormally large. ‘I say you realised your miscalculation — perhaps, as you so helpfully suggest, a few days beforehand — plied yourself with a few whiskies and whipped a few enriched slugs from the other reactor.’ His laugh was a most unpleasant sound. ‘All that stuff about moderators! Well, which fits the facts best — your theory or mine?’

  ‘I must say, Manson,’ said Hargreaves, ‘I find your inferences extremely ill-timed.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Seff grimly, ‘I think they are singularly illuminating in a way. Not very factual, perhaps. But interesting, none the less. And, oddly enough, scientifically very plausible.’

  Gatt smiled at Seff in an odd sort of way. ‘I for one,’ he commented, ‘am very glad it was said.’

  Manson clutched at this straw. ‘Well, it may have sounded pretty unpleasant; but someone had to say it.’

  This remark was entirely ignored.

  Gresham came in quietly, and handed a copy of the new press release to the Director, who accepted it without comment. Gresham took his place at the table.

  Gatt said: ‘All right. Since we all seem to be coming out in the open, I suppose I should admit that I was guilty myself of wondering whether, to be blunt, your judgment was affected by alcohol — though not exactly on the lines our friend has just suggested.’

  ‘Well, let’s have it.’

  Gatt put two of his tablets in a glass of water and watched them fizz. ‘If you drive a car when you’ve had a few you don’t go wild. Under normal circumstances you drive very much the same as you do when sober. Only your reactions are slowed down. Instead of responding to an emergency in something like point four of a second, it takes you, say, double that time.’ He swirled the mixture round in the glass pensively. ‘Now, I was thinking of those control rods. I take it that when the reaction did not start as it should have done, you raised them right out of the pile, to absorb the minimum of neutrons and therefore allow them to do their stuff. Am I right so far?’

  ‘More or less. Actually, you can’t lift them right out. If the thing won’t cook when they’re raised about three-quarters of the way out, you can reckon that something’s cock-eyed somewhere.’

  Gatt drank the liquid and pulled a face. ‘Beastly stuff! I see. And you lifted them to that extent?’

  ‘As I’ve already said, yes.’

  ‘I just want to get the chain of events firmly fixed in my mind. What happened then?’

  ‘I lowered the rods back to the half-way position and checked that the artificial neutron source was working. I found that it was.’

  ‘Ed Springle was with you, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Ed was there. In fact, the next thing I did was to tell him to lower the gas pressure, which he did. (Incidentally I phoned him yesterday about this — among other things — and his recollection of what happened in the Control Room checks with mine.) When Ed had reduced the pressure sufficiently, I then started to raise the control rods again.’
/>   ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Precisely nothing. Sweet damn-all.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I had to do some hard thinking. Ed suggested he got us some food from the canteen, and he went off to get it.’

  The Director said: ‘So you were left alone?’

  ‘As you say, I was left alone.’

  Gatt said: ‘And the control rods were still raised nearly as far as they would go?’

  ‘That’s right. I was still hoping for the thing to make up its mind to co-operate.’

  Gresham said: ‘Wasn’t that rather risky, old boy? I mean, if the confounded thing suddenly went into action?’

  Seff drew hard on his cigarette, so that it made a little plop when he took it out of his mouth. ‘It was a risk, Frank, but a calculated one. Leaving the rods out gave it the best chance to start reacting, and you can stick them back in a matter of seconds — even without pressing the shut-down button.’

  ‘I’m sorry — this is probably a bloody-fool question. But wouldn’t it have been better to have assumed that something was wrong, put the rods back in, and left it till the next day? I mean, it wasn’t a matter of life and death, was it?’

  ‘As things turned out, it would have been a damn’ sight better, yes. But I hardly expected the pile to go clean off its head.’

  ‘Sorry, old chap. I suppose I’m being wise after the event.’

  Manson had been keeping very quiet. But now he nerved himself to ask the obvious question. ‘What happened then, Jack?’

  Seff spoke to the room in general, not to him. ‘Two things. Two things happened almost simultaneously. The output meter on the panel suddenly shot up to 20 megawatts — that’s twice the rated output — and Ed came in with the supper. The warning lights on the console were giving a very creditable impersonation of Piccadilly Circus at night, and the alarm bells started ringing. Ed shouted: “For the love of Mike, what’s happening?” I remember saying “Ed, the blowers!” and he just threw the tray on the floor and made a dive for the switches of the gas-cooling system. (Actually there was no need; they had started up automatically by then.) At the same time I pressed the shut-down button and waited for the needle of the output meter to drop back. But it didn’t.’