Mutant 59

by Kit Pedler

  OBITUARY NOTICE

  S. Ainslie, MB, BS, MCPath

  Dr S. Ainslie, senior lecturer in microbiology at the Kensington General Hospital, died suddenly on 20 July at his home in Sydenham.

  Simon Ainslie was born on 6 December 1919 and qualified at St Mary’s Hospital in 1939. Joining the RAMC shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, he spent considerable time studying the mechanism of bacterial infection in gun-shot wounds.

  After he returned to civilian life, he decided to train as a research bacteriologist and became deeply interested in the adaptability of bacteria. Over the years he was able to amass a considerable quantity of data regarding the tailoring of bacteria to unusual growth media, and although none of his work had been published, many colleagues have paid tribute to his diligence and single-minded devotion to his work. One writes:

  ‘Simon was a thoroughly charming man. He always gave his expertise willingly to any problem at hand and in the last months it was clear that he had made a series of original observations about bacillus prodigiosus which excited him tremendously. It is tragic he should have died before completing his studies. He will be greatly missed.’

  Simon Ainslie is survived by his wife and two daughters, to whom we extend our deepest sympathy.

  MUTANT 59

  THE PLASTIC EATER

  Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis

  Souvenir Press

  Contents

  Title Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Copyright

  One

  The switch had cost eighteen dollars and forty-three cents and although it performed exactly the same task as any other switch on the counter of a general store it had one difference – unimportant to the houseowner – but vital to Hannson. In its specification the designers had stated that there was a ‘PF of 0.1’, that is to say its likelihood of failure was infinitesimal. For eighteen dollars and forty-three cents, success was in practical terms a certainty. It had two positions labelled: ‘Attitude correction manual’ and ‘Attitude correction automatic’.

  The Apollo commander clicked it over to ‘manual’ and from that millisecond onwards – began to die.

  His action should have fired a small pulse of electricity into the intricately woven array of microcircuits behind the control panel. Instead, the current flowed out of a wire which had once been perfectly insulated but now lay – invisible to his gaze – bare and gleaming. A red warning light flickered once and then lit steadily.

  The commander’s face showed little reaction. Perhaps a momentary dilation of the pupils and a twitch of an eyelid. He moved the switch again backwards and forwards – each time the warning light went off and on with the switch.

  The two crew members followed his actions. No trace of emotion showed on their faces. They were all deadly tired. The fatigue of an almost impossible workload was marked in the dark shadows around their eyes.

  All three men were concentrating on the liturgy of survival imprinted on their memory by the long years of training.

  The commander floated back onto his couch and lay quite still. No one spoke. Abruptly their concentration was broken by the voice of Houston ground control, the flat distorted tones filled the cabin.

  ‘Apollo nineteen – you are one minute forty-five from final TEI course correction, mark.’ The tone bleeped briefly after the voice.

  The commander replied – his voice free of any inflexion.

  ‘Copy, Houston. We have switching malfunction on computer severance – repeat on computer severance, over.’

  Again the mark tone.

  ‘Roger Apollo. Running ground check now, over.’

  ‘Thank you Houston.’

  The ship – a tiny speck in the empty dark of space – lunged faster than any bullet, along its curved trajectory towards earth. It made no sound as it hurtled onwards – and left nothing in its wake.

  ‘Apollo nineteen – ground check confirms malfunction on severance control. Reposition control to automatic – repeat, switch to automatic.’

  The commander replied: ‘Roger Houston – time to course correction please.’ He moved the switch and the warning light went out.

  ‘Time to correction burn one minute fifteen – on the mark – mark.’ The tone bleeped.

  At the bio-medical console in the manned spacecraft centre, doctors anxiously watched the spiking traces of the commander’s body. The flight surgeon made a note on his record sheet: ‘command pilot; tachycardia, one hundred and ten, respiration thirty’.

  In the command module a process never conceived by its designer moved inexorably towards its conclusion behind the control panel.

  Two more small components failed abruptly. A cascading series of electrical pulses flashed through computing circuits. There was a soundless flash of flame and smoke billowed out into the confined space of the cabin. In the choking fumes, the three men desperately fought to retain control as the capsule tumbled hopelessly out of control towards the outer limits of the atmosphere …

  Out over the Atlantic, passengers on board BOAC Flight 122 bound for New York were sleeping in the dim blue light of the cabin. A small boy on the starboard side was fidgeting and sleepless, his face pressed to the window. Suddenly, he shook his mother awake: ‘Look, quick, Mummy, look!’ He pointed out of the window. The mother rubbed her eyes and leant across him to look out.

  Spread across the clear star-lit sky was a long orange trail of fire; she could see that something at the head of it was moving. It steadily grew larger and then suddenly broke into three separate flaming points. These broke again and again and spiralled away from the main direction of the fire trail dying away in the darkness like a Fourth of July firework. She sat back in her seat and cuddled her son down beside her. ‘Just a shooting star honey – they don’t hurt anyone.’

  Mrs Harris finished stacking her husband’s books in the loft and, shutting the trapdoor above her, wheezed unsteadily down the ladder to the upstairs landing. Two months, they had told her at the hospital and it was just three weeks.

  In the front hall she passed a photograph of the two of them in its embossed tin frame and wondered tearfully whether to take it back up to the loft and put it with his other things. She thought of her blood pressure and her ankles and instead took it off the wall and put it on the mantelpiece in the front room.

  Her concern for her health saved her life.

  On the flight deck of BEA Flight 510 from Paris to Heathrow, the captain was relaxed. There was no particular problem ahead on the flight plan except for light ground fog at Heathrow. The door behind him opened and the co-pilot eased his way past the jump seat and through the congested mass of instruments and controls and sat down. The captain grinned over at him: ‘I know where you’ve been – thought she was engaged.’ The co-pilot replied, rubbing his hands:

  ‘All the cabin crew must remain under the instructions of the flight officers.’

  ‘In professional matters!’

  ‘This is going to be very professional. What’s the latest ETA?’

  ‘Seventeen-ten if we don’t get stacked.’

  Rivulets of water streamed up the cabin windows and whipped away in the slipstream, partly obscuring the solid cloud cover beneath the aircraft.

  The captain began the routine conversation with Heathrow control, trying to sort out his own ground controller from the jumbled mass of voices he could hear jabbering in the
background.

  ‘Alpha Charlie Flight 510, you are clear to cross and make a right turn as you enter on block 82.’

  ‘Thank you Alpha Charlie, right turn …’

  As he talked, the flight engineer was studying the array of dials in front of him showing, in quadruplicate, the state of each engine, temperature, per cent thrust, oil pressure. He made notes in a log strapped to the desk as the great aircraft banked on its final turn before entering the cone of signals which would guide it down onto the runway. The co-pilot noted that they were on both the beam transmitter and glide-slope beam. They passed the first vertical marker …

  Ena Harris had just finished making tea in the kitchen and was sipping a boiling hot cup and staring glumly out of the window.

  In the port wing of Flight 510 there was a small metal box containing a tightly woven mass of wires and solid state circuitry. Its task, in the almost biological complex of arteries and veins under the gleaming alloy skin of the wing, was to control the flow of fuel to number two engine. It also transmitted information to the engineer’s control panel about the fuel feed rate to number two engine, and data about fan temperature in the roaring cyclone of flame inside the thrusting jet engine.

  Inside the dull grey metal skin of the box, two centimetres of wire began to sag away from its contact points.

  On the flight deck, the captain made his final communication with ground control:

  ‘Alpha Charlie, Flight 510 you are clear to land on runway 4, good day.’

  ‘Thank you Alpha Charlie, good day.’

  He clicked off the trans-ceiver …

  In the wing, the control function of the box abruptly failed. Fuel pumped suddenly from the central fuselage tank into number two engine, an event which could only have occurred if the feed line from the port inboard wing tank had previously shut-off.

  It was still open.

  The combustion chambers in the engine flooded and there was a sudden small explosion, a single blade on the turbine shaft sheared away and flew upwards like a projectile. The engine exploded and blew away from its hanging pod under the wing. The streaking blade plunged into the structure of the wing, tearing through pressurized tubes and complex honeycombed sheets like a knife through flesh. It came to rest, wedged into a tightly knotted assembly of pipes, between the inboard spoiler and the flaps. Red hydraulic fluid gushed out like blood from the severed pipes. Both the inboard and outboard aileron slammed into the fully raised position and locked solid. The wing lurched downwards pulling the stricken machine uncontrollably away from the radio cone of safety …

  Mrs Harris finished her tea disconsolately and went out into the garden to fetch in the washing. As she started to unpeg the sheets, grey and dripping with the water and the fog, she heard the noise of an approaching aircraft.

  For twenty years she had lived in Isleworth only a few miles from the main airport runways and so at first she took no notice. As the noise grew louder, she began to peer blindly into the fog. The mixed roar and scream grew to an almost intolerable level and then suddenly, over the two apple trees at the bottom of her garden, an enormous winged shape loomed out of the murk, wings tilted at an impossible level.

  Ena stared for a split moment, her mouth sagging in complete disbelief, then she turned and began to run towards the door. She reached it and all light ceased as the sky was blotted out by the enormous spread of the plane. The last image she remembered as she fainted away was the great black doughnut of the wheel suspended by gleaming struts only feet above her head.

  From that instant onwards Flight 510 ceased to be a flying machine and became instead a plunging disintegrating mass of machinery. The wheel smashed into the loft, scattering the neatly stacked books and, as the roof timbers and tiles sprayed into the air like matchsticks, the plane slewed around and began to break up. One wing knifed into the houses on the other side of the street and the fuselage, breaking loose like a giant torpedo, tore down the centre of the road flinging cars and people aside, routing a terrible path of death.

  An engine from the starboard wing, turbine blades still screaming, broke loose and plunged into a crowded supermarket and exploded.

  The tail assembly cartwheeled like a giant boomerang and plunged through the wall of a Bingo Hall disappearing in a boiling cloud of dissolving brickwork.

  The severed nose section, turning over and over like a giant bullet, bounced once at the end of the road and, in one final gigantic ricochet, spiralled into a tightly packed mass of houses, pulverizing walls and ceilings.

  The remaining fuselage began to shatter, turning end over end like a ragged metal stick flung through the air.

  The lives of the forty-eight passengers and crew ceased almost simultaneously as collapsing bulkheads and jagged panelling slashed their bodies into a terrible carrion which rained down on the street below. Finally, in a thunder of collapsing homes and dust, the unrecognizable fragments of the great aircraft spun away from the point of impact and clattered down over the surrounding homes.

  A car, flung like a toy onto the roof of a garage, slid slowly off to thump down on its roof in the blackened road.

  A street lamp, leaning slowly, began to move like the hands of a mad clock, then snapped and fell.

  One man, pulling himself painfully out of the wreckage of his car, began to stagger aimlessly down the street, his face blank of any reaction. As he zig-zagged onwards, his senses automatically guided him between the obstacles lying in the road: the scattered airline bags and the chic leather trunks. His eyes failed entirely to comprehend the terrible and pathetic human remains scattered all around him.

  Anne Kramer stood shivering in the driving rain. Pulling up the hood of her raincoat, she strained to hear the officer talking through a loudhailer on the quayside below her.

  She was standing on the bridge of a small naval frigate looking down onto the foredeck of HMS Renown, a nuclear submarine, carrying sixteen A3 Polaris missiles. Perforating the black bulbous contours of the foredeck, open to the rain, were the sixteen hatches leading to the missile launching tubes, running over forty feet down through the full extent of the whale-like hull. Between the two rows of tubes, two ratings were standing on the deck looking upwards.

  Above them, hanging from a crane, was the dull grey cylinder of a Polaris missile slowly descending towards one of the open tubes. Gradually the ratings eased its base into the opening and it began to slide down into the body of the submarine. Anne stood among a small group of journalists huddled against the bridgehouse to keep away from the driving rain. One of them came up to her, nudging her shoulder. There was a large drop of water hanging from his nose under a battered hat. He grinned:

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘You’ve got a thoroughly dirty mind, Matt,’ she bantered.

  They watched as the two ratings fitted a circular plastic membrane in place over the mouth of the tube holding the missile.

  ‘Complete with maidenhead,’ he chuckled.

  ‘Bit late,’ she murmured and turned to listen to the officer’s voice. His voice came metallically through the loudhailer:

  ‘When the missile is launched, high pressure steam, generated by a conventional cordite explosion, drives the missile up against the plastic membrane. The membrane ruptures and the missile leaves the submarine under the guidance of on-board target computers …’

  As the voice crackled on, Anne wondered whether she would be able to remember the exact sequence for her article and hoped that the official handout had enough details in it. Perhaps she could do a first draft in the mess.

  The gale drove the rain hard against the great picture windows of the officers’ mess, obscuring the great sheds of the submarine base down the hill near the lochside. Inside, it was softly lit and warm and there was a relaxed murmur of conversation around the bar. The group was ill-assorted. The uniformed officers, looking impossibly well groomed and clean, handing round drinks to the journalists, each wearing a circular orange ‘press’ label in
his lapel.

  The voice of a senior officer rose above the hubbub:

  ‘Can I have your attention please ladies and gentlemen, can I have …’ The talk died away.

  ‘Thank you. Well, first of all may I welcome you all to Gareloch base. I hope that you are seeing all you want.’

  There were a few friendly jeers, the officer reacted, smiling:

  ‘The Official Secrets Act doesn’t cover the systems behind the bar I assure you gentlemen, so please enjoy yourselves.’

  Somebody raised his glass and said in mock accent: ‘God bless you governor.’ He went on:

  ‘Now, as to tomorrow’s programme. In the morning, we are to visit the Polaris training school – there are camera restrictions there I’m afraid – and then we were to have gone aboard HMS Triton, the first Royal Navy Poseidon carrier, in the afternoon. As you’ve been told, she was to have docked tomorrow morning but, owing to unforeseen circumstances, there has been a bit of a hold up, so, instead, we shall take you onto the dry dock where HMS Resolution is having a refit. Oh, and one more thing, dinner will begin at seventeen thirty, thank you very much.’

  Anne turned to Matt: ‘What’s happened, they’re usually as regular as clockwork.’

  Matt was deadly serious, his eyes flicking round the room for clues: ‘I agree, they never vary the time schedule without bloody good reason.’ He looked at Anne intently: ‘Something is definitely up.’

  Lionel Slayter’s PhD had been in communications theory. The University of Keele had marked him out early in his student days as an unusually gifted mathematician, but one progress report made by his tutor had said: although his maths was impeccable he had a regrettable tendency to speculate well beyond the bounds of reasonable induction. After completing his thesis, he made the usual tour of North American institutions on a travel grant and then returned to England to scan the columns of the science journals for a job. His American tour had been without particular interest or success except for one small event, insignificant in itself.