Chain Reaction

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  ‘At the local. As soon as they found out why we were here, they came up with their pet theory. It’s all wrong, of course; but there’s just one thing about it that makes sense.’ He switched on the detection equipment, which had been mounted behind the seat. ‘Now, if you will come down lower, I’ll see if I get any pips out of this thing.’

  ‘Okay. But I’d better get through to base first. I promised to maintain contact.’ He picked up a microphone and pressed the pressel switch. ‘Hallo, baker one; hallo, baker one. Report my signals. Baker one, over.’

  ‘Baker one. Okay. Over.’

  ‘Baker one. Okay. We’re over the loch now, and we’re going down to have a closer look. Over.’

  ‘Baker one. Roger. Wait one.’ There was a lengthy pause. Then the voice came back. ‘Can you put Simmel on? Over.’

  Pentecue handed Dick the headset and microphone. Dick looked enquiringly at him, rather surprised. But Pentecue said nothing, gesturing with his spare hand that Simmel was to take over the radio. Dick put on the headset and pressed the switch. ‘Baker one. Simmel speaking. Over.’

  ‘Good!’ came the voice. ‘Can you remember army procedure? Over.’

  ‘Baker one. Just about! Over.’

  ‘Baker one. Roger. All you need remember really is to say “over” at the end of each transmission. It’s important, because we’ve just had orders to connect you by remote control to London by telephone. Each time you say “over” we have to switch over with you — otherwise confusion reigns. Do you understand? Over.’

  Dick pulled a face. ‘God!’ he said to Pentecue, ‘what now? I’ve got to have a ruddy telephone conversation!’

  The Major grinned but didn’t look up from the controls. ‘Probably a rocket from your outfit for taking a midnight flip. Serves you right!’

  Dick pressed the switch again. ‘I get it. I’ll stand by for your further call. Out.’

  The aircraft was now hovering quite low over the water, but so far the geiger counter was only registering the background count. ‘Can you get lower still?’ said Dick.

  ‘This isn’t a bloody submarine! All right, I’ll go down till the wheels touch.’

  Abruptly the radio came to life, and clearly through the headphones came Gatt’s voice. He spoke in a very stilted way. He was obviously unused to this kind of procedure. ‘Hallo, baker one,’ he said laboriously. ‘Can you hear me?’ There was a longish gap, followed by a squawking noise. Then his voice came back. ‘Sorry — forgot to say “over”. Once again, are you receiving me? Over.’

  Simmel said: ‘Yes, I can hear you clearly. Over.’ He waited in some trepidation or the impending rocket.

  Gatt said: ‘Good. I won’t waste time on the why’s and wherefore’s’ — he sounded more relaxed now — ‘but, anyway, I think you did right not to worry us with whatever strange theory sent you aloft in the middle of the night. Now, listen Carefully. We now know — almost for certain — that the centre of contamination is Loch Logie. And I understand you’re over the loch now — is that right? Over.’

  ‘Yes. In fact we’re almost down to the surface of the water, only there doesn’t seem to be any detectable radiation. The reason I decided to investigate was because some local wizard in the town got talking while I was in the pub. It’s about the level of the loch. Apparently it varies a good deal, because a somewhat archaic dam, that was built heaven knows how long ago, has crumbled away. So there is nothing to stop the water flowing out. It seems the loch has almost run dry on two occasions …’

  Gatt looked across the table at Seff, who nodded. Manson had gone white. And when he tried to write an annotation on the piece of paper upon which he had been doodling, his fountain-pen just made a big blotch. He looked slowly up at Gatt as if he couldn’t help himself. But Gatt said nothing to him, just focused his eyes unseeingly on a blob of sweat that threatened to trickle down Manson’s nose, and barked into the microphone. ‘Dick, what’s the radiation level? You’d better watch out for yourselves. Over.’

  ‘There’s no need to worry at the moment. Unfortunately, I can’t pick up a thing. Over.’

  ‘That’s odd. Well, keep trying. I’ll call you back in a few minutes. Now I’m talking to the operator: Keep this line free whatever happens and listen on the line. I’m leaving the receiver off the hook.’

  Gatt turned to Manson. ‘Alec, now you have been confronted with this thing, can’t you think back and remember whether you had any conscious doubts about that cock? You see, if you turned the right one — as you still say you thought you had — we’re wasting our time with this loch theory. Simmel has already found that the surface, at least, of the water is not radioactive, so we could be wrong.’

  Manson spoke quietly and hesitantly. He was clearly on his guard. ‘I can only say,’ he answered, ‘that once I was inside the pumping-room, I was naturally very aware of the importance of turning the right cock.’

  ‘Exactly what did you do?’ said the Director, quite calmly and quietly.

  ‘Well, in the darkness there was only one thing I could do. I knew it was the second one from the door; so I groped around until I found the first one, and knew it couldn’t be that. So then I went a bit farther in and found the other one. Having found it I opened the cock.’

  ‘And at this stage you had no doubts?’ said Gatt.

  ‘That.is so.’

  ‘But, Alec,’ said the Director gently, ‘if you had no doubts — then or afterwards — how do you account for what you said under the anaesthetic?’

  Suddenly Mr Rupert, who had hardly said anything throughout the entire three days, looked up from his Stenotype and offered an opinion. ‘I think I can explain that,’ he said in his sibilant voice. ‘It is a case of the mind being triggered below the threshold of consciousness.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Frank Gresham, ‘what in heaven’s name is that?’

  ‘Simply,’ continued Mr Rupert, still operating the keys of the machine and apparently writing down what he was saying as he went along, ‘that Mr Manson must have heard, at a later date, about the second entrance to your pumping-room without actually noticing it consciously. It was his subconscious mind that noticed it; and it was his subconscious mind that spoke out under the influence of gas.’

  Seff, a whisky glass now planted conspicuously before him, was sketching something. After a few rapid strokes of his pen he skidded the drawing across the table to Manson. ‘Alec,’ he said. ‘Look at that layout. Recognize it? It’s the pumping-room. Take a good look and tell me this: if you had come in through the door marked “A” the cocks would have been on your left; and if you’d come through “B” they would have been on your right. Which side were they?’

  Manson saw from the sketch that Seff had deliberately not marked which was the right one and which was the wrong one. It was a memorable moment as Manson stared mutely at the piece of paper, then back at Seff, knowing how much depended on his answer. Then he shut his eyes for a few seconds, and groped with his hands as if he were actually in the pumping-room once more. Eventually he was satisfied, and pushed the sketch back across the table, never taking his eyes off Seff s face. ‘They were on the left,’ he said. No one breathed.

  Seff sipped some of the whisky. ‘When I told you to open the outlet valve — which I referred to as the “second cock from the door” — I naturally thought you would go down the quickest way. That is, by the inner stairs. The way Ed went down. Did you see Ed?’

  ‘No,’ said Manson in a level voice. ‘I didn’t see anyone. Don’t forget, only the emergency lighting was on by then.’

  ‘That’s right; it was. And there was steam coming from the burst heat exchanger, so I grant you it was difficult to see anything much. And that steam was very radioactive. But I couldn’t afford to think about your personal safety then, or Ed’s — or mine, for that matter. I had to go through the steam myself after discharging some of the cartridges. But, for the present, I want you to recall the moment when we were all on the top of the pile, just befo
re you and Ed went down.’

  The Director interrupted. ‘I’m sorry, Seff. But is this relevant? We must get back to Simmel on the radio. Can’t you just tell us, from what Manson has already told you, whether he did turn the right cock?’

  ‘I think you will see in a minute, Sir Robert, that this is of vital importance.’

  ‘Then please continue.’

  ‘As I said,’ continued Seff, ‘our own personal safety had to come second to that of the many employees who were at Marsdowne that night. My job was therefore to prevent a major fire. So I sent Ed down to the cooling-room with instructions to step up the carbon-dioxide pressure, and you to the pumping-room to get rid of the water in the heat-exchange system. If you remember, we had no remote control by then, and everything had to be done manually.’

  ‘I am not likely to forget it,’ said Manson. And once again the accusation was there.

  ‘Quite. Now let us consider what you are alleged to have said under the anaesthetic. You said: ‘The second one, yes. But, oh God! From which end?’ Now, why should you have been bothered about “which end”? There could be no doubt, surely — provided you did what you knew I had meant you to do and went down the inner stairs and through the control-room?’

  Manson found his lips had gone dry. ‘I don’t see where this is all leading,’ he said.

  ‘I think you will in a minute. But first you must allow me to make a rather unpleasant suggestion concerning what you might have done — rather in the manner that you suggested what I might have done in my drunken effort to get the pile to react. Have you any objection?’

  Manson said: ‘I have no objection to a hypothetical suggestion.’

  ‘Good. That’s a very good phrase — hypothetical suggestion! It keeps it all nice and friendly, doesn’t it! Well, supposing this is what happened. Supposing you were thrown into complete panic when things started to go wrong. You knew there must have been a hell of a lot of radiation about — particularly on the inner stairs, which run right underneath the heat exchangers. You were terrified, in fact. So you rushed out of the main hall, went through the air-lock, and into the pumping-room through the other entrance. The wrong entrance, Manson! And when you got there you were in such a panic that you couldn’t work out for a moment which cock you should have turned, having come through the wrong door! You weren’t in any real doubt as to which door I meant you to use. So what you said under the anaesthetic was not an expression of doubt that you felt after the event, but your panic-stricken feeling at the moment of entering the pumping-room!’

  ‘A very interesting and incriminating hypothesis,’ said Manson calmly. ‘Only it doesn’t work, because I told you that the cocks were on the left. Which they obviously couldn’t have been if I had come through the other door.’

  ‘My dear chap,’ said Seff with grim bonhomie, ‘I didn’t ask you that question merely to get the right answer. After all, you’ve had two years to think it out.’ There were about one thousand roentgens of tension in the air now.

  ‘Then why,’ said Manson stupidly, ‘did you ask me?’

  Seff knocked back the rest of the Scotch. ‘To get you to lie,’ he said, and his eyes had become rivets. ‘You’re a fool, Manson. If you had told me you came down the wrong stairs, if you had told me the cocks were on the right, and therefore you turned the first one instead of the second, you would have got away with it. But don’t you see what you have forgotten?’

  He took something out of his brief-case and put it on the table. It was a large chart, and he spread it across the table, using ash-trays as weights. ‘I got this from Ed’s office this morning,’ he said. ‘As you see, it’s the Lifetime Dose Sheet for that period. If Ed had a more suspicious mind, he might have realised that the answer to this whole bloody business had been staring him in the face the whole time.’

  Manson found that the muscles of his face had become so stiff that he couldn’t move his lips properly. But he managed to say, in a voice that was almost steady: ‘I don’t see what the Dose Sheets have got to do with it.’ And, more confidently: ‘In any case, Springle wasn’t with Administration at the time.’

  Seff looked at him expressionlessly. ‘You’re right; nor he was. So why should he have got curious? I only thought of it myself a few minutes ago, when there was some reason to. And I had to make a special journey to get the sheets.’

  Manson felt the panic building inside him — the more so because he couldn’t see what significance the information stored on those bits of paper could have. But he said: ‘I hope it’s good, Seff. Because after what you’ve said to me it had better be!’ He paused for a moment, found that Mr Rupert was staring at him from the end of the table, his fingers poised over the keyboard in readiness. Manson wrenched his eyes away, turned back to Seff. ‘Well? What do you fondly suppose you’ve discovered?’

  ‘Take a look, my friend. I think you’ll find it rather interesting. Here we are — you see the red entries? There’s mine — I got 40 roentgens that night. A pretty stiff dose, but nothing to Ed’s; he got nearly 60! Of course he did; he had to come down the inner stairs. He knew it was vital to turn on the gas, and he risked his life to do it. Now look at yours, Manson. Just over 6 roentgens. Now, tell me how you managed to get down the inner stairs and get off so lightly? Just how hypothetical is that?’

  He stood up suddenly, uncurling like a leaf-spring. The veins stood out on his arms and forehead, as he gave Manson the full force of his feelings. ‘Damn your guts, you are just a plain, ordinary, bloody liar!’

  Manson pushed his chair back with such violence that it clattered against the wall. ‘It was your fault!’ he shouted. ‘It was your fault the pile blew up — I knew the design was wrong, you supercilious, high-level bungler!’ He laughed viciously. ‘And to think that you expected me to risk my neck because of your mistake …’

  ‘Shut up!’ It was the only time Hargreaves had raised his voice during the whole three days of the enquiry, and it had an electrifying effect.

  Manson stammered: ‘Forgive me, Sir Robert. I —’

  Hargreaves cut him short. ‘I’m not going to say very much to you now, Manson, because there isn’t time. But I’ll say this: To have panicked under duress was, to say the least, a grave reflection on your character. But it was a human thing to do. We none of us know how we are going to react until the testing time comes. I could have forgiven that.’ Hargreaves’ voice was shaking now. Shaking with an overwhelming rage and disgust. ‘I’ve heard of people hiding things to save their own skins — even at the expense of public safety. I had an officer do that during the war, and I felt intensely sorry for him, even though it was I who ordered his court martial. But that man’s crime was nothing to yours.

  ‘I won’t try to remind you of the enormity of your breach of trust. Your own conscience must be your chief prosecutor; because nothing the law can hand out can do justice to your conduct.’ The Director rammed the butt of his cigarette hard on to the ash-tray. The savage finality of the act was as articulate as anything he could say.

  It was after Manson had left, silently, and somehow (thought Gresham) for all his ignominiousness, pathetically, that Mr Rupert made his only other verbal contribution to the proceedings. ‘That man,’ he said, ‘has invented a new crime. The crime of silence.’ It was, perhaps histrionic. But it was apt.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  LONDON was quiet that night.

  The buses were on the road as usual, and there were plenty of taxis around. But the private cars were few. The theatres were playing to only sparsely populated houses, and an unlucky producer launched a new play to many rows of tipped-up seats. Those addicts who had decided to use their tickets hardly applauded.

  Drizzling rain had turned the streets into shiny reflectors. A sports car which had taken the bend of St Martin’s Lane too fast had piled against a lamp standard. No one was hurt. Only a few pedestrians watched the wreck being towed away, and only one discontented onlooker could be bothered to remark that the driver
must have had too much money and not enough to do.

  Aircraft flew in, trains left their termini, chorus girls kicked their legs at the television cameras, tramps slept with sly unconcern in their customary doorways.

  All was calm.

  But behind shutters, in warehouses, aboard Thames barges, roped inside freight trucks, sealed in packing-cases, cartons and silver paper, alien atoms, millions of times smaller than the head of a pin, basic elements of matter that should never have been there, sent thin streams of electro-magnetic energy into free air. The energy they call gamma rays.

  In chocolate boxes and milk jugs, kitchen cupboards and coffee cups, the nuclei of unstable atoms broke up and changed their nature and shot out electrons in their slow process of metamorphosis — the quest for electrical balance that cannot be stopped by man or by his science.

  And within human bodies the same ionizing rays committed homicide among the cells that are the very structure of life itself — the template for man’s future existence which, once changed, can never be restored …

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  GATT screwed up his face like a man who was looking at the naked sun. He had a splitting headache, and the squeak of that relentless fan seemed to go right through it. Seff had strongly recommended a stiff whisky, but on the table by Gatt’s blotter there was still only the little bottle of tablets and a glass of water. He said: ‘I wish Simmel would come up on the air.’

  Hargreaves was thinking the same thing. He knew the dangers. ‘Well, it’s no good calling him till he’s ready.’ He’d give Dick another five minutes.

  Seff had marked an ugly 200-foot contour line with a red pencil. It ringed the loch, hemming it in. He made no further comment, however, about the obvious hazards of flying round that dark basin at night. He discarded a cigarette, adding the debris to the already overfilled ash-tray. ‘If our theory is right,’ he said, ‘the loch has dried up on at least two occasions — probably more. And by sheer bad luck, it didn’t happen to do this during one of Gatt’s routine checks of the atmosphere. But what about the loch itself?’ He addressed himself to Arlen. ‘Did you check the loch for radiation at the time of the accident?’