He stood up suddenly, uncurling like a leaf-spring. The veins stood out on his arms and forehead, as he gave Manson the full force of his feelings. ‘Damn your guts, you are just a plain, ordinary, bloody liar!’
Manson pushed his chair back with such violence that it clattered against the wall. ‘It was your fault!’ he shouted. ‘It was your fault the pile blew up — I knew the design was wrong, you supercilious, high-level bungler!’ He laughed viciously. ‘And to think that you expected me to risk my neck because of your mistake…’
‘Shut up!’ It was the only time Hargreaves had raised his voice during the whole three days of the enquiry, and it had an electrifying effect.
Manson stammered: ‘Forgive me, Sir Robert. I—’
Hargreaves cut him short. ‘I’m not going to say very much to you now, Manson, because there isn’t time. But I’ll say this: To have panicked under duress was, to say the least, a grave reflection on your character. But it was a human thing to do. We none of us know how we are going to react until the testing time comes. I could have forgiven that.’ Hargreaves’ voice was shaking now. Shaking with an overwhelming rage and disgust. ‘I’ve heard of people hiding things to save their own skins — even at the expense of public safety. I had an officer do that during the war, and I felt intensely sorry for him, even though it was I who ordered his court martial. But that man’s crime was nothing to yours.
‘I won’t try to remind you of the enormity of your breach of trust. Your own conscience must be your chief prosecutor; because nothing the law can hand out can do justice to your conduct.’ The Director rammed the butt of his cigarette hard on to the ash-tray. The savage finality of the act was as articulate as anything he could say.
It was after Manson had left, silently, and somehow (thought Gresham) for all his ignominiousness, pathetically, that Mr Rupert made his only other verbal contribution to the proceedings. ‘That man,’ he said, ‘has invented a new crime. The crime of silence.’ It was, perhaps histrionic. But it was apt.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
London was quiet that night.
The buses were on the road as usual, and there were plenty of taxis around. But the private cars were few. The theatres were playing to only sparsely populated houses, and an unlucky producer launched a new play to many rows of tipped-up seats. Those addicts who had decided to use their tickets hardly applauded.
Drizzling rain had turned the streets into shiny reflectors. A sports car which had taken the bend of St Martin’s Lane too fast had piled against a lamp standard. No one was hurt. Only a few pedestrians watched the wreck being towed away, and only one discontented onlooker could be bothered to remark that the driver must have had too much money and not enough to do.
Aircraft flew in, trains left their termini, chorus girls kicked their legs at the television cameras, tramps slept with sly unconcern in their customary doorways.
All was calm.
But behind shutters, in warehouses, aboard Thames barges, roped inside freight trucks, sealed in packing-cases, cartons and silver paper, alien atoms, millions of times smaller than the head of a pin, basic elements of matter that should never have been there, sent thin streams of electro-magnetic energy into free air. The energy they call gamma rays.
In chocolate boxes and milk jugs, kitchen cupboards and coffee cups, the nuclei of unstable atoms broke up and changed their nature and shot out electrons in their slow process of metamorphosis — the quest for electrical balance that cannot be stopped by man or by his science.
And within human bodies the same ionizing rays committed homicide among the cells that are the very structure of life itself — the template for man’s future existence which, once changed, can never be restored…
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Gatt screwed up his face like a man who was looking at the naked sun. He had a splitting headache, and the squeak of that relentless fan seemed to go right through it. Seff had strongly recommended a stiff whisky, but on the table by Gatt’s blotter there was still only the little bottle of tablets and a glass of water. He said: ‘I wish Simmel would come up on the air.’
Hargreaves was thinking the same thing. He knew the dangers. ‘Well, it’s no good calling him till he’s ready.’ He’d give Dick another five minutes.
Seff had marked an ugly 200-foot contour line with a red pencil. It ringed the loch, hemming it in. He made no further comment, however, about the obvious hazards of flying round that dark basin at night. He discarded a cigarette, adding the debris to the already overfilled ash-tray. ‘If our theory is right,’ he said, ‘the loch has dried up on at least two occasions — probably more. And by sheer bad luck, it didn’t happen to do this during one of Gatt’s routine checks of the atmosphere. But what about the loch itself?’ He addressed himself to Arlen. ‘Did you check the loch for radiation at the time of the accident?’
‘Yes. That’s what has been puzzling me.’
‘When?’
‘At regular intervals for two months after the blow-up. Negative each time.’
Seff nodded. ‘That checks. I’ll explain in a minute.’ He got up and started to pace the room. ‘As you know, when the pile “ran away”, one of the heat-exchangers burst with the increased steam pressure. That meant that radioactive gas from inside the damaged reactor came into direct contact with the steam and made it highly radioactive. The main turbine cocks were all closed, and so the steam could only escape either through the fractured walls of the heat-exchanger or back into the pumping-room. Now, it was essential to open the outlet cock fast, both to get rid of that lethal steam and to relieve the rapidly building pressure. The safety valves couldn’t handle it, and there was a danger that the whole system would burst. Those gauges were already clean off the dial. And the pressure didn’t start dropping, even after Manson had — supposedly — opened the outlet cock. Then, after a very anxious ten minutes or so, the pressure did fall. Why?’
He stood, this wiry man. by the window, the muscles of his face drawn taut with alertness. ‘We now know why. For a while, after Manson had opened the inlet cock, nothing happened. There is a non-return valve in the system to prevent the water flowing back into the loch — under normal conditions. But of course it was under high pressure. And eventually the valve blew. The steam and boiling water roared down the inlet pipe towards the loch.
‘But there’s a reservoir tank between the pumping-room and the loch. I won’t bother you with details of plumbing, but that tank is where the radioactive water lay in wait, while Gatt was busily testing the loch for contamination. And since it is normally “clean” water in that tank, and since no one had the slightest inkling that Manson had opened the inlet cock, there was nothing to prevent some innocent engineer from emptying its contents into the loch when it was evident that there was no further use for the water, due to the closing down of Project 3. You see, there was no earthly reason to suppose that the water could have been anything but innocent.’
Hargreaves said: ‘About these safety valves. Shouldn’t they be capable of handling any excess pressure in the event of an emergency?’
‘Yes, they certainly should. Of course, no one had visualised anything approaching the colossal pressures that built up as a result of the accident. And of course if Manson had opened the right cock the pressure would have dropped immediately. Still, we’ll have to look at the valves on the new reactor with this in view, before we start it up.’