‘Don’t be so damnably bitter.’
‘All right; I’ll concede you that. Anyway, his only contribution, important though it was, was to step up the cooling after the fun began.’
‘Yes, Gatt, I know. But don’t you see, what happened after the accident may have been just as significant as what went before.’
Gatt propped up the volume of music and spontaneously played the opening bars of the Appassionata. The Director stood there by the fireplace, quietly smoking, his feet planted eighteen inches apart. The creases of his well-cut trousers were immaculate. Gatt played through the first page and then stopped.
‘Go on, Arlen. It’s my favourite sonata.’
Gatt smiled, but shut the lid of the piano. ‘You’re a cunning devil, Robert!’ he said. ‘You knew I had something to work off so you provide me with a Stein way to do it on! May I have another Scotch?’
‘Help yourself.’ Gatt did so without hurrying, walked over and joined Hargreaves by the fireplace. ‘Well, if you want to know, I’m absolutely convinced that Mr Spigett’s blasted beans are in some way connected with Marsdowne.’
‘I know,’ said the Director quietly. ‘And, as a matter of fact, I am too, though I couldn’t tell you why.’ He lit another cigarette as soon as he had thrown away the last. ‘Perhaps it’s because I think that everything has got to have a reason and the present emergency doesn’t seem to have one.’ A thought struck him, but when he spoke his voice was studiedly casual. ‘I suppose it is quite impossible to get into the pumping-room?’
Gatt looked at him expressionlessly for a few moments. Then he said: ‘I’m afraid so. If you remember, when the cartridge-scanning system jammed solid they had to open up a duct in the pumping-room to give access to the guts of the reactor — to take its temperature, so to speak. You know what happened after that. As soon as the men were safely out, the bulkhead doors were closed and sealed and the gas pressure was raised inside the pile again. Thus a lot of burning fission products must have been blown into the pumping-room. It will be years before it’s a proposition for anyone to go inside without taking one hell of a risk. Even then the job would take months.’
‘This was after Manson emptied the heat-exchangers?’
‘Yes. About two hours after. They weren’t able to reduce the gas pressure before that time; and of course they couldn’t open the duct until the pressure was down inside the pile.’
The Director said: ‘What decided the moment when they could reduce the pressure?’
‘When Seff had discharged enough of the uranium cartridges to stop the chain reaction. Project 3 was designed in such a way that the cartridges could be removed even when the pile was fully active. And if that hadn’t been so, we would have had a fire that would have got totally out of control, contaminating the countryside dangerously for hundreds of square miles.’
‘Even with the control rods in?’
Gatt looked at him squarely. ‘That was the point, Robert. Seff said he lowered the control rods as soon as the heat output level rose above normal — and it takes just seven seconds to do that. The trouble was they did not have the required effect.’
‘You don’t doubt he did lower them, do you?’
‘I don’t doubt he tried to lower them. But when? Did he leave it so late that the ‘X holes’ had warped out of alignment and the rods wouldn’t drop? If so, no one would be any the wiser, and there was no way of finding out afterwards, because, of course, eventually they did become warped and the whole mechanism got jammed. It was like that when I arrived.’
‘There was no way of knowing, then, whether they had dropped right in or not?’
‘That is the plain truth of the matter. Once you press the emergency button, the rods are released from their claws and drop down by gravity. When control is restored, you have to fish them out again with a special grab in order to restart the reactor. But if the rods don’t drop fully down in the first place, there’s no way of knowing.’ He finished his drink in one. ‘But one would suppose, Robert, that if one pressed the button and the reactor didn’t stop reacting that the rods hadn’t dropped at all.’
Hargreaves looked at him sharply. ‘You didn’t mention this in your report.’
‘It’s pure surmise. But I always thought it was rather a pity that the time-recording clock was out of action and failed to record at what stage of the proceedings Seff did attempt to shut down the pile.’
‘I see. So what you are saying, virtually, is that the accident could have been caused by Seff pressing the shut-down button so late that although the control rods were released they could not fall to the bottom of the ‘X holes’ because by that time their alignment had been distorted by the excess heat. Is that about it?’ Hargreaves flicked half an inch of ash carefully into the fireplace. ‘That still doesn’t explain why the pile began to operate in the first place if Manson’s theory about it is right.’
‘You mean about it being of insufficient mass to operate at all? No, I admit it doesn’t.’
‘On the other hand, let’s suppose you’re right for a moment. Let’s say Jack did press the button too late. All right, I grant you that would have been a very serious piece of negligence. But it still doesn’t get us any nearer solving the problem of the tins, does it? The point is, what happened after the pile went wrong, if anything, that could account for widespread contamination? That is the missing link in the chain, Arlen.’ He relaxed a little. ‘Now do something for me, will you? Play the rest of that Movement before you go over to Frank’s.’
When Gatt arrived at the Greshams’, Frank was playing with the trains.
True, his two sons were taking part, but they only had rather minor roles in the proceedings — operating the signals, for instance, and winding up the engines.
‘We’re not fully electrified, old boy,’ said Frank, neatly changing the points just in time to prevent a major rail disaster. Arlen was rather disappointed: he would have liked to have seen a good crash.
Gatt said: ‘Can’t you make the electric one go a bit faster?’
‘Won’t take the curves.’
‘Couldn’t you bank them up with books?’
‘By Jove! That’s a good idea. Christopher, go and get a few novels out of the study.’ The boy ran off on his mission, and Gresham shouted after him: ‘Don’t take Mummy’s Book Society choice!’
They all played with the train set for a while and they banked up the line, and there was a wonderful crash when Gatt was a little slow, for some reason, in switching the points. Then Mummy called that it was time the children were put to bed, and off they went.
Gresham got his pipe going, and the two men settled down in comfortable arm-chairs among the engines and the coaches and the maze of track, and talked about general things.
Gatt brought the conversation round to the Newlands Steel business and asked Gresham what he thought. ‘I dunno. That man Spigett is evasive. And he likes to make an easy profit. If he could do that by getting some metal on the side that he didn’t have to ask too many questions about, I think he’d do it. Why don’t you go down to his factory and take a look round?’