‘What part of Scotland?’
‘You know Scotland, then? You know the Highlands? Well, I’m not really a Scot myself, although on my mother’s side—’
The Director managed to repeat the question without rising his voice, but it took all the control he could muster. All the same, he managed to instil into the question a tone which brought the threatened travelogue to a dead stop. Mr Rupert shifted in his chair and waited, his delicate hands poised above the keyboard of the Stenotype machine.
‘Glennaverly,’ said Gould. ‘It’s near Loch Logie.’ The fan made fifteen leisurely revolutions before anyone spoke again. And with each revolution a slight but maddening little squeak. Only nobody was listening to it.
Seff knocked some ash off his cigarette and said, very calmly: ‘Quod Erat Demonstrandum.’
Hargreaves continued with the questions just as people continued to play chess during an air-raid when the motor of a flying-bomb suddenly cut out. ‘You say your shed is fully enclosed. How, then, is it ventilated? It must presumably have windows?’
‘No. Not windows. Air-conditioning!’ He said it as if it were a brand-new invention. ‘We had it installed a couple of years ago. Gracious, what an expense! And what a trouble!’
Gatt said: ‘Why do you say “trouble”?’
‘Well, it’s no trouble now. Fully automatic, you know.’
‘But you had trouble?’
‘At first we did. Good gracious, I should say so! The filters, you see. They used to get clogged up. As I said, it’s a windy part of the world. So we used to get bracken and heather and old newspapers and every kind of fiddelly-diddelly mixed up in it.’
‘So what did you do about it?’ asked Gatt.
‘We had them redesigned.’
‘And how did you get on in the meanwhile?’
Mr Gould giggled. ‘Why, we did the only thing we could do! We ran the air-conditioning without them. It worked just as well. In fact, it worked better.’
‘And how long did you run them like that?’
‘Goodness gracious gracious! Now you’re asking me! Well, off-hand I’d say about six months.’
Then suddenly it hit him. Nobody had to say anything more. Indeed, he had said it all. He thought of the six open-topped bins — or was it seven? — and the unfiltered air being pumped in from outside and the high winds blowing down the valley from Loch Logie and the strange, unbelievable fact that impurities had been found in a lot of tin cans, and he saw. Nothing could alter his dapper appearance, however, and the change in him was neither obvious nor dramatic. Everybody does something with their hands under duress; and all he could think of doing was to straighten his very conservative tie which was already quite straight.
They got rid of Gould and Spigett when Manson returned from the laboratory.
‘I tried scraping the coating from the inside of the tin,’ said Manson. ‘And I was right; I got no reading from the metal afterwards!’
Nobody seemed very interested in his rather tardy triumph, however. The Director just nodded assent and Manson shut up and sat down. Gatt brought him up-to-date on the facts.
‘I see,’ said Manson, and looked across at Seff.
‘I tell you one thing,’ said jack (he was addressing the Director specifically), ‘there was a design fault in Project 3.’
Hargreaves said heatedly: ‘Well, why in hell didn’t you say so before?’
‘Because I didn’t know before. I found out last night. I fed all the data to the computer and got a very rude answer.’
‘To the effect that the thing shouldn’t have operated at all,’ added Gatt, completing the confessional.
Seff gave him a sideways look. ‘How did you know? I didn’t mention it to anybody.’
Gatt said: ‘It was Alec’s theory. He told me at the party the other night.’
Seff turned to Manson with that perplexed little laugh of his. ‘Why in God’s name didn’t you mention it to me?’ Not so much censure as amazement.
Gatt (to Alec): ‘Didn’t you? You said you did.’
Manson stared into space. ‘I thought I did.’
Seff said: ‘How long have you known this?’
‘Ever since it was built.’
Hargreaves said, ‘Good God!’
‘Did someone say,’ observed Seff with an angostura-like smile, ‘that we worked as a team? Just one big, happy family, I’d say. Well, since you’re such a mine of information, Alec, perhaps you’d tell me this: why in hell did it go haywire the night I started it up? And what, if anything, did it have to do with the contamination of the sugar? Nothing went up through the chimneys.’
Gatt looked directly at Manson. ‘You know something, don’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t have cornered me at the party.’
‘If Jack doesn’t know, I don’t know.’
‘Come on, Manson,’ said Seff. ‘What am I supposed to have done?’
‘You tell us.’
‘All right; let’s put it like this: what would you have done, in the event of getting no reaction?’
‘That would depend,’ said Manson carefully, ‘upon my state of mind.’
Seff’s voice sounded very dangerous. ‘What would you have done if you had been drunk?’
‘I didn’t say you were drunk.’
‘Never mind. Pretend you did. What would you have done if you weren’t in full possession of your senses, my dear Alec?’ Manson looked around the table, from one face to another. But he said nothing. ‘Very well,’ said Seff, ‘I’ll tell you what I might have done if I had been drunk. Shall I? Good. Well, I might have worked it out this way, in the blurred confusion of the moment. I might have thought to myself: “It still doesn’t operate, even with the control rods right out. My artificial neutron source is working all right, but still there’s no chain reaction. So I’ll stick some more uranium in. That’s sure to get things going.” ’
Gatt was smoking quite calmly. ‘But where would you get it from? All the uranium is accounted for.’
Manson leaned forward. ‘All except the stuff inside the main reactor,’ he said. The accusation was unmistakable.
‘Which was shut down,’ he added, ‘and has been ever since. On your specific instructions, Seff!’
Gatt said quite calmly: ‘But that would be enriched uranium. Could one man operate the discharging equipment safely, without getting a packet from it himself? Then load it into Project 3?’
‘Don’t forget,’ Seff reminded him, ‘I’m supposed to be drunk! And, for that matter, you think I was drunk too, don’t you, Gatt? Oh yes, one might attempt it — even get away with it. And as Manson so rightly says, it wouldn’t be missed because the main reactor has never been discharged. And it would probably do the trick. It might put the total mass so high that the control rods wouldn’t be able to keep it in check. And the control rods didn’t keep it in check for, as you no doubt remember, we had to whip out as much of the uranium as we could, and we managed to get enough out, before the mechanism seized, to stop the reaction. But only just. And luckily Manson was there to pump the water out of the heat exchangers into the underground tanks. But none of this explains how a sugar refinery, just six miles away, became so richly and plentifully infected with radioactive dust.’
Gatt said: ‘There’s a hole in this theory, anyway. You wouldn’t have had time to do it. And there were too many people around.’
Self’s smile was off-centre. It amused him to theorise at his own expense. ‘Not then, I agree. But supposing I had found out about my miscalculation before we came to start the pile? There were occasions when I could have stuffed some more slugs in the thing without anyone being any the wiser.’