by Kit Pedler
Myers raised his beer: ‘Any time, cheers!’
Four
Wright was at his most pedantic, reflected Gerrard. The sort of starchy fussiness he associated with English officers in Hollywood war films. A superb technician, no more. He was getting tired of Mr Wright.
‘It’s much the most likely that it’s due to some form of solvent action. Heat could never have produced this degree of distortion. It would have caused charring or at least slight carbonization around the rim here. Are we quite sure that nobody spilled any volatiles – acetone or whatever – near the robot?’ questioned Wright.
I’ve only got Aspinall’s word for it,’ said Gerrard. ‘He was very much on the ball. No one was allowed to go near it except him.’
Wright smiled a thin disbelieving smile. ‘Well, perhaps, but we’d need proof of that.’ He bundled up the cloth-wrapped wheels, put them into a metal container and drew out a paper label and started writing.
‘What are you going to do with it?’ said Gerrard.
‘A few tests,’ said Wright. ‘But not right now, we have to get on with this project. Later on we can do rigidity, permeability and so on.’
It was next morning and the sun was streaming through the high arched windows of the schoolroom laboratory, the only advantage Gerrard could see for working in that Victorian folly. The panels of stained glass near the top of the window threw swirling patterns in deep ruby, blue and yellow onto Wright’s desk.
‘Suppose it turns out not to be an external fault,’ said Gerrard.
‘How’s that?’ said Wright.
‘I’m not a chemist, but couldn’t it be a fault in the plastic which maybe renders it liable to some external influence. A change in molecular structure – so that it’s susceptible to – well I don’t know – but let’s say nitrogen or oxygen in the air?’
Wright looked over his glasses at him. ‘The Neoplas company are extremely careful in their development testing. They work under licence from us you know and I make absolutely certain that each batch goes through a complete specification check. We have it done independently by another firm. Their data is impeccable, they’ve no reason to make it otherwise – they wouldn’t get paid!’
‘That wasn’t an accusation,’ said Gerrard.
‘Well, I trust my answer resolves your fears, Mr Gerrard,’ said Wright. He picked up the box with the specimens and took them over to a large refrigerator, opened it and put them carefully on a shelf at the back, halfway down from the freezing compartment. Looking back at Gerrard, he closed the door with a bang. ‘We can finish this later,’ he said.
‘I thought red tape and procrastination were confined to Government departments in this country,’ replied Gerrard.
‘By no means, my dear fellow,’ said Wright. ‘You’ll find them everywhere, but there is another word you know … priorities.’ He smiled and left the lab.
Gerrard wandered over to his desk and sat down. Was it any use going to see Kramer? He was sure there was some other factor concerned in the melting plastic. What would happen if plastic insulation started melting … wait a minute, insulation melting! It struck a chord somewhere. Hadn’t he read something about insulation melting – in connection with what? He thought rapidly and then snapped his fingers.
‘Got it,’ he said aloud. It was the Isleworth air disaster. There had been reports of insulation failure. Could there have been a connection here? Insulation – plastic – yes. Which newspapers?
He started to his feet and lifted the phone on his desk.
‘Betty,’ he said, ‘the Post over the last ten days, can you bring them to me?’
‘All of them?’ The voice from the phone sounded a bit hesitant. He reflected it takes much more time to gain a secretary’s confidence than that of any other person in business.
‘Yes, every last one and pronto.’ He put the phone down and sat back, his mind racing.
He looked over at the array of shapes on the wall On the display board were mounted various examples of the use of Aminostyrene: telephone cables; gas pipes; electricity conduits. Suppose there was some fault in the basic plastic and, under certain conditions, it all started to break down. What sort of chaos would communications be thrown into? He started to his feet thinking the idea through, then checked himself. He had been there three weeks. True they had not given him anything constructive to do in that time and part of his irritation towards Wright was based on this. He felt unused, unstretched, unappreciated. Wasn’t he now simply looking for some form of competition, something to prove to Wright that he, Gerrard, was a more effective scientist than the older man?
Besides, what would Kramer say if he was able to prove that Aminostyrene, the foundation rock on which the consultancy was based, was defective and production had to be stopped. It wouldn’t exactly enhance the status of the group.
The finances of the group came almost entirely from their one spectacular success: the bio-degradable bottle, made from Degron.
Soon after Wright had joined the group, he gave them a short informal seminar on one of his favourite themes – a plastic with a number of hitherto incompatible properties. High tensile strength in a single direction, considerable elasticity in the opposite direction and extreme cheapness. Working from the standpoint of his other, original, success – Aminostyrene – he developed a series of polymers – compounds with tightly cross-linked chains of molecules which, in succession, came nearer and nearer to the required properties.
Eventually one of his experimental compounds seemed to be almost perfect except for one major and crippling defect. In the presence of oxygen and visible light, it underwent a rapid breakdown, turning, in a space of a few hours, to a grey filamentous powder. He told the assembled group that, as far as he could see, there was no way round these failures in the compound.
Shortly after the talk was over, Buchan became extremely agitated, it was obvious that he was in the throes of some internal struggle. Finally, with a great cry of triumph, he rushed to the blackboard and in a matter of seconds turned the weakness of Wright’s compound into what he then called ‘the self-destruct container’. He reasoned that so long as light and oxygen were kept away from the plastic, it would retain its properties, but if it was then exposed to both, it would begin to disintegrate.
Kramer was excited beyond measure and, for a moment, returning to his old image of the compulsively creative scientist, filled in the remaining details: make the plastic container in an injection moulding apparatus deprived of both air and light, then, under the same conditions, mould on a complete opaque and impervious layer of another plastic. Finally provide, in the outer opaque layer a tear-off strip which it was essential to operate if the container was to be opened. When the strip was pulled off, both light and air were admitted to the surface of the sensitive plastic and disintegration would begin.
An original and brilliant idea nearly always provokes a hostile reaction in those who hear about it but fail to think of it themselves and the self-destruct container was no exception.
Everyone produced negative hypotheses to show why it shouldn’t work and one by one they fell silent as they failed to refute the idea. Finally, there were no more objections and the group set to work in a fever of activity.
A secondhand injection moulding machine was installed, a die-maker produced moulds and Wright set about synthesizing enough ‘premix’ to make a small run of experimental containers. The air in the main laboratory was hot and foul smelling. A smell which was mainly due to complex amines given off by the precursor compounds necessary to make the plastic.
Kramer, meanwhile, had taken out provisional patent rights and negotiated a support grant from the National Research and Development Corporation,
There were many irritating snags to be overcome before the idea worked reliably. The principal problem was to design the molecular structure of the sensitive plastic so that once light and oxygen had been admitted to the localized area under the tear-off strip, the self-destruct process would propagate itse
lf throughout the container, leaving only the one-thousandth of an inch opaque covering of ordinary plastic.
This covering in itself posed the final problem for solution. It would not undergo spontaneous destruction, as in the case of the main container body, so a compound was introduced into the sensitive plastic which reacted with the residue after self-destruction releasing a small quantity of solvent for the opaque covering. This converted the covering into a volatile liquid which evaporated, leaving only the carbon particles with which it had been filled to make it black and impervious to light.
Finally, the self-destruct time was set at two hours and instructions printed on the bottle stating that the contents were to be emptied immediately.
During the frantic development process, the mood in the group was almost religious in intensity. Everyone worked, often through the night. There was a sustained air of adventure and excitement and nobody spared themselves. Betty became mother and cook providing constant supplies of coffee, food and whisky. One night, after nearly twenty-four hours of continuous experiment, a bottle passed round and Kramer started to play on the blackboard with names for the new material. As they all relaxed in the glow of the drink, the suggestions became more and more impractical and ribald. Someone suggested ‘Suncrap’ only to be countered with ‘Oxynure’ or ‘Kramer’s Krumbling Krud’. Finally, they settled for ‘Degron’.
Then came a press conference in the Central London Office hired by Kramer as a selling front for the organization and, although drink flowed and journalists were freely given information, it was carefully designed so that none was able to get his hands on any samples to take away for analysis.
Then came interviews on television science-spectacular programmes and finally a flood of manufacturers wanting to mass-produce the Degron container under licence from the group.
Kramer conducted a successful auction among the competing firms which would have done credit to a stallholder in the Souks of Baghdad, finally completing a deal with a nationwide soft drinks manufacturer who, basically, wanted a new gimmick to sell the mixture of tartaric and citric acid, saccharin and colouring which he shamelessly called: ‘Tropic Delight’.
The sales campaign mounted by the firm was a spectacular success. The public bought the same chemical fraud in the new container, simply because it looked interesting and required a novel operation to open it.
The advertising campaign mounted by the soft drinks firm was carefully worded. On a hundred hoardings, on the tube, on television commercials, in the newspapers, people were exhorted to buy ‘Tropic Delight’.
‘Help your environment, drink Tropic Delight. Pull the strip – watch it crumble. Put it on your window box – sprinkle it on your garden. Watch your flowers flourish. If you haven’t got a garden, flush it down the sink.
‘Every ten intact tear-off strips gets you a bonus gift voucher. Ten gift vouchers can get you any one of a hundred beautiful gifts in your local Tropic Delight shop. Introductory offer till the end of the month only. Hurry, hurry …’
So the exhortations went and so the public bought. Bored by the once exciting sexual ritual of rupturing the vacuum seal on the instant coffee jar, they now turned to the equally satisfying ripping sound of the tear-off strip – carefully designed with a serrated edge by media psychologists to give the tearing feel, direct to the fingers. To be able to vent the destructive urge sadistically – to rip to tear – the bottle never cried out in pain.
Throughout the country, the bottles were initiated into their dissolution by a hundred thousand tearing hands, started on their path back towards the earth, flushed without thought down a million lavatories.
Degron became a household word and eager industrialists lined up to buy the manufacturing licence.
In an increasingly pollution-conscious world, it became simply good business to advertise a package which did not add to the garbage disposal problem. In the first nine months after its announcement, the Kramer group negotiated forty-seven separate deals with container manufacturers. Other soft drinks with names even more transparently dishonest than ‘Tropic Delight’ began to appear in self-destruct containers. Finally the Ministry of the Environment stepped in and asked the group to make the process generally available on government licence.
Everyone was content. Ministers smiled benignly and down into the maze of vaulted echoing sewers in a hundred towns went dissolving Degron. The sewer filtration screens at outfall works cleared of plastic bottles began to be more troublefree. Councils were pleased.
Profit plus heroism. Kramer was content.
But what had this financial bonanza done to Kramer himself? Gerrard wondered. Was his once global vision now reduced to perfecting financially profitable but intellectually sterile inventions? Suppose a flaw was discovered in Aminostyrene – what then? Would the bonanza dry up? Would Kramer divert the attention of his group back to the study of the world’s problems, the careful evolution of the future of science? Or would the whole thing founder?
He remembered Kramer’s once deep concern for the future of science. His massive attack on knowledge for its own sake and how much he wanted to reorient the skills of the scientist towards social problems. He compared that image with the profit-seeking obsessional he saw now. He wondered, why the change?
Betty entered with a pile of newspapers and put them on his desk.
‘Only the main papers,’ she said. ‘I didn’t bring the others with the naked dolly birds.’ Gerrard smiled: ‘Party pooper.’ But there was no response from Betty.
‘Nobody else in,’ said Betty. ‘You don’t want any coffee yet, do you?’ She was obviously unwilling to make coffee simply for one and that one the new boy on the staff.
‘That’s OK,’ said Gerrard, his smile a bit fixed by now. ‘Don’t bother.’ She left the room.
He started to spread out the papers, irritated by her attitude. God damn it, he wanted coffee! He would phone her in a minute or two and tell her he had changed his mind. Get her off her fat can. He looked down at the papers.
The air disaster had been about a week ago. He flicked over the pages looking for the accounts of it. Nothing conclusive about insulation failure met his eye. Various causes were suggested by under-employed feature writers looking for a story. It was being investigated, there was an inquiry in progress. He closed the last paper with a sense of frustration. As he pushed the papers away another headline caught his eye. This one referred to the massive snarl-up of traffic in central London.
He read it through carefully and then looked through the papers of the next couple of days. In one of them a man called Slayter, the inventor of a new road control system, had given a press conference in which he had blamed insulation failure in one of his computers for the trouble.
Again, insulation failure! What insulation? Gerrard wondered. He looked up at the wall display. Aminostyrene was widely used as an insulator in a modified form. It would certainly be a feasible assumption that the wiring in both cases would be coated with the stuff. Suppose the same sort of failure had happened here. Aminostyrene – Degron, he wondered about the differences in structure between the two plastics.
What should he do, phone up Kramer? He felt the man was getting increasingly remote. The new Kramer scared him. He would probably meet with the same sort of reception as Wright. They had other more important projects on their plate than to go back and check something that was now passed. He must be very, very sure of his facts first. He looked at the paper again. This guy Slayter was currently under suspension but still occupied an office in the Ministry of Transport. He picked up the phone book.
Slayter was late. They had arranged to meet in a Westminster pub tucked away behind St James’s Street, near the Ministry. He had been cagey on the phone suspecting, from Gerrard’s transatlantic accent, another journalist on his neck. Gerrard had also been a little hesitant about stating his ideas over the telephone. If he was wrong then it wouldn’t do for one of Kramer’s team to show doubts about their own product.
Far better to listen to Slayter first without giving too much away.
Slayter arrived, rather flustered; a man under great pressure. Gerrard bought him a large whisky. Immediately, he filled it to the brim with soda and began gulping it down like beer.
‘You look as though you can use that,’ said Gerrard, nodding at the Scotch. He was also nursing whisky, a single one. He wanted to pump Slayter and not be too obvious about it. A lager against a double whisky would have seemed as though he was trying to loosen the tongue of the other man.
Slayter paused: ‘Never work for a big organization. There are too many frightened people about.’ Slayter finished the drink and insisted upon buying another round. He was beginning to look more relaxed. Gerrard saw a short, compact, strong-looking man with a clean-cut open face. He liked him, and wondered how he’d survive long in governmental research with all its red tape and grinding away of individuality. He seemed far too impatient, nervy and forthright to survive in Civil Service science for very long. When he spoke it was in short staccato bursts, he was obviously an intense, rapid thinker. His temporary suspension and the threat hanging over him gave him a caged, paranoid attitude. Each time Gerrard spoke, his reply was oblique and suspicious.
‘What exactly is your stake in this?’ said Slayter. ‘I’d like to know who I’m talking to and why.’
‘I thought I told you over the phone,’ said Gerrard.
‘You told me who you worked for and what you were but not the why and the how.’ Then, as Gerrard’s face showed his reaction, Slayter went on: ‘You’ll forgive me, but right now I feel like a fox running before a pack of half-starved hounds. It’s nice to have someone taking an interest, but right now I’m too hungry for a friendly ear.’
Gerrard decided to open out. He gave him a capsule account and told him of the robot in Barratt’s toy department.
Slayter listened intently and then in turn gave Gerrard a diluted version of the inquiry. Again, there was no direct proof that there was anything inherently wrong with the plastic. The breakdown could have been caused by several factors. But with this fresh evidence … it was worth trying anyway.