Derham took the lead again, and checked the screen on his suit. ‘Radiation levels are almost off the scale,’ he said and pointed to a box on the floor. It was about six inches to a side and looked to be in remarkably good condition except for a tiny patch of corrosion at one corner. ‘That is definitely the source,’ Derham said. ‘See where it has finally been breached? It survived for a hundred years, but the elements got to it in the end. The split looks less than a quarter of an inch long, but it’s enough.’
Lou was right behind him. ‘Unreal!’ he exclaimed.
Derham didn’t waste a second. From his backpack, he removed a small metal contraption — a spindly steel framework. He pushed a button on its base. ‘We had no idea what to expect,’ he said. ‘But reasoned the source of the radiation was something pretty small — how else could it have been brought onto the ship in the first place?’ He flicked a glance at the box. ‘Thankfully, we were right.’
He leaned forward, opened the metal framework and slipped it over the box. Flicking a switch on the side, the ensemble started to glow red. ‘This is another thing we have to thank the eggheads for,’ he added, and tapped a button on the side of the device. ‘A radiation containment frame. It’s more than a million times more efficient than a lead container of the same size. It’ll keep the radiation levels manageable until we can get it up to the Armstrong and then back ashore.’
‘Another product of DARPA?’ Kate asked.
Jerry nodded and noticed Lou poking around inside a metal framework — a rectangle about two feet high and eight long.
‘I think this must be what’s left of the wardrobe,’ Lou said. ‘There would have been timber panels and doors attached to this metal structure.’ He shifted some debris with his gloved hand. ‘Looks like there’s another metal box.’
In the helmet beams they could all see a steel container the shape and size of a large attaché case. It had corroded along one edge.
‘What is it?’ Kate asked.
‘Not sure. It says “EF” on the side.’
Derham glanced at his chronometer again. ‘Gotta go, people.’ He placed a hand on Lou’s shoulder.
‘Sure… I’m taking this back, though.’
The captain nodded and the three of them headed for the door.
8
It was absolutely freezing in the lab, both day and night. As he prepared this, the fourteenth attempt at the experiment, Fortescue happened to notice the mercury had dipped to minus three degrees inside, and it was already nine o’clock. At that moment, with his long thin fingers numb as prosthetic digits and his thoughts hazy from sleep deprivation, he felt he could just give up and return to the experiments after a good rest at home. He pulled his scarf tight about his slender neck and rubbed his hands together in an effort to get the blood flowing again.
Leaning across a bench, Fortescue helped his boss, Ernest Rutherford, set up the final pieces of apparatus ready for the next test. The lab was a bit of a jumble, but it was a jumble he and Rutherford could navigate with consummate ease. To any outsider, it would have looked as though the large, high-ceilinged room was nothing but a dumping ground for a menagerie of equipment, but every machine, every wire, every truss rod and metal lever had its place and its purpose.
Fortescue and Rutherford had spent four months putting the apparatus together. A long wooden bench took up the centre of the room. Over this had been built a steel gantry which held much of the heavier equipment clasped in strong metal brackets. To vary the many parameters of the experiment, they could move the apparatus along rails built under the arches of the gantry.
By eleven o’clock, they were almost ready. Fortescue went off for a few minutes and came back with two cups of freshly brewed tea and the pair of them gave the equipment one final inspection. At one end of the bench stood a mahogany box about afoot square. On the front of the box was a circular metal plate some quarter of an inch thick. This was called the receptor plate. At the other end of the bench, on the far side of the room, thirty-five feet from the box, stood a device that lay at the heart of this complex array of apparatus — a neutron emitter. The design of this alone had taken them almost two years to complete, and Fortescue was very proud of it.
They made a good partnership. Rutherford was the senior one of the pair, acclaimed both within the scientific community and beyond; Fortescue, twelve years younger than the professor, but still not quite thirty, had already published three important papers and was widely regarded as one of the brightest of his generation, a man set for greatness.
The idea behind the experiment was for a stream of particles called neutrons to be fired at the box at the far end of the bench. The box contained an incredibly small quantity of a substance Rutherford had christened ibnium. It was what scientists called an unstable heavy element. The objective was to smash the neutrons into this minute fragment of ibnium, causing a tiny controlled explosion inside the mahogany box. Attached to the box were wires connected to a collection of special measuring instruments, each of which had been handmade at the university workshops in the basement of this building. These instruments could measure the size of the tiny explosion, and from this data the scientists hoped to calculate the power of the process occurring when the neutrons hit the sample of ibnium.
‘I think we’re ready, sir,’ Fortescue said after triple-checking a set of wires connected to one of the generators close to the neutron emitter.
‘Well, we could go on checking until the cows come home, old chap,’ Rutherford replied. ‘But at some point we have to let this beauty do its stuff.’ And he patted the top of the emitter — a curved sheet of steel stretching over a large cylinder half-buried beneath a tangle of wires and metal cables.
Fortescue walked over to the windows running along one side of the room and drew closed two pairs of heavy black curtains. Rutherford switched on a low-wattage lamp close to the control box. A rectangular glass screen stood in front of the control panel. It reached seven feet into the air and was five feet wide. The two men took up position behind it and Rutherford went through the complicated process of getting the generator to maximum power and achieving the correct voltage, which he measured on a rather temperamental voltmeter to one side of the main control box. The coils inside the neutron emitter started to hum as they warmed up. Vacuum tubes in the main unit under the curved steel panel glowed an intense white, creating a ghostly halo at one end of the twilit room.
‘So, Egbert. Are you ready?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Fortescue replied.
‘Righty-ho. On three. One… two… three.’ And Rutherford pulled on a lever in the centre of the control panel.
For a second, nothing happened. Then, barely audible at first, the humming of the vacuum tubes increased in pitch and a buzzing sound started up within the emitter. Rutherford and Fortescue stared through the glass, rapt, each lost in their own world of hope and anxiety. Rutherford’s right hand moved to a second lever and he pulled it back slowly. The humming and the buzzing grew suddenly louder.