Unobtainium 1: Kate on a Hot Tin Roof

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘I am not trouble.’

  ‘No, you are not. Your father did not like it when you complained, did he? When you said you hurt?’ He got a shake of the head and her eyes dipped away. ‘He did something to you? He put… a material into your body–’

  ‘Won’er meddle,’ Kate said, nodding. ‘Lots of sharp… needles. Yes? Needles?’

  ‘Needles, that’s right. Try “wonder metal.”’ He enunciated the words carefully for her, wondering whether she had ever had anyone teach her how to speak.

  ‘Wonder metal,’ Kate replied as though reading from a child’s spelling book.

  Charles smiled. ‘Excellent. It is correctly called “Un-ob-tain-ium.”’

  She looked at him for a second and then said ‘Un ob tain yum’ just as carefully.

  He narrowed his eyes, a smile playing over his lips. ‘Are you making fun of me, young lady?’

  ‘Unobtainium,’ Kate said and tapped her ear. ‘I listen good. I speak bad. I… don’t have words.’

  ‘Well, that is something we will have to correct, but first I need to see if I can undo what your father did. It’s hurting you, is it not?’

  ‘It… hurts a little. It gets worse. Once it got worst of all.’

  ‘Well, let us hope that I can make the pain go away.’

  Burlington House, Westminster.

  The library of the Royal Society was the best in the world, but it was not proving up to the task at hand. Charles had suspected that that would be the case, but he had tried anyway.

  Biochemistry was not one of his specialities. Oh, he was an acknowledged expert, as was the case with most things scientific, but the biological side had always been an area he had let slip. He was beginning to regret that, but not giving up hope.

  The problem was that cell structure and function was a relatively unknown quantity. There had been advances made in microscopy which had revealed many secrets, but those uncovered details had posed more questions than given answers. And here was a problem which appeared to encompass every cell in the body. Even her bones had absorbed the metal.

  By rights, she should have been dead long ago, which meant that something in her body was keeping her alive, and that something was no longer functioning. Cooper had said that she would die without him and Charles was beginning to worry that the man might have the right of it. If only there was a way to precipitate the metal from her body.

  Now chemistry was something he knew more about! Getting up from the chair he had fallen into, he marched off towards the chemistry books. He knew more about the chemistry of Unobtainium than any other man alive, but being surrounded by the knowledge of his predecessors was always inspiring.

  The Barstow Club, Mayfair.

  Inspiration did not, however, come from the books and by the evening, Charles was sitting in the common lounge of the Barstow Club hoping that inspiration would come from a brandy. So far it was not working much better than the books.

  ‘That look on your face suggests that something of a grave nature has occurred, Doctor Barstow-Hall.’

  Charles looked up to see Antonia Wooster standing over him again and tried to muster a smile. He knew from her expression that he was not doing well. ‘It’s Kate,’ he said.

  ‘I thought as much. She has not reverted or harmed anyone, I hope?’ Again Antonia settled into the seat beside his, crossing her legs and arranging her skirts. Her gown was off the shoulder this evening, a far more modern style than she usually wore and a little shocking, but of course she absolutely shone in it.

  ‘Oh, far from it. The process her father employed is unclear to me, but what he did is. Somehow he has saturated her body in Unobtainium two-six-two.’

  ‘You’ll pardon me, Charles. Science is not my forte, though I have an understanding of zoology. I was unaware that there were different kinds of Unobtainium.’

  That managed to raise a small chuckle from him and she smiled. ‘The metal you may have seen, perhaps in the British Museum, is the most stable form, the “isotope” my grandfather discovered thirty-five years ago. The mass of each atom is two hundred and sixty. The units are not important. In fact, they are essentially arbitrary. The fact that an atom is Unobtainium, or carbon or oxygen, is determined by the element number, related to the positive charge in the atom’s core, but the mass of an atom can vary. We call these atoms of the same element with different masses “isotopes.”’

  ‘From the Greek? These isotopes occupy the same place on the periodic table of elements. Isos topos?’

  ‘I see you know a little Greek and a little chemistry as well as biology. Unobtainium has three known isotopes. Two-six-oh is used in most of the devices we construct from the metal. It is alloyed with iron to make adamantium. Two-five-seven is unstable. Over the course of many years it decays into other materials, giving off energy as it does so.’

  ‘So that is used in the reactor which powers this great city.’

  ‘As you say. Two-six-two is thought to be stable, or very nearly so, but exceptionally rare. I thought that there existed no more than three ounces in the world, all of it accounted for. We know little of its properties. It appears relatively useless given its availability and there is no clear advantage over its more common cousin.’

  ‘But this man, Cooper was it? He has not only obtained some of this heavier element, but he has somehow soaked it into Kate’s body?’

  Charles nodded. ‘It’s killing her. Slowly, but surely. Heavy metals in the body do little good to anyone. I’ve no idea how he kept her alive this long.’

  ‘And he is not saying, I assume? No, but of course not. The man is using the life of his own daughter as a… a bargaining chip.’

  ‘I believe that we can only use the term “daughter” loosely. He may, indeed, have been the… paternal contributor to Kate’s creation, but I believe he did so simply to reduce the chance of discovery. One less person involved in the experiment.’ He spat out the last word, his fists clenching.

  Antonia leaned forward, her hand coming to rest on his. ‘This is not your fault, Charles, and if there is anyone who can cure her of this malediction, I am quite sure that it is you.’

  ‘Thank you for your confidence, but I fear that it may be misplaced even if no one else does.’

  Antonia narrowed her eyes and glared at him. ‘Charles Hunter Barstow-Hall, do not dare to sit here in the club your grandmother’s family built and tell me that you are not scientist enough to solve this problem. You are the foremost mind in science today. In this Great Britain if not the entire world! Kate could not have a better champion in this fight and I wish to hear no more of your negative assertions. You can do this. Do not make me resort to uncivilised language to emphasise my surety on this.’

  ‘Far be it from me to force a lady to use uncouth words.’ Charles picked up his glass and drained it. ‘I must return to my laboratory. If there is an answer to be found, I will find it there.’

  Knightsbridge, 18th April.

  The nightmare was a familiar one, but no less terrifying for that. Charles crawled in darkness, looking for a way out. He had had similar dreams ever since, at the age of seven, he had been trapped by a small collapse in one of the Unobtainium mines. The sight of his grandfather’s lantern had been the most welcome thing Charles had ever seen, and the fear of darkness had stayed with him for twenty-five years.

  But this time there was something different and the difference was holding him there in the dark as his sleeping mind fought to awaken and to determine what was wrong. He had just worked out that the floor was smooth, too smooth to be the floor of the tunnel, when the light appeared from above. Cold, pale blue light flooded into the chamber, a roughly square cell with a tin bucket in the corner. Charles knew that light all too well, recognised the colour even as he felt his skin begin to burn under the torrent of radiation. Felt his eyes melting…

  He jerked awake, barely noticing the blanket, which Harroway must have put over his shoulders, falling behind him. He had fallen asleep at hi
s desk trying to come up with some way of removing the contamination from Kate’s body, and he had dreamed of what it must have been like for her. She had lived much of her life in darkness. Perhaps she had seen daylight when taken up to be experimented on, but Cooper had arranged it so that he could expose her to the blue light of the reactor without her leaving her cell. A channel had been cut through the floor, covered by a lead plate. They had found it when they had moved the reactor. All to make it easier to irradiate the girl.

  Why had he done that? His experiments appeared to use the cages with radiation directed through the light tubes. Yet he had made it a simple matter of moving a metal plate to fill Kate’s cell with the same energy. It seemed… uncontrolled. Unscientific. Cooper was insane, but he was an insane scientist. So why use such a haphazard method… Unless it served some other purpose.

  Charles bolted to his feet and rushed to the door. ‘Harroway!’

  A door at the end of the hall opened and the manservant, immaculately dressed even at whatever time it was, appeared through it. ‘Sir? Your tone suggests that you have found an answer to your conundrum.’

  ‘Not an answer, but possibly a palliative. Call the hospital and tell them to have Kate ready to travel. If they can provide an ambulance, so much the better. Then call Greenwich and tell them I need our heaviest suit ready for me when I get there. I’ll be collecting Kate and taking her there.’

  Harroway actually raised an eyebrow. ‘You are taking the young woman to the largest Unobtainium reactor in the country, sir?’

  ‘Yes. I believe I know why her father was exposing her to the radiation. I believe that it may be the only thing which keeps her alive!’

  Greenwich.

  Kate’s condition had worsened, but she was still on her feet and quite capable of moving under her own power, and the sight of the huge, brick-built building which housed arguably the Unobtainium Company’s greatest achievement caused her eyes to widen.

  ‘Very big,’ she said as Charles led her from the ambulance to the main doors. ‘Very big house.’

  ‘No one lives in this house, my dear. We call them “buildings” when no one lives in them. Or factories, or warehouses, or… Well, you can learn all those words later. This one is where we keep a reactor, a machine like the one your father had, with the blue light. Do you trust me, Kate?’

  She stopped and looked at him. ‘You want to show me the light.’

  ‘I believe that it stabilises… No, a simpler explanation. I believe that it stops you becoming sick.’

  She nodded. ‘Sometimes when I was sick, father showed me the light and I felt better. Sometimes I not sick and it make me sick, but not… not like the same sick.’ She lifted the arm which had been burned but was now perfect skin. ‘Like this.’

  ‘Then we go in. I’ll take you into the room, but you will have to come out when you think you’ve had enough. I have no way of determining how much exposure you need.’

  She frowned at him. ‘If you come too, you get hurt.’

  ‘I have a way of protecting myself. Don’t you worry.’

  Charles’s method of protecting himself, a heavier version of the suits the hazard teams wore with a solid, armoured chest and helmet, and triple-layered cloth everywhere else, reduced Kate to a fit of giggles. ‘Sharles is funny,’ she proclaimed.

  He smiled, even if she could probably barely see it through the thick, Unobtainium-doped glass of the small window in his helmet. ‘Yes, I probably look funny, but even with this on, I cannot stay with you for too long.’

  Kate nodded, suddenly very serious. ‘Sharles not hurt himself for me. I am brave. I stay on self. Get better. Come out.’

  ‘Very good. This way.’

  The reactor room was sealed behind six feet of brick, concrete, and lead, but there was one way to get through. The tunnel had three doors. The first, thick, iron, and locked until Charles opened it, led into an antechamber where he paused, hanging up a new shift the hospital had provided on a peg.

  ‘Kate, listen carefully,’ he said. Kate put on a studious expression which almost made him laugh. ‘When you come out, you need to remove your dress and place it into this receptacle here.’ He indicated a large, metal bucket with a lid across the tunnel from the peg. ‘It must be burned. This new dress is for when you go out through the door. Do you understand?’

  She nodded emphatically. ‘When I come out, I put this dress in bucket and put on new one. Thank you for new dress.’

  ‘My pleasure. Let us continue.’

  There was a second door, this one made of a thin layer of adamantium welded to a thicker iron base, and then the third door with a thicker adamantium layer let them into the reactor room.

  It was not dark. The room was fifty feet across and the centre of it was a metal sphere ten feet in diameter. The size of the thing had meant that casting the case had not been an easy operation. They had known it would leak and so they had constructed the room around it to absorb that leakage. In a way it made things easier since the blue light of the reactor provided illumination. Surrounding the reactor itself were pipes, coiled copper pipes in large numbers, all of them there to absorb the heat of the reactor and convert water into steam which in turn was used to generate electricity. The heat in the reactor room was more oppressive, but less lethal, than the radiation.

  As Charles opened the door, he heard the Geiger counter on his suit begin to click. Kate looked at him as though she might be about to start giggling again. ‘Now Sharles make funny noise.’

  ‘That is telling me that there is radiation in this room. The blue light.’

  ‘Yes.’ She could see that.

  ‘Stay near to the wall.’ He pulled the door closed and turned the locking wheel. ‘You see how this door is opened and closed? You turn this wheel–’

  ‘And the bars move, and it open.’

  ‘You are an observant girl. Good.’

  ‘Now you go. Sharles will not hurt for me.’

  He looked at her through the hazy glass. ‘You will come out as soon as you feel better?’

  ‘Yes, Sharles.’

  ‘You remember you have to change clothes?’

  ‘Yes, Sharles.’

  The urgent clicking of the radiation meter told him she was right to insist, but it was still with reluctance that he turned the wheel and left her to the mercy of the vast, metal beast behind him.

  ~~~

  William Rotham watched as one of the greatest minds in the country paced back and forth across the access room of the power plant. There was every possibility that Charles was going to wear a groove in the concrete floor, not that Rotham planned to point this out. He liked his job. Chief engineer paid well and kept his wife in the style she enjoyed, and the work was generally more supervisory than practical. And it was in the dry.

  ‘It’s been over ninety minutes,’ Charles said.

  ‘Just coming up to one hundred, sir.’

  ‘That’s… if she’s stayed near the wall as I instructed, that would be… thirty roentgens of exposure.’ Rotham quietly marvelled at the fact that Charles could just work that out in his head. ‘It’s not certain death, but she should be badly burned, nauseous… I’m going to go back in and check on her.’

  ‘Sir, I think that it would be wise–’ He stopped as a red light appeared above the door. ‘The reactor room door has been opened, sir.’

  Charles stopped pacing and looked up at the light. ‘All right, you know what’s required. We’ll need to isolate her if she’s giving off too much radiation, which I’d rather not do, but I think she’ll understand.’

  Rotham picked up a Geiger counter, the head mounted on the end of a six-foot pole, and waited. A minute or so later Kate emerged from the tunnel, dressed in her new, white shift, and turned dutifully to close the door.

  ‘Kate,’ Charles said, ‘just wait there for a moment. This is Mister Rotham and he is going to check that you are not… He’s going to make sure you did not bring any of the light out with you.’ />
  ‘Radiation,’ Kate said seriously as Rotham extended the pole out towards her.

  Charles smiled. ‘Indeed. I really must stop treating you like a child. You clearly have a good memory. Rotham?’

  Rotham was frowning at his instrument. ‘Uh, she appears to be clean, sir.’ He scanned the probe up to Kate’s head and then down to her feet. Then he shook the box as though he was having trouble believing what he was seeing. ‘Too clean, if I may be so bold. The instrument is reading the background of this room, always a little higher than outside, but nothing from Miss Kate. It’s as though she had never been in the reactor room.’

  Charles walked over to Rotham and took the device from him, peering at the set of gauges on the top. He turned it off, back on again, waited for it to warm up, and peered once again at the needles.

  ‘You continue to astound me, Kate,’ Charles said, handing the box back to Rotham. ‘By rights you should be burned and sick, if not dying, but you seem to be completely unaffected.’

  ‘Burns could show up later, sir,’ Rotham pointed out.

  ‘Indeed, but that does not explain this total lack of apparent contamination.’

  ‘Agreed, sir, but I’m an engineer, not a physicist. I’ll leave the explanations to you, if you don’t mind the presumption.’

  Charles chuckled. ‘I do not, Mister Rotham. Thank you for your assistance. Come, Kate. We’ll get you back to the hospital and have you watched for a few hours. I will attempt to find a more permanent home for you now that we know what is required. I believe that there is only one place we can put you, and I am afraid that I will have to do some persuading to make it work.’

  Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

  ‘There are no signs of ill effects from the exposure,’ Wilberforce said. ‘I consulted one of our experts in the field and he professed disbelief. I assured him that your estimations were correct, and he agreed that you of all people would know. He believes the young lady to be either lucky beyond all women, or blessed by God Himself.’

  ‘Perhaps God did look down upon Cooper’s work and decide that it could not be allowed to stand,’ Charles allowed. ‘Sadly, He did not have more hand in Kate’s nature than He does in any of us. I swear that her father will pay for his detestable acts, but that is for another day.’ He looked around at Franklin, who was attending the hospital because Charles had requested he be there to give his opinion on Charles’s plans. ‘Inspector, you said that you had some news?’