The Egg-Shaped Thing

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  The guard made a movement to grab the receiver out of my hand. As he did so I could see that the place was coming alive with interest and four men were approaching the gate on the double. I thought I’d lost everything and I felt it was because no matter what I did it was beyond the limits of my personality to carry conviction about any damn thing.

  But Sanger’s smile was audible as he said: “Sticking my head in the what? That’s something we just don’t do here! I hope what you have to say is good. Or by the time we’ve finished with you, you wouldn’t get into an Underground station and come out alive. Put the guard on.”

  *

  Sanger had got a deputy to take over in the control room and conducted me himself to the lecture room below.

  He began awkwardly: “I’m just a night-watchman for thrumming dynamos. Cuts one down to size, doesn’t it?”

  I said: “Sanger…I’m afraid this visit means trouble — real trouble.”

  He folded his arms and looked at me expressionlessly. “Let’s have it. All of it.”

  So I told him, right from A to Z, the way I saw it.

  My account left in its wake a deafening silence.

  Sanger simply sat there.

  I got up stiffly, sauntered uneasily to a window, looked out at the night. A few yards away I heard Sanger flipping the pages of some reference book that had been left around. He wasn’t looking anything up; he was just expressing a huge sense of futility. My account had reduced him to utter inertia.

  After several eternities he said: “James, it’s the maddest thing I ever heard.”

  “I know.”

  “The worst part of it is your deductions. They don’t have any meat to them. Totally intangible. And what does it all mean? And what do you expect me to do? Take it all seriously? Or pretend to take it all seriously? Call a psychiatrist? What?” He gestured helplessly, and the little sound he emitted, a cross between a laugh and a sigh, expressed to perfection how he felt. He scratched his brow, as if the itch there was the nearest he could get to the problem I had outlined. “I don’t know…what to say! At least I listened — you’re going to have to admit that. You took nearly two hours…Two hours of that stuff! James, where’s the science in you? I know you’re not qualified, but you used to talk sense.”

  I said: “So you were quite happy about the way Moorbridge was suddenly closed down?”

  He revealed now what he had been trying to make up his mind about a few moments back. “I think, James,” he said, “it would do you good to read the report, on that affair. I shouldn’t really show it to you. But anything is better than your going around with that crazy-mixed-up nightmare in your overtaxed head. It’s in the library; I think I can get it out if you’ll wait here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Look…You’ve got to promise not to wander about.”

  “I’m not a raving lunatic.”

  “Well…All right, if you say so! Personally…oh, the hell with it! Wait here.”

  He left the room, walking slowly at first, then rapidly picking up pace. I heard him clacking down the corridor.

  My earlier feeling that I wasn’t going to be up against this kind of thing had been bitterly premature. Now, I felt angry and ridiculous. I’d tried to express something that could not be expressed. Of course, you can’t express some aspects of the Quantum — that, in a way, is the whole point. But the Quantum is supposed to stay put; to remain in its agreed and appropriate home: the mysterious atom, the exact truth of which so cussedly eludes.

  It isn’t supposed to escape into actuality, to encroach upon nice, reassuring applied physics, which is still a science that people conduct as far as possible as if the pretty pictures of the atom we grow up with really mean something — sweetly-simple atomic nuclei surrounded by little balls called electrons, revolving around a spinning top in clear-cut orbits. Matter isn’t like that; energy isn’t like that; but I could well understand Sanger’s predicament. He was running a powerhouse.

  The footsteps came back. So did the scepticism, vastly increased and improved even over the short duration of the walk to the reference library.

  “Here you are. Look at page…What is it?…page fifty-eight…under summary.”

  I did so. Sanger was very patient, very kind. He stood, with his arms folded, watching me…hoping against hope I would give way to a slow, self-derisive smile, offer myself for a friendly slap on the back, an exhortation to go away for a holiday, to leave the whole thing for Us to worry about, to come back to my field with a fresh mind…

  Dutifully I read the thing. To be fair, it was quite well done. It contained just enough of the truth to fit the more glaring conflicts if you happened to want to believe it. Of course, most people did. Therein lay the excellence of the document. It fulfilled a need.

  Sanger stood there waiting, feet planted apart on the bare boards, arms folded. His brow was furrowed in his genuine concern.

  I had been half-leaning on a bench-chair while reading that blurby handout. Now, I replaced it on the table, found myself getting up, measuring him for the intellectual fisticuffs to come.

  Here was a different proposition from Guy Endleby, for here was an honest man.

  He cared about things. He cared about the job he did, the service that Number One Reactor at Calder Hall, Windscale, performed, in supplying so many megawatts of electricity at such a price for this duration and that burn-up.

  He cared about public safety, and the safety of his staff and equipment from every known hazard and saw that these hazards did not occur.

  And for all that, he had turned the atom into caricature…

  Six feet apart, cerebrally at war, we began.

  “All right,” I said, “so you think I’ve come here for nothing — or at most…at the very most, some kind of reassurance that everything I’ve seen and been through and witnessed is a product of my own mind. Is that right?”

  He didn’t move. His shadow, there on the floorboards, was as static as the one thrown by the table nearby. “Yes” — speaking just quietly without the implied malice and indoctrination of a Davvitt or a Miles Pollenner…“I think so.”

  “What have you got down there below your feet, Sanger? What is under all that steel and concrete shielding, do you think? — what is it that gets hot, all by itself, spontaneously and of its own accord? — what is it inside each long canister that’s so alive when you finally draw it out that some of it can’t be touched for a thousand years?”

  He shook his head. “This isn’t working, Fulbright. Rhetoric isn’t enough. If you gave me a single fact I could believe, I’d help you. Dramatizing just makes you look foolish.”

  “I’ll take that risk. It’s high time. You see, I can prick my own bubble very much better than you can, Sanger. It’s too easy. I’ve done it often and I know. I can see myself through your eyes. All too clearly. Believe me, it still hurts — even though I’m sure of my ground, inside me, I’m shaking.”

  “Because you so desperately wish you were a scientist. You’re playing out your frustrations for your own purposes. No one else’s. It’s a fight between you and you.”

  I found myself strangely calm, strangely convinced. “That doesn’t alter anything. I’m scared of what is cheap in me, yes. I couldn’t have chosen a better place to feel inadequate than here. You have all the labels which make me feel the most jealous. I admit that. Sometimes people feel too puny; and when they do, something drives them hard, frantically making up for it. Out of cotton wool they build a big nothing, yet believe in it because it’s all they can ever build.”

  He looked down. “Isn’t that what you’re really trying to tell me? — tell yourself? Are you sure you didn’t come to this place in the middle of a wild night, to face just that truth?”

  I said: “Sanger, don’t you see how easy it would be for me to believe that? Don’t you see that the thing inside me that is uppermost is the mocking prosecutor to whom the accused would really be only too relieved finally to yield?”

&
nbsp; “Then why are you saying these things about yourself? — Why now? — Why to me?”

  “Because unless you’re a coward it obligates you to do the same thing to yourself. And if you can’t do it I’m taking the responsibility of doing it for you.”

  “To cut me down to size, because you feel helpless yourself? What kind of a solution to your problems is that?”

  I stood my ground. “Try it. Please. Just to see where it leads.”

  “Let me get this right. You want me to abuse myself, in your presence, because you can’t help abusing yourself in mine?”

  “Can’t you afford to?”

  “But to what purpose?”

  I said: “I promise you it wouldn’t give me any satisfaction.”

  “Oddly enough, I believe that now. I just don’t see…”

  “Sanger! There’s just the two of us. Before you throw me out of this place, which I envy and admire and which stands so high above me that I feel like crawling underground…before you’re driven to exert the authority which I shall never have, just do what I ask.”

  He paused, staring at me for a very long time. Then he crossed to where I had crouched near the table top.

  He said: “We’re two different people and I’m not going to adopt your method. All the same, I take your point. I know why you want me to do it — that’s the important thing. Isn’t it?”

  “Then go ahead and do it your way.”

  He lit a cigarette. “It’s done. Don’t you see? Didn’t you want me to flip the coin the other way up? To look at nuclear physics quite suddenly as if I’d never seen it before? Weren’t you saying that I’m a two-a-penny B.Sc. gone stale on the job? That in fact we don’t know what the hell the atom means, however many times we may reel off its constituent parts, invent new ones to explain the puzzle — only to create another one? Aren’t you saying that I’m the manager of a boilerhouse watching the temperature gauge and shovelling in more fuel every now and then without asking any questions?”

  “I’m saying you’re capable of humility.”

  He looked at me shrewdly. “You know you’re quite ruthless — don’t you? That soul-baring…” He shook his head. “Jesus! You never lost sight of your objective for a split second! Right! What did you come here to find out?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I,” said Sanger, “can do one of two things.” This just a few minutes after he nearly threw me out. “Either I can shut my eyes and ears to everything you represent — and I still could, Fulbright! — or I can think your way. I’m sure you will agree there’s nothing in between? The poles are infinitely too far apart. No compromise reached could possibly have anything to do with either. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So let’s go up to the control room and I’ll have some food sent in. You must need it. Then we’ll start finding out which way I’m going to jump. It’s something I don’t even know myself.”

  I dug into this twilight tiffin while Sanger took over from the deputy. It would be dishonest to describe these surroundings; my mind at this point was exclusively fixed upon bacon and eggs. I was oblivious of all else around me. In any case, dials are just dials whatever they’re for; and in that room there were plenty. I’ll show you in a minute the only one that mattered. It was labelled ‘neutron flux’…neutrons being the invisible corpuscles which fly about and break up uranium atoms, flux being a measure of their denseness of activity. You can reckon that if there’s anything the matter with Space/Time, it’s the needle of this one which is going to move first…

  ‘It’s not glowing brighter, Daddy; it’s glowing faster!’

  At the beginning of the conversation we agreed on two counts: First, that we would both try taking everything I thought true to see where it led; and second, after his giving me a limited amount of information I would accept his decision if he wished to withhold any further support.

  To start with, Sanger emphasized that if I misused any of the information he gave me he’d be fried alive. “They’ll probably lower me — but slowly! — into the bowels of the reactor, then sink my remains, if any, in a decay pond.”

  I said I would be careful.

  Upon which he promptly produced a file marked top secret in which the dates of the mysterious neutron surges that I had guessed at were entered. He looked up momentarily from his task of copying them out in his meticulous hand. “I don’t know how you worked that one out. Extremely presumptuous. You’d make an appalling scientist.”

  “I know.”

  “I really can’t stand people who arrive at the right conclusions for all the wrong reasons.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Now we’ll draw your curve. You said it was parabolic, didn’t you?”

  “That’s what the girl said.”

  “Which girl?”

  “Jane. The one I met in nineteen fifty-nine.”

  “Otherwise known as yesterday?”

  “You choose.”

  “Let’s see if she’s right.”

  He took the entire six-year period and converted it into days: “That’s a lot of days,” he said. “Let’s see where the Pulses fall.”

  The curve slowly began to appear on the graph-paper — inch by parabolic inch.

  “That’s the hard way of drawing an egg,” I said.

  He grinned — a rapid flicker across the face which disappeared instantaneously. “In the fourth form,” he said, “they do it for laughs. But my hand is trembling with concentration.”

  “Very wiggly egg-shell,” I said.

  “It’s cracked. But here’s your answer.” He stood up stiffly. “The next Pulse is due Monday night — Tuesday morning to be exact. At four thirty-one.” He said it flatly, like announcing a train arrival. “And I concede that it’s highly suggestive that I should arrive at something thirty-one minutes past the hour. We go on…” He checked over his instruments briefly, then jotted down painstaking notes in a near-illiterate hand as he asked question number two: “What are your intentions?”

  “To prevent the next Pulse and neutralize the egg.”

  “Concisely put. But why the next Pulse, particularly?”

  “Because it’s liable to be the last.”

  He threw me an unpleasant, ironic smile, but didn’t overtly question the assumption — for the moment. Instead he asked: “And just how do you propose we prevent this Pulse?”

  “We have to work that part out.”

  “Yes! Well, why can’t you just blow the egg to bits? — assuming you can get hold of it and feel like taking the law into your own hands?”

  “It wouldn’t oblige. I think it has some rather unusual spacial properties.”

  “I’ll say! Including, you claim, drinking power from my reactor like a sort of nuclear vampire!” He fought to keep a straight face. “Sounds…interesting, your egg.”

  I refused to be goaded. “What has to be done — somehow — is to cut it off from its source of power.”

  “Yes…but if you are sticking to that idea you’ve got to take into account that there are other reactors, operating all over Europe, besides mine. On what you’ve told me so far, I couldn’t shut down. But even if I could, what about the others?”

  “I agree about the others…though the range of interference wouldn’t necessarily have to be worldwide. It depends how far the dent in space extends.”

  “Er, yes. No doubt it would. Well…I suppose you could cart the egg out of range — take it out to sea, or something. You might even get beyond your ‘dent in space’, you never know. If you managed that you then might be able to neutralize the egg with due care and consideration for its status.”

  “But how do we get it out to sea in time? In the first place, we don’t know where it is. In the second place, it may not be anywhere near an airport; in the third place, no ship is going to get that far in that time.”

  “Still, I can’t see anyone getting every reactor in the whole of Europe to shut down on your say so. Can you? — All those Iron Cu
rtain physicists shutting up shop because of a runaway egg? You’ll never do it. In fact…in fact…” He broke off.

  “In fact what?”

  “It looks a bit like this to me: if you’re right, there’s nothing you can do about it; and if you’re wrong, there’s nothing that needs doing.”

  “So we sit back and wait for the bang?”

  “Well, who’s going to believe you?”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “You asked me to keep an open mind. I complied. That doesn’t mean I’m swallowing it whole. You’ve outlined quite a list of unusual phenomena. You’re not the only one to do that! Take flying saucers…some very respectable people have reported U.F.O.s in the sky.”

  “Flying saucers! Are we down to that?”

  “They always claim their particular thing is the real McCoy and everything else is just neurosis.”

  “They? Who?”

  “Phenomenon seekers.”

  “The death of Dr Flaske and Tesh was real enough.”

  “Fulbright…when you drove here, didn’t you come via the pass?”

  “Yes.”

  “Couldn’t you have had a fatal accident just as easily, if something had gone wrong?”

  I felt helpless, got up, stared unseeingly at some of those instruments. Finally I said: “But look at the evidence you’re simply dismissing!”

  “But I’m not dismissing it. I’m just saying it doesn’t necessarily belong in one great bundle.”

  I splayed out my fingers, picked off the items one by one. “Okay, let’s look at them: Brundash disappears.”

  “Like many other scientists. It’s an occupational disease.”

  “Nicola’s puppy.”

  “Trivial. Dammit, no one’s going to listen to that!”

  “Nor the cats?”

  “Nor the cats,” he agreed.

  I pushed back two fingers. “All right; delete them…But whatever really happened at Moorbridge and whenever it actually closed down, those people there have never been accounted for since — and that’s a lot of people.”