by Simon Mayo
‘Oh. OK … Now, while we’re waiting for the medics, let’s see what you have brought us. I’d include you if I could, but we don’t have the suits, I’m afraid. You can watch through the glass though, if you like …’ And the director disappeared back into the lab where he had stored the rocks moments before.
They sat silently, their four stools close together, and watched him. Jack still had her arm round Chloe, who was leaning on her shoulder, eyes tightly closed. Itch sat with his head down, shoulders slumped, suddenly totally exhausted. If he stopped now to think about how much trouble he was in, he’d be paralysed. Soon he would have to deal with his family, and the ambulance and police when they arrived. He would look after his sister too, but she had her cousin at the moment, and right now he wanted to focus on the rocks. Once he knew what they were and what was going to happen to them, he would feel as though he’d done his duty to Cake. The note had said not to trust anyone, but that was never going to be practical. At some stage he had to hand them over to be tested, and if Mr Watkins thought that West Ridge and Dr Alexander were the best option, then that was OK with him.
Jack interrupted his thoughts. ‘I’m just taking Chloe to the toilet, Itch. She’s not feeling well again.’ And she escorted her cousin out of the lab.
Itch found himself thinking about his grandfather’s Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments and its advice to go and ‘find out about things’. He wondered what its author would have made of this situation, with eight radioactive rocks being tested in one room and an eleven-year-old girl sick with radiation poisoning in another. It was the ‘finding out’ bit that was still driving Itch – he had to know what he had stumbled upon.
While lost in this vein of thought, he began to be aware of that feeling of combined dizziness and nausea he had felt in the greenhouse. It brought his thought processes to a crashing halt. This is it, he realized. I know what’s coming. On the one hand he was surprised he’d been OK till now, but this was really the worst time to get sick. The rocks were finally being analysed; now was the moment he had to be well and thinking straight. Small beads of sweat appeared on his forehead, and he could feel his stomach tightening – there was no doubt what was happening.
He turned to his teacher. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
Watkins looked grim. ‘I’ll check on the girls and then come and check on you. I’m sorry, Itch. Not much I can do to help. But the ambulance is coming, the paramedics will be here soon – you’ll be in good hands.’
Itch nodded and dashed out, trying to remember where he had seen the signs for the toilets. If he hadn’t been bent double with cramps and had instead been peering through the glass door into Dr Alexander’s lab, he would have observed the director engaged in the most amazing analysis of his life.
It wasn’t a tricky operation – just the transfer of eight stones into an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, a two-metre-high green metal cabinet-style machine with a large console at the front. The effect was of an oversized and rather dull arcade game – operated by a man from outer space. Alexander had put his helmet back on and had taken the rocks out of first the canvas bag and then their protective covers. Once unwrapped, Itch’s original one slid from the lead tube and the other seven were cut out of the lead apron. Their sizes varied from that of a large pebble to a medium potato, but all eight were jagged and charcoal black. They were staggeringly heavy for their size – much heavier than lead. Alexander’s pulse kicked up a notch.
On closer inspection, he noticed small pewter-coloured flecks in most of them – they sparkled as they reflected some of the neon lights. He pulled out his phone and took photographs of each of them. Before placing the rocks in the spectrometer, he pointed his Geiger counter at them – and a volley of clicks rattled through the speaker so fast that it was just a solid wall of sound. In astonishment he looked at the meter – it was off the scale. John Watkins had told him this would happen, but it was astonishing to see. Adrenalin shot through his body – what were these rocks?
With a renewed sense of urgency, he set about transferring them one by one into the spectrometer. He needed it to get to work, bombarding the rocks with its X-rays. They would then react by emitting X-rays of their own, and from that the machine could determine their make-up. Before he keyed in the final instruction, Alexander turned to look at the glass door between the labs.
Itch’s face was pressed against the window. His face was white and shiny with sweat, some of his hair plastered to his forehead, the rest sticking up at crazy angles. He had never felt as bad as this sickness had made him, but had been desperate to return to Alexander. He had been sick the once, then forced his trembling legs back to the labs – he was not going to miss this.
Alexander gave him a gloved thumbs-up – at which Itch raised his thumb to the glass in reply – then turned back to the spectrometer’s keyboard and pressed ‘Enter’.
There were no flashes, no bangs – just an instant row of black numbers and letters scrolling across a white screen. Itch watched as Alexander read, then re-read the figures. The director stood stock still for a moment, and then ran to grab some documents. Frantically he turned the pages of the largest file until he found what he was looking for. He held the chart he had found to the screen, his head moving up and down as he checked the results.
At first Itch thought a wasp must have found its way inside Alexander’s protective outfit: he had started pogoing and leaping around the lab, his arms whirling like windmills. He ran around the spectrometer four times. Through the glass and the thickness of Alexander’s helmet, Itch could definitely hear yelling.
He inched open the door. ‘Dr Alexander? You OK?’
The director saw Itch, hastily put the rocks away and bounded over. Picking up some of the papers, he pushed Itch back through the door to the next lab, following closely behind. He removed his helmet, his face running with sweat, his eyes wide and staring. He was smiling broadly.
‘Astonishing, truly astonishing! If I hadn’t witnessed it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it. Astonishing! Never seen the like … It’s what we’ve been hoping for!’ He was talking at, rather than to, Itch as he started to pace again.
‘Excuse me, Dr Alexander. What is it? What are they? What have you been looking for?’
The director stopped his pacing and turned to face Itchingham Lofte. ‘It’s not uranium. It’s … It’s … not anything we’ve seen before. It’s new … It’s … a … new … element! Well, an old element maybe … never seen on Earth since the Big Bang. It’s what we’ve been looking for. But then—’
Frustrated, Itch interrupted. ‘Sorry, but what? Dr Alexander! Can you start again?’
‘OK.’ He took several deep breaths. ‘Unless my machine is on the blink, those rocks are made of a substance we’ve never seen before. The Table of Elements would put it at 126.’
‘No, that’s impossible,’ said Itch. ‘It stops at 118 – everyone knows that – and those at the end only exist in labs. They disappear in seconds. Your machine needs a kicking.’
‘Trust me, I’ve kicked it!’ said Alexander. ‘Look, come through, you can kick it.’ They walked back together into the next lab. ‘You clearly know your stuff, Itch – I’m impressed. Your dad did well! Oh, congratulations, by the way, on getting the rocks here. You took what precautions you could, but this is absolutely where they should be.’
‘You know my dad?’ asked Itch – but they had stopped by the spectrometer and Alexander was pointing at the computer screen.
‘Look, the results are clear.’ He indicated the rows of figures. ‘Each element produces its own characteristic X-rays, and these are absolutely unique to what we think 126 will be.’
Itch gazed at the numbers, dumbfounded. ‘It’s still not possible.’
Alexander laughed loudly. ‘I know! Isn’t it great!’
‘OK,’ said Itch. ‘Assuming this’ – he waved at the screen – ‘is correct, what does it mean? What sort of things
will these rocks be able to do?’
Alexander rubbed the stubble on his head vigorously. ‘What a fantastically exciting question! Who knows! Let me give you an informed guess, based on what some elements at the top end of the table can do. Help with some forms of cancer. Detect oil down a well or gold down a mine – it’s all down to the neutrons they give off. But I think that, when this gets out, most attention will be on their ability to start a nuclear reactor.’
Hearing footsteps, they turned and saw Mr Watkins helping Jack and Chloe back into the lab. He was alarmed to see Itch in the same room as Alexander and the rocks.
‘Itch! What are you doing? Jacob, are the rocks safe now?’ he called.
The director thought for a moment and walked back through the door towards his friend.
‘Are they safe? Well, I think so as I’ve put them back in their case. And the case is back in the can. And I’ve sealed the can. So, normally, yes – but I think we might have just said goodbye to normal …’
20
WEST RIDGE IS a small town set high on hills fifteen miles from the sea. Its college sits on the only through road. The lofty position and the single carriageway mean that it is vulnerable in winter, on the rare occasion of heavy snowfall, to being cut off. Seventeen years ago, following a freak storm, the town had been cut off for twelve hours. This Saturday evening in June, two road traffic accidents achieved the same result.
The first took place at a nasty bend in the road five miles to the south of West Ridge, a notorious accident black spot. A white Transit van skidded while cornering, lost control and overturned, spilling its load of drums of cooking oil. These split on contact with the road, leaving a slick which had spread across both lanes by the time the first car arrived on the scene.
Five minutes later, three miles north of West Ridge, a broken-down old tractor was rammed by a blue minibus. The tractor’s right rear wheel had collapsed, leaving it leaning on the crumpled coach. Fuel leaking from both vehicles had burst into flames, sending an explosion of light and smoke high into the evening sky. In the still, summer air, the sound carried to every house in West Ridge. In both accidents, everyone walked away from the scene unhurt – there were no casualties.
When the ambulances came from the north to get to the sick children at the mining school they found the road blocked by an impassable furnace; when the police arrived from the south, the road was blocked by twenty tonnes of Transit-van wreckage, six hundred litres of cooking oil and four cars which had skidded into each other.
The last two vehicles to reach West Ridge before the accidents were both black Audi A8s. In the one approaching from the south was a German – Volker Berghahn; the one from the north was driven by an American, Bud Collins, who turned to the smartly dressed woman in the passenger seat next to him.
‘Boom. And boom again. Our turn, I think, Roshanna.’
21
IN LABORATORY 4 of the West Ridge School of Mining, its director was enjoying a moment of discovery he had thought he would never experience. He had served his time as a government climate scientist, as a metallurgist, and as a lecturer at Harvard. Although he was widely respected by his peers, he had always hoped to return to climate research. For him this was the most thrilling and important area of all science – indeed all education. But the big research jobs had come and gone, each with other people’s names attached to them. Never his. Eventually he had taken the hint and moved back to his beloved Cornwall – to his last job before retirement. He had been promised the time and space to follow his own research, and so it had turned out.
And yet here he was with what he could only conclude was a revolutionary moment. Unless his spectrometer had gone as mad as Itch’s chemistry teacher, the rocks sitting next door could change the world. Two questions ran round his head:
Are there any others?
Why have they appeared now?
Alexander found his head was spinning with it all. He was only brought back to earth by the sound of one of the children being ill. It was Chloe again. Jack was stroking her hair, Itch holding her hand while Mr Watkins started clearing up.
When he had finished, the teacher approached his friend and said quietly, ‘Would I be right in saying that, whatever else it might do, your element 126 can make children very sick?’
Jacob Alexander nodded and turned away from where the cousins were sitting. ‘I’m afraid so, yes. I’m just glad the ambulance is on its way because it is, frankly, impossible to know what we are dealing with here. These are extraordinarily powerful rocks – I’ve never seen their like before. So quite how much protection the children got from their makeshift containers is anyone’s guess.’
Chloe had now fallen asleep, exhausted, and Jack was making her a pillow from her jacket.
Itch, though, was up and thinking again. ‘Dr Alexander, you were talking just now about how these rocks could start a nuclear reactor …’
Watkins looked up. ‘They can do what?’
‘They are strong neutron emitters,’ said Alexander, ‘and small amounts can start up a nuclear reactor. We have more – so much more than that.’
Watkins said, ‘So how many reactors could be started with that little lot next door?’
And Jacob Alexander was off again, pacing the well-worn channel between the workbenches. ‘Impossible to say. Potentially, though? I’d hazard a guess at twenty or more.’
The enormity of what they were hearing was now sinking in.
‘And weapons?’ asked Watkins. ‘Could they be used in nuclear weapons?’
‘Yes, of course. For a nuclear weapon you need a critical mass of material, and that’s what this is. It’s deadly.’
Watkins now looked as pale as the cousins. ‘You realize, Jacob, what we have here, then? Never mind every energy company and every government in the world wanting these rocks – every terrorist group will be after them! Nuclear power in a box! That’s what we have! And available from Lab Four of your college!’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Where are the police and the ambulance? I suddenly feel we are very exposed, very exposed indeed.’
Alexander looked at his watch. ‘They said they’d be here soon, but it doesn’t feel like it, does it?’ He turned back to the children. Chloe was still asleep, her breathing shallow. Jack had fallen asleep too, her head on Itch’s rucksack.
‘Trust no one is what Cake wrote,’ said Itch, ‘and he was right. Who would you trust to do the right thing with that lot?’
The director sat down on a stool at the end of the bench. ‘Well, in the right hands, you know, it could save the planet. When I was in the States, I worked with a man called Lovelock – James Lovelock. He developed an idea called the Gaia Theory – heard of it?’
Watkins nodded, but Itch shook his head.
‘Doesn’t matter. It boils down to this. Our Earth – Gaia – is the only living planet in the solar system and it behaves like a living thing. It looks after itself. Well, we need energy, and we need it quickly. Our natural resources are running out and our world is getting hot. And just look what we have here – a power source that can change the world, just when we need it.’
Itch looked at John Watkins to check if he was hearing straight but his teacher wasn’t looking.
Alexander continued, ‘I know I’m getting carried away here, but this is an evening for wild thinking, isn’t it? We were all ridiculed for these ideas when they first started doing the rounds, but this is an extraordinary event, so I’m offering an extraordinary theory.’ He was warming to his theme and couldn’t keep still, so was up and touring the lab again. ‘The Earth is hot, and getting hotter. In fact, it’s moving to a new hot stage that we haven’t seen for millions of years. I’ve always believed that, just as the Earth would look after itself, humans would have to look after themselves. But what if the Earth was, somehow, saying, Here’s your last chance. Here’s the most extraordinary energy source you’ve ever had – green, clean nuclear power for all – surely even you guys can’t mess this up!’
‘I’m wondering if that’s the old hippie we’re hearing here, Jacob … You always were one for the sandals and brown rice. Surely you’re not suggesting—’
But Alexander interrupted him.
‘Oh, John! That’s the old way of thinking! I’ve had all that hippie stuff thrown at me every time I went for the jobs that mattered. Well, who’s looking stupid now? Next door lie eight rocks that could bring about a new industrial revolution on their own. This country could have all the energy it would ever need! And it’s next door! In … in … that cupboard! Forget the oilfields. If we can share this knowledge and power, we might find a way through the new hot age that’s coming.’ His voice was starting to crack and Watkins offered him a bottle of water from his jacket pocket.
Watkins shrugged. ‘Now maybe isn’t the time for detailed argument, Jacob – I’m sure there’ll be a proper discussion in due course. I really think we should call 999 again; the girls really don’t look good.’ They all turned to look at Chloe and Jack, both asleep, both deathly white. ‘Why don’t we start to move out to the reception area? It’ll take us a while to get there. We might as well be ready when the ambulance arrives.’
Itch knelt down to wake his sister and cousin. He shook them gently by the shoulder. ‘Guys. The ambulance will be here soon – let’s get ready.’
Jack opened her eyes. ‘Wasn’t asleep. Just tired. That’s some crazy stuff I was listening to.’
Itch smiled. ‘Glad you were listening – I wasn’t looking forward to explaining it to you.’
Jack sat up but Chloe hadn’t moved, so Itch shook her more vigorously. She opened her eyes. ‘Wassappening,’ she said, slurring her words as she tried to sit up.
‘We need to get you to the ambulance,’ said her brother. ‘It’s on its way. Here, lean on me.’ He hauled her up, with John Watkins helping from the other side. Jack didn’t need any help; she passed the rucksack to Itch, and the party slowly set off for the front of the school. Alexander led the way, occasionally pausing to hold the doors open for Chloe, Itch and Watkins, as they retraced their steps.