Jones began with a careful visual inspection of all four, talking in a loud voice so that his description of what he was looking at reached his tape recorder. Then he moved from observation to exploration. He began with Sergeant Dundas. A careful series of probes and pressings resulted in a sudden, surprised grunt. ‘What do you make of this?’
Penmarrick crossed and pushed his fingers into the cavity beneath Dundas’s skeletal sternum. The protective gloves deadened the feel of his fingertips, of course, but even so he easily felt a hard protuberance at the junction of oesophagus and stomach.
‘Any thoughts?’ asked Jones.
‘Could be anything…’
‘Not likely to be a sandwich, though, is it? Bit of pork pie?’
‘Well…’ Penmarrick was swept back to his days as a junior houseman under the tutelage of a particularly cantankerous surgeon.
‘Quite right, though; quite right. It is likely to be something carcinogenic.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘But there’s only one way to be sure, isn’t there?’
Jones bustled across to the far side of the room and began to rummage around in his case while Penmarrick looked down at the concavity between Dundas’s chest and navel as though the lump would be as apparent to his eyes as it was to his fingertips. Jones began to whistle tunelessly and it was only after a few moments that the bemused doctor realised that the professor was sorting out the contents of his case to the tune of ‘Mack the Knife’.
‘Done much post-mortem work?’ he asked cheerfully five minutes later and Penmarrick said ‘No’ very faintly indeed. His eyes followed the line made by the big scalpel as it moved from the hollow of Dundas’s throat in one sure sweep down almost as far as the navel. Then two shorter slices created an inverted Y shape and Jones slid his thickly gloved fingers into the sergeant’s body cavity.
‘What did you say? Speak up.’
‘No, sir.’
‘You won’t like this bit then.’
Penmarrick didn’t.
But then his fierce distaste was swept to one side. The grey-pink sack of the stomach was revealed, and Jones’s nimble fingers were lifting the tube of the oesophagus into prominence. And the lump was much more obvious, though still concealed in the internal organs like a walnut in a sausage.
A delicate movement of a very much smaller blade opened the stomach wall and the lump slid into view. It was at once obscene and wondrous, like the laying of some rare egg. Automatically, Penmarrick reached for die gleaming, obsidian jewel as it slid out of the pale flesh and into the dark-walled cavity below.
‘Don’t!’ snapped the professor.
Penmarrick looked up, surprised by the urgency in the older man’s voice. He stepped back; his eyes still fixed on the strange contents of the dead man’s stomach. There were silvery specks deep within it. They gleamed like a galaxy of distant stars in the blackest of winter skies. He did not look away until the end of the Geiger counter was thrust rudely into his line of vision. Jones’s thumb moved and the machine screamed.
Only when he switched the machine off could the tutting sound he was making be heard. He crossed to the case again and returned. He was holding, of all things, a card. A white, pasteboard business card with plain black letters and numbers etched upon it. ‘I want you to phone this number, please,’ said Jones formally. ‘You’ve done very well indeed, but we will be taking over now.’
It was only when he was reciting the number to the camp’s telephone operator that Penmarrick’s eye strayed up to the words above it: THE DIRECTOR, ATOMIC WEAPONS RESEARCH ESTABLISHMENT, ALDERMASTON.
Halfway between Reading and Newbury, in the northernmost section of the county of Hampshire, just south of the River Kennet on the edge of a Roman road which has run north-west from Silchester for more than two thousand years, stands the British Atomic Weapons Research Establishment.
At dawn the next morning, the ambulance carrying Professor James Jones sound asleep in the passenger seat and the four corpses in lead-lined coffins behind, turned south off the A4 onto the A340, crossed the river and slowed as it pulled up the gentle slope and approached the security gates of the establishment.
Like the Royal Aeronautical Establishment at Farnborough little more than thirty kilometres south-east along the long-buried Roman road, Aldermaston sits on sandy-soiled heathland with low pinetrees surrounding it, giving it a faintly Nordic atmosphere — as though both establishments had been designed to make the German scientists imported at the end of the Second World War feel at home in case, like Werner von Braun and his Peenemunde rocket team, they were tempted into going far further west.
During the 1960s the high wire fence with which the establishment was surrounded had featured widely and regularly in a whole range of media as the British anti-nuclear lobby, under their peace signs so reminiscent of the incisions disfiguring the belly of the dead Sergeant Dundas, marched regularly down the A4 and demonstrated outside the main gate in the same way as, during the next decade, they demonstrated outside the United States Air Force base at Greenham Common. But the air base and the wire fence were redundant now, of course, because glasnost held sway. Even so, the guard at the gate examined the contents of the ambulance and the passes of the two men in the front of it as closely as he would have in the darkest days of the Cold War. The coffins, however, remained closed.
Two hours later, the Director reached across his wide mahogany desk, offering a cup of coffee to Jones, and said, ‘You’ve no real idea what it is?’
‘No. It’s a crystal of some kind and it seems to have flecks of metal suspended within it. It is fearsomely radioactive. The sergeant’s face was burned so severely probably because he looked at it closely. His fingers and hand have even more severe burns. And the internal sections of his digestive system which came into closest contact with it have sustained quite considerable tissue damage.’
‘Quite so. And how did it come to be wedged inside the body?’
‘Well, he must have swallowed it.’
‘Yes, I see that. But where did he get it in order to ingest it in the manner you describe?’
‘Apparently somewhere on the iceberg which the United Nations is having towed to the west African state of Mau.’
‘How on earth could it come to be on — or in — an iceberg the mass of which is more than two million years old? Is there anything on record to indicate it might have fallen from outer space?’
‘Nothing at all, as far as I know,’ Jones answered, ‘though you must understand that I have yet to offer it for close analysis by men in that particular field of expertise. What I am reporting to you is the effect of a crystal of unknown substance and of unknown origin upon the body of a man noted for his fitness up to a week or so ago.’
‘Right. Have we reported to the people involved in the Mau project that what they are dealing with may be dangerous?’
‘No. That’s a decision which needs to be taken well above our heads, I’m afraid. I’ve recommended that we warn them that something is going on, especially because of the United Nations involvement, but as I say, it’s not my decision.’
‘I see. So you’ll be working in detail now, I imagine.’
‘Yes. I would like to start at once. I assume the rest of the teams are in place and ready to go?’
‘They are. We called them in last night and they’ve been waiting for you to get here.’