The Egg-Shaped Thing

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  I said I thought it was too late. People had seen the devastation you could generate with nuclear weapons and it was natural, if reprehensible, for governments to vie with each other. I said I couldn’t imagine another great war; but cold wars would occur with isolated outbreaks that were none the less tragic for Korea and Vietnam and so on, because power-minded people enjoyed walking the tightrope. We indulged our political whims for a time, till he said: “Funny, when you come to think of it, how in our search for new war materials we keep discovering new things in the soil to use up. Isn’t it? — Like first we dug deeper and deeper for coal, till there was nothing left of that. Then oil…and they say there is only a reserve to last us another forty years or something…What happens when all the uranium has gone? What will follow the atomic age?”

  I said by that time they’d probably know how to use up all the sea water and pinch all its atoms.

  “All right,” he said. “Use the sea. But you know, it’s like eating up your own straw hut, in the end. Sort of converting permanent things into consumer goods. How long can you go on doing that?”

  The man who had just come off guard duty outside listened to us for a moment, said ‘Christ Almighty!’ and went immediately to sleep.

  I grinned at the sharp difference between the marrieds and the unmarrieds. The sergeant’s domestically acquired attitudes drove his subordinate instantaneously to sleep.

  “Still,” said the sergeant, “there must be a fantastic amount of uranium inside the earth. You couldn’t get at it all, of course…Here! What’s the matter? What have I said?”

  “Everything!” I must have gasped even wider than the snoring aircraftsman. “Sergeant,” I said, jumping up, “thanks a million for the talk — and the cocoa. Both were just what the doctor ordered. Can you get the gates opened for me at once?”

  Five minutes later I had started up the jeep and I was driving in a private stampede along the valley. I didn’t bother with the road and all those gates. On two occasions I scraped the sides of the jeep on the stone walls because the gaps made for the bikes weren’t quite wide enough.

  But I kept going.

  The sensible way to get to the Atomic Energy Authority’s establishment at Windscale is to take the main road to Amble-side, then Coniston, Broughton, Whicham and double back North along the West coast through Bootle, Holmrook to Seascale.

  It takes a very long time.

  But I’d taken a good look at the map on the wall at the airfield. There’s another way. You cut through the mountains and take the Wrynose Pass, then Hard Knott Pass to Santon Bridge, Gosforth and you’re there. Though some of the pass is one-in-three gradient most of the holiday traffic that tries it makes it…

  The sergeant, an intelligent man who had not, however, been consciously and miraculously cueing me in the very missing factor that had through my own stupidity eluded me all the time, had nevertheless said himself a mouthful.

  It all went back to my wristwatch.

  It all went back, you see, to my initial feeling that the egg-shaped thing couldn’t just be an isolated entity on its own, couldn’t be a source of power, must therefore be linked with something that was.

  It all went back, also, to a remark made in the lavatory at the Clarendon Hotel, Doncaster, which marked the first occasion when the word ‘statistics’ crept in.

  It all went back, indeed, to one sentence on the transcript that Tesh had shown me of the bugged conversation between Dr Gray and Dick Davvitt, in a car parked right in the sizzle of the desert sun of the mesa…

  GRAY: To say you can alter basic laws of chance is just ridiculous. Chance occurs because it’s there. It’s unpredictable.

  DAVVITT: It isn’t if you look at it back to front. Look back at something after it’s happened and you have a sequence of events that isn’t chance any more — it’s history.

  These were fragments that I picked out by instinct. As I hoiked the jeep off the main road, just after Lake Windermere, and took the lane leading to the first of the two passes, they were just thoughts buzzing around in my head and trying to point a particular way.

  This way, the way a child would reason it:

  CHILD (being very irritating indeed): Daddy, did you just put your watch near a very strong fight?

  DADDY: No. So don’t ask me why it’s glowing so brightly. I don’t know, and that’s that.

  CHILD: Perhaps it’s making up for lost time.

  DADDY: It’s your bedtime. So stop trying to understand the impossible.

  CHILD: Supposing time was going faster, and nobody knew. The luminous dial would have to catch up, wouldn’t it? It’s not glowing brighter, Daddy; it’s glowing faster!

  So what I wanted to find out at Windscale was really as simple as the child would make it seem, though an adult would find it much more difficult.

  I wanted to find out whether there had been any periods in which something else had been ‘glowing faster’ too.

  For instance, the nuclear fuel inside reactors, like those at Windscale.

  Could this have been what Tesh’s work at the Computer Centre had been all about? — a statistical puzzle suddenly presented by the fuel rods he had there under study?

  The more I thought along these lines, the more sense I seemed to make of the ‘impossible’ performance of my wrist-watch, and of the luminous instruments in the aircraft.

  Let the child think, then…and let’s not clutter the mind with phoney science.

  ‘The egg is only half there.’ (Tesh)

  So what’s the other half doing? Does it consist of an entirely new concept of Matter? — in some utterly new dimension?

  Is it this ‘other half’ that has so gigantic a mass that it can distort the shape of space itself?

  The sun is only just large enough to twist space very slightly. But it does twist it. (Einstein)

  And you can’t lift the sun on a chain hoist.

  All right…Think of a human being: You can lift his body on a hoist, but you can’t alter the position of his soul, which continues to exist as an Idea. And ‘Ideas’ are spacial. (Me)

  ‘Body and Soul.’ Neat. But does it mean anything?

  I stopped the jeep, to think.

  Well, certainly Brundash’s soul is involved. It is his soul which has inspired lesser men, like Davvitt, to think beyond their intellectual means.

  What of ‘bodies’?

  The Earth is a body. Packed in its crust are the elements. Matter, as we know it.

  And matter is ingeniously arranged so that it doesn’t spontaneously explode.

  What do you have to do to it to make it explode?

  In an atomic bomb you have to alter the statistical balance of two very slightly different materials: Uranium 235 and Uranium 238. In nature there is far more of the second than of the first. So in constructing a bomb you reverse this balance, just as in a reactor you reverse the balance in a different way which amounts to the same thing.

  But in studying the actual state of fuel rods taken from reactors, Tesh’s people found something different.

  What, in fact, had they found?

  That the composition of those fuel rods was becoming more like a bomb and less like a reactor?

  That they were unduly rich in Uranium 235?

  The thought made me squirm.

  Supposing, in some way not explainable in terms of classical science, the egg was actually running off the power within those reactors, and in so doing was changing the relative composition of the two sorts of Uranium within them?

  Eventually something would have to explode.

  But supposing you extended this thought?

  Could it not mean that the Uranium within the Earth’s crust might also be undergoing such a change?

  When Tesh had noted that the screen of the television set was acting like a fluorescope, hadn’t he said that the radiation wasn’t coming from anywhere in particular?

  Of course it wasn’t! — if indeed it were coming from the whole world!

>   Impossible?

  CHILD: Don’t you see how simple it is, Daddy?

  DADDY: You’re predicting the impossible.

  CHILD: You can only say that because it hasn’t happened yet!

  As I slammed the jeep into gear again I recalled, sweating, that the last thing that ‘hadn’t happened yet’ suddenly did.

  *

  Under a starless sky I began the ascent to where the pass would take over from the macadam. There was that claustrophobic clam in the air, that faint tang of heavy oxygen that is different from the norm suggestive of a high electrical potential between cumulonimbus cloud and the huge electrode of the earth’s surface.

  Confirming the proximity of lightning were the faint blue haloes — St Elmo’s fire — around the high-tension cables that were slung between the skeletal titans towering the route.

  The first scorching crackle of released electricity ripped a torn-sheet sky in brilliant blue-blaze as I topped the crest and slammed into first gear. The sizzle was directly overhead, so that the entire bowl of the chasm below and ahead was illuminated in three quick-succession flickers, then plunged back into pitchness as ionized air was split down two prong-seams with a double ear-slamming crash.

  Before the thunder had experimented fully with the combinations of echo available from vying rockfaces another immense spark drilled a hole through the atmosphere and completed the circuit between sky and ground. I got a small kick from diffuse static electricity and tiny sparks zipped from my fingertips as I lifted a hand from the steering wheel the better to take the first hairpin turn.

  At once the drench of water fell like a solid wet platter from the cloud that no longer held it up. It crashed piecemeal on to the jeep’s engine-housing as if some tyrant had pulled a sluice lever and dropped the whole tonnage in one go. The headlights merely showed a vertical river and almost at once the ground underneath turned to mud, soiling the windscreen with its upsplash and causing the jeep to veer violently.

  I slid to a dangerous halt near the edge of the escarpment to search for the wiper switch and to engage four-wheel drive.

  On again, as the rain now settled to a tattooing drench, icing up my body and filling the floorspace with water that sloshed over the pedals on each pivot of the steep incline down. Brakes snatched erratically at pebbles after sliding on the mud and on the first three-in-oner I thought I would go over. To torment me, the electrical fiend overhead showed me an instant view of what I thought I was in for below, then growled repressedly as I managed to skid somehow back to road centre and outwit it.

  The windscreen was now useless and I had to squelch to another locked-brake stop to fold the thing down. Cursing at the obnoxiously unfair conduct of the weather of jagged Cumberland, which first had produced a fog to hazard an aircraft and now followed-up with a storm of freak dimensions, I wrestled with the tyre-slithering down-gradient for what seemed like hours till I thought the steering wheel would unscrew from its spindle and leave me to the mercy of the mud.

  Then I had to go up the other side.

  Hard Knott awaited me, offering a waterfall of a road surface with me aiming upstream.

  And it must have been halfway up that I completely lost control of the jeep.

  I had taken three bends in rapid succession and got too big for my driving-boots. The steering went slack in my hands and I knew I was gripping nothingness with all four wheels. Behind me was a two-seventy degree hook with a sheer drop on its outside. The squirming vehicle was simply lessening the usefulness of the road surface without getting anywhere.

  Gradually I lost the battle against gravity and felt the whole thing sliding back with engine racing. In terror I bounced frantically in the seat to no effect. I could see nothing behind; and this time the lightning failed to oblige. With a few feet to go I made ready to try and jump clear if the flailing metal beneath me went over the side. I thought there might be a chance this way if I were prepared.

  But my mind had made itself up on an issue which on the face of it was ridiculous.

  It said plainly that if I let that jeep go I didn’t deserve to survive. If I let go I let go of everything I valued — Nicola, everything.

  And so metaphorically in dream-vision, I placed Nicola in the seat beside me.

  It would have been impossible for her to jump clear. She would have been the wrong side — the escarpment side.

  Therefore I had to conduct myself as if her life were at stake.

  With this crazy reasoning I seemed to grasp an extra dimension on the scene. I realized that the length of the jeep was fractionally less than the width of the road.

  If I could only slew it around sideways, then give it a full-skid turn another ninety degrees I could go back down the pass and try again in a higher gear with more impetus.

  I pulled the steering till it locked hard right and kept alternating gas and brake pedal and just willpower.

  Slowly, grudgingly, with tyre-tread burning off in strips, the jeep started to come around sideways on.

  Now I had to judge it marginally.

  If I kept my foot down too long I would simply shoot over the edge.

  If I took it off too soon the slide back would gain hold and drag us backwards over the nick of the hairpin behind.

  I’m no sort of driver. I do not claim skill or courage. I swear it was Nicola who yelled ‘Now James!’ and I who merely obeyed. I know this to be true. Racing drivers, quite without embarrassment, have reported the same phenomenon…

  Brake and clutch at the optimum time.

  Now the weight of the engine to pivot me around.

  Pointing downhill with the lights where I so frantically needed them.

  Creep around that bend.

  Now down the bottom of the gulley and next time, cocky, learn from your mistake!

  I waited, panting and shaken for a minute, in the dip between the two passes.

  Then, fractionally that much more experienced, I took the whole pass in low-ratio middle gear, neither storming the easy bends nor having to lose vital volition for the hard ones; but planning each manoeuvre ahead with something a bit closer to the precision needed.

  I was ashamed that this way the patch that had so nearly had me hurtling below presented no problem. Any fool motorist of average experience could have done it the first time.

  But I made the climb and I still had my jeep and was still in the game.

  *

  Crossroads. Signpost just back of the beam of the headlights.

  I backed, was wrong, found no guidance.

  Cursing, I drove straight on. The height of folly would have been to start turning back on myself at this time of night. No one to ask, not a house in sight…no phone box from which to ask a disembodied voice where the hell I was.

  Concrete barrier and an unhelpful sign saying: ‘Road Closed’.

  I have to confess that the frustration was such that I almost gave way to tantrum.

  All right, punk. Sit here shivering till the cigarettes run out. Till time runs out.

  But you’ve got to stop this self-denigration. It’s the product of exhaustion; of the freezing cold wet, of being out on a limb on your own, against all the common-sense-mongers who put their feet up and light their pipes and quote good clean Isaac Newton after those reassuring Laws have been wrung-out long since in the neuro-nether world of Max Planck. Don’t believe in their fool’s paradise, James — Nicola wouldn’t have it. People like Guy Endleby get hold of your balls and twist them up till you forget you’ve got them. They have to. They rely on the same herd for support as they so flagrantly claim to despise.

  Go take a closer look at that sign.

  Now take a look at the small letters at the bottom right-hand side: ‘Atomic Energy Authority, Windscale.’

  And beyond the shimmer of the rain above the trees, through there! Doesn’t that look mighty like a cooling tower?

  All right. Use names. Use anything. Don’t hesitate and falter and apologize for living. You’re drenched and they
’ll think you’re some crazy crank. But you know at least two people on the site and once you had their respect as an engineer.

  Where the hell is the main entrance of this place?

  But you have one slice of luck.

  Though the security guard on the gate looks at you blankly and offers to call the police, you persuade him a little and you learn that Chris Sanger is Duty Physicist on Reactor One.

  You snatch the phone from the guard and you talk as you never talked before. You don’t sound as panicky as you feel. You don’t begin by saying that one more Pulse from that evil hunk of devilry could make Sanger’s reactor look less than a candle flame.

  You say: “Did you hear on the radio about Tesh Philbar’s death?” You’ve started with something he knows already and he’s willing to listen to your next sentence, despite the fact that the guard has already pressed the panic button to have you thrown out.

  Sanger says: “Did you phone someone here from Moorbridge, with some questions about Brighton?”

  You say: “This directly concerns you, Sanger.”

  “You can’t possibly come up here. You should know that.”

  “I also know what Philbar knew when he died. It may not be in your regulations, Sanger, but Philbar had all the Ministry backing there is and

  “I do happen to know that, but it still doesn’t entitle you to shoot your way in here.”

  “Then phone the Minister.”

  “He won’t know you from Adam, and you know it. I don’t have any fancy private lines for that purpose and if I had I wouldn’t get people out of bed unless my ratemeters started going off the dial. So why don’t you go home before I instruct the police to have you physically removed?”

  I lowered my voice instead of raising it. “You tell me you didn’t get a freak surge yesterday and I’ll go off home like a lamb.”

  Harshly: “Tesh couldn’t have known that.”

  “I’m telling you I do.”

  “How?”

  “If I thought I could explain that over the phone I wouldn’t have got drenched to the skin getting here and trying to get through to someone who seems to want to stick his head in the sand.”