As he left, briskly parting the glass doors, Kate stared after him. She was wondering what she had done wrong and when she’d done it.
Half an hour later Dick returned to Kate’s office. He strode up to her looking, she thought, even more impersonal. ‘Don’t let Manson go without telling me,’ he said.
‘He’s already gone.’
‘Damn!’
‘Is it important? You might catch him at the station. We could call the station announcer.’
Simmel stood there thinking for a moment. ‘No; he can’t be that stupid,’ he said. ‘I must be wrong.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’d better go upstairs and get ready for the press. See the staff get there on time, won’t you?’ He started for the door. ‘The man I’m afraid of is Bob Soliss. He asked some highly embarrassing questions about Windscale, and he’s not all that popular with the A.E.A.’
Bob Soliss did, in fact, live up to his reputation, and it was he who sent the most penetrating missiles in the general direction of Project 3. Most of them were aimed pretty accurately.
Soliss was a small, hunched-up man in his fifties. He was softly spoken, and was conspicuously unlike the popular idea of a newspaper man. He wrote for a very influential Lancashire newspaper which daily garnished many a London breakfast table.
When Hargreaves had finished his short, prepared address Soliss fired the first salvo. ‘I notice,’ he said, in that easy, relaxed way of his, ‘that there has been no reference in your statement to the ill-fated Project 3. Do you feel, sir, that there can be no possible connection between that and the crisis which you have just outlined?’
Hargreaves answered without hesitation. This was not his first press conference. ‘Naturally we have not ruled it out as a possibility. But, as you know, a very thorough investigation was carried out at the time.’
‘But would it be true to say that no conclusive reason was found or given for the damage that then occurred to the pile?’
Hargreaves looked across at Gatt, who answered the question. ‘Unfortunately that is perfectly right. It was necessary to seal off the entire reactor since it became highly radioactive after the fire. It won’t be possible to diagnose the trouble with any certainty for several years. But the fact that we didn’t discover the cause doesn’t alter the fact that we were very careful to ensure that the effects were very carefully watched.’
Peter Mobray, still in his everlasting, ill-fitting raincoat, put the next question. ‘If you don’t suspect that Project 3 was the fly in the ointment, why all the bother? Why call a conference of most of those connected with it — and why send its designer up to Marsdowne tonight, in a specially chartered aircraft, to make a special report?’ This last question caused a slight stir.
Seff answered this, and couldn’t help grinning as he did so. ‘You seem to have found out a great deal in a short time!’ he said. ‘It’s quite true that I am going up there tonight. And the reason is surely pretty obvious, isn’t it? We certainly don’t think that Marsdowne has any connection with the disaster, but since Project 3 is the only thing for which we as an organisation are responsible that is capable — or was capable — of producing radioactive isotopes (apart from our main reactor) we naturally must make absolutely certain that nothing was overlooked at the time in the course of the stringent steps we took to protect the public.’
Soliss unhurriedly rolled up a document he had been consulting. He said: ‘Most of us here are familiar with the main features of the Windscale accident. For instance, the escaping of iodine-131 through the chimney. Is it not possible that some similar but undetected occurrence also happened in this case?’
Gatt said: ‘In the first place, don’t forget that the Marsdowne incident happened nearly two years ago — that is, six months before the food product in question was canned. Marsdowne, as you know, is in the Scottish Highlands, Spigett’s factory is in Watford — so they are some four hundred miles apart. The beans are imported. It is a little hard, both in the time and distance scale, to see the connection. In the second place, since I personally supervised the investigation, I can put your mind at rest about the chimneys. Without going into technical details, I should point out that Project 3 was a closed-circuit pile and nothing except surplus heat could go up the chimney. In any case, exhaustive tests were made for miles around, and no trace of radioactivity was detected over and above the normal background count. It is true that a small quantity of radioactive steam escaped, but this didn’t go on for long because Seff, who was on the spot, ordered the water to be drained from the heat-transference system.’
‘Where did the water go?’
‘Into underground tanks.’
‘Are you sure?’
Gatt grinned. ‘Of course I’m sure.’
There was only a barely perceptible smile on Soliss’s lips. ‘How do you know the tanks don’t leak?’
‘Because there is some very fool-proof equipment that would tell us so immediately if it did.’
‘Would you stake your last dollar on the “fool-proof” equipment?’
‘Lloyd’s did.’
‘I only asked.’
‘That’s the answer.’
‘Thank you.’
Alford of the Mirror asked: ‘What restraints are you asking us to put on what we report?’
Hargreaves said: ‘None. Except the common-sense ones. We don’t want you to make a meal of it. We all have a responsibility in this matter, which I’m sure you all feel. We must not alarm the public. If you consider, from what you have heard here, that we are taking every possible precaution to safeguard your readers, and to find the cause of the crisis and deal with it energetically, we would naturally like you to say so. If you don’t, then I would be extremely grateful if you would tell us now, so that at least we know what we are in for! If there is anything we have overlooked, we would, believe me, be only too happy to have the omission put right.’
Soliss said: ‘I myself have no criticisms of that sort, but I would like to address one question personally to Mr Seff.’
For the first time Seff appeared to be tense. ‘Yes?’
The whole room had gone quiet, and everyone seemed to sense that Soliss had now bracketed his aim and was about to fire his heavy artillery…
‘I must ask you not to regard my question as an impertinence,’ he said carefully. ‘We are dealing with vital issues, and since the freedom of the press is — commendably — to be observed, I intend to exert it to the full.’
Seff said: ‘I am sure, Mr Soliss, that any question you ask on behalf of your paper would never be regarded as an impertinence.’
‘Thank you. Then would you please tell us how many drinks you had that evening prior to the moment when Project 3 ran out of control?’
‘To the best of my knowledge and belief, three large whiskies. And now do you mind if I ask you one?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Before coming to this conference and asking the extremely astute and carefully considered questions that you have just been asking, you must presumably have had lunch somewhere. May I ask you what you laced it with?’
‘A fairly immoderate quantity of good Scotch.’
‘Thank you very much.’
The Seffs did not speak to each other until the plane had levelled off on a northerly heading. Below them London impersonated Cinerama and curved away in all directions, changing its angle slightly every now and then as the pilot corrected small variations in the aircraft’s attitude. The big, red-lit ‘T’ which marked the threshold of the runway had now been reduced to six-point type, and the network of runways looked hopelessly small — surely not large enough to land a paper dart. And all the lights of the city seemed to pulsate like stars. A thousand feet below the little Dove a huge airliner, its navigation light flashing rhythmically, was nosing its way in, losing height and dropping away from them now, as its captain sought to render the airfield larger by getting closer to it; until finally the runway would open out before him, an illuminated study in perspective, and offer a sure pathway for the fat tyres of his ship. What more satisfying, thought Seff, than the moment when the runway would come up under the belly of the big plane, just at the right angle, to scoop it up at precisely the right instant, with a squeal of tyres and a momentary smell of hot rubber and brakes? A superlative exercise in mechanical perfection.