‘I’m not your secretary,’ she pointed out. ‘You’d better speak to Miss Day about it.’ She kissed him on the forehead. ‘If you dare,’ she added.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Even someone who didn’t know Alec Manson at all would have noticed that he looked confused. His full face was redder than usual. His clearly etched blue eyes, which usually emitted a beam of self-importance and high-pressure urgency, seemed to be tinged with red. Now he tried to hold the Director’s eyes with his, but he had to avert them. The ray of guilt that his eyes propagated scanned the walls and the fan and the faces of Heatherfield and Ganin. He avoided Gresham’s cool gaze. That left only Mr Rupert, who looked through him rather than at him with an expression of smug insolence that quite clearly said: ‘You’ve flunked, and I hope you like it.’
The Director rapped his questions in a manner that did not disguise his feelings. ‘Did Simmel show you the experiment he carried out last night?’
‘Yes, Sir Robert…’
‘Didn’t it occur to you to try the same thing?’
‘I would have if it hadn’t been decided on the first day that we were to work on the theory that it was the tins which were contaminated.’
There was a long silence this time. It was, after all, undeniable that so long as it was assumed that the metal was the prime cause of the trouble, there would be no reason to suppose that the beans inside the allegedly ‘dead’ cans could be ‘hot’. And yet a man of flair — or even somebody more thorough — might well have checked this possibility.
Gresham deliberately concentrated on a ridiculous little game of tiddlywinks he was playing with a few of the children’s coloured discs he had found in his pocket. Hargreaves was noticeably irritated by this, but made no comment because he knew that Frank — who was practically the only friend Manson had got — was embarrassed at seeing the man so compromised. Mr Rupert was rather fascinated by the tiddlywinks and would have liked to join in.
The Director knocked some ash carefully from the end of his cigarette. He smiled one of those smiles. ‘Surely, Alec, in the course of all those tests you made, you must have noticed — if only by accident — that some of the beans which should have been inert were in fact radioactive?’
Manson seemed reluctant to comment on this. He picked up one of the discs that had shot across the table and examined it, needing something to do with his hands. Eventually he put it down again and admitted: ‘As a matter of fact, it did happen once, yes. But I thought the equipment was faulty. We’ve been having trouble with it, you know. You saw it go wrong yesterday, when the red light came on.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said the Director impatiently, ‘but surely it isn’t the only detection equipment in the place?’
‘All the others are out on loan. And even the Home Office couldn’t supply us — all their instruments have been sent out to various depots for the checking of cans stored in bulk.’
‘Yes, yes! As usual, Manson, you seem to have an answer to everything. Well, tell me this: what do you deduce from the facts that have now emerged?’
Manson wiped his brow. ‘In the first place, I still think there is something wrong with the machine. If you remember, I explained yesterday that the particular instrument I was using was set to register gamma rays.’
‘And?’
Manson permitted himself a slightly patronising smile. ‘Well, obviously, it must have been faulty. Some of the tins are radioactive inside but are dead on the outside. But we know gamma rays would penetrate the metal, whereas beta rays wouldn’t. Therefore it is clear that what the machine ‘thought’ were gamma rays were really beta rays all the time.’
Ganin interrupted. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think that is quite right.’
Manson was belligerent. ‘Oh? And why?’
Ganin’s face broke into the smile that so infuriated him. ‘Well, surely,’ he said, ‘if there are beta rays only, and if they are — as Simmel’s experiment suggests — coming from the food and not the metal, how did you ever get any radiation from the outside of the tins at all?’
Manson said ‘Well…’ and stopped there. There was a moment’s silence.
Hargreaves stood up and walked over to his favourite place by the window. ‘Quite right,’ he said thoughtfully, with his back to them. ‘That means that some radiation is going through and some isn’t.’ Then he swung round abruptly, snapping his fingers as he did so. ‘We’ve all been blithering idiots!’ he exclaimed ‘All of us…!’
The tall young man in the white overalls, which blazoned the word ‘Spigett’s’ in large red letters, looked bored. He hated having to shout above the unspeakable din of the automatic guillotine. And while he shouted the stock explanation of its working principles he did not even look at Gatt properly — like the dragoman showing the tourists round the Pyramids for the four-hundredth time he spoke like a guide-book.
‘As you see,’ he said, ‘the sheets arrive cut in squares, tinplated on both sides. Then they’re fed to this machine which cuts them into strips. Over there is another machine that stamps out the lids.’ They moved over and watched that for a while.
To Gatt, not the least fascinating part of the proceedings was the extraordinary blank expression on the face of each woman operator. It was as if they had been able to switch off their minds at will, allowing their subconscious to do the simple, rhythmic operations that the machines demanded — feeding in the sheets of metal, or helping them on their way if the suction mechanism didn’t grip them quite as it should. Above, endless lines of tins moving with a characteristic rattling sound along conveyors, weaving in and out of each other like motor-cars negotiating the fly-overs of an American highway. If you looked at them for long you became almost mesmerised, so relentless was their march. Gatt looked up while his guide continued with the stock patter, and tried to trace the progress of one can as it left the pounding, viciously brutal machine that rammed and clamped the bottom of each can to the cylinder that was the main body of the tin. He watched it travel forward a little, then round a loop and up to the roof of the shed. There the highway joined forces with three others, all running parallel to each other. Sometimes the traffic in one lane would overtake that of the others, and then, as all four tracks suddenly took a sharp left-hand turn, the faster cans would find themselves on the outside of the curve and the other ones would catch up again. Gatt’s tin rapidly lost its identity among the many; and by the time the four lanes reached a hole in the wall and passed to the next shed, he had no idea which one it was. But to the uncurious faces of the operators — young girls and middle-aged women of every shape and size — each can was just another operation, just another fleeting movement of the hands. Probably it would never occur to them to wonder about it all — to guess at what kind of shop any one tin might end up in, whether a big store in a capital city, a little grocer’s shop smelling of paraffin and candle-wax, or a native duka that constituted the heart of some remote township in Africa. Never would they conjecture upon the final destination of any one of these identical cans, as it was placed on someone’s kitchen table in readiness for the tin-opener and saucepan, its contents to be consumed hungrily by noisy children or a tired dockhand or a country parson taking a snack after visiting a delinquent parishioner.
‘Now we’ll go into the next department,’ shouted the bored young man in the white coat, ‘and you can see how the cans are filled and so on.’ They walked out into the sun and breathed fresh air. A contrast to the smell of hot solder.