Heatherfield grinned back at him. ‘You have. And I’m sorry if I seem to be wasting your time. But the fact is, I know absolutely nothing about this subject; and if I’m going to be an intelligent observer at this meeting, I should know a little about it.’
‘Of course you must,’ said Seff. ‘It’s certainly not a waste of time. Well, to get back to Gatt. When something starts happening that we hadn’t bargained for — even if there is no increase in radiation — I pick up a phone and ask Gatt to come up. When he gets there, he puts any safety precautions into force that he considers necessary. These might include such things as stepping up the cooling system, putting additional checks on local radiation, banning personnel from certain areas and, most important of all, I think, making sure that the readings we are getting from the various metering systems are the true ones and not falsified through damage. The worst part for me is he then writes a report on the whole business, and I get hit over the head for trying unofficial experiments or putting paid to a few hundred quids’ worth of equipment.’ There was no guile or malice in this remark, and he exchanged a friendly glance with Gatt across the table. ‘However, it doesn’t happen too often, and I’ve still got the job.’
Manson added, slightly over-casually: ‘Actually it so happened that Gatt was on a visit to Calder Hall at the time of our only major accident. He didn’t get to Marsdowne till the following morning.’
‘But you were up there, weren’t you, Alec?’ Gatt spoke perfectly politely, as if he had been saying ‘you were at that party on New Years Eve’.
‘Yes,’ said Manson, ‘I was up there.’
A short silence followed. Hargreaves cleared his throat. ‘So there you have it,’ he said. ‘You know what everybody does. Simmel, you’d better go and see about some coffee. In a few minutes we’ll have a break; then we’ll get down to it in earnest, and start the story from the beginning. What time is the Spigett man due?’
‘I expect: he’s in the building by now, sir,’ said Dick, getting up.
‘Well, you’d better send him in when the coffee’s ready,’ he said. ‘Then he can get to know everybody before we resume.’
Simmel left the room and found Kate in the outside office. He ran a pencil absent-mindedly through her ginger hair, watching the tight little curls spring up again behind it. She looked up at the pencil, raising her eyes as far as they would go as if she could watch what he was doing to her hair, but she did this somehow without altering her facial expression.
‘Is all quiet on the Western From?’ she said.
‘Yes, they’re as good as gold,’ said Dick. ‘I can’t understand it. All handing out compliments and being brothers-in-arms. Even Gatt and Seff eating out of each other’s hands. I call it ominous.’
Kate raised her eyebrows thoughtfully. ‘Well, I hope it lasts,’ she said.
Dick looked down at his script-board and crossed out ‘coffee’ with a vertical line. ‘That depends on what they dig up,’ he said. ‘But meanwhile let’s make our own vital contribution to the proceedings. They want their coffee.’
CHAPTER SIX
Sydney Spigett really had started life as a barrow-boy. He was excessively proud of the fact. As he slapped you a crippling blow on the back he would boom: ‘Used to have a pitch near the Elephant, y’know. Hard times they were, old man, hard times!’ Then you would get any one of a number of those highly coloured versions of his life-story. Contradictory though they were, most of them were probably true. For Sydney Spigett was just one big contradiction. His bright green tie contradicted his mauve socks. His pretensions at being a patron of the Arts contradicted his gaudy taste in furniture. But he sold a lot of beans. ‘The war,’ he would say, in that sandpaper Cockney voice of his, ‘was the Beginning of Beans. It became the staple diet of millions. Fish and chips’ — he gestured with mutton-chop hands — ‘nothing! Phhht! You can forget ’em. You can’t put chips in a tin. The world is tin-minded now. Look at the beer. Comes in cans these days. Smart. Slick. Give the world a can-opener and you’re in business.’
At least he had made an effort, this morning, to dress in a manner suited to the occasion. For, apart from his tie and socks, his attire was modest — almost dignified. The total effect was rather incongruous, however, like a super-cinema that sprouted Doric columns in the midst of the chromium-plate. And to crown it all he wore a bowler hat that sat, exactly horizontally, upon crinkled, black-acetate hair.
‘I’m Sydney Spigett,’ he said unnecessarily.
‘I think they’re ready for you, sir,’ said Kate. ‘If you’d kindly take a seat, I’ll just go and see.’
Spigett took his hat off and sat down. Then he stood up again, as if the compressed springs of the chair had shot him up in the air by their recoil action. His stocky figure certainly looked better when standing up than sitting down. ‘Too low,’ he explained. ‘Bad for the heart. Give you thrombosis.’
Kate went in and announced him, and he walked briskly into the room and shook the Director’s hand with an iron grip. ‘Glad to meet you, Sir Robert,’ he said. ‘Coffee, eh? Thought the Civil Service always drank tea.’
‘Believe me,’ said the Director, ‘there’s very little difference between the two in our catering establishment.’ Spigett was looking round with high-pressure curiosity. ‘Hope I’m not late. Hate being late. Had a lot of press boys turn up at the flat this morning. Couldn’t get rid of them, so in the end I gave ’em breakfast. Never seen anything like it. Averaged three eggs each.’
Sir Robert smiled. ‘You’d better meet my colleagues,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact, you have arrived at precisely the right time.’ He introduced him round. Manson and Mr Rupert had something in common at last: they both loathed Spigett on sight.
After the formalities, they all sat round the table again, Spigett sitting between Manson and Simmel. There was an expectant air prevalent in the room now; they were all waiting to see what kind of a firework display Spigett could produce.
Hargreaves said: ‘just before we paused for coffee I suggested to the meeting that we started at the very beginning of the story, following through every detail to the limit. This way I think we will arrive at the truth.’
‘Fair enough. I want to sell beans. I’m losing thousands over this. Thousands. Don’t even get any insurance. “Act of God” clause. I want the truth all right.’
Gresham puffed at his pipe and looked across the table, peering squintingly through the smoke. ‘I’m not sure about that, Mr Spigett. That is one way this meeting may help you. We will be able to discover whether what is legally known as an “act of God” applies. I dunno; it’s an interesting case. Supposing, for instance, it was found chat, for some reason, bean crops themselves were peculiarly sensitive to radioactive fail-out — particularly the strontium-90? That fall-out would not really be classed as a ‘natural phenomenon’, since it has been considerably increased by all the hydrogen-bomb tests and so on that have been made over the last twelve years or so. In that case, it would not be considered an “act of God”.’
Sir Robert said: ‘I might accuse you of raising a purely side-issue, Frank — and we haven’t got time for that, as you know — but in so doing you’ve put your finger upon what might be termed the Sixty four thousand-dollar Question.’
‘You mean ‘is it the beans or is it the cans?’ said Gatt. There was silence for a few moments.
‘I go for the cans,’ said Seff suddenly. He stubbed out a cigarette. ‘Frank’s illustration — about the beans mysteriously sucking up all the fall-out — was, of course, a piece of sheer Alice in Wonderland to demonstrate a point. But it does, in fact, demonstrate another one. As most of you know, the usual way of transferring radioactivity from one substance to another is through bombardment by neutrons. Alpha, beta, gamma rays and so on can do damage by ionisation, but do not cause the substances they attack to become radioactive themselves. Now, where do those neutrons come from? Well, fissioned uranium gives off neutrons; and so do one or two other very rare metals. We know that during the Windscale business fission products originating from uranium got on the grass; and then the cows ate it and by chemical process it got in their milk. If you drank the milk you would be subject to contamination yourself, though in that case only to a fractional degree. If Mr Spigett’s entire supply of beans came from that area and if the crop happened to have been gathered at exactly the optimum moment, the amount of radio-iodine present in them would be virtually nil, since by now it would have lost its potency. In any case, such a close watch was kept on matters up there that there would have been no question of harvesting them under such circumstances.’